There is no question that John Brennan, who seems to have the inside track to be named CIA Director or even DNI, was a strong supporter of the new FISA legislation including telecom immunity. Brennan also appears to have some reasonable views on engaging Iran. What do you want to bet that the former will be cited as proof of his qualifications for the job and the latter will be used in the campaign to try to derail his confirmation?

More troubling is the evidence that suggests he seems to have had at best a very, er, flexible definition of what passes for torture in the past. Saying “the dark side has its limits” is a bit like saying, “Well, the ends don’t always justify the means.” However, there is some small reassurance to be found in this short profile of Brennan in yesterday’s NYT:

As a senior adviser to Mr. Tenet in 2002, Mr. Brennan was present at the creation of the C.I.A.’s controversial detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama has strongly criticized. But Mr. Brennan has distanced himself from the program, and told The Washington Times last month that interrogation methods like waterboarding are “not going to be allowed under an Obama presidency.”

Gates is closely identified with the surge and, in tandem with Petraeus, he would probably counsel Obama to rethink the idea of unconditional withdrawal of combat forces. ~Robert Dreyfuss

If he ever believed in “unconditional” withdrawal, Obama reconsidered this long ago. That was one of the reasons why there wassomecontroversyin early July when Obama made clear that withdrawal of combat forces would be tied to conditions and the advice of commanders “on the ground,” which is virtually indistinguishable in this respect from the long-term view of the current administration. Even earlier, he had made commitments that large numbers of “residual” forces would remain once the “combat forces” had departed. Incredibly, despite Obama’s rather impoverished withdrawal position, McCain was permitted throughout the election to make false claims that Obama wanted to engage in precipitous withdrawal without regard for conditions. It might have been a more interesting series of debates if Obama actually held some position remotely like that and had been willing to defend it, but as longtime antiwar observers already know he has never held such a position, which is why his antiwar backers never should have expected much from him.

Brendan Nyhan writes:

Despite the election results, it looks like House Republicans are going to shift their leadership in a conservative direction [italics in original].

Nyhan says this almost as if he cannot believe it is true, but it was unavoidable and also, from a Republican perspective, desirable. Let’s remember that the current House Republican leadership was in place for almost the last three years and presided over two of the largest consecutive electoral defeats in modern times. Their most notable achievements in the last two years were to tie the GOP even more tightly to an unpopular war and a failed administration, and to capitulate to the administration during the bailout debate. (It’s worth noting that Ryan also went along with this.) They were bound to be replaced, and even more conservative members were all but certain to replace them.

For one thing, conservatives are practically all that the GOP has left in the House. During the last two elections, most moderate House Republicans were defeated either by primary challenges or in the general election, and any remaining moderate members would not be able to command support from most of the conference. In the wake of the disasters of the Bush era and McCain’s defeat, even if there were members to fill the slots, it is inconceivable that Republicans would decide that now was the time for choosing a moderate Republican leadership. This change in leadership, assuming Lungren’s challenge to Boehner is successful, might be comparable in certain respects to the selection of Pelosi as Democratic minority leader after the ’02 defeat and Gephardt’s resignation. No doubt there were those saying incredulously at the time, “Despite the election results, the Democrats are shifting their leadership in a liberal direction.” As it turned out, Pelosi proved to be a reasonably effective minority leader and kept the House Democrats in a position to capitalize on administration mistakes and win the majority in ’06. There is no guarantee that a new House GOP leadership would be able to make such a comeback, and there seems to be little evidence of creative thinking or preparation that would make a speedy recovery possible, but Pelosi’s example suggests that political skill and winning the loyalty of your members are more important than where one falls on the political spectrum. It’s also worth remembering that Pelosi became leader eight years after the Democrats lost the majority, which may mean a long time in the minority for the GOP, but there is nothing inherently or obviously wrongheaded in choosing more right-leaning leaders in the center-right party.

If I were a Republican, I’d ignore the inane Palin debate and start looking around for a politician who had the good sense to break with the bipartisan consensus and oppose the bailout bill before it passed. Then I’d start planning an insurgency. ~Jesse Walker

That would rule out Pawlenty. Outside of Congress, as far as I know there were only two reasonably prominent Republicans who opposed the bailout, and these were Huckabee and, more or less, Mark Sanford. In the Senate, Shelby was a leading opponent, and there are a few leading House Republicans who can say the same, but none of them immediately strikes me as a presidential contender. In the end, one of them might have to be the populists’ candidate for lack of alternatives.

In the past, I floated the idea that Huckabee would be in the best position to take advantage of anti-bailout sentiment, which he could tie to his normal pseudo-populist rhetoric to lend it some substance. While his move to the right on immigration was sudden, belated and opportunistic, he did move that way early in the primaries. He has much more credibility among social conservatives and evangelicals than virtually any other likely candidate. However, the anti-Huckabee forces among activists and interest groups are influential and they loathe the man with a passion that is hard to understand. Unless I have missed other leading Republican bailout opponents, that leaves Sanford, who was critical of the bailout but not entirely hostile. However, he seems a very unlikely candidate to lead a libertarian populist insurgency.

In the same way that leading Republicans tied themselves to or did not oppose the war, most did the same with the bailout. This leaves a very small pool of future candidates not tainted by this last in a string of terrible policies of the current administration, and it is already taken for granted that the best-known of these, Huckabee, is unacceptable to a lot of donors and activists. Thanks to the capitulation of its leading members to the administration on the bailout and the powerful opposition to Huckabee, the GOP is doomed to have the inane Palin debate and debates like it, and it can look forward to another weak field of presidential candidates.

The film picks up right after Casino Royale, with Bond on the hunt for the secret organization that turned his beloved Vespa [sic] against him. ~Peter Suderman

Even more cruel was the organization’s successful efforts to buy the loyalty of Bond’s trusted sidekick, Schwinn.

Well, this took a week longer than I expected. The Economiststarts the drumbeat for more intervention in Congo, and it gives Obama an ultimatum:

If he is to prove worthy of the near-universal exaltation with which his election has been greeted, he has to prepare America and the world for the possibility of further American military interventions overseas.

I’m hoping that Obama has no interest in being worthy of near-universal exaltation, and that he was not serious last year when he said that American security is inextricably tied to the security of all other nations. Perhaps instead he will be satisfied with merely nationwide forbearance? Maybe just hemispheric respect?

Let’s hope that Obama will stow away these suggestions that he act like the hyper-ambitious interventionist that he has claimed to be along with the promises he made in Berlin to help dissidents in Burma and Zimbabwe. When it comes to humanitarian interventions, there is usually a time-lag of one to three years between Economist leaders demanding action and U.S. involvement in a foreign crisis it has no business addressing. There would seem to be much more of a lag when it comes to interventions in Africa, because so few governments are willing or interested in doing much of anything about African crises. Better still, perhaps Obama could simply ignore calls to intervene and focus entirely on the American interest. That would be quite a change.

Earlier today, I mentioned the ideology of national security. Prof. Bacevich describes it in The Limits of Power:

The ideology of national security does not serve as an operational checklist. It imposes no specific obligations. It functions the way ideology so often does–not to divine truth or even to make sense of things, but to provide a highly elastic rationale for action. In the American context, it serves principally to legitimate the exercise of executive power. It removes constraints, conferring upon presidents and their immediate circle of advisers wide prerogatives for deciding when and how to employ that power.
——–
Postwar presidents have routinely tapped elements of this ideology as a source of authority. America’s status as a force for good in a world that pits good against evil has provided a rationale for bribing foreign officials, assassinating foreign leaders, overthrowing governments, and undertaking major military interventions. George W. Bush did not invent this practice; he merely inherited and expanded upon it.

It is with this in mind that we should consider the prospects of a reduction of executive branch powers under the Obama administration. Obama will be taking office in what is generally considered to be wartime, despite the nebulous, open-ended nature of the so-called “Long War” alongside the campaign in Iraq, so the temptation to justify any number of usurpations in the name of national security will be great. Obama already supported reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act and the FISA bill while in the Senate–how likely is he really to change significantly from these positions when he is in control of the executive branch? We are still experiencing the effects of the financial crisis that has resulted in vastly increased the powers of the executive, and Obama has already supported this increase in powers.

If executive power grows fastest and with the fewest checks during times of crisis, and it is in the nature of the executive to seek ever more power, executive power is bound to grow under the next administration. The only thing that would prevent expansion of executive power would be stiff resistance from Congress and the courts. The latter will be of little use until after some particularly egregious abuse has occurred and has to be rectified, and Congress will be no more able or willing to resist a President of the majority’s own party than it was able or willing to resist Mr. Bush when he invoked national security during debates on the “surge” and FISA. This will be true even if Obama follows through on his promises to change interrogation procedures and treatment of detainees.

Glenn Greenwald has an important post rejecting the claim that holding lawbreakers from this administration accountable is a kind of partisan attack. Leave aside for the moment that a significant number of voters who elected the new President probably chose him precisely to have this kind of accountability, which would mean that part of the reform of our government that many Obama voters expect entails nothing less than investigating and prosecuting officials who committed crimes. Instead, let’s simply consider what a system governed by the rule of law would require. It would require that those suspected of abuses of power, corruption or the commission of crimes under the color of authority be investigated and, if the evidence merited it, prosecuted.

Right now in Taiwan there is some political controversy over the arrest of former President Chen Shui-bian on corruption charges, which his supporters naturally portray as purely political, but there are good reasons to think that Chen may have broken the law and it is appropriate to prosecute him if evidence points to criminal activity. Most Americans cannot conceive of executive branch officials, much less the President himself, having to answer for their crimes, which is one of the reasons why so many members of different administrations, but particularly the current one, have held the law in such contempt–because they know they will not have to answer, much less pay, for what they have done.

This is what the members of the party now headed out of power will probably call “criminalizing policy differences” because there is a frighteningly large number of partisans of the outgoing administration who believe that disputes over interrogation techniques, detainee treatment and illegal surveillance are merely policy disputes about which there are supposedly two equally legitimate positions. Actually, administration defenders probably think that the illegal activities carried out during this administration are more “legitimate,” because they are justified by what Prof. Bacevich has called “the ideology of national security.”

Greenwald is correct that the claim that prosecution of criminals means “criminalizing policy differences” is a strawman, but we can be sure that it is one that we are going to encounter if there is any effort to hold members of this administration accountable. High-ranking members of both parties go along with these sorts of arguments, and invoke the importance of bipartisan cooperation, because there is something that they wish to preserve that is certainly far more important to them than the law, which is the ability of members of both parties to be able to likewise break the law in the future without fear of prosecution. Hiding under the cloak of “national security” is the first response, and when that fails to distract we hear about the importance of unity and comity. Bipartisanship enables the initial illegality through collaboration in creating or acquiescing in the relevant administration decisions, and then it is summoned to cover up for it. In the process, we see that there is no real benefit to be derived from an adversarial party system and the idea of accountable government is revealed to be a joke.

Update: Conor responds:

I find it hard to conceive of throwing Dick Cheney in jail for breaking the law. But I think there is a high-likelihood that a fair investigation would find him guilty of illegal acts, and if that happens I’ll be the first to advocate his prosecution and imprisonment, fully understanding that it’ll be a dark day for the United States — one on which the former vice-president himself will have forced the nation to choose between all the awful effects of throwing him in jail… and remaining a country dedicated to the rule of law.

I understand what Conor means, but I think his sentiment at the end has it the wrong way round. The dark day for the United States was the day when members of the executive branch first authorized illegal actions by our government, which we all seem to agree definitely happened. In the event that the officials responsible for these decisions were arrested or found guilty of crimes, that would not be a dark day, but rather the day when the sun has finally started to peak through the clouds of arbitrary and illegal government actions. If high officials have broken the law, the day when they are brought to justice should be considered a very good day indeed. Is it regrettable that these officials created this situation? Of course. What we should never regret or lament is the successul revival of the rule of law that holding such officials accountable would represent. However, it remains to be seen whether such a revival will even be attempted.

Kanwal Sibal, Indian Foreign Secretary under the previous government, is the voice of reason for all of us:

Because of its “soft power”, the US presidential election gets such extensive coverage internationally that its import gets exaggerated. This election decides the fate of two competing candidates, not that of the world. As in elections elsewhere, the central issues are domestic ones, not those of foreign policy. In the American case, the contest is not between two radically different visions of US foreign policy; it is about advancing US interests best. The difference is in tactics, not strategy. On basic assumptions, such as US global pre-eminence, preventing the emergence of any other power that can challenge Washington’s dominance, the goodness of US intentions and actions, superiority of American values, the responsibility to maintain international peace and stability, its exceptionalism providing the right to act unfettered by multilateral constraints if required and keeping America safe against non-proliferation, there is internal consensus in the US.

Certainly, there are many Indians who don’t mind the status quo that much, other observers from India who would like to see many changes to the U.S.-India relationship, but even here Mira Kamdar acknowledged that “87 percent of Indians polled said that they did not think the [U.S.] election mattered to them.” Their indifference is refreshing. Perhaps the only thing more strange than the jubilation among Americans I have seen is the enthusiasm of some foreign nations after the election. There aren’t going to be that many significant changes domestically, so how much less are things going to change in our relations abroad?

Sibal also sees a flaw in the Indian response to the Bush administration’s initiatives on the nuclear deal:

As a country desiring and capable of playing a larger international role a prospective global power and a pole in a future multi-polar world public expressions of gratitude to any foreign leader, especially one so unpopular in many parts of the globe where we have interests, are self-diminishing.

This error of personalizing international relations and identifying too strongly with particular foreign leaders is one that Americans should recognize, as we do it all the time with leaders of governments all over the world. Rarely do we prefer to think in terms of governments and their interests, which may help explain why we tend not to discuss parts of the world that cannot be readily defined by references to familiar political leaders. If we like Sarkozy, suddenly France is our close ally again, and if we find Ahmadinejad offensive then negotiating with Iran, even when it is in our interest to do so, becomes much worse than it would have been when Khatami was in office. More than almost any other nation, we take the electoral results in other countries as referenda on America and relations with the West, which sometimes even leads our government to take sides more or less openly in foreign elections.

Of course, like so many others in India, Sibal is not pleased with Obama’s agenda for India:

Obama has announced an acceleration of the US non-proliferation agenda. So long as India is not pressed to assume obligations ahead of internationally negotiated non-discriminatory treaties, the situation can be managed. But if the provisions of the nuclear deal are used as pressure points and concepts of regional strategic stability are actively resuscitated, tension will surface in India-US relations. Far more problematic is Obama’s advocacy of a quick resolution of the Kashmir issue in order to free Pakistan to conduct the war on terrorism on its western front to greater US satisfaction.

This is retrograde thinking. The US will once again be seen as seeking to reward Pakistan for doing what it must at India’s expense [bold mine-DL]. His toying with the idea of appointing former president Bill Clinton as special envoy on Kashmir is “old think”. Such a move will embarrass New Delhi and deplete the high levels of goodwill Washington currently enjoys in India. The government has already reacted negatively. Some may see in this move to satisfy Clinton’s thirst for a subcontinental role, [or] the potential costs to India of the nuclear deal.

Just as Sibal understands the consensus that prevails in Washington, the next administration needs to understand that when it comes to India’s nuclear program and Kashmir there is a fairly broad consensus in Indian politics that includes the two leading parties. No matter which coalition is in power after elections next year, India is not going to be receptive to having the nuclear deal used as leverage against it and will certainly not respond well to any initiatives on Kashmir.

Peter Suderman says that he doesn’t understand this Palin statement:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely. By comparison, the second sentence is a piece of cake. Pretty much every word in the second sentence serves a function. Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.