Nouvelles en Langue Anglaise

This week, President Barack Obama spoke to the United Nations' General Assembly and insisted that Israel and the Palestinians negotiate "without preconditions." (Well, excluding the effective precondition that Israeli settlements are "illegitimate," according to the administration - so no pre-conditions means feel free to rocket Israel while you talk.)

This tact, Obama hopes, will lead to "two states living side by side in peace and security - a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people."

Hate to break the news to you, but there already exists a Jewish state of Israel with true security for all Israelis. This security is attained through a perpetual war against terrorism and Arab aggression.

And the last time Israel withdrew from disputed lands without pre-conditions to allow the potential of the Palestinian people to shine through was in Gaza. The Arabs, hungering for the light of freedom, used the gift to elect Hamas - now an Iranian proxy and always a terror organization - to rain rockets down on the civilians that voted to allow the first democratic Arab entity in history.

If Obama expects Israel to end the "occupation" that began in 1967 he is also demanding Israel abandon parts of Jerusalem. If he really anticipates a Palestinian state will be "contiguous territory," what he expects is that Israel can't be contiguous.

And when he uses the word "occupation" he is negotiating for the Palestinians. None of the lands up for discussion are "occupied" territory. The president, a highly educated man, knows well that there has never been an ultimate agreement on borders, nor has there ever, in history, been a Palestinian state to occupy.

There is an ethical question that the president might want to answer, as well. Why would the United States support an arrangement that scrubs the West Bank of all its Jews? Why is it so unconscionable to imagine that Jews could live among Muslims in the same way millions of Arabs live within Israel proper? Not many international agreements feature ethnic cleansing clauses.

Isn't this, after all, about peace?

Of course, we all know the answer to this question: Jews would be slaughtered, bombed from their homes, rocketed from their schools.

This indisputable fact reveals the fundamental reality of these negotiations.

Instead of reaffirming the importance of our relationship with Israel, Obama has renewed our membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council, presided over by exemplars of self-determination and human dignity like Libya, Syria and Angola. The hobbyhorse of this organization is accusing Israel of war crimes, which isn't surprising.

Noted intellectual George Gilder argues in his recent book, "The Israel Test," that where you stand on Israel - not always, but in general - is an indication about how you feel about the ideals of liberty and capitalism. The debate over Israel, he claims, is the manifestation of a deeper moral and ideological war around the globe.

"The real issue," writes Gilder, "is between the rule of law and the rule of leveler egalitarianism, between creative excellence and covetous 'fairness,' between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment."

This nation has no inherent duty to wage endless wars to secure freedom for the world's masses - often against their will. But shouldn't it stand with those nations that already value the basics tenets of a free and peaceful society?

Or, are all people now equally deserving of our friendship simply because they exist?

Such is the Jewish way of burial. Its simplicity, austerity and unsentimentality would have appealed to Irving Kristol, who was buried by friends and family Tuesday. Equally fitting for this most unsentimental of men was the spare funeral service that preceded the burial. It consisted of the recitation of two psalms and the prayer for the dead, and two short addresses: an appreciation by the rabbi, followed by a touching, unadorned remembrance by his son, Bill.


The wonder of Irving was that he combined this lack of sentimentality -- he delighted in quietly puncturing all emotional affectations and indulgences -- with a genuine generosity of spirit. He was a deeply good man who disdained shows of goodness, deflecting expressions of gratitude or admiration with a disarming charm and an irresistible smile. That's because he possessed what might be called a moral humility. For Irving, doing good -- witness the posthumous flood of grateful e-mails, letters and other testimonies from often young and uncelebrated beneficiaries of that goodness -- was as natural and unremarkable as breathing.

Kristol's biography has been rehearsed in a hundred places. He was one of the great public intellectuals of our time, father of a movement, founder of magazines, nurturer of two generations of thinkers -- seeding our intellectual and political life for well over half a century.

Having had the undeserved good fortune of knowing him during his 21-year sojourn in Washington, I can testify to something lesser known: his extraordinary equanimity. His temperament was marked by a total lack of rancor. Angst, bitterness and anguish were alien to him. That, of course, made him unusual among the fraternity of conservatives because we believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. That makes us cranky. But not Irving. Never Irving. He retained steadiness, serenity and grace that expressed themselves in a courtliness couched in a calm quiet humor.

My theory of Irving is that this amazing equanimity was rooted in a profound sense of modesty. First about himself. At 20, he got a job as a machinist's apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He realized his future did not lie in rivets, he would recount with a smile, when the battleship turret he was working on was found to be pointing in the wrong direction. It could only shoot inward -- directly at the ship's own bridge.

He was equally self-deprecating about his experiences as an infantryman in World War II France. ("Experiences?" he once said to me. "We were lost all the time.") His gloriously unheroic view of himself extended to the rest of humanity -- its politics, its pretensions, its grandiose plans for the renovation of . . . humanity.

This manifested itself in the work for which he is most celebrated: his penetrating, devastating critique of modern liberalism and of its grand projects for remaking man and society. But his natural skepticism led him often to resist conservative counter-enthusiasms as well. Most recently, the general panic about changing family structures.

Irving had an abiding reverence for tradition and existing norms. But he thought it both futile and anti-human to imagine we could arrest their evolution. He never yelled for history to stop. He acknowledged the necessity of adaptation (most famously, to the New Deal and the welfare state).

He was less concerned about the form of emerging family norms, such as France's non-marriage Civil Solidarity Pact, than whether they could in time perform the essential functions of the traditional family -- from the generational transmission of values to the socialization of young males.

That spirit of skepticism and intellectual openness was a marvel. One of Irving's triumphs was to have infused that spirit into the Public Interest, the most serious and influential social policy journal of our time. Irving co-founded it in 1965, then closed it 40 years later, saying with characteristic equanimity, "No journal is meant to last forever."


A new time, a new journal. On Sept. 8, 2009, the first issue of a new quarterly, National Affairs -- successor to the Public Interest -- was published. Irving Kristol died 10 days later, but not before writing a letter to its editor -- two generations his junior -- offering congratulations and expressing pleasure at its creation.


That small tender shoot, yet another legacy of this great good life, was the last Irving lived to see. We shall see many more.

In 1994, my father wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal titled "Life Without Father." It dealt with the subject of the family and poverty and welfare--with my father drawing for his argument, as he so often did, on a combination of social science, common sense, history, and personal experience. In the course of the article, my father briefly discussed his father, Joseph Kristol--who, he wrote, "was thought by all our relatives and his fellow workers to be wise, and fair, and good. I thought so too."

So have Liz and I always thought about our father. To us, he was wise, and fair, and good. I honestly don't think it ever occurred to us that we could have had a better father. So as we enter the rest of our life--a life without our father--we are overwhelmed not by a sense of loss or grief, though of course we feel both, but by a sense of gratitude: Having Irving Kristol as our dad was our great good fortune.

Now my father would often speak of his own great good fortune. That was meeting my mother. Shortly after graduating from City College, my father--a diligent if already somewhat heterodox Trotskyist--was assigned to attend the meetings of a Brooklyn branch of the young Trotskyists. As my father later wrote, the meetings were farcical and pointless, as they were intended to recruit the proletarian youths of Bensonhurst to a cause they were much too sensible to take seriously.

But the meetings turned out not to be entirely pointless, because my father met my mother there.

They were married, and remained happily married--truly happily married, thoroughly happily married--for the next 67 year.

Dan Bell, who knew my parents for that whole span, called my parents' marriage "the best marriage of [his] generation." I only knew my parents for 56 years, so I can't speak with Dan's authority--and my first couple of years with my parents are something of a blur. But I know enough confidently to endorse his judgment.

During the 1960s and 1970s, when Liz and I were growing up, everything is supposed to have become complicated and conflicted and ambiguous. Not so with respect to my parents' love for each other. Or with respect to the love and admiration that Liz and I--and, later, Caleb and Susan--had for my father. Our love for him was always straightforward, unambivalent, and unconditional.

As was the love of his five grandchildren for him. And as was his love for them. Almost seven years ago, my father was scheduled for lung surgery. As we were talking the night before, my father matter-of-factly acknowledged the possibility he might not survive. And, he said, he could have no complaints if that were to happen. "I've had such a lucky life," he remarked. (Actually, I'm editing a bit since we're in a house of worship. He said, "I've had such a goddam lucky life.")

But, he said, it would be just great to get another five years--in order to see the grandchildren grow up. That wish of his was granted. He got almost seven years. So he was able to see Rebecca and Anne and Joe graduate from college. He was able to attend Rebecca and Elliot's wedding. He--a staff sergeant in the Army in World War II--developed a renewed interest in things military, as Joe trained to be, and then was commissioned as, a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.


And he was able to see Liz's children grow up too, to watch Max and Katy become poised and impressive teenagers--it turns out that's not a contradiction in terms. My father was able to get to know them, and to talk with them, in a way you can't with much younger kids. So that too was a great source of happiness.

Everyone knows of my father's good nature and good humor. He kept that to the end. In the last couple of years, his hearing loss--and the limitations of even the most modern hearing aid technology--sometimes made it difficult for him to understand everything that was being said in a noisy restaurant or a busy place. But he compensated. A few months ago, my parents were out for brunch with the Stelzers and the Krauthammers. After a stretch where he couldn't quite pick up some exchanges between Irwin and Charles, my dad said to the two of them: "I can't hear what you're saying. So I make it up. And," he added, smiling, "sometimes you disappoint me."

But my father was in general not the disappointed sort. It's true that he loved dogs and never had one. But he made up for that by doting on his two granddogs--Liz and Caleb's Sandy, and of course Patches, whom he saw more of because of our proximity. Patches really loved my father--and, as many of you know, Patches is choosy in his affections.

Just a day or so before he slipped from consciousness last week, my father was greeted by one of those well-trained dogs that visit hospitals, in this case a big golden retriever. He patted it and communed with it for a while. Then, as the owner led the dog away, my father commented to us, as if for the ages--"dogs are noble creatures."

My father liked humans too--though I'm not sure he thought they quite rose to the level of dogs as noble creatures. Still, as I look around today, I do wish my father could be here, because he would have so enjoyed seeing and talking with all of you.

In one of the many, many emails and notes I've gotten in the last few days, a friend commented, "When I'd stop by the Public Interest office in the 1980s, your dad would always start a conversation with, 'How's the family?' I suppose that was his standard opener. But I noticed in the last few years, when I'd see him at AEI or somewhere else in D.C., he'd ask about 'the family' and then 'how's everyone?' If I mentioned some former PI editor or writer, he'd beam--as if it were news of his own extended family."

My father's extended family ended up being pretty large. In politics and law and business and journalism, in New York and Washington and elsewhere--even in the strange outposts of modern academe, there are scores, legions--hordes they must seem to those who disapprove of them--who have been influenced, and not just casually, by my father.

How did he do it? I do think that in my father was found an unusual combination of traits--confidence without arrogance; worldly wisdom along with intellectual curiosity; a wry wit and a kindly disposition; and a clear-eyed realism about the world along with a great generosity of spirit.

He very much enjoyed his last two decades in Washington, but he had none of the self-importance that afflicts us here. He loved intellectual pursuits, but always shunned intellectual pretension. For example, I don't think I ever heard him use the phrase "the life of the mind," though my father lived a life of the mind.

Beneath the confident wit and the intellectual bravado, my father had a deep modesty. My father spoke with gratitude of his good fortune in life. He wouldn't have claimed to deserve the honors that came his way--though he did deserve them.

Perhaps in part because he was a man who was marked by such a deep sense of gratitude, he was the recipient of much deeply felt gratitude. Even I've been surprised, judging by the emails and phone calls since his death, by the sheer number of those befriended by my father, by the range of those affected by him, by the diversity of those who admired him. I expected the appropriate remarks from distinguished political leaders and professors, and we were moved by eloquent testimonials from people who've known my father well, in some cases for many decades. But what struck all of us in the family were the emails from individuals who met my father only once or twice, but who remembered his kindness or benefited from his counsel--or from people who had never met him, but who were still very much influenced by his writing or other enterprises he was involved in.

For example--this, from a young Capitol Hill aide: "Your father was one of the first people I met, totally by accident, when I went to work at AEI a few years ago. And I will always remember how incredibly gracious and kind he was toward me, an utterly clueless research assistant." Or this, an email forwarded by one of our kids: "Sorry to hear about your grandfather. He was ahead of his time and provided the intellectual underpinnings for the only conservative kid in his Jewish youth group in Tulsa, Oklahoma." Of all the communications my mother and my sister and I have received, I suspect my father might have gotten a particular kick out of that one.

Leon Kass said to me last week, after a final visit to my father: "It's hard to imagine a world without Irving Kristol." So it is. But, as Leon would be the first to say, we're not left simply with a world without Irving Kristol. It's true that his death leaves the world a poorer place. But it's a world made richer by the life he lived, and the legacy he leaves.

Bill was my kind of conservative. He was a real conservative in his wariness over government overreach and in his steadfast defense of free speech (even where it involved national security), and had a real appreciation of the role power plays in international affairs. He was always hard-headed and true to his beliefs. But unlike every true believer I have ever met, he was always ready and willing to argue and to do so without any rancor. He was willing to make points and to concede points if his opponent's facts and arguments were sound. There was no pretense or hatred in his give and take. He was a model to us all--a model too little followed.

Nor was he simply a political man. He loved politics, but he also loved words. He made language his other love in life, after politics. Or perhaps he put it before politics. I don't know. His language columns and books were a model of civility and learning. I don't think anyone else can step into his shoes.

Forgive me for making this appreciation so personal, but every time I think of Bill Safire, I think of the advice he gave me many years ago when I joined him as a columnist at the Times. In his usual staccato, twangy, short-sentence style, he said: "Let me give you two pieces of advice:

"Half the columns you write will be no better than C+. Write them and go home." Boy, was he right, and I wasted a ridiculous amount of time trying to transform the C+ into a B-.

"And make sure that at least twice a year you make somebody bleed in your column," he intoned. Boy, was he right, and the whole world seemed more eager to talk to me when the blood spilled onto the pages.

I tell this story not just for the pleasure of remembering it, but to show Bill Safire's very practical way of thinking about life, a good way, probably the best way for someone in the business of having to give opinions in print at least a hundred times a year.

There was yet another special aspect to Bill Safire's columns. Unlike almost all columnists, he was also always a reporter. He actually worked extremely hard to gather actual information. His columns weren't simply off the top of his head, which made his opinions all the more weighty.

It's particularly sad that Bill passed away on the eve of Yom Kippur, the highest holy day in Judaism and the Day of Atonement. I always suspected it was Bill's favorite day. It involves a day of reflection and fast, and Bill and his terrific wife, Helene, always closed the day with a breaking-of-the-fast dinner. To it, they invited Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, friends and foes alike. That event and that kind of event will be sorely missed--but not nearly as much as we will miss Bill Safire, his wit, his wisdom and himself.

Leslie H. Gelb is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense can Rescue American Foreign Policy and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times.

In a stern warning to critics of a continued troop presence in Afghanistan, Gates said the Islamic extremist Taliban and Al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States as similar to the Soviet Union's humiliating withdrawal in 1989 after a 10-year war.

"The notion of timelines and exit strategies and so on, frankly, I think would all be a strategic mistake. The reality is, failure in Afghanistan would be a huge setback for the United States," Gates said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

"Taliban and al-Qaida, as far as they're concerned, defeated one superpower. For them to be seen to defeat a second, I think, would have catastrophic consequences in terms of energizing the extremist movement, Al Qaeda recruitment, operations, fundraising, and so on. I think it would be a huge setback for the United States."

Gates' pointed remarks came as President Barack Obama re-examines his administration's strategy in Afghanistan and as the Pentagon sits on a request for additional troops from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

McChrystal has said a different strategy on the ground as well as more troops are needed in Afghanistan. In a "60 Minutes" profile airing Sunday night, the commander argued for faster progress.

"We could do good things in Afghanistan for the next 100 years and fail," he said. "Because we're doing a lot of good things and it just doesn't add up to success. And we've got to think quicker."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Obama's decisions will come after the election in Afghanistan is sorted out.

"This is not like an election in Western Europe or the United States, to carry out an election in these circumstances was going to be difficult under any conditions. It's not over yet," Clinton told CBS television's "Face the Nation."

"We have to wait until it is resolved, hopefully very soon. Then make a new commitment on how to meet our strategic goals. And it's going to be up to the president to determine how best to achieve that."

Gates said Obama has made no decision on whether to send additional troops. He said if Obama were to choose to increase combat forces, they would not be able to mobilize until January.

The prospect of sending additional soldiers has created a backlash among some Democrats in Congress and has angered anti-war activists on the left who rallied behind Obama's presidential candidacy last year.

Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin has said the administration should set a "flexible timeline" to draw down troops. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, has called for a timeline and a time limit for achieving objectives in Afghanistan.*

"I do not believe the American people want to be in Afghanistan for the next 10 years, effectively nation building," she told "Fox News Sunday."

Others, such as Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin of Michigan, have not gone as far, but have urged Obama not to escalate the war.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said he hopes Obama will decide to commit the necessary troops.

"I think you will see signs of success in a year to 18 months, if we implement the strategy right away," McCain said on ABC's "This Week."

Obama sent 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan earlier this year. But in a tough assessment of conditions on the ground, McChrystal warned that without more troops the United States could lose the war against the Taliban and its allies. Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen also has endorsed more troops, telling Congress this month Afghan forces are not ready to fight the insurgency and protect the population on their own.

Gates rejected suggestions of a split over troop levels between the Pentagon's uniformed leadership on one side and Gates and Obama on the other.

"Having the wrong strategy would put even more soldiers at risk," he told ABC. "So I think it's important to get the strategy right and then we can make the resources decision."

He said the strategy review would be "a matter of weeks," but he said he would not submit McChrystal's request for troops to the president "until I think -- or the president thinks -- it's appropriate to bring that into the discussion of the national security principles."

In veiled criticism of the Bush administration, which he also served as defense secretary, Gates said the United States was too preoccupied with Iraq to have a comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan.

"The strategy that the president put forward in late March is the first real strategy we have had for Afghanistan since the early 1980s," he said.

On the surface, the comparison is plausible. In 1994, as now, a charismatic outsider took office amid general unhappiness with the record of his Republican predecessor. Then, as now, the president decided to make health care reform a signature issue despite widespread concerns about the economy, taxes, and federal budget deficits. And, as now, Republicans responded with an abrasive political strategy that energized their conservative base, at a time when Democrats were seemingly divided between centrists and liberals discouraged by the new president’s perceived centrist path.

It's impossible, however, to draw concrete conclusions from such superficial observations. A more disconcerting parallel for Democrats might be the scope of their recent winning streak. In the elections leading up to both 1994 and 2010, Democratic victories, particularly in the House, left the party somewhat over-exposed. In 1994, 46 of the 258 House Democrats were in districts carried by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The numbers are comparable today, where 49 of the 257 House Democrats are in districts carried by John McCain, with only 34 Republicans in districts carried by Barack Obama. Similarly, if you apply the Partisan Voting Index, (PVI), which compares a district’s prior presidential results to national averages, you find that there are 66 Democrats in districts with a Republican PVI and only 15 Republicans in districts with a Democratic PVI--a similar situation to the 79 Democrats in Republican districts in 1994. Clearly, two straight "wave" elections have eliminated most of the low-hanging fruit for Democrats in the House, and created some ripe targets for the GOP.

But that's where the fear-inducing similarities end. The Republicans' 1994 victory in the House was also enabled by a large number of Democratic retirements: Twenty-two of the 54 seats the GOP picked up that year were open. By comparison, the authoritative (and subscription-only) Cook Political Report counts only four open, Democrat-held House seats in territory that is even vaguely competitive. That low number of open seats is significant because it limits the number of seats Republicans can win; if there is a similar wave of retirements in the offing for 2010, the signs have yet to materialize.

The 1994 parallels appear even more tendentious in the Senate. In 1994, Democrats lost eight of the 22 seats they defended, six of which were open. Republicans had only 13 seats to defend, and three of them were open. In 2010, however, the situation lopsidedly favors Democrats. Republicans have to defend 19 of their seats, seven of which are open. Meanwhile, Democrats have to defend 19 seats, only three of which are open. For Republicans to take the Senate, Democrats would have to lose eleven seats without picking off a single Republican. There’s no modern precedent for a tsunami that large.

Another disconnect between 1994 and 2010 involves patterns of demography and ideology. The 1994 election was the high-water mark of the great ideological sorting that occurred between the two parties. That made the environment particularly harsh for southern Democrats, as well as those in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain West, where many ancestral attachments to the Donkey Party came unmoored.

In the South, this sorting-out was reinforced by the decennial reapportionment and redistricting process, during which both Republicans and civil rights activists promoted a regime of "packing" and "bleaching" districts--that is, the electoral consolidation of African-American voters. While this had a salutary effect on African-American representation in the House of Representatives, the overall effect was to weaken Democrats. This dynamic was best illustrated by my home state of Georgia, whose House delegation changed from 9-1 Democratic going into the 1992 election to 8-3 Republican after 1994.

Nothing similar to those handicaps exists today. The ideological filtering of the parties is long over; any genuine conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans left in the electorate clearly have reasons for retaining their loyalties, which will be difficult to erode. Moreover, whether or not you buy the "realignment" theories that Democrats were excited about after the 2008 elections, there is not a single discernible long-term trend that favors the Republican Party. Bush-era Republican hopes of making permanent inroads among Hispanics and women were thoroughly dashed in 2006 and 2008. Moreover, as Alan Abramowitz recently pointed out, the percentage of the electorate that is nonwhite--which is rejecting Republicans by overwhelming margins--has roughly doubled since 1994.

Still, there is one short-term demographic factor that Democrats should be alarmed about in 2010. Older voters almost always make up a larger percentage of those who go to the polls during midterm elections than they do in presidential election years. And older white voters, who contributed mightily to the Democrats' midterm victory in 2006, are famously skeptical of Barack Obama. Indeed, they skewed away from him in 2008, even before Republicans devoted so many resources turning them against health care reform with tales of big Medicare cuts and death panels. So the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman may have been correct when he predicted that, "[e]ven if Obama and Democrats are just as popular next November as they were last November, they might stand to lose five to ten seats in the House based on the altered composition of the midterm electorate alone."

That’s bad, but it's certainly not political reversal on the scale of 1994. Unlike Bill Clinton at the same time in his presidency, Obama's approval ratings seem to have recently stabilized in the low-fifties; not great, but not that bad in a polarized country, either. And as both Abramowitz and Ron Brownstein have pointed out, in group after group of the electorate, he remains as popular as he was when he was elected. A cyclical turnover of ten House seats, which seems to be the most likely scenario in 2010, would not a revolution make.

Obama will join other administration officials and first lady Michelle Obama in pitching Chicago to the International Olympic Committee on Friday, spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

No other U.S. president has ever attended an IOC meeting.

Chicago is vying for the Summer Games against Madrid, Spain; Tokyo, Japan; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Leaders from Brazil, Spain and Japan are expected to also make in-person pitches.

The United States has hosted four Summer Olympic Games. The games were held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904; in Los Angeles, California, in 1932 and 1984; and in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996. The last U.S. city to host the Olympics was Salt Lake City, Utah, which was the venue for the 2002 Winter Games.

The International Olympic Committee will vote on the host city next month in Copenhagen.

In April, the U.S. Olympic Committee chose Chicago over Los Angeles as the U.S. bid city. Earlier, three other U.S. cities were in the running: Houston, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and San Francisco, California.

Obama held an event at the White House earlier this month to rally for Chicago as the host city.

"I may live in Washington these days, but I've called Chicago home for nearly 25 years," Obama said.

"It's a city of broad shoulders, big hearts, and bold dreams. A city of legendary sports figures, legendary sports venues and legendary sports fans.

"We want these games!" Obama exclaimed, drawing applause.

While in Denmark, the president and first lady will meet with Queen Margrethe II and her husband, Prince Henrik, the White House said in a release. Obama also is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

Obama will leave Thursday night and return Friday afternoon, the White House said.

Nicolas Sarkozy was furious with Barack Obama for his adolescent warbling about a world without nuclear weapons at a meeting Mr. Obama chaired of the United Nations Security Council last Thursday (9/24).

"We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth," President Obama said.

What infuriated President Sarkozy was that at the time Mr. Obama said those words, Mr. Obama knew the mullahs in Iran had a secret nuclear weapons development site, and he didn't call them on it.

‘President Obama dreams of a world without weapons...but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite," Mr. Sarkozy said.

"Iran since 2005 has flouted five Security Council resolutions," Mr. Sarkozy said. "North Korea has been defying Council resolutions since 1993."

"What good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community?" he asked rhetorically. "More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe out a UN member state off the map."

If the Security Council had imposed serious sanctions on the regimes which are flouting UN resolutions, the resolution Mr. Obama proposed about working toward nuclear disarmament wouldn't have been so meaningless, Mr. Sarkozy implied.

"If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce or own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons," he said.

The extent of President Obama's naivete - or duplicity - was on display Friday at the G20 summit when the president, flanked by Mr. Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, revealed to the American public that Iran had a second nuclear weapons site on a military base near the holy city of Qom.

News reports indicated Mr. Obama had been briefed on the site before his inauguration. But he's been conducting his foreign policy as if the mullahs could be trusted.

"Iran has been put on notice," President Obama said in Pittsburgh.

Iran responded to being "put on notice" by testing Monday two ballistic missiles that could carry a nuclear warhead 1,200 miles.

It was to protect Europe from such missiles that the ABM system President Obama abruptly cancelled earlier this month was designed.

Obama administration officials said the ABM cancellation - regarded as a betrayal by Poland and the Czech Republic, where the missiles and radars were to be located - actually improved U.S. security, because it has made Russia more amenable to sanctions against Iran.

The UN Security Council has never passed strong sanctions against Iran because Russia and China have vetoed them. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said he still doesn't like economic sanctions, but will support them if diplomacy fails. China remains opposed.

President Obama shouldn't count on Russian support, said Soviet expert David Satter.

"Words are cheap for the Kremlin and the Iranians are aware of this," he said. "The Russians, having endorsed sanctions, will now find hundreds of reasons why any specific sanctions package is unfair...The reason is that support for Iran is Russia's most important trump card in foreign relations and there is little likelihood they will give it up."

Iran has been put on notice before. At the G8 meeting in Italy in July, Mr. Obama and other leaders set a "firm deadline" of Sep. 10 for the Iranians to make a serious offer to negotiate about their nuclear program. When the mullahs blew him off, Mr. Obama quietly extended the deadline until December.

December could be too late. "Tehran soon could have humankind's most frightening weapon if substantial diplomatic progress is not made in the coming days," Rep. Howard Berman (D-Cal), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Saturday (9/26).

If severe economic sanctions are not imposed immediately, in months if not in weeks, only a military strike will b e able to prevent an Iranian bomb.

But after sternly lecturing Iran on its international obligations Friday, President Obama didn't call for sanctions. He called for more negotiations. And then, as the Iranians were spitting in his eye with the missile test, he jetted off to Copenhagen to lobby to have the 2016 Olympics held in Chicago.

No wonder Nicolas Sarkozy holds him in contempt.

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All across America, Candidate Obama hammered home his message. Mr. McCain represented "the same old Bush-McCain policies that have failed us for the past eight years." A vote for Mr. McCain was a vote for a "third Bush term." And far from being a maverick, Mr. McCain was in actuality a Bush "sidekick."

Today we're back to the Obama v. Bush storyline. With one twist. In this election cycle, the Democrat tarring his opponent as a "Bush Republican" is running behind in the polls—while the Republican bashing his opponent as an "Obama Democrat" enjoys a lead.

The two races are for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, states that Mr. Obama carried in the last election. In New Jersey, the incumbent Democratic governor, Jon Corzine, is running on the same anti-Bush message that worked so well for Democrats last year. But in Virginia, Republican Bob McDonnell has turned the tables by tying his opponent to Barack Obama.

The received wisdom, of course, is that national politics have little to do with the choices voters make at the state and local level. Most press commentary reflects this wisdom, tut-tutting about candidates trying to use presidents to define their opponents. Whether or not the received wisdom is right, the candidates themselves obviously believe otherwise—or they wouldn't be doing it.




In New Jersey, Republican challenger Chris Christie served as a U.S. attorney under President George W. Bush before receiving his party's nomination—and Gov. Corzine doesn't intend to let the voters of blue-state New Jersey forget it. A cruise through the Corzine campaign Web site shows press releases referring to Mr. Christie as "Bush Republican Chris Christie." One of many Bush-themed ads carries this tag-line: "Chris Christie—the same Bush policies that got us into this mess." And at a Corzine rally this past weekend, the Press of Atlantic City reports former Vice President Al Gore revving up the crowd with attacks suggesting that Mr. Christie represents "the George Bush wing of the Republican Party."

Given the miserable state of New Jersey's economy, it's not surprising that Gov. Corzine would like to nationalize this election. In addition to the swipes at Mr. Bush for the state's woes, the governor has put up billboards showing him standing behind President Obama. Unfortunately the old Bush-bash doesn't seem to be working: the RealClearPolitics.com poll average shows Mr. Christie up by 6.6 points.

Down in Virginia, meanwhile, it's the Republican candidate who's playing presidential tag. Mr. McDonnell surprised many people by trying his Democratic nominee, Creigh Deeds, to Mr. Obama.

Mr. McDonnell has zeroed in on Mr. Obama's economic agenda and is hanging it around Mr. Deeds's neck. On issues from health care to card-check legislation for unions to cap and trade, Mr. McDonnell has been painting Mr. Deeds as an Obama tax-and-spend clone.

This one appears to be more successful: the RPC average shows Mr. McDonnell's lead at 4.4 points.

Though this is down from the double-digit advantage Mr. McDonnell held earlier, the decline has little to do with the Obama issue and more to do with an old college thesis that Democrats are using to paint Mr. McDonnell as a religious extremist.

Mr. Deeds's discomfort shows in the pains he is taking to put some distance between himself and the president. Indeed, at a recent debate sponsored by the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Deeds was asked whether he saw himself as an Obama Democrat. He answered pointedly, "I'm a Creigh Deeds Democrat."

It's a tricky dance for all. On the one hand, the White House wants Democrats to win these two governorships. On the other, it doesn't want to get so close to these two candidates that if they go down in flames, the president gets burned too.

It makes for interesting politics. In Virginia, the White House took a hit when former Democratic Gov. Doug Wilder revealed that he had rejected a personal appeal from Mr. Obama to endorse Mr. Deeds.

And here's how a recent New York Times piece described Team Obama's work in New Jersey: "Every TV ad that Mr. Corzine puts on the air is being screened by the president's team. The governor's aides are giving daily briefings to the White House. Mr. Obama's pollsters have taken over for Mr. Corzine's polling team, and White House operatives are on the ground for everything from internal strategy sessions to obscure pep rallies with Latino supporters."

Each race is still too close to call. In the end, the experts may well be correct that the presidential factor will have little to do with the outcome of either contest. But with Mr. Obama's health-care bill stalled, and his popularity declining, you can bet the last thing the administration wants is to wake up the day after the election to stories suggesting that the Obama magic is gone.

Both countries wanted to confront Iran a day earlier at the United Nations. Mr. Obama was, after all, chairing a Security Council session devoted to nonproliferation. The latest evidence of Iran's illegal moves toward acquiring a nuclear weapon was in hand. With the world's leaders gathered in New York, the timing and venue would be a dramatic way to rally international opinion.



French President Nicolas Sarkozy flanked by President Barack Obama, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.




President Sarkozy in particular pushed hard. He had been "frustrated" for months about Mr. Obama's reluctance to confront Iran, a senior French government official told us, and saw an opportunity to change momentum. But the Administration told the French that it didn't want to "spoil the image of success" for Mr. Obama's debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons, according to the Paris daily Le Monde. So the Iran bombshell was pushed back a day to Pittsburgh, where the G-20 were meeting to discuss economic policy.

Le Monde's diplomatic correspondent, Natalie Nougayrède, reports that a draft of Mr. Sarkozy's speech to the Security Council Thursday included a section on Iran's latest deception. Forced to scrap that bit, the French President let his frustration show with undiplomatic gusto in his formal remarks, laying into what he called the "dream" of disarmament. The address takes on added meaning now that we know the backroom discussions.

"We are right to talk about the future," Mr. Sarkozy said, referring to the U.S. resolution on strengthening arms control treaties. "But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises," i.e., Iran and North Korea. "We live in the real world, not in a virtual one." No prize for guessing into which world the Frenchman puts Mr. Obama.

"We say that we must reduce," he went on. "President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions . . .

"I support America's 'extended hand.' But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions."

We thought we'd never see the day when the President of France shows more resolve than America's Commander in Chief for confronting one of the gravest challenges to global security. But here we are.

Mottaki was due to visit the Iranian interests section at the Pakistani embassy in Washington, they said. He was not holding meetings with American officials, they said, describing his visit as a "ministerial" meeting.

They also denied that Mottaki's visit was related to the decision announced yesterday that Iran would allow representatives of the Swiss embassy to visit three American hikers being held by Iran.

Western diplomats said the Obama administration, which had been closely consulting with them about the upcoming talks tomorrow in Geneva with Iran, did not tell them about Mottaki's visit to Washington, and that news reports of it were causing something of a stir. One diplomat said it was a concern that it could become a distraction that the Iranian foreign minister was coming to Washington one day before the Geneva talks, creating the impression that Washington and Iran may be exploring a separate bilateral channel.

U.S. officials gave no indication that was the case, portraying the visit as fairly ordinary, although to some experts' knowledge, it was the most senior Iranian leader visit to Washington since 1979, when the US and Iran broke off diplomatic relations.

Separately, National Public Radio reports that an Iranian businessman with many international and academic contacts who has been imprisoned in Iran since after the June elections, Bijan Khajepour, has been released from Iranian prison. NPR, which first reported the news, also interviewed Mottaki while he was on his visit to Washington today.

At the White House briefing tonight, senior administration officials said Iran was being presented with a clear choice, and that the President was serious that he had offered Iran "bona fide" negotiations. If Iran does not choose serious negotiations that include far more transparency and cooperation with the international atomic energy agency in verifying the peaceful nature about its nuclear program, they said, then it would face increased pressure. They said they had had indications in advance of the Geneva talks that the Iranians were interested in a more high tempo sustained number of talks, not just a one time meeting. But they expected tomorrow's meeting to be difficult. They declined to offer a specific date for a possible follow on meeting with the Iranians.

Separately, such a second follow on meeting with the Iranians is being planned for the first half of October, depending on how the Geneva talks go, another source who declined to be identified said.

“If you put the pieces together: you have Mottaki in town -- the first Iranian minister visitor in the U.S. outside of Manhattan in more than ten years; the Swiss visiting the American hikers, the Iranians agreeing to open up the Qom [enrichment] site to the IAEA, you had Clinton and others talking about a 'verifiable, peaceful Iranian nuclear program,'” the National Iranian American Council's Trita Parsi said. “The Obama administration is very clever in reducing expectations to zero. At the same time, when you look at what is happening behind the scenes, there is actually some promise here."
By Laura Rozen 10:25 PM

Voyons si elles tiennent mieux que celles de la semaine derniere concernant les Russes.