Last August, I ran into Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation, who remarked to me after reading both something on The Washington Note and after Ari Berman's excellent article, "The Strategic Class," that "realism had become the new liberal ideology."

Her views are echoed in an interesting rundown of "The Most Valuable Progressives of 2005" by John Nichols on The Nation's website today.

Despite some naysayers who had a too little/too late attitude about former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson's revelations about the "flummoxed" national security decision making process inside the White House as well as the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal that took over the political helm after 9/11, The Nation has dubbed Wilkerson as its "most valuable progressive" in the Executive Branch this past year.

TWN supports that view. Wilkerson's comments have both real policy and historical importance -- and it is fascinating that the journal of record for the "left" in America sees it the same way.

Wilkerson is a conservative with a conscience and with a profound sense of duty and obligation to the nation, and it is a sad comment that in the climate we are in today, conservatives with a conscience are mostly abandoned by the right and are increasingly embraced by the left. This really does speak to a possible solutions-oriented, radical centrism that unites the Wilkersons and van den Heuvels in a serious discussion about national interest and foreign policy in the coming year.

From John Nichols' piece:

* MVP -- Executive Branch:

Yes, there was one. It's Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the retired U.S. Army colonel who served as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell until Powell exited the State Department in January, 2005.

After leaving his position, Wilkerson began revealing the dark secrets of the Bush-Cheney interregnum, telling a New America Foundation gathering in October that during his years in the administration: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

Wilkerson warned that, with "a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either," the country is headed in an exceptionally dangerous direction. "I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita and I could go on back, we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time," Wilkerson explained.

"And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

That is truth telling of a quality and a scope all too rarely witnessed in the Washington of Bush and Cheney.

Nichols is on the money.

On his roster of MVPs are:

U.S. Senate: Barbara Boxer, John McCain, and Russell Feingold

U.S. House of Representatives: Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, Walter Jones, John Murtha and John Conyers

Executive Branch: Lawrence Wilkerson

Law Enforcement Branch: Patrick Fitzgerald & Ronnie Earle

Citizen Branch: Cindy Sheehan

Watchdog Branch: The "After Downing Street" Coalition

Cheers to all -- and more later on what is planned with Bolton Watch.

-- Steve Clemons

I don't have much time to write about this now, but TWN -- which was keenly focused on blocking John Bolton's confirmation as Ambassador to the United Nations -- will be launching a "Bolton Watch" division of The Washington Note in early 2006.

I have been keeping my powder dry on Bolton and decided some time ago to give Bolton time to prove his critics, and me, wrong about the fundamental reasons we opposed him.

He started off politely on the surface, but underneath, he's done a great deal to harm America's foreign policy portfolio, and his crusades in the name of U.N. reform are actually designed to undermine any chance of achieving reasonable and serious reform.

Because Bolton was not confirmed by the Senate, his days at the U.N. are numbered -- but those days and his work during them need to have a more consistent monitor. This will not be a Bash-Bolton blog, but will call his actions and behavior as they are. If he gets on a course that is positive for American and UN interests, then the blog will highlight that. But as I suspect, he continues to vigorously work to undermine both the United Nations and enlightened American diplomacy, then this blog will expose him.

There is more planning that needs to be completed before launch, but I wanted to give early word of this decision.

TWN will be hiring research staff to help in this endeavor -- so your financial support is appreciated. If you are interested in supporting, there is a paypal link above, or alternatively, you can write to me and I can give a mailing address.

I have really deliberated about this step -- and take it reluctantly. I feel that it was civil society's responsibility to debate Bolton's qualifications and my responsibility do all that one could to try and block Bolton's confirmation and appointment to the position he holds now as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

We succeeded in blocking confirmation, but the President has a right of recess appointment, even though that provision of the Constitution is not designed to skirt Congress as Bush did in this appointment.

I was hopeful that the pressure TWN and others put on Bolton in this process would produce a John Bolton who would be less damaging than he has been in this job. But it is only after having spent time with some very high-ranking former Republican officials recently -- who all share my perspective of Bolton -- that I have decided to launch this new "Bolton Watch" division of TWN.

I don't think Condi Rice can manage John Bolton, as she promised Senator George Voinovich. But I do think that more constant, micro-focus of this Ambassador's every move -- good and bad -- will help us survive his tenure there.

More on this later -- but this was news I wanted to get out to readers before New Year's Day.

So, if you are thinking of it, toast "Bolton Watch" on the 31st.

My friends and I will be.

-- Steve Clemons

I am in Los Angeles this morning and was drawn to two op-eds that ran in today's Los Angeles Times, one by Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations and the other by journalist Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent of Britain's The Independent.

I like Haass and often agree with him, but the "messy, barely a democracy" scenario he holds out as probably the best we can hope for in Iraq depends on U.S. forces being able to forestall the civil war he fears.

I have a different view as I believe that U.S. forces and the "brand name of America" have become so tainted in Iraq that we can't achieve our objectives, have become targets ourselves, and unless we internationalize the face of occupation, as well as institution building efforts and aid to Iraq, the civil war will rage anyway with Americans being targeted and blamed for the instability. His scenario is not necessarily wrong, but mine is plausible and perhaps even more probable.

Haass's piece though should be read because he is a serious analyst who is taking many far more conservative than he and walking them towards acknowledging less-than-rosy, more likely scenarios in Iraq than the White House has been portraying.

However, the stem-winder article today is "Telling it Like it Isn't" by Robert Fisk who has written the irreverent, honest piece I wish I had written on the subject of the Israel-Palestine conflict and on war coverage in general.

It's a devastating critique of how global media -- not just American -- have become complicit in the selling of wars, occupation, and colonization.

He opens with a vignette of his farewell to a Boston Globe correspondent and then writes:

"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore."

Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been.

This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" -- or even, in some cases, "outposts."

Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land -- just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.

Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all — so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.

The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.

If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.

And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" -- words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex.

For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them.

We follow these unwritten rules elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency -- referring to those who attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or "remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently -- and grotesquely -- by American journalists.

This is a powerful and important perspective that should remind journalists, bloggers, academics, and public intellectuals in general that their job is to keep the state from becoming a self-justifying system that undermines our liberties and democratic form of government. America is tilting towards a "national security state" that has too many vested interests that thrive from a "high-fear" world rather than one of lower fear and higher trust.

Candid and honest journalism have been undermined by scandals ranging from Stephen Glass to Jayson Blair to Judith Miller -- but there are worse out there. And the celebritization of journalists has also had disturbingly corrupting consequences as James Fallows once bravely wrote about in his book, Breaking the News: How Media Undermine American Democracy.

More later on this subject, but Fisk's piece certainly did inspire some hope that media might just be able to make its way back to the oversight function that it should play in our brand of democracy.

-- Steve Clemons

The Washington Note was the first to get out the news that Douglas Holtz-Eakin was leaving his post to accept a position at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Today, a talk that he recently gave at the New America Foundation was highlighted by the New York Times editorial writers as being the sort of "straight talk" that has largely disappeared from government agencies -- particularly from Republicans like Holtz-Eakin.

The Times writes:

As director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin has been Congress's top economist, handpicked by the Republican leadership. Recently, he had some advice for lawmakers - mostly Republicans - who insist that more tax cuts will foster economic growth and raise tax revenue: "Don't even think about it."

The occasion was the release of the agency's long-term outlook, which shows huge unending deficits. "You can't grow yourself out of this problem," said Mr. Holtz-Eakin. "It's just too big."

That's startlingly straight talk, given that Republicans are determined to pass tens of billions in unpaid-for tax cuts come January. But it is typical of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, who is retiring this week after three years as the director. In those years, he has delivered nonpartisan, data-driven research on some of the most controversial issues.

I'm glad that the New America Foundation was host to Holtz-Eakin's last major policy address in his official position.

However, he will be working on significant international economic policy questions at the Council on Foreign Relations and attempting to synthesize thinking about America's classic military, political, and economic dimensions of U.S. foreign policy -- much like the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation is doing. I suspect that Holtz-Eakin and New America will continue to work closely together to generate sensible policy proposals for future governments.

Congratulations Doug.

-- Steve Clemons

Anne Gearan's interesting piece on Condi Rice yesterday got me thinking about what structurally is enhancing or constraining the Secretary of State's success.

Gearan writes:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become the most popular member of the Bush administration and a potential candidate to succeed her boss in the White House, even as Americans lose confidence in the president she serves and patience with the Iraq war she helped launch.

Entering her second year as the country's senior diplomat and foreign policy spokeswoman, Rice has improbably shed much of her image as the hawkish "warrior princess" at President Bush's side. The nickname was reportedly bestowed by her staff at the White House National Security Council, where Rice was an intimate member of Bush's first-term war council.

Rice resolutely defends the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism and the expansive executive powers that Bush claims came with it. She has lately sounded more optimistic than Bush about the progress of the Iraq war and the future for that country.

Yet, it is unusual to hear anyone talk about Rice as an architect of either of those two defining undertakings of the Bush presidency.

By a mix of charm, luck and physical distance from the White House, Rice has managed to escape the fate of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who saw their public approval ratings fall to historic lows before rebounding slightly recently.

Kurt Campbell, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, credits Rice's heavy travel schedule, an approach to diplomacy that is more pragmatic than other Bush advisers, and a measure of personal pluck.

"She appears to have sort of skated away" from controversies over U.S. intelligence failures and aggressive U.S. tactics in the hunt for terrorists, Campbell said, and from the perception that the United States is "slogging" along in Iraq.

"She appears at once to be close to the president but separate and detached from some of the foibles of the administration, and that's a very hard thing to pull off," he said.

Rice has been busy putting together small victories. For a while -- and perhaps still -- there looked like there was a breakthrough in negotiations with North Korea. She got the Gaza-Egypt border crossing open, and has been putting constant and regular pressure on Israel to follow through with commitments made when she pushed forward a post-Gaza framework deal. She has had other successes as well -- but frankly, without taking anything away from the way she is performing as Secretary of State, she is cutting a work agenda that is very Colin Powell-like.

Many are ready to call anything "realism" that doesn't look like 'Borg-ian assimilate or annihilate neoconservatism.'

Condi Rice was never a neoconservative. She just bent their way after 9/11. In fact, before then, she was trying to tutor George W. Bush in what "neo-realism" would look like in a world of America as the ascendant power -- in contrast to the Nixon/Kissingerian realism that managed American interests as America was in decline. In March 2001, she even arranged private tutorial sessions with America's most influential Machiavellian realist, Robert Kaplan, who was then my colleague as a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

At the time, there were three camps in the White House: neo-realists who had Rice at their helm; neoconservatives who had Paul Wolfowitz as their in-government high priest with many others inside the administration and a well-organized band of ideology officers embedded in civil society; and Colin Powell -- who was neither realist, liberal internationalist, or neoconservative -- but who was the cautious incrementalist who felt that America need to be far more careful with its political and military capital than these other camps called for.

Powell was apparently the guy in the room who mattered when he was there because he would usually bring up the part of the picture that others had conveniently neglected as they tried to sell their plans to the President. The problem was that Powell had to be in the room. If he wasn't there, his ability to influence the process was seriously diminished. Powell didn't have an "ism" he was championing.

Rice does not look like a doctrinaire realist today. She looks like a Colin Powell cautious incrementalist -- doing what she can here and there, nearly in an ad hoc fashion to promote global stability, encourage and nudge forward self-determination, and doing deals with some of the world's real bad guys -- particularly in North Korea and Syria.

If she embodies a new realism, then it is realism super-lite. Nonetheless, Condi's stock is rising in the eyes of many.

But she needs to be aware of a few things. First, she has the "latitude" to do what she is doing both because she has a personal relationship with the President that lets her call many of her own shots and because she does not have a Condi Rice at the National Security Council shutting her down.

Rice's biggest failure as NSC Advisor to the President is that she got swept up in the strong Cheney-Rumsfeld current following 9/11 and tilted the President and the national security decision-making process away from judicious analysis and consideration of all options and all consequences. Rice deferred to "the cabal" and made Bush's decision making easier and less complex than it should have been because she filtered out much of what should have been before the President.

In the past, Rice shut down Powell and his team. Today, Stephen Hadley -- though while a close devotee of Vice President Cheney -- is not taking on his former boss on any front whatsoever. Condi Rice is succeeding as Secretary of State because she doesn't have her clone shutting her down.

The other reason she is successful is because the President is weak. When Bush was at the height of his power, he chose to bully the world -- on everything from America's disdain for renewal of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to climate change remediation efforts and negotiations. When Bush was strong, America walked away from a deal that Colin Powell's team had assembled with North Korea, which had great continuity with the Clinton team's work in this arena, and which looks a lot like the deal that Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Christopher Hill put together earlier this year. The cost for Bush's arrogance and failure to move forward with North Korea: about 8-12 nuclear warheads that the North Koreans probably have today.

Bush negotiates when he is weak, not when he is strong -- and thus he is a miserable investor in global stability -- because he has taught the world that as he sees it, the powerful make all the rules, make all their own weather, and decide right and wrong. This is not what one would call a "democratic message."

So, Rice is succeeding because the President is weaker and because she has no Condi Rice to shut her down. But she still has to worry about Cheney and his torture-obsessed thugs.

For one, we still have the story that her own Ambassador to the United Nations, the recess-appointed and Cheney-vassal John Bolton, leaked the news of her diplomatically fragile effort to offer Syria a "Libya-like" makeover track. Bolton sabotaged Rice -- and thus far has gotten away with it.

David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, is no fan of Condi Rice's and has fought her efforts vigorously inside the White House. So far, Rice is winning -- but if Cheney's power resurges which may occur, Rice could be chewed up in a tug-of-war over foreign policy. To this writer, Cheney appears to have successfully tossed off the negatives from the Libby indictment.

The other risk that Rice has is that if she covers up and flacks for White House misdeeds on illegal wiretaps, detention centers, and torture -- these will eventually undermine her with an American public that won't tolerate institutionalized dishonesty in the Oval Office.

But as things look today, Rice may not be readying herself for President as much as getting ready to be John McCain's vice presidential running mate.

That ticket -- if the Republicans were smart enough to put it together -- would be tough for any Democrat, Hillary included, to beat.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. TWN is on the move again. Had a great Christmas yesterday and am enjoying "Boxing Day" in Claremont, California. Tomorrow, TWN will be in Las Vegas. Wednesday and Thursday in St. George, Utah. Friday in D.C. Saturday and Sunday in Philadelphia. Look for me on the running trails and say hello. To all the rest -- have a great week!

Be back soon, Steve Clemons

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

Oakley and I wish you a fantastic holiday weekend. I'm working with my new Apple Powerbook and appreciate all of the advice from knowledgable Mac practitioners.

While Oakley has the blue ball, it seems that my powerbook does have the blue tooth -- so many things are possible.

And to cap off an interesting season of foreign policy work, the October 19th talk by Lawrence Wilkerson at the New America Foundation and Wilkerson's subsequent thoughtful and impassioned commentary on America's broken national security decision making "system" drew a great profile piece by Steve Weisman today in the New York Times.

Weisman writes:

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," Mr. Wilkerson said in a well-publicized speech at the New America Foundation in October. "And you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either," he added in the speech.

Mr. Wilkerson has also attacked the Bush administration for allegedly condoning torture and setting lax policies on treatment of detainees that led, he charges, to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the black eye they gave to the United States Army.

SINCE starting to speak out a few months ago, Mr. Wilkerson has become something of a Washington celebrity. He has given interviews and speeches, appeared on television, written op-ed articles and taken telephone calls from journalists and senators.

That talk Col. Wilkerson gave at New America was an event that "mattered", and my New Year's Resolution for 2006 is to make sure that we have more such occasions that "matter."

I salute Larry Wilkerson for what he has done these last few months with regard to getting this country's foreign policy back on track -- and I feel privileged to have worked with him and enjoyed make his speech a "well publicized" one as Weisman remarked.

Just a short note to Col. Wilkerson's wife, Barbara, who recently sent me some fantastic Christmas cookies. I had two of them -- and Oakley, the very crafty weimaraner, decided he deserved the rest.

Thanks on behalf of both of us for the cookies, and thanks from TWN's readers for supporting your husband during this complicated time.

Happy holidays to all -- and more soon.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. Keep the Mac advice coming. I'm reading everything you post and send. Really appreciate it.

Greetings and happy Friday TWN readers.

I just bought a new Apple Powerbook G4 to move me into 2006, and this is a real departure from the Dell Inspiron I had which had two hard disks and four keyboards go out on me in 20 months.

I will post more later, or tomorrow morning -- but need to get some things worked out on this system. If there are any experts out there on Apple powerbooks, drop me a line. I'd love to ask a few questions about what one does without a right click.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Besides holiday gift shopping, which I still do too much of on foot rather than on-line, I have been digging into as much detail as possible on the so-called "Bush Bombing Memo" that recounts George Bush's conversation with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair about bombing Al-Jazeera's headquarters.

TWN is going to be posting more about this in the first week of January. The Brit's prosecution of two bureaucrats involved in the leak of the memo's contents will resume on January 10th. This is one of the first -- and perhaps the very first -- serious prosecution of an individual under Britain's "Official Secrets Act."

The Official Secrets Act sounds to most Americans like it is trotted out all the time; maybe it has something to do with our James Bond fetish. But in fact, it's rarely actually applied in real legal terms -- and is used more as threat.

I have spoken with several senior American intel officials who think that if Bush did say something to Blair -- despite Scott McClellan's basic denial -- that it would have been in jest.

Would the Brits be prosecuting two guys over a joke? I don't think so.

There are ten lines that refer to this Al-Jazeera bombing topic in a 5-page memo on the Bush-Blair meeting.

Tomorrow I'll have more on this subject, but still trying to confirm one piece of this fascinating story.

Thus far, it is looking increasingly like the one who most benefited from the leak of this story was Tony Blair himself. Did he set things into motion? TWN is running some of this down.

And those in the right places know that TWN is prepared to run the relevant ten lines from the broader secret session, which dealt with Fallujah, if that material is leaked. It's not out of the realm of possibility.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons