From The Sunday London Times
Cool cat Barack Obama must count on his nine lives
Is the aloof president at risk of alienating today’s emotional US?
Andrew Sullivan
If you were to come up with a very short phrase summing up Barack Obama’s core identity, you could do a lot worse than the rat pack-era term “cool cat”. The coolness is now legendary: the poise during every political earthquake in the campaign, the steady willingness not to take the Clinton bait, the refusal even to raise an eyebrow at the Palin circus and that elegant lope as he walks into a state dinner.
The writer Christopher Hitchens has long seen Obama as essentially feline in his manner: “Does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché: that cats have nine lives and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.”
Obama also has the emotional distance of many cats — a self-sufficiency that limits the kind of bond you might feel with him. It’s not the Ronald Reagan alien-like distance from other humans, even his own children — which was just weird. It’s not awkward George Bush Sr Waspiness. It is, rather, a self-possession from which one draws enormous comfort — thank God he’s not so obviously out of his depth like his predecessor — and that provokes sudden spasms of resentment: what makes him so bloody above-it-all anyway?
This is especially notable in a period such as today when America is roiling with emotion. Unemployment continues to rise and unofficially is close to 17%; the anger of rural white America in the face of global change is hard to miss on any cable news channel; the left that helped Obama to gain office is furious that Guantanamo is still open, that gay rights are left on the shelf, that the banking sector has so far been coddled, not clobbered, and that health reform is headed back to the policy centre. With large swathes of the country “going rogue”, can a president with preternatural calm resonate? Can he bring the people with him?
This debate already happened in 2008. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, for example, has always seen Obama as a bit of a cold fish, aloof, too unwilling to punch back, too arrogant to explain himself too much. Dowd worried that in the campaign the Clintons brought more raw human emotion to the trail and Obama often seemed to coast too cockily until he had to rescue himself.
In the campaign Dowd was nearly right (Obama did let the Clintons get back off the mat too many times), but in the end wrong (look who got elected). But in campaign mode, Obama could harness all the emotion behind him for change. In government? He comes off as some kind of high Bismarckian Tory at times — calculating and cold.
You see this in the almost clinical way Obama has played the politics of taking on George Bush Jr’s interrogation, detention and rendition policies. The way in which two key White House appointees, Greg Craig and Phil Carter, have been dispatched in a matter of weeks for insisting that Obama live up to his campaign promises on accountability for past torture is chilling in its raw calculation. Ditto Obama’s disciplined refusal to act on gay rights any time soon — and his rhetorical restraint during Iran’s green revolution. The determination to figure out the best and most detailed way forward in Afghanistan, even during a war in which allies are waiting and enemies are watching, and to take his time ... well, this is also a sign that we are dealing with one very, very cool character.
The paradox is: in today’s populist, emotional climate, coolness can be eclipsed in the political drama and thereby rendered moot. In many ways Sarah Palin is the extreme counter-example. She plays a short game. She deploys no substantive policy content and no interest whatever in actual government. But she channels pure emotion, identity and rage very effectively in a country where unemployment is soaring. As such, she is a political nightmare, someone whom most Americans would never entrust with actual responsibility, but a cultural phenomenon who thereby wields political power.
Will this kind of heat — however irrational, however impulsive — overwhelm the cool emanating from the White House in this period of discontent? Not should it — but will it? That is the question.
In all this, Obama reminds me of Bush Sr in government and of Reagan in campaigning. It’s a dream combo in many ways — in theory. Whether it can work out in practice at this emotional and turbulent moment in American history is another question.
He has stayed aloof most of the time in the health insurance debate, while his opponents unleashed an emotional tsunami. He still hasn’t taken a specific position on several key elements in the bill — which won’t be passed, if at all, until next year. He has refrained from all but the smallest expressions of populism, even as his more partisan supporters want to see investment bankers’ heads placed on spikes above Wall Street’s pillars. He seems to have little human ego at stake as he fails to get headline-dominating concessions in diplomatic summits. What matters to him appears to be long-term gains and structural shifts — not short-term feelings.
Will this sell in troubled America? Do Americans need a more emotive, empathetic figure? Franklin D Roosevelt was aloof, but he let rip some populist rants every now and again and his fireside chats helped to forge an emotional bond with Americans. Is Obama’s coolness responsible for his approval ratings falling back to normal levels?
My own sense is that in many ways the drama and anxieties of the first decade of this century make public anger and fear more politically potent — but also generate a yearning for calm and stability at the centre. Sixteen years of Clinton family melodrama and Bush global brinkmanship have led Americans to appreciate a certain cerebral calculation in the White House. No Drama Obama remains something of a relief. And that’s especially true as America’s news media continue to devolve into more and more populist partisanship.
In other words, he’s got this. His biggest risk is if the economy turns south a second time next year and he has to pick between a second unpopular stimulus and soaring debt, or no second stimulus and soaring debt and unemployment anyway. At that point no president could easily survive — unless the hot-headed populist opposition seems too risky an option. His lowest risk is that his own party will turn on him the way the Republicans turned on the first Bush, another aloof president doing the right, calm, long-term things in too tempestuous and short attention span a time.
I doubt the Democrats will turn on him the way the GOP once did with the first Bush. Obama has a much stronger tie to his own party than Bush Sr had with his. His race makes anger a cultural liability — and is anyway alien to him. His authority in his own party dwarfs Bush Sr’s in his — Obama won an election while Bush inherited his from Reagan. Obama’s best cool-cat model should be John F Kennedy — the Kennedy whose long-term political prospects we never got to test because he was taken from us so soon.
Obama? I pray for his safety daily — and not just because I pray for every president’s safety. But because I remain fascinated by the enormous implications if, in the long run, this cat lands on his feet.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
Beware the powerful fantasy world of Sarah Palin, Warrior Princess
The US vice-presidential candidate’s memoir mocks the truth, but she remains a possible future American leader
Andrew Sullivan
What can one say about one of the most compelling and bizarre works of “non-fiction” on the market, Going Rogue by Sarah Palin?
I have to say it stymies me somewhat. Treating it as some kind of factual narrative to check (as I began to), or comparing its version of events with her previous versions of the same events (as I have), and comparing all those versions with what we know is empirical reality, is a dizzying task. The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious purée of such ghastly self-serving prose that, in the end, the book can really be read only as some kind of chapter in a cheap 19th-century edition of Lives of the Saints.
It is a religious book, full of myths and parables. And Sarah is fast becoming a religious icon of sorts for what is now the Republican base. On the first day of her tour, she dragged her infant with Down’s syndrome everywhere she went, even waving his hand to the crowds at one point as his little head swung back and forth. Here is the Madonna with child and a child that is an emblem of everything those who oppose abortion believe in.
Yet the book is also crafted politically, with every single detail of the narrative honed carefully for specific constituencies. The pro-life base is nurtured; various Republican allies are flattered; former sparring partners in the McCain campaign are lacerated; the evil liberal media are portrayed as a pack of ravenous hounds (even though they were unable to get an open press conference from her in the entire campaign, a fact unique in modern American political history).
It is also some kind of manifesto — but not in the usual sense of a collection of policy proposals. It is a manifesto for a certain identity — the heartland religious fundamentalist who is bewildered and angry at the world America no longer controls, at the debt and government that now dominate and at the liberal elites they hold responsible (even though the Republicans have been in power for a generation). This image is not, of course, made up out of whole cloth. Palin is indeed a feisty Alaskan and a genuine triumph of red-state feminism. But her narrative is embellished and embroidered to such an extent, it resembles not so much a memoir as a work of magical realism.
If you treat it as a factual narrative you will soon falter. Among the few early reactions were those of Nicolle Wallace — a McCain campaign staffer — who said of one passage: “It is pure fiction. No such discussion took place.” A reporter Palin says targeted her daughter Piper after a press conference was never at the press conference cited. Palin’s claim that she was personally billed $50,000 for vetting is point blank denied by the McCain campaign. Palin’s account of her record in the Exxon Valdez lawsuit was described last week by the chief lawyer for the case as “the most cockamamie bullshit”. I could go on. None of this is particularly surprising. Palin has a long and documented record of saying things that are empirically untrue but asserting them as if her own imagination is the only source of objective reality.
So you simply read the book as if it is fiction and enjoy it. Or you read it as non-fiction and believe that Palin is a magical mythical figure who defies the laws of time and space and normal human nature.
Take one story that every mother will relate to: the drama of her delivery of her fifth child, Trig. She tells us that at eight months pregnant with a child she knew had Down’s syndrome and would need special care at birth, she got on a plane from Alaska to Dallas, Texas, to attend an energy conference. Most airlines won’t allow this but Alaska Airlines did. Palin then tells us that at 4am on her first night in Dallas, “a strange sensation low in my belly woke me and I sat up straight in bed”. In an interview she gave with the Anchorage Daily News just after Trig’s birth, she confirmed that she had amniotic fluid leaking at that point.
So she was a mother eight months pregnant with a special-needs child thousands of miles from home. She wakes up in the middle of the night with contractions and amniotic leakage and she tells her husband she doesn’t want to call her doctor because it would wake her up at 1am. And she is the sitting governor of a state and her doctor is a close personal friend. Not only that, but she gives the speech as planned in the afternoon, during which she makes a rather good joke. She then tells us what happens next: “Big laughs. More contractions.”
After the speech, does she then go to a local hospital to get checked out? Nah. She gets on two separate aeroplanes all the way back to Alaska, with a stopover in Seattle, because she is determined to have the child in her home town and she just knows that the contractions and amniotic leakage are not signs of imminent delivery. She has had four previous kids so she has experience. “I still had plenty of time ... It was a calm, relatively restful flight home,” she explains of the next 15 hours.
You might imagine that an airline would have some qualms about letting a woman in some sort of labour at eight months, and pregnant with a Down’s syndrome child, get on a long transcontinental flight. What if the baby were born in mid-flight? The plane would have to be diverted. What if something happened to the baby? The airline could be liable. Palin never told the flight attendants. Couldn’t they tell, one might innocently ask. In the Anchorage Daily News story about the birth, Alaska Airlines said: “The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress.” Palin makes Xena, the warrior princess, seem fragile.
It is this image of a frontierswoman, capable of almost anything, fiercely independent, fathomlessly brave, totally unflappable, driven and blessed by faith in God, resisting the evil cynicism and hatred of the eastern elites, ambushed by hostile interviewers, persecuted by her godless enemies and carrying on as an “iron lady” of Alaskan dimensions, that makes her such a powerful cultural and political icon. Her physical beauty doesn’t hurt either.
That is why, despite the fact that she quit the only key political office she had held in her first term for no good reason, she remains a viable candidate for the next presidential election. In a steep recession, with intractable wars abroad, with unemployment rising and paranoia deepening, Palin knows America wants a spiritual and cultural saviour. And God has chosen her.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
Barack Obama dream fades as China visit fails to bring change
Even his allies feel let down by the president’s lack of progress both in Asia and at home
Tony Allen-Mills in New York
Gazing serenely from the Great Wall of China last week, President Barack Obama appeared to be making the most of one of the supreme perks of White House occupancy — a private guided tour of Asia’s most spectacular tourist destination.
White House aides exulted that perfectly choreographed pictures of this moment would make front pages around the world. Yet an experience Obama declared to be “magical” turned sour as he returned home to a spreading domestic revolt that is fanning Democratic unease.
It was not just that the US media have suddenly turned a lot more sceptical about a president with grand ambitions to reshape politics at home and abroad — even one previously friendly newspaper noted dismissively: “Obama goes to China, brings home a T-shirt.”
Nor was the steady decline in the president’s approval ratings — which fell below 50% for the first time in a Gallup poll last week — the main cause of White House angst. Obama remains more popular than either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton a year after their elections, and both presidents eventually cruised to second terms.
The real problem may be Obama’s friends — or rather, those among his formerly most enthusiastic supporters who are now having second thoughts.
The doubters are suddenly stretching across a broad section of the Democratic party’s natural constituency. They include black congressional leaders upset by the sluggish economy; women and Hispanics appalled by concessions made to Republicans on healthcare; anti-war liberals depressed by the debate over troops for Afghanistan; and growing numbers of blue-collar workers who are continuing to lose their jobs and homes.
Obama’s Asian adventure perceptibly increased the murmurings of dissent when he returned to Washington last week, having failed to wring any public concessions from China on any major issue.
For most Americans, the most talked-about moment of the trip was not the Great Wall visit but his low bow to Emperor Akihito of Japan, which the president’s right-wing critics assailed as “a spineless blunder” and excessively deferential.
While some commentators acknowledged that behind-the-scenes progress may have been made on issues such as North Korea, financial stability and human rights, even the pro-Obama New York Times noted in an editorial yesterday that “the trip wasn’t all that we had hoped it would be”.
Nor have the president’s domestic policies proved everything Congressman John Conyers wanted. The prominent liberal black Democrat startled colleagues last week by launching a direct assault on Obama’s handling of healthcare reforms, which were facing an important Senate vote last night.
Asked on Thursday if Obama had provided sufficient leadership on so divisive an issue, Conyers responded tartly: “Of course not ... bowing down to every nutty right-wing proposal about healthcare ... is doing a disservice to the Barack Obama that I first met.”
Tension over healthcare and what many Democratic legislators now view as neglect of economic issues reached an unexpected breaking point when members of the Congressional Black Caucus — previously regarded as unshakeable Obama loyalists — staged a startling rebellion over what they regarded as a lack of economic support for the AfricanAmerican community.
A vote on proposed financial reforms had to be shelved at the last minute as black caucus members threatened to oppose it as a protest against broader economic policy. The revolt came as new reports showed that one in seven Americans were struggling to pay for food; that mortgage delinquencies are continuing to rise with almost 2m homeowners more than three months overdue on their payments; and that unemployment rose to 10.2% in October.
While many Democrats remain unswervingly loyal to Obama — and would rather blame President George W Bush for most of America’s ills — there has been no escaping a damaging sense of disappointment in liberal circles that a historic presidency is failing to deliver on its promises.
Others are disturbed that the president’s promises to clean up Washington’s “politics as usual” have dissolved in a familiar murk of cronyism and political patronage.
Susan Johnson, president of the American Foreign Service Association, noted last week that the age-old tradition of presidents handing out ambassadorships as rewards for campaign donors had continued undiminished under Obama, who has so far rewarded more than 40 of his key fundraisers with plum diplomatic jobs.
“There is a bit of disappointment, largely because expectations were raised by the ‘change’ theme of Obama’s campaign,” said Johnson.
Perhaps most depressing of all for a small number of influential Washingtonians was the little-noticed resignation of Gregory Craig, Obama’s former White House counsel, who is widely believed in legal circles to have been made a scapegoat for the administration’s difficulties in resolving the future of Guantanamo Bay.
Craig was a key campaign aide to Obama and played the role of Senator John McCain in rehearsals for television debates. Charged with implementing the president’s instruction to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo, he fell foul of Obama aides who had failed to predict the wave of public hostility to the prospect of Al-Qaeda inmates being shipped to American soil.
Elizabeth Drew, a presidential biographer and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, described the effective dumping of Craig as “the shabbiest episode of Obama’s presidency”. Drew blamed the “small Chicago crowd” that surrounds the president for undermining Craig’s position with a series of anonymous leaks — notably suggesting that the lawyer was “too close to human rights groups”.
This kind of White House infighting is par for the course in most presidencies — but Obama was not supposed to be the kind of man who jettisons old friends at the first hint of trouble.
All this provides the Republicans with an unexpected propaganda bonanza. “We don’t need to slam Obama — his own folks are doing it for us,” one gleeful conservative declared.
The Republicans’ own divisions — magnified now that Sarah Palin, the defeated vice-presidential candidate, is crossing middle America with a new conservative manifesto under her arm — are nonetheless going largely unexamined as the Democrats implode.
Last week Republican governors meeting in Texas talked openly of winning all the states due for midterm elections next year.
The news is not all bad for Obama — America remains enchanted with his family, and many Democrat insiders are convinced that the party’s internal squabbling will melt away at the first hint of real economic recovery.
“Do Democrats have to worry about turnout and voter intensity? You bet,” said Peter Hart, a leading pollster. “But it’s nothing that lowering unemployment by two points can’t solve.”
TOP FLOPS
Israel — Obama wanted: A freeze on settlement building as a precondition for the resumption of Palestinian peace talks.
He got: An Israeli brush-off. Construction of a new Jewish housing complex began last week.
Iran — Obama wanted: A deal to ship low-enriched uranium to Russia to curb Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons.
He got: Another brush-off. Tehran reneged last week.
China — Obama wanted: Concessions on climate, currency rates, trade and human rights.
He got: A bland statement with no firm commitments and no mention of internet censorship or Tibet.

From The London Times
David Headley: quiet American with alleged links to Mumbai massacre
Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent
In almost every way, David Headley was the perfect neighbour. When the 49-year-old American citizen began renting an apartment in Mumbai last year he charmed his landlord, treated his laundry boy with respect, and befriended Bollywood figures at a local gym.
He told them that he was Jewish, and running an immigration agency from a respectable part of town. “Sweet and charming,” said his landlady. “Down to earth,” said his personal trainer.
Not until the past few days did they learn of his alleged other identity — and of quite how close security figures claim India may have come to a repeat of the militant attacks on Mumbai a year ago next week.
Apparently, Mr Headley’s original name was Daood Gilani. He was born in Pakistan, and is suspected of helping the terrorists who carried out last year’s Mumbai attack, and of planning another atrocity this year.
The details emerged when the FBI arrested Mr Headley in his home city of Chicago on October 3, and filed an affidavit in a US court, which has since been made public.
It alleges that he worked with Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami (Huji), a Pakistan militant group, and Lashkar e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan group blamed for last year’s Mumbai attacks. The document also outlines claims that he was involved in the “Mickey Mouse Project” — a plan to attack Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper whose cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 infuriated Muslims across the world.
It also allegedly shows that he and an apparent accomplice visited India several times between 2006 and 2009, and appear to have discussed attacking Indian targets as recently as September this year.
Indian investigators are now examining whether Mr Headley may be the “missing link” in the Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 170 people between November 26 and 29 last year. They are also investigating claims that he may have planned attacks this year on targets including the National Defence College in Delhi, the private Doon School in Dehradun, northern India, or even a nuclear facility.
In the process, they are shedding light on the evolving threat from LeT and its allies, and on India’s haphazard — but so far successful — efforts to respond. “This is yet another wake-up call for India,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.
“This shows LeT is as determined as ever to attack India, and they are now using Western territory and foreign Muslims to do it.”
The most striking aspect of the Headley case is his profile: unlike other militant suspects, he is middle-aged, speaks fluent English, and lives in Chicago.
The son of a Pakistani diplomat and an American woman, he went to cadet college in Pakistan before moving to the US when he was 16.
In 1997, he was jailed for 15 months for trying to smuggle heroin into the US, according to court documents.
Yet by simply changing his name in 2006, he stayed under the radar on at least nine visits to India over the past three years.
The FBI says that in the alleged activities he was helped by Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Canadian citizen of Pakistani origin who studied at the same cadet college, and was also arrested in the US last month.
Mr Rana’s immigration agency, which has offices in Chicago, helped to arrange Mr Headley’s trips and provided his cover story, according to the FBI.
To burnish his fake Jewish credentials, Mr Headley even carried a book called How to Pray like a Jew, the FBI says. The FBI appears to have placed him under surveillance after noticing his frequent movements between India, Pakistan, the Gulf and Europe.
It alerted Indian authorities after intercepting an e-mail in which Mr Headley’s alleged handler appears to give him a coded message suggesting an attack on India.
“I need to see you for some new investment plans,” the affidavit quotes the handler as saying.
When Mr Headley asks where, the handler suggests that he should “say hi to Rahul” in what the FBI says is a reference to a prominent Indian actor.
The actor has since been identified as Rahul Bhatt, a minor Bollywood star, who has admitted befriending Mr Headley in Mumbai.
In a telephone intercept in September, Mr Headley and Mr Rana are heard discussing five alleged targets and mentioning “Defence College”, according to the affidavit.
Mr Headley and Mr Rana have yet to respond to the affidavit.
But Indian and Western officials and analysts agree that the evidence presented so far appears to underline the global reach and ambitions of Huji and LeT. It also confirms India’s long-held fears that such groups might use foreigners of Pakistani or Indian origin, forcing it to tighten visa procedures.
Western governments had already adapted to that threat, but are worried that Mr Headley and Mr Rana may have used their immigration agency to move militants around the globe.
They are also increasingly aware of the threat to their own citizens in India — particularly during next year’s Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
“Prior to Mumbai, LeT was largely seen as a regional threat,” said one Western diplomat.
“Mumbai brought home that attacking India could directly impact Western interests, by killing their nationals, and also their indirect interests by destabilising the region.”
There is less agreement, however, on what the case says about India’s domestic security.
Some say that LeT and its allies are becoming more desperate as the Pakistan Army — which once sponsored them — has become distracted by its own campaign against the Taleban.
India has also taken a number of steps to improve its security apparatus. It has, for example, now established the National Investigation Agency, and it is amending legislation to give increased powers to the security services.
P. Chidambaram, the new Home Minister, has now started chairing a meeting of the heads of all the country’s important security agencies every morning.
The National Security Guard — whose commandos took eight hours to get to Mumbai from their Delhi headquarters last year during the attacks — has expanded its numbers and set up hubs in four more cities, including Mumbai.
“What about the past, almost 365, days?” said J. K. Dutt, the former NSG chief who led last year’s Mumbai operation. “There haven’t been any terrorist attacks since Mumbai. Doesn’t that also speak of the fact that there are steps the country has taken?”
Critics, however, say that India had a lucky escape thanks only to the FBI. Others question whether the US should have informed India earlier that it was watching Mr Headley.
Yet the biggest concern of all is still the underfunded and short-staffed police, a force which under India’s Constitution is the responsibility of state governments.
“When are we going to improve the training, consciousness and capability of local police?” asked Arun Bhagat, a former head of the Indian Intelligence Bureau. “Central agencies can only do so much.”

From The London Times
Suspicions over 'heart attack' death of Iranian doctor who knew too much
Martin Fletcher
Ramin Pourandarjani, 26, told friends that he had been threatened by authorities

Ramin Pourandarjani was a brilliant medical student with a promising future, until he was found dead in a dormitory at Tehran police headquarters last week. He is now the new cause célèbre of the Iranian Opposition, with MPs and Western organisations demanding an investigation into the death of a man who knew too much.
The official cause of death for the physician is heart attack but there is evidence that regime officials drove him to suicide or murdered him because he witnessed the brutality used against opposition detainees after the disputed election in June.
Dr Pourandarjani, 26, attended a school for gifted children, graduated with distinction from the University of Tabriz and was doing his two-year national service at the Kahrizak detention centre in Tehran during the June protests.
Many detainees were beaten and at least three died of their injuries, including Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of a senior conservative politician. His death provoked such an outcry, even among the regime’s sympathisers, that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, was forced to close Kahrizak on the pretext that its facilities were sub-standard.
The Supreme Council for National Security set up a special committee to investigate. Its report has not been published but what is purportedly a leaked page has been posted on the internet.
It says that “rape, mental and physical torture, malnourishment and inhuman treatment of the detainees have been confirmed” and it demands that those responsible be punished. The authenticity of the document cannot be confirmed.
Dr Pourandarjani examined many of the detainees, including Mr Ruholamini. Opposition websites claim that Dr Pourandarjani was detained for a week after Kahrizak was closed and forced to state that Mr Ruholamini had died of meningitis. He was released on bail and ordered to say nothing about what he had seen in the centre. He was threatened with imprisonment and the removal of his medical licence.
One reputable website, Mowjcamp, said that Dr Pourandarjani later told MPs on the special committee that he had examined Mr Ruholamini two days before he died. He said: “He was brought to me after being physically and severely tortured. He was in a grave physical condition and I had limited medical supplies, but I did my best to save him. It was then that I was threatened by the authorities of Kahrizak that if I disclose the cause of death and injuries of the detainees, I will cease to live.”
Dr Pourandarjani told friends that he feared for his safety and the authorities’ subsequent conduct has only fuelled their suspicions.
The official line is that Dr Pourandarjani died in his sleep of a heart attack on November 10 but his family has not been given a coroner’s report and his father, Reza Gholi Pourandarjani, says his non-smoking, clean- living son had no health problems.
The authorities washed and shrouded Dr Pourandarjani’s body while his family were absent and sent it to Tabriz, his home city, under strict surveillance. The funeral took place amid tight security and some of Dr Pourandarjani’s closest friends were barred from attending.
Masoud Pezeshkian, a former Minister of Health, heart surgeon and opposition member of the parliamentary health committee, said it was improbable that Dr Pourandarjani had died of a heart attack.
He said: “We will investigate this suspicious death until the precise cause of death is determined.” The reformist website Norooz stated: “There is no way the doctor could have committed suicide given his high spirits, strong religious faith and emotional links to his family and society as well as the talks he had the night before the incident.” His friends concurred.
Tom Porteous, the London director of Human Rights Watch, told The Times: “The circumstances of Pourandarjani’s reported death raise serious concerns. At the very least there’s a need for a full, independent and transparent inquiry.”
Four months after Kahrizak was closed the special committee’s report remains unpublished and no one has been prosecuted. Mowjcamp said that it was being supressed by the men it blamed for the abuses — Saeed Mortazavi, a former prosecutor-general, and General Ahmad-Reza Radan, the police chief.

From The London Times
It was the Sun wot done it. Or was it?
A sharp drop in solar activity could soon tell us how much mankind and the Sun are responsible for warming the planet
Stuart Clark
Like it or not, it will soon be time to start placing bets for a white Christmas. If most climatologists are to be believed you are almost certainly throwing your money away.
The onward march of global warming is consigning such traditional Christmas card scenes to history. No more deep and crisp and even winters for Britain, replaced instead by damp and slush and stormy.
But, if a small group of maverick scientists are right, the chances of Yuletide snow may rise dramatically over the coming decades.
The difference of opinion hinges on what role — if any — the Sun plays in climate change. The vast majority of climate scientists maintain that the solar influence is limited or even negligible, and it is the unsustainable growth of industrialised nations that is driving the climate into chaos. The mavericks contend that the Sun’s activity dwarfs the human contribution, and that there is nothing we can do except wait for the Sun to change.
The public seems to agree with the mavericks. In a recent poll for The Times, only 41 per cent of UK voters thought the case for man-made global warning had been proved. Now, by a quirk of nature, the Sun has presented us with a golden opportunity to resolve this debate once and for all.
Satellite measurements for the past 30 years show that the Sun’s energy output has remained remarkably constant. What is changing is the level of solar activity. Solar activity governs the appearance of sunspots — dark blemishes on the solar surface. Sunspots form where magnetism reaches out from the Sun into space. In times of high solar activity, sunspots pockmark the solar surface for years and the Sun’s magnetic field balloons outwards to shield the Earth from deep space particles called cosmic rays.
According to the mavericks, cosmic rays induce clouds to form when they strike our atmosphere and low-level clouds are thought to reflect sunlight, cooling the Earth. So, when solar activity is high, the Earth is protected from cosmic rays and fewer clouds are formed. Thus, more sunlight reaches Earth’s surface and the planet heats up.
But how to prove this? During the 20th century, solar activity rose steadily, as did the amount of industrial gases being pumped into the atmosphere. With both quantities rising, it has been impossible to distinguish between them. Now, that has all changed.
In the past 12 months solar activity has fallen to levels unseen since the 1920s. Sunspots have become rare sights and for three quarters of this year the Sun has been spot-free. According to one study if the trend continues at its current rate, the Sun will lose its ability to produce sunspots by 2015. That would take it back to its condition in the latter 17th century, when hardly any sunspots appeared for 70 years — and Northern Europe underwent the worst years of the so-called Little Ice Age.
Winter scenes from this period were romanticised by artists such as Brueghel painting frost fairs and hunting scenes. But was the 17th century sunspot crash responsible for the Little Ice Age or a coincidence? Could we now find ourselves plunged into a similar freeze if the sunspots do not return?
The answer to the latter is, presumably, yes if the Sun is solely responsible for climate change; no if the mainstream is correct and solar influence is negligible. With this in mind, tonight in Bruges, I am chairing a public debate for the sixth annual European Space Weather Week between world authorities on solar variability who represent all sides of this discussion and have differing opinions about the Sun’s influence on climate. Topping the agenda is the sunspot crash and the opportunity that it presents. The plunging solar activity level will effectively remove the solar influence on climate change. If we are vigilant and honest about any slowdown in warming, its amount will tell us exactly how much the Sun was contributing.
The smart money is on the level of solar contribution being somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, both solar activity and industrial gases play a role. There is credible scientific work that ascribes up to a third of current warming to solar influence. Studies show that the Earth’s temperature mirrored solar activity until the 1980s. Then the number of sunspots stabilised but the temperature continued to rise. In other words, something overtook the Sun as the primary driver of the Earth’s temperature. That is generally thought to be industrial gases.
Now the test can be made. It is time for all sides to put away the rivalry and begin to work together. Observations must be made, experiments performed and all data must be published, not cherry-picked. This golden opportunity to reach consensus must not be squandered.
Above all, we must not let any downturn in temperatures be used as an excuse by reluctant nations to wriggle out of pollution controls. Just as certainly as the solar activity has gone away, so it will return. If we have done nothing in the interim to curb man-made global warming, we will be in worse trouble than ever.
Dr Stuart Clark is the author of The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began (Princeton)

From The Sunday London Times
Outwitted’ Obama has Israel just where he wants it

Andrew Sullivan
If there were one White House meeting I would have killed to be present at, it would have been last Monday when Barack Obama conferred with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, for 70 minutes in the Oval Office. Alas, no one in Washington seems to have the scoop. But one can, of course, speculate.
Netanyahu’s objective since getting into office has been simple enough: to neutralise the presidency of Obama. And in the skirmishes of the first few months of Middle East diplomacy, Netanyahu has clearly won a critical tactical victory.
Coming into office, Obama avoided any direct comment on the controversial Gaza campaign, Operation Cast Lead, and has subsequently defended Jerusalem on the Goldstone report on human rights abuses during the conflict. But he did do something else, a critical gesture meant to signal to the Arab and Muslim world that America was serious about becoming an honest broker again in the Middle East.
He demanded that Israel stop all settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem to win a modicum of trust in order to jump-start negotiations. There was a rationale to this demand. Very few people in Washington publicly support the settlements, including even the more hardline pro-Israel factions. In Congress there is also scant support for the policy of rubbing salt in the wounds of Palestinian grievances and for the project of Greater Israel that the more extreme settlers believe in.
But Israel simply said no. The nation, it appears, is uninterested in helping the West and the United States grapple with this broader war, if it would mean any risks to its own security. Israel remains unwilling to offer anything of substance to its most important ally and appears prepared even to humiliate the new president if it could help to undermine his appeal to Israel’s enemies.
And on this critical first step, Israel won. A tiny country, receiving $3 billion (£1.8 billion) a year in aid from America, has the clout to stymie the US president’s critical first manoeuvre into the Middle East. Hillary Clinton, visiting Israel recently, buckled under as well. The secretary of state praised Netanyahu for “unprecedented” restrictions on settlement building, even as Netanyahu privately exults in his humiliation of Obama.
As a result, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, all but said he was withdrawing from politics and the Arab and Muslim press went overboard in arguing that Obama’s entire outreach to the Muslim world, as revealed in his keynote speech in Cairo in June, was a sham. If paranoid Muslims wanted to find a piece of evidence for their conspiratorial notion that Israel controls US foreign policy, Netanyahu gave it to them on a platter.
That’s why the meeting between the seemingly powerless American president and the apparently all-powerful Israeli prime minister would have been so interesting to witness. Netanyahu has subsequently declared a genuine commitment to open-ended final-status negotiations, even as he builds more facts on the ground to ensure that East Jerusalem remains part of Israel’s capital.
However, if there’s one thing to understand about Obama, it is his indifference to the kind of tactical coup that Netanyahu has pulled off. He is Mr Spock to Netanyahu’s Captain Kirk.
Is this wishful thinking or are we seeing Obama’s weakness, as Netanyahu has privately boasted? Has Netanyahu essentially proved it is he and not Obama who is driving events? I suspect not. This is an early skirmish in a long campaign. In the long run Obama retains one key advantage. He knows he has a critical lever with respect to Israel and will not use it until Jerusalem gives him no alternative.
In fact, it would be domestically suicidal for him to use it until Jerusalem gives him no alternative. That lever is not the military aid given to Israel, which would have to go through a Congress heavily influenced by the pro-Israel lobby. It is America’s United Nations security council veto, which Israel desperately needs if it is not to become a pariah state in the near future and if its own leaders are to be able to travel abroad without actionable war crimes charges in the wake of Gaza.
In the long run, then, Obama knows he has Israel by the unmentionables. In the short run, it helps no one to reveal or demonstrate this. So Netanyahu wins the day. But he may live to regret this — not least because he has further isolated Israel from the rest of the world and because he has alienated Washington in ways that few Israeli prime ministers dare to. For the time being, Obama can simply try to repair the damage with the Arab world while pushing even more forcefully for a peace process in which Israel will feel more, rather than less, willing to offer compromises.
Perhaps this is too sanguine an assessment. The world is as it is, and Obama cannot perform miracles. Perhaps Israel’s iron grip on US foreign policy will prevent any progress towards defanging the cycle of religious warfare that threatens more than just Israelis in today’s world. Perhaps Netanyahu will succeed in wrecking Obama’s promise to move Middle Eastern politics towards a saner future. Perhaps Hamas and the feckless Palestinian Authority will render any such future impossible as well.
At the same time, the deepening crisis in the Middle East, the looming threat of a nuclear Iran and the intensifying despair of Palestinians make some moment of truth inevitable under this president. And Obama’s position on settlements and the fact of the UN veto after Gaza remain deep structural advantages that he has yet to deploy. At least the Arab world now knows that Obama tried, which in itself is useful for building trust and pulling the trigger later if necessary.
I repeat my view that what we know about Obama’s character is that he bides his time on these kinds of thing, forces his interlocutors to reveal themselves and eschews tactical victories for long-term success. You see this Lincoln-style passive-aggression everywhere — from health reform to civil rights to foreign policy. It is too rash to pronounce judgments prematurely on a man who plays the long game. And it means that at any particular moment he can seem weak. But allowing oneself to seem weak, even as one remains structurally with the upper hand, can be a sign of fathomless self-confidence.
What we are witnessing, in real time, will show us whether that self-confidence is merited. The jury remains out.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Times
Grave of Neda Soltan desecrated by supporters of Iranian regime
Martin Fletcher
Supporters of Iran’s regime have desecrated the grave of Neda Soltan, the student who became a symbol of the opposition after she was shot dead during an anti-goverment demonstration on June 20.
The incident was confirmed by Ms Soltan’s fiancé, Caspian Makan, who fled from Iran after being released on bail following 65 days in prison. A recording of Ms Soltan’s mother weeping and cursing those responsible has been posted on the internet.
Mr Makan, 38, also disclosed that the regime tried to force him and Ms Soltan’s parents to say that she was killed by the opposition, not by a government militiaman on a motorbike as eyewitnesses have claimed. A documentary to be shown on BBC Two next week contains an unseen clip of demonstrators catching the militiaman seconds after the shooting.
Mr Makan, who is in hiding said: “The breaking of Neda’s gravestone broke the hearts of millions of freedom-loving people around the world. The repressors, believing they can stifle the cries for freedom, have even attacked, beaten, threatened and insulted Neda’s parents. This is while the Islamic Republic of Iran denies Neda’s murder.”
On the internet recording Hajar Rostami, Ms Soltan’s mother, weeps over her daughter’s grave and wails: “Woe on me! Where’s my child’s tombstone? . . . My child has no gravestone . . . You bastards! Why don’t you leave my child alone?”
On November 4 Ms Soltan’s parents were attacked and detained when they joined a protest in Iran. One source told The Times that members of the security forces taunted them, saying that they could meet the same fate as their daughter.
Officials had been pressurising Ms Soltan’s parents to say that their daughter was shot not by a government militiaman — a basij — but by enemies of Iran seeking to embarrass the regime. They were told that if they did so she would be declared a martyr and they would receive a pension.
In October Ms Soltan’s mother said: “Neda died for her country, not so that I could get a monthly income from the Martyr Foundation. If these officials say Neda was a martyr, why do they keep wiping off the word ‘martyr’ in red which people write on her gravestone? . . . Even if they give the world to me I will never accept the offer.”
Arash Hejazi, the doctor who tried to save Ms Soltan’s life and who now lives in exile in Oxford, told The Times: “The beating and arrest of Neda’s parents, the shattering of her tombstone, and the torturing and imprisonment of her boyfriend only shows how far this government is ready to go.”
Mounting fury
June 12 Presidential elections after a campaign with huge rallies for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and main challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi
June 13 Mousavi calls for vote counting to stop, citing “blatant violations” but government says Ahmadinejad won with 62.63 per cent of the vote. Angry crowds assemble in Tehran
June 15 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader, agrees to investigate the disputed election but tens of thousands of Mousavi supporters take to streets. At least eight are killed and at least 368 detained
June 19 State television says more than 450 are detained during clashes in Tehran. At least 10 are killed, including Neda Soltan, apparently shot by a militia sniper. Footage of her murder is seen around the world on the internet
July 30 Police fire teargas to disperse mourners at her grave
August 5 Ahmadinejad sworn in
November 4 Tens of thousands rally to attack the regime on 30th anniversary of storming of US Embassy

From The Sunday London Times
French mock Nicolas Sarkozy, the Beatle who bust the Berlin Wall
Matthew Campbell in Paris
THE French are enjoying a good laugh at the expense of Nicolas Sarkozy, their energetic leader, who is being mocked for claiming to have helped knock down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
Lampooning of the “hyper-president” has gone to new extremes after a picture on his Facebook site of him chipping at the Wall turned out to have been taken after the hated symbol of the cold war had fallen.
A diminutive stature and boastful streak have long made “Sarko” a figure of fun. He was ridiculed previously for claiming to have single-handedly rescued Europe from global financial crisis.
His desire to be at the centre of events was parodied last week in a series of spoof photographs showing him leading the French to victory in the 1998 football World Cup and storming the Bastille in 1789.
He has been shown seated next to Winston Churchill at the Yalta summit in 1945 and walking on the moon. In one of the pictures he is recast as a member of the Beatles. He also “discovers” America, invents penicillin and wins an Olympic medal.
Not all of the reaction to the Berlin Wall photograph was quite so good-humoured. Visitors to Sarkozy’s Facebook site accused the Elysée Palace of censorship, complaining that negative comments about the president’s behaviour had been erased from the internet. A presidential spokesman said only “hateful and vulgar” messages had been removed.
With his platform heels and pugnacious demeanour, Sarkozy, a hate figure for the left, is used to being mocked but has made it clear that it upsets him. He has often threatened lawsuits when faced with the worst excesses, such as a “voodoo doll” in his image that did a brisk trade in Parisian shops last year.
A taste for luxury watches, designer sunglasses and jewellery led to caricatures of him in the early days of his rule as “le président bling-bling”, but more recently comics have focused on his allegedly dictatorial bent: he is often parodied as Napoleon or Louis XIV.
The cartoonists had a field day with his marriage to Carla Bruni last year and much of the fun has revolved around the difference in height between the statuesque former model and the pint-sized president.
Photographs of him in platform heels or standing on his toes next to President Barack Obama have fuelled the comedy and there was hilarity when Sarkozy, in a desperate attempt to look taller than his 5ft 5in during a factory visit, surrounded himself with workers who had been picked because they were shorter.
Ever since a television interviewer accused Sarkozy of behaving like a “little boy” — the journalist was sacked for this lèse majesté — Les Guignols de l’Info, a satirical television programme that features politicians as puppets, has been lampooning the leader as a tantrum-prone toddler.
In a sketch about his threat to walk out of a G20 summit earlier this year (if the rest of the world did not endorse his ideas for regulating financial markets), leaders’ seats were depicted around a conference table and next to a baby’s high-chair for Sarko.
He has promised “rupture” with the bad old ways of the past and has embraced new ways of communication, attracting thousands of “friends” to his Facebook site. A caption alongside the photograph of him at the Wall claimed he had rushed to Berlin on November 9, 1989 — the day the Wall fell — “to take part in the event that was taking shape”.
It emerged, however, that the photograph was taken at least one day later. Sarko’s account of witnessing the fall of the Wall was a “total fantasy”, according to Alain Auffray, a journalist who covered events in Berlin at the time. Various officials roped in to bolster Sarko’s version of events offered conflicting versions.
To some it was reminiscent of the fuss that erupted last year when Hillary Clinton, now the American secretary of state, recalled landing “under fire” at an airport in Bosnia, only to be contradicted by footage of an entirely peaceful arrival.
For Sarkozy, who has had to brazen out allegations of nepotism and turning a blind eye to a minister’s past as a sex tourist in Thailand, it was one more embarrassment.
He took yet another knock last week when Bernard Laporte, the former French rugby coach and sports minister, challenged the government’s reputation as a beacon of “openness”.
The cabinet might include women, members of ethnic minorities and homosexuals, but Laporte claimed it had snubbed him because of his regional accent — an almost incomprehensible Toulouse twang.
His government colleagues, he maintained, had seen him simply as “the bloke who gives out the tickets” for football and rugby matches.

From The London Times
Iranian doctor Arash Hejazi who tried to rescue Neda Soltan tells of wounds that never heal
Martin Fletcher
As Arash Hejazi sat in an Oxford coffee bar, members of Iran’s Basij militia in Tehran were demanding his extradition outside the British Embassy.
The previous day the Iranian regime had sent an Oxford college a letter of protest over a scholarship given to honour Neda Soltan, the student killed during a huge demonstration against electoral fraud in Tehran in June. The letter also suggested that Dr Hejazi was responsible for her murder.
For Dr Hejazi, who had tried to save Ms Soltan’s life, that was the final straw. He decided that it was time to speak out. It was time to reveal how the regime has sought to vilify, punish and silence him ever since he told the world, immediately after Ms Soltan’s death, how she had been shot by a government henchman for peacefully protesting against President Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election.
Dr Hejazi is now living in exile in Britain, jobless and fearful, while back in Tehran the regime blackens his name and hounds his friends, family and colleagues. “I told the truth. I just did what I had to do, but there were dire consequences,” he told The Times. In short, a quirk of fate — that he happened to be standing near Ms Soltan the moment that she was shot — has turned his entire life upside down and made him “another victim of tyranny”.
Dr Hejazi, 38, was doing a one-year postgraduate course in publishing at Oxford Brookes University at the time of the June 12 presidential election, and returned to Tehran on a business trip the following day. On June 20 he was caught up in a street protest when he heard a blast, looked around and saw blood gushing from the chest of the woman next to him.
She collapsed. Dr Hejazi, who had trained as a doctor before switching to publishing, tried in vain to save her life. Within hours a video clip of that scene had flashed around the world, transforming Ms Soltan into a symbol of the regime’s brutality and of the Iranian people’s battle for freedom.
So powerful were the pictures that Dr Hejazi, realising that the regime would try to suppress the truth, fled back to his wife and infant son in Britain. A few days later, in interviews with The Times and the BBC, he told how Ms Soltan was shot by a Basiji on a motorbike who was swiftly caught by other demonstrators.
Dr Hejazi’s troubles began almost immediately. His father, a university professor, was interrogated for hours and ordered to tell his son to shut up. Senior officials in the regime asserted that Ms Soltan had been killed by foreign intelligence agencies, and that Dr Hejazi was part of an international conspiracy to undermine the Islamic republic. He was denounced in the state-controlled media. Iran’s police chief declared him a wanted man.
Although Dr Hejazi received thousands of e-mails praising his courage in speaking out, supporters of the regime threatened to kill him, and called him a murderer, a spy and Ms Soltan’s pimp. Oxford police installed alarms and a hotline in his two-bedroom rented house on the edge of the city but he still does not feel entirely safe. He opens his door with caution, and asks that his wife’s name not be published. “I worry for my security,” he said.
In Tehran the regime is exacting revenge on Caravan Books, the publishing house that Dr Hejazi co-founded and which employs 22 people. It has used Iran’s censorship laws to ban the publisher’s books and forbidden banks from giving it loans, even after Dr Hejazi resigned as editorial director. “They are trying to close the company down,” he says. He believes that the regime is pursuing him not just because he has seriously embarrassed it — “a lot of the pressure is to discourage others from speaking out”.
Dr Hejazi’s course ended in September but returning to Iran is obviously now impossible. “I would be arrested at the airport,” he said. He would join hundreds of other political prisoners who have been beaten, raped and tortured in the past five months. “I can be considered an exile.” He has been searching for a publishing job in Britain, however menial, but in vain. His wife has lost her post as a finance manager in a large Iranian company, and they are living on money borrowed from friends. “I can’t see my family. I’ve lost my job and my career. I don’t know how to sustain myself,” he said, laughing at the regime’s charge that he was an agent of foreign intelligence services. If he were, he said, he would not be living as he was.
While the regime makes Dr Hejazi and his family suffer, it has does nothing to punish the Basiji who shot Ms Soltan and was quickly identified by the demonstrators who caught him.
Dr Hejazi does not regret what he did and insists that he would do exactly the same again. He believes that he helped to expose the true nature of an evil government. “Totalitarian regimes always want to cover up their violence and terror, but evidence always surfaces to show the world what is really happening,” he said. He is proud that he rose to the challenge. “In every person’s life there are moments of truth that determine the sort of person you are, that test your beliefs and values. For me Neda’s death and speaking out was that moment, and I think I’ve been true to myself.”
For the rest of his life, however, Dr Hejazi will be haunted by the memory of the young woman’s face, her struggle to ask the question “why”, as her life ebbed away on that pavement.
He still suffers flashbacks. “As a doctor I’ve seen death many times,” he said. “But Neda’s innocence, the injustice of her death, and her gaze before she passed away mean I can never heal.”

From The London Times
It’s not about health, it’s about who runs the US
Power is draining from Obama. If he can’t get his Bill through he will be at best another Clinton, at worst another Carter
Giles Whittell
A funny thing happened in Ida Grove, Iowa, last Saturday. Funny and a bit sad. Steve King missed his son’s wedding. The weather was perfect. The traffic was light. Steve really loves his son, Mick, and has no problem with his new wife, Stephanie. He wanted to be there and could have been, but instead he was in Washington voting against a healthcare reform Bill in the House of Representatives. Despite his vote, the Bill passed.
What was Mr King thinking? Did he miss the most important day in his son’s life because he believes the Democrats are wrong to try to extend health insurance cover to the 46 million who lack it, or because he thinks they are going about it the wrong way? He did not. As a fellow Republican with more in the way of name recognition said yesterday: “This is not about healthcare. This is about power and political control.”
That Republican was Dick Armey, an icon of the anti-Clinton movement of the early 1990s and a hate figure for the Left, but also a keen student of US social history. He knows full well that America’s employer-based health insurance system exists largely by accident. It started as a 50 cents-a-month scheme for teachers, offered in the 1920s by a Dallas hospital looking for ways to keep its wards full.
It grew as a result of bureaucratic accident and business opportunism — not legislation, let alone constitutional amendment — and for decades it offered superb care at reasonable prices. It doesn’t any more. It denies cover to many and doles out too much care to many more at prices employers and taxpayers can no longer afford. Few serious politicians in either main party deny that large parts of it are failing.
The central issue for Congress is not whether healthcare needs fixing or even how. It’s by whom.
Deep down, Barack Obama believes it’s his turn. He ran for President promising change, and won. “Change” could mean anything to anyone. That was its chief merit as a slogan. But this Administration believes in its soul that the many meanings of the word should include a willingness to expand the role of the State itself if nothing else works. On economic management that meant taking controlling stakes in banks and car giants to stop them failing. On healthcare, it means proving that the Federal Government can move into running a nationwide low-cost insurance programme, and not screw it up.
My father-in-law believes a screw-up is inevitable. For his generation of Eisenhower Republicans it is axiomatic that anything the private sector can do, the public sector can do only worse. Dick Armey and the army of Tea Party activists that he informally leads go much farther. They call the slightest expansion of the State a step towards Marxism. They say so politely, seriously, despairingly, on battle buses and in town halls across the country, and it is a great mistake to doubt their sincerity.
Never mind that the most progressive healthcare reforms debated on Capitol Hill since Mr Obama entered the White House are still so private sector-dependent that in Britain no right-wing Tory could advocate them without risking his seat. Never mind that the most state-phobic conservatives are also among the most enthusiastic supporters of a gigantic and reasonably effective government-run machine at the heart of American society, foreign policy and economic life — the US military. There is a new insurgency in US politics that believes the Democrats’ pursuit of a public healthcare option is politically, constitutionally, fundamentally unAmerican.
The insurgents also smell blood. As Mr Armey said, this is about power and political control. Mr Obama has staked his presidency on showing that he can win reforms that eluded Mr Clinton in 1994 and generations before that. He has majorities in both houses. Even the legal tussle for a disputed Minnesota Senate seat went the Democrats’ way, adding a self-important comedian to their caucus in the upper house and giving them, in principle, a filibuster-proof majority. Yet the President seems unable to use it.
His first deadline for a healthcare Bill to reach the Oval Office sailed by in August. Christmas is the next, unofficial, deadline. That looks likely to be missed as well. Each day of delay on healthcare is a day of delay on everything else the White House wants Congress to do, starting with once-in-a-century financial regulatory reform and the climate change legislation that has become a test for how the rest of the world judges this Administration’s break with the last one. Even Afghanistan is waiting. One reason for Mr Obama’s interminable delay over requests for more troops is his fear of splitting the liberal base on which robust healthcare reforms depend.
In truth “robust” already sounds ambitious. The Tea Party insurgency has blunted the health crusade from the Right. Democratic infighting over tax-funded abortions may do the same from the Left. Slippage deep into next year is entirely possible. So is complete failure, and if Mr Obama fails on healthcare what remains of the bubble of hope he created in his 2008 campaign will deflate faster than a blood pressure cuff in an overpriced private hospital. He will be, at best, a Clinton facsimile; at worst another Carter, undone by his own naivety and shorn of his unused majorities in next year’s mid-terms.
It is a prospect that sets Steve King’s pulse racing. That is why he came to Washington on Saturday instead of watching Mick wed Stephanie. It is also why Mr Clinton told a Democratic power lunch on Tuesday to stop bickering over details and get healthcare done. A Bill — any Bill — would silence the President’s critics and kick-start the rest of his agenda, he said. “The worst thing is to do nothing.”
Power drains from those too afraid to use it. It is draining now from the White House to a handful of senators who could make or break Mr Obama’s healthcare reforms, and thus his presidency. One is Joseph Lieberman, widely accused of being in hock to the health insurance industry that dominates his home state of Connecticut. I don’t think so. He’s our new neighbour; a modest chap who happens to hold the fate of a nation in his hands. It’s time for the President to take it back.

Op-Ed Columnist NY Times
Call White House, Ask for Barack
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play. It is obvious that all the parties are just acting out the same old scenes, with the same old tired clichés — and that no one believes any of it anymore. There is no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency — not even a sense of importance anymore. The only thing driving the peace process today is inertia and diplomatic habit. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has left the realm of diplomacy. It is now more of a calisthenic, like weight-lifting or sit-ups, something diplomats do to stay in shape, but not because they believe anything is going to happen. And yet, as much as we, the audience, know this to be true, we can never quite abandon hope for peace in the Holy Land. It is our habit. Indeed, as I ranted about this to a Jordanian friend the other day, he said it all reminded him of an old story.
“These two guys are watching a cowboy and Indian movie. And in the opening scene, an Indian is hiding behind a rock about to ambush the handsome cowboy,” he explained. “ ‘I bet that Indian is going to kill that cowboy,’ one guy says to the other. ‘Never happen,’ his friend answers. ‘The cowboy is not going to be killed in the opening scene.’ ‘I’ll bet you $10 he gets killed,’ the guy says. ‘I’ll take that bet,’ says his friend.
“Sure enough, a few minutes later, the cowboy is killed and the friend pays the $10. After the movie is over the guy says to his friend, ‘Look, I have to give you back your $10. I’d actually seen this movie before. I knew what was going to happen.’ His friend answers: ‘No, you can keep the $10. I’d seen the movie, too. I just thought it would end differently this time.’ ”
This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.
Right now we want it more than the parties. They all have other priorities today. And by constantly injecting ourselves we’ve become their Novocain. We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening. “Look, the U.S. secretary of state is here. Look, she’s standing by my side. Look, I’m doing something important! Take our picture. Put it on the news. We’re on the verge of something really big and I am indispensable to it.” This enables the respective leaders to continue with their real priorities — which are all about holding power or pursuing ideological obsessions — while pretending to advance peace, without paying any political price.
Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: “My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.”
Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: “When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”
The fact is, the only time America has been able to advance peace — post-Yom Kippur War, Camp David, post-Lebanon war, Madrid and Oslo — has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy, and we had statesmen — Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, George Shultz, James Baker and Bill Clinton — savvy enough to seize those moments.
Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other — a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”
It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.
If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.
If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.

The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down
By FRANK RICH NY TIMES
FOR all cable news’s efforts to inflate Election 2009 into a cliffhanger as riveting as Balloon Boy, ratings at MSNBC and CNN were flat Tuesday night. But not at Fox News, where the audience nearly doubled its usual prime-time average. That’s what happens when you have a thrilling story to tell, and what could be more thrilling than a revolution playing out in real time?
As Fox kept insisting, all eyes were glued on Doug Hoffman, the insurgent tea party candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. A “tidal wave” was on its way, said Sean Hannity, and the right would soon “take back the Republican Party.” The race was not “even close,” Bill O’Reilly suggested to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, who didn’t disagree. When returns showed Hoffman trailing, the network’s resident genius, Karl Rove, knowingly reassured viewers that victory was in the bag, even if we’d have to stay up all night waiting for some slacker towns to tally their votes.
Alas, the Dewey-beats-Truman reveries died shortly after midnight, when even Fox had to concede that the Democrat, Bill Owens, had triumphed in what had been Republican country since before Edison introduced the light bulb. For the far right, the thriller in Watertown was over except for the ludicrous morning-after spin that Hoffman’s loss was really a victory. For the Democrats, the excitement was just beginning. New York’s 23rd could be celebrated as a rare bright spot on a night when the party’s gubernatorial candidates lost in Virginia and New Jersey.
The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans. Tuesday’s results may be useless as a predictor of 2010, but they are not without value as cautionary tales. And the most worrisome for Democrats were not in Virginia and New Jersey, but, paradoxically, in the New York contests where they performed relatively well. That includes the idiosyncratic New York City mayor’s race that few viewed as a bellwether of anything. It should be the most troubling of them all for President Obama’s cohort — even though neither Obama nor the national political parties were significant players in it.
But first let’s make a farewell accounting of the farce upstate. The reason why the Democratic victory in New York’s 23rd is a mixed blessing is simple: it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.
This race was a damaging setback for the hard right. Hoffman had the energetic support of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox as well as big bucks from their political auxiliaries. Furthermore, Hoffman was running not only in a district that Rove himself described as “very Republican” but one that fits the demographics of the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. The 23rd is far whiter than America as a whole — 93 percent versus 74 — with tiny sprinklings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. It has few immigrants. It’s rural. Its income and education levels are below the norm. Only if the district were situated in Dixie — or Utah — could it be a more perfect fit for the narrow American demographic where the McCain-Palin ticket had its sole romps last year.
If the tea party right can’t win there, imagine how it might fare in the nation where most Americans live. Some G.O.P. leaders have started to notice. Mitt Romney didn’t endorse Hoffman despite right-wing badgering to do so. On Wednesday, Michael Steele dismissed the right’s mantra that somehow Hoffman’s loss could be called a victory and instead talked up the newly elected Republican governors who won by appealing to independents and moderates. Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are plenty conservative, but both had rejected Palin’s offers to campaign for them. They also avoided the tea party zanies, the fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage and the anti-abortion-rights zealots Hoffman embraced. They positioned themselves as respectful Obama critics, not haters likening him to Hitler.
In the aftermath of this clear-cut demonstration of how Republicans can win, the revolutionaries are still pledging to purge the party’s moderates by rallying behind more Hoffmans in G.O.P. primaries from Florida to California. And they may get some scalps. But Tuesday’s loss revealed that they’re better at luring freak-show gawkers into Fox’s tent than voters into the G.O.P.’s. As if to prove the point, protesters hoisted a sign likening health care reform to Dachau at the raucous tea party rally convened by Michele Bachmann on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing this fringe, then the president and his party will have to confront their real problem: their identification with the titans who greased the skids for the economic meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the country has not. If there’s one general lesson to be gleaned from Christie’s victory over Jon Corzine in New Jersey, it’s surely that in today’s zeitgeist it’s less of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat cat, even in a blue state.
Michael Bloomberg’s shocking underperformance in New York was an even more dramatic illustration of this animus. Tuesday’s exit polls found that he had a whopping 70 percent approval rating, as befits a mayor who, whatever his quirks and missteps, is widely regarded as a highly competent, nonideological executive who has run the city well. Yet only 72 percent of those who gave him a thumb’s up voted for him. Though the mayor wildly outspent and out-campaigned his bland opponent, Bill Thompson, he received only 50.6 percent of the vote.
This shortfall has been correctly attributed to Bloomberg’s self-serving, highhanded undoing of the term limits law he had once endorsed. The ferocity of the public reaction to this power grab surprised him, pollsters and the press alike. That it became a bigger deal than anyone anticipated — arguably bigger than it merited — is an indicator of how much antipathy there is toward the masters of the universe in the financial capital. Americans don’t hate rich people, but they do despise those who behave as if the rules don’t apply to them. “Michael Bloomberg is About to Buy Himself a Third Term” was the cover line on New York magazine in October. However unfairly, some voters conflated his air of entitlement with the swaggering Wall Street C.E.O.’s who cashed out before the crash and stuck the rest of us with the bill.
The Obama administration does not seem to understand that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It has pushed aside the entreaties of many — including Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House’s own Economic Recovery Advisory Board — to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by the government’s bailouts, low-interest loans and guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on “Meet the Press” dodging questions about the banks in general and Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides. “We’re not going to let the system go back to the way it was,” he said.
Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington, publicly questioned Geithner’s fitness for his job, given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations of the derivatives that enabled last year’s collapse. On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White House’s consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, told me on Friday it was “surreal” that Democrats were now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing “the golden chalice” of reform. If investors cannot have transparency, Levitt said, “the whole system is worthless.”
The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.
The tea party Republicans vanquished on Tuesday have no jobs plan. They just want to eliminate all Washington spending — a prescription that didn’t go down too well in New York’s 23rd, where the federal government has the largest payroll. The G.O.P. establishment’s one-size-fits-all panacea is tax cuts — thin gruel for those with little or no taxable income. The administration’s answer is the stimulus, whose iffy results so far, it argues, can’t be judged this early on.
Fair enough. But a year from now the public will register its verdict in any event. Meanwhile, both parties have their own delusions, not the least of which is the Republicans’ conviction that Tuesday was a referendum on what Obama has done so far. If anything, it was a judgment on just how much he has not.

Paranoia Strikes Deep
By PAUL KRUGMAN NY TIMES
Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.
The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.
True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”
What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.
The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?
But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.
When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.
Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.
But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.
Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.
Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.
In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.
In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.
And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.
The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.