Third Way Dispatch

(NOTE: This piece was authored by Third Way’s Senior Policy Fellow for National Security, Jonathan Morgenstein)

Yesterday’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the once and future Prime Minister of Pakistan, has thrown this nuclear-armed Muslim country of 165 million people (one of whom is Osama bin Laden) to the edge of –or perhaps over – the brink of chaos. Her loss is a tragedy, not only for the people of Pakistan, but for those everywhere who believe in women’s rights, democracy and the rule of law. And her murder carries important lessons, not only for Pakistan and her neighbors, but for the United States as well.

Today Al Gore went to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, making him the second son of Carthage, Tennessee to bring home that honor (the first was Cordell Hull). What is in the water in Carthage and Hope, Arkansas?

It was a proud day not only for Carthage but for all of us former Gore staffers. While far short of the presidency, the prize he deserved, the Nobel signals Gore’s immense role in offering a global wake-up call on climate change.

With an existential crisis looming for humanity, Third Way is trying to do our part, too. And last week, that effort put me prominently before a sign that said, in a fashionable, repeated graphic: “The Heritage Foundation.”

Now, let’s be clear: the views of the folks at Heritage are antithetical to Third Way’s on virtually everything. And I have no doubt that the feeling is deeply mutual. But in politics, ideological combatants make strong allies, and that’s why Third Way has teamed with The Heritage Foundation to help promote what many are calling “the nuclear renaissance.”

We believe, as we have written before, that progressives must embrace nuclear power, the only major baseload power source that doesn’t emit carbon. Until renewable sources mature, and we should be pushing hard to get there, the US must have more nuclear power if we are to avoid ramping up our reliance on coal and other carbon-producing sources.

We have also said, in a recent Boston Globe oped, that we must find a better way of dealing with nuclear waste, the issue on the table for last week’s panel at Heritage. As the experts there pointed out, it is time for the United States to join Japan, France, and much of the rest of the industrialized world in dealing with our nuclear waste in the same sensible fashion we are dealing with other waste – by recycling it.

Heritage has a webcast of the event here. I hope you’ll check it out.

[Note: This Dispatch is by Michelle Kobler, a Third Way staffer with deep family ties to Burma.]

It ought to be explained that Burma and I first met when I was a scrawny girl of thirteen. I stepped off the plane at Yangon airport sporting hair down to my waist, a set of pink glasses, a Sony Walkman shoved into my back pocket and only a vague sense of the experiences waiting ahead.

The US Army is crippled.

That was the stark conclusion that could be drawn from the incredible testimony yesterday by Army Chief of Staff George Casey.

But chances are, you missed it. The New York Times, the purported “Paper of Record,” didn’t deem it newsworthy. (They put a short wire story on their website). And The Washington Post buried it in a story about the Pentagon’s request for more money for Iraq. The only print outlet we could find that did it justice was The Boston Globe.

But believe me, the proceedings were extraordinary, beginning with their origins. General Casey wasn’t called to the Hill – he actually asked to testify. This is highly unusual in the best of times, and these days, when high-ranking Pentagon officials anticipate trips to Congress with the joyous anticipation of a colonoscopy, it’s downright unheard of.

As the President prepared for a battle with Congress over the future of the war, he asked his national security advisor to prepare the arguments that the Pentagon would face on the Hill:

We are trying to fight a war we can’t fight and win, the country we are trying to help is quitting. The failure on our own to fully realize what guerrilla war is like. We are sending conventional troops to do an unconventional job. How long – how much…aren’t we talking about a military solution when the solution is political. Why can’t we interdict [guerrilla supply lines] better…why can’t we improve our intelligence – why can’t we find the [enemy]?

This isn’t a leak from today’s Bush White House – the President was Lyndon Johnson. Those words were penned by McGeorge Bundy in July 1965 to buck up the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Congress asked hard questions about America’s sideways slide into Vietnam. But obviously those same words could have been written yesterday by Stephen Hadley.

George W. Bush may be the purest example of “the Peter Principle” in all of human history. Call him “The Peter Principal.” Rarely before has someone risen, with such spectacularly dreadful consequences, to his own “level of incompetence.”