Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska isthe nation’s most prominent Republican officeholder to publicly question whether Sarah Palin has the experience to serve as president.

“She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials,” Hagel said Wednesday in an interview. “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.” ~The Omaha World-Herald

What’s interesting about this story is not that Hagel doesn’t think Palin has foreign policy experience, since this is just an acknowledgement of reality, but that Hagel remains neutral in the campaign.  As the report says, Hagel will not endorse either candidate.  As a Barr voter, I can sympathize with a refusal to endorse either one, but Hagel is not staying quiet out in protest of the bankrupt bipartisan consensus but simply so that, as usual, he can avoid taking any meaningful action that would oppose the policies he reportedly considers so disastrous.

Admirers of Hagel have told me on several occasions that I criticize him unfairly and don’t give him credit for being the serious foreign policy figure that he is, and I would like to believe them.  I would be very pleased to be wrong.  Nothing would please me more than to see a Republican internationalist not only recognize his own mistakes in supporting the invasion of Iraq, but also come out openly against the candidate that promises to be just as belligerent, reckless and dangerous as the current President.  If Palin’s foreign policy experience is nil and McCain is wrong, one might suppose that this would compel a Republican whose main area of disagreement with his own party has been in foreign policy to support the other major nominee, whose ideas he clearly finds more reasonable and sensible.  Like Gilchrest, whose future in GOP politics is already over, Hagel could take some kind of stand for that “Eisenhower Republicanism” he is always talking about and never actually defending in practice.  I don’t expect Hagel to endorse a non-interventionist and third-party candidate, but if Hagel is at all serious in his critique of the failures of this administration it stands to reason that he ought to take some public stance against McCain, who promises to repeat all of those failures.

Update: To his credit, Hagel warned Secretary Rice about the dangers that would follow from Kosovo independence and U.S. recognition.

The RJC isn’t satisfied with dishonest push-polling against Obama, and so has decided to take the line of attack used by Obama surrogate Robert Wexler* against Palin and claim that there is some connection between Obama’s view of the U.S.-Israel relationship and Pat Buchanan’s view.  While the RJC doesn’t talk about Nazi sympathizers as Wexler did, it nonetheless smears Mr. Buchanan with the usual outrageous labels.  If Palin’s connection to Mr. Buchanan was slight at best, Obama’s connection is obviously non-existent.  If Obama has started to approach a Buchananite position on any issue of foreign policy (e.g., holding talks with “rogue” states), it is almost always by accident, and on pretty much everything related to Israel and Near East policy it is more accurate to say that Obama is indistinguishable from Bush.  The RJC’s attack smears Mr. Buchanan, and it is also badly misrepresents Obama’s record in order to drive “pro-Israel” voters away from the Democrat.  One of the main problems in Obama’s foreign policy is that he proposes to change nothing fundamental about U.S. policy in the Near East, and indeed outside of Iraq he proposes to change nothing at all.  Obama is unfortunately light years away from Mr. Buchanan’s positions, and he is far, far closer to the positions held by McCain. 

*Wexler, by the way, supported the invasion of Iraq, so he has hardly been representative of the antiwar left in case there was any confusion there.

So it seems that not all of McCain’s advisors are as confused as Scheunemann.  Today McCain has come out swinging against the SEC and SEC Commissioner Cox in particular for signing off on lax rules concerning short-selling, and particularly for allowing the kind of short-selling that permits those who don’t borrow the stock to short it.  This was the kind of short-selling that drove Lehman’s stock price into the ground.  The crisis has compelled the SEC to start enforcing old rules that prevent the sort of runs on a stock that we have seen this week, and so McCain called them on their previous failure.  

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Sen. McCain also criticized Mr. Cox for eliminating a trading rule that acted as a speed bump to prevent short-sellers from pounding a stock. The rule, known as the uptick, said traders could only place short-sales following a higher bid in a stock price. The SEC eliminated the rule in July 2007, and market participants have been urging the SEC to reinstate the rule ever since [bold mine-DL]. Mr. Cox has said the rule is ineffective today since markets have changed since it went into effect around the Great Depression.

Cox has been wrong, and whoever is telling McCain to say this has McCain on the right track.  Of course, a commissioner of the SEC cannot be removed by the President, so McCain did mess that up rather impressively. 

Update: In some fairness to Cox, he and the SEC had started developing regulations against naked short-selling that were put into effect this week, but they had started on this rather late in the game and only after eliminating the rule mentioned above.  However, he did not oversee the agency’s loosening of rules on how much debt the broker-dealers could take on that directly contributed to the current meltdown.  Then again, those rules obviously remained in force throughout his tenure. 

It should be added that McCain is, of course, being utterly opportunistic here, since he has probably never concerned himself with the intricacies of the stock market until this week and, no, these short-selling rules are not the cause of the current crisis.

William Lind elaborates on the point I was making yesterday:

Obama’s position on Pakistan is even more dangerous. In August of 2007, Obama called for direct U.S. military action in Pakistan, with or without Pakistani approval. Speaking to the Woodrow Wilson Center, he said, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” President Bush took Senator Obama’s recommendation this past July, authorizing such actions. 

This is an example of the classic strategic error of sacrificing a more important goal to one of lesser importance. Not even outright defeat in Afghanistan would do America’s interests as much damage as would the disintegration of the Pakistani state and the transformation of Pakistan into another stateless region. The state of Pakistan is already dangerously fragile, and actions such as cross-border raids by American troops will diminish its legitimacy further. No government that cannot defend its sovereignty will last. Ironically, if Pakistan collapses, so does our position in Afghanistan, because our main logistics line will be cut. In effect, Obama wants to hand al-Qaeda and the Taliban a double victory.

I would add that even without cross-border raids by soldiers, but merely with the drone attacks launched without Islamabad’s approval, Pakistan’s government will react strongly against violations of airspace and sovereignty.  Lind’s recognition of the close similarities between Obama’s policies here and on Iran with those of President Bush echoes an observation I made last September about Obama’s foreign policy vision:

But despite claiming to be a “change,” Obama’s overall foreign policy and his judgments do not represent that much of a correction from this administration’s hubris, recklessness, and presumption. His proposals actually derive from the same all-encompassing, hyper-ambitious, and dangerous foreign-policy tradition.

It seems that the candidates save some of their most dishonest ads for Spanish-speaking audiences.  The first one I noticed was McCain attempting to paint Obama as someone with no interest in Latin America whatever, despite the fact that Obama had already given a policy speech on Latin America earlier in the year, and then there have been Obama’s ads trying to incite Latinos against McCain, with whom Obama has essentially zero disagreements on immigration policy, with false and dishonest representations of both McCain and critics of illegal immigration.  These ads attempt to make McCain out to be some hard-line restrictionist who doesn’t like Mexicans, which is so comically inaccurate that one might almost think that Obama’s people were auditioning for jobs at The Onion.  On top of that, the latest ad attempts to twist things Limbaugh said and then impute them to McCain, the candidate whom Limbaugh once pronounced as the doom of the Republican Party if he were nominated (Limbaugh seems to have gotten over his concerns).  This is on par with Obama’s insinuations that McCain will engage in race-baiting to compensate for his lack of ideas.  This misunderstands McCain completely–he glories in his lack of ideas and takes pride in his tired platitudes.  This latest Obama attack is right down there with his lame claims that McCain is responsible for undefined “allies” who talk about Obama’s “Muslim connections,” when this is simply not true.  To my surprise, despite a fairly concerted effort to pin race-baiting on McCain earlier this year, the media and the Obama campaign have largely abandoned that accusation and redoubled their focus on McCain’s dishonesty. 

If challenged on any of this, I suppose Obama can also use the McCain defense that the media reward trashy attack ads and ignore high-road tactics, but lies are lies and Obama has been churning out some amazing whoppers lately.

Update: I had forgotten that McCain was already running his own dishonest Spanish-language ad on Obama’s immigration position, which McCain absurdly tries to portray as opposed to amnesty, er, the “road to citizenship” and thus makes explicit his own continued support for the same.  So I suppose you can call Obama’s latest an example of retaliatory lying.

In the best of cases he would be demonstrating his ignorance concerning Zapatero. ~El Pais [translation mine-DL]

This interview with McCain, translated into Spanish, has been picked up by the Spanish-language press and flagged by TPM, and in it McCain seems to have no clue who Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain is.  He keeps repeating formulaic statements about cooperating with friendly nations and confronting others, and several times he replies to questions about bringing Zapatero to the White House with non-responsive remarks about relations with Latin America.  You can’t even put this down to ideologically-driven disdain for a European antiwar socialist, since that would require McCain to know something about Zapatero.

My Spanish is pretty limited and rusty, but that is what I have managed to confirm from listening to the interview, reading the news accounts and checking against others’ interpretations.  No doubt we will be treated to a week of spin about how no one else knows who Zapatero is and how tricky the interviewer was trying to be by asking these questions. 

Update: Miami’s Caracol 1260 has another version of the interview, and McCain’s voice is slightly more audible.  I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure that McCain also reiterates his false claim that Obama has not paid any attention to Latin America.

Second Update: Here is a summary in the Post.  If McCain did know who Zapatero was and would not agree that he would meet with him, that demonstrates an attitude toward relations with allies that is captive to the obsessions of the Bush administration.  Here is the original interview.  His references to “the Hemisphere” in response to one of the Zapatero questions suggest that he didn’t understand who Zapatero was, and this seems to be confirmed by his “what about me, what?” response to the follow-up when the interviewer tried to press him on relations with Spain.  Obviously, Scheunemann’s spin that McCain wants to keep his options open–unlike that crazy guy Obama–is not credible, since McCain said in April that he would be glad to have Zapatero visit in order to repair U.S.-Spanish relations.

Patrick Deneen has an outstanding post reflecting on the financial crisis, and as I mentioned earlier in the week Andrew Bacevich has an article adapted from The Limits of Power in the previous issue of TAC that discusses the relationship of the mentality of endless consumption and the pursuit of continued and expanded hegemony.  Following on Prof. Bacevich’s article and working from the title of his book, the easiest way to summarize our predicament is the failure to understand our limits.  We do not recognize that means are always limited and resources are finite.  Rather than treating credit as a sometimes necessary mechanism, we treat it as a way of life, and our institutions are structured around the deferral of responsibility and the demand for instant gratification that credit represents.  More than that, credit was once extended to borrowers who possessed some real property, and now it is extended to those who have none.   

As the temporary ability to pay increases, restraint recedes and a culture of feeding and exciting appetites grows.  As virtue is the moderation or even denial of appetites, moral integrity in society as a whole weakens as this culture gains ground.  When limits to our consumption seem to fall away, the desire for acquisition and domination becomes stronger and it begins to be expressed in our relations with the rest of the world.  We begin to define our interests to satisfy unbounded desire, and so the scope of what we believe is rightfully ours expands until it encircles most, if not all, of the globe, and we are then violently offended when our claims are challenged.  Coupled with this desire is the fantasy that technology will gradually overcome or address every limitation, so that every barrier to growth will fall sooner or later.  The expectation of progress makes us impatient when our excesses lead to collapses, and when those collapses happen responsibility is deferred again and pinned on useful scapegoats whose punishment will allow us to return to our previous unrestrained habits.

Hillary Clinton pulled out of a Jewish-sponsored rally against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after it was announced that Sarah Palin would participate.

Organizers announced Tuesday that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president, will speak at the Sept. 22 rally organized by several Jewish groups to protest the Iranian president at the United Nations. ~JTA

Sarah Palin is now apparently going to take the Mitt Romney approach to foreign policy–making loud-mouthed denunciations of an Iranian President as a substitute for knowing anything about the region.  It might work.  Clinton’s cancellation, citing concerns about the event becoming “partisan,” is an odd twist, since I would have thought that mindless hostility to Iran is one of the things that would bring members of both parties together.  Then again, perhaps in the wake of the SNL skit a joint appearance on stage with Palin was not something she wanted to do.

Update: Palin has been disinvited from the rally, which is their loss.  She could have given them tips on how not to blink when confronting Ahmadinejad, and we all know how important not blinking is.

After Lehman declared bankruptcy and the government did not move to bail out the company, I noticed a little-remarked story that AIG had refused an infusion of private capital because it came attached with the price tag of yielding control of the company.  Here are the details from a more recent report:

AIG turned down a capital infusion from a group of private-equity firms led by J.C. Flowers & Co. because an option tied to the offer would have effectively given them control of the company, an 89-year-old giant that does business in nearly every corner of the world. Other private-equity firms also floated various options in helping the company. 

Now the Fed has essentially bought the company, which will result in replacing existing management, which makes it unclear why the government backing was that much more acceptable than the private investment.  It is even more unclear why the Fed found it acceptable for AIG to reject a private takeover that would have apparently made the government support unnecessary.  Of course, AIG could say that it is within its rights to turn down private money, but it seems to me that it was in no position to refuse assistance and then cry for help from the government.

On Tuesday, the Pakistan’s military ordered its forces along the Afghan border to repulse all future American military incursions into Pakistan. The story has been subsequently downplayed, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, flew to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, to try to ease tensions. But the fact remains that American forces have and are violating Pakistani sovereignty. ~Robert Baer

What is remarkable about this is that these incursions have been administration policy for the better part of a year, and they are the recommended policy of a future Obama administration, and the conventional wisdom among both Bush and Obama supporters is that this is a brilliant idea.  Trotskyites and Obamacons agree–stand up to Pakistan!  By stand up, of course, they must mean fight, since that is what implementing their plan will require.  What else is there to say about this view except that it is more belligerent and confrontational than the one held by John McCain?  In fact, there is a good deal more to say, but we might start with the frightening truth that McCain represents the voice of reason on whether or not to launch strikes inside Pakistan.  If McCain is the voice of reason, the others have pretty clearly gone mad. 

Why is Pakistan taking this position now?  First of all, while we should not discount the existence of dangerous elements in the ISI that continue to support the Taliban and Al Qaeda just as they support jihadis in India (including possibly the latest bombings in Delhi), Islamabad is not “giving refuge” to these forces.  The Pakistani government is, however, insisting that its sovereignty be respected in the wake of the Bush administration’s egregious violations of it, and one would think that a major non-NATO ally’s sovereignty would be something that would not be taken so lightly.  I am well aware of how dangerous elements of Pakistan’s government are, and I have been quite clear in my views that Pakistan has been a poor ally, but there are larger considerations here.  

Partly because President Zardari is weak, and because Sharif broke up the coalition with the PPP and weakened Gilani’s government, the government has evidently felt compelled to take a stronger line on Pakistani sovereignty than Musharraf did to shore up its position.  Besides, the new government has been provoked and humiliated, since Gilani was in Washington not two months ago stating that American strikes inside Pakistan without their permission were unacceptable.  The main reason why Washington and much of Obama’s cheering section have had no problem with violating Pakistani sovereignty is that they seem to have assumed that there would be no hostile reaction on the part of the Pakistani government.  Musharraf was eager to show his patrons in Washington that he was cooperating–or at least that he was not stopping U.S. forces from operating inside Pakistan–in order to give the administration some reason to keep backing him, so I suppose many people were misled into thinking that what an enormously unpopular dictator would allow our forces to do would also be permitted by an elected government.  This is clearly wrong, and the situation now requires much more than tete-a-tetes between Mullen and Kayani. 

It requires reconsidering what U.S. interests dictate, and it seems fairly clear that they do not dictate entering into open conflict with the Pakistani military.  Were our forces to engage Pakistan’s military, the consequences would be dire for the cohesion of the country, which is indeed every bit as artificial and unstable as Iraq, and for regional stability.  Let’s be very clear about this: if we stir up Pakistan against our presence in that part of the world, we will end up losing whatever gains we have made in Afghanistan and will turn one of the largest Muslim states in the world, and the only one with nuclear weapons, from an unreliable ally to an open enemy.  Remember the Pakistani boy Andrew thought would look at Obama’s face and be overwhelmed by American soft power?  If Obama follows through on the war policy that he would now have to endorse to continue launching raids into Pakistan, that boy will see Obama’s face as the face of the enemy and will react accordingly.   

It is telling that it was mostly opponents of the invasion of Iraq who saw Pakistan for what it was years ago, understanding that it sponsored terrorism against India, engaged in nuclear proliferation and had been exploiting the military aid we provided to build up its forces on the border with India.  The warmongers, Hitchens included, were indifferent to Pakistan then, preferring instead to back a war against a government that had no ties to Al Qaeda and had no weapons programs.  Having plunged into that war for no reason, they are now quick to discover what we have known all along, and, of course, their solution is always escalation.