The talking heads use various metaphors: "It's going to be a hard road ahead."
"We're only entering the fourth quarter."

Well, we're giving the Iraqis back their country, for better or worse. Mostly worse. We've already been over how misbegotten this whole foray was, how it was the wrong war for the wrong reasons, all the blood and treasure lost in the sand.

The hard line rear guard Bush administration apologists claim that, regardless of all the bloodshed, the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam.

I wouldn't know, since I'm not there on the ground. I have a feeling they don't either. As we stand back and observe the inevitable sectarian score-settling, favoritism, corruption, and the other symptoms of a failing state as the Iraqis--who never thought of themselves as a "people," but a collection of tribes--jockey for power, we'll probably see a strong man emerge.

A populace grown weary of undending violence will turn to him for stability, and gladly trade in whatever trappings of "democracy" we bequeathed upon them at the point of the gun.

The new strong man, after all is said and done, will remind us a lot of Saddam Hussein. Maybe he won't look as ridiculous in a fedora. He'll probably deal with us on oil, because he'll need the money...which was what the whole thing was about in the first place.

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It's very easy to say all kinds of nutty stuff designed to please your base when you're (a) campaigning for something, (b) holding an elective office where what you say on a particular subject really doesn't matter to anybody, or (c) a non-elected political big shot standing on the sidelines.

Barack Obama is certainly guilty of transgression (a) regarding a raft of subjects, including gay rights, Guantanamo, and the Iraq War. The scales fell from his eyes when he got in the Oval Office and realized that to make good on all those reckless promises, he would basically torpedo his presidency before he even got out of the gate.

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven," to quote Ecclesiastes.

Guilty of transgression (b) are those who, from the safety of their armchairs, would take a tougher line with Iraq in its electoral crisis, like members of Congress who have the luxury of not representing the official American line with every word they utter. Guilty of (c) are smart-mouthed ex-pols jockeying to be presidential nominees in 2012 and broadcast types seeking to boost ratings.

I think Obama is handling this one correctly. Rash statements now will only serve to unite the Iranians against the Great Satan. Don't confuse the protesters with Yankee-lovers. It has nothing to do with us. But it could if we muscled in there and tried to interfere.

Besides, what would we plan to do to back up the tough talk? Use Iraq and Afghanistan as staging grounds for Operation Iranian Freedom? The Pentagon would probably have something to say about that.

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You'll notice this entry is cross-filed under "Local South Florida Issues," because that's where it belongs.

The multi-decade dance between Castro's Cuba and successive U.S. administrations has transcended mere foreign policy; long ago, it became an emotionally-charged co-dependency fueled over the years by a volatile exile community capable of tilting national elections.

That we are now making a form of progress in relations with Cuba is due to a couple of developments: the hard-line old guard of the Miami exile community is gradually dying off, leaving more moderate, American-born heirs who think of themselves more as Americans of Cuban descent than Cuban-Americans, and the fact that Obama won Florida in 2008 without the Cuban-American vote, so he owes them nothing.

Both countries have benefited from this warped relationship. Fidel--and now Raul-- Castro needed the U.S. and its embargo to blame for inherent systemic failures in the Marxist Paradise, and U.S. conservatives liked having a Communist enemy just off our shores, not only to keep the base whipped up, but to ensure that mostly Republican Cuban-Americans showed up to vote in high proportion.

Well, it's time to move on, at least for the United States. The Organization of American States has, with qualifications, invited Cuba, finally, to join. The U.S., deciding it doesn't really matter that much anymore, dropped its objections.

Raul, not surprisingly, has spurned the invitation, proving that he needs us as an enemy more than we need him. The intractable problems of his country aren't going away soon, so he might as well keep shifting the blame.

Good luck with that, Amigo.

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In the end, it's all about respect.

His detractors will say that he didn't introduce any new ideas. While they'd like to think that's a criticism, it isn't. It's a fact. It also wasn't the point of the speech to throw new strategies or initiatives into the stew.

The point was to show people who think we hate them that we treat them as equals, that we value their contribution to civilization, that we appreciate and understand their grievances, and that they will find a new, welcoming attitude from us if they approach with outstretched hands and open hearts.

Regardless of what everybody may have been expecting in his own mind, that was President Obama's goal in Cairo, and he accomplished it with his customary eloquence and grace.

Some may say that that isn't the way to treat these people, that they only respect you when you slap 'em around a little, walk tall, strut your stuff, rattle the saber, let 'em know who's boss.

Well, that hasn't worked very well to date, so what's the harm in trying the human approach?

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This really seems to be "who'd a thunk it?" week.

It's bad enough that GM goes bankrupt, but now we have the company selling one of its iconic brands to...the Chinese!

Remember when you saw a Hummer (usually when it was blocking your line of sight to make a left turn, or back out of a parking space), and its owner looked so tall in the saddle? Remember that surge of good old American pride when somebody who drove a vehicle that got about ten miles to the gallon left it running in the parking lot to keep the A.C. running while he or she shopped, just because they could? It does bring a tear to one's eye.

Now the stylish street knockoff of our armed forces' standard combat vehicle is just another rice-burner, like all those Toyotas, Hyundais and (shudder) Mitsubishis that lesser mortals sneak around in.

No, it's worse, because the Koreans and the Japanese aren't poised to take over the world, and they don't hold the tattered remains of our economy in thrall. That's right, every Hummer that gets sold now is aiding and abetting the enemy.

Looks like it's time for our own Cultural Revolution.

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It just shows you that no matter who is in the White House, our republic--with all its awesome and high-priced might--remains at a disadvantage when it comes to asymmetrical warfare.

What do you do if you're the Taliban, you're armed with rocket-propelled grenades and maybe some old Enfield rifles the British left behind back in the Nineteenth Century, and you're fighting a foe who has precision missiles that can rain down destruction from the sky with no advance notice, obliterating an entire crowd?

You make sure the crowd he obliterates is the wrong one.

Remember, this battle is for hearts and minds, not body counts. You use jiujitsu, turning the aggressor's own bulk and momentum against him. Enough of these little mistakes, and pretty soon the whole country sees you as the heroic defender of innocent women and children.

What are a few thousand more deaths in a country that has suffered so much already, especially if they serve a strategic goal? The locals don't know the Twin Towers from the Doublemint Twins, and when you say "terrorism," they look at all the bodies of their friends and loved ones that need to be buried.

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What a feel-good moment. We certainly needed it. Reminds me of the "Miracle on Ice" during the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, and more recently, the Hudson River plane crash.

The first thing that struck me when I heard the news on Easter Sunday was how capricious fate can be. Barack Obama is being hailed as a man who, when tested, made the right decision under pressure.

What if, God forbid, a rogue wave had lapped against the side of the little lifeboat, throwing off the rhythm of one of our snipers just enough so that he hit the hostage, instead of his captor, in a horrible accident? The President would be condemned as a man whose intemperate rush to conclude the impasse cost an innocent man his life, when further negotiation might have yielded fruit.

I would have liked to be inside Jimmy Carter's head for a moment yesterday. Remember when he sent the task force into Iran to free the hostages, and the effort ended in tragedy? All because a few rotor blades got tangled up with each other, and some sand got in the engines. Had it succeeded, he might have been reelected.

Upon such discrete and seemingly trivial phenomena do the great wheels of History turn.

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It looks like Fidel Castro may have won simply by outlasting everybody else.

The Cuban American National Foundation, long the bulwark of the hard line against engagement with the Communist regime--a group so powerful that it hamstrung one administration after another and virtually dictated our Cuba policy for years--has now decided that maybe increasing our ties with the island is the best way to effect change.

It's true that the C.A.N.F.'s influence is on the wane (Obama took the swing state of Florida in spite of its support of McCain), and the younger Cuban-Americans, the next generation, neither share the fire in the belly nor the fear of being tarred as Castro sympathizers for following their own political path. Slowly and tentatively, U.S. official policy toward Cuba is becoming more flexible.

It has been said that Miami-Dade County is the only county in the U.S. to have its own foreign policy. That may still be so, but at least theirs is finally coming into line with the federal one.

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Some of us may be old enough to remember Nikita Khrushchev's famous utterance, "We will bury you," from 1956. He didn't exactly mean it the way it sounds--it was a loose translation made by someone who obviously didn't understand Russian very well. He meant that capitalism would fall on its own accord from bloat and topheaviness, and that Communists would be shovel-ready to pile dirt on the corpse.

He was wrong about a lot of things, including which Communists would be doing the burying. Modern-day China, whose political and economic system would give Karl Marx an aneurism, is delighted to shower us with a panoply of defective and poisonous goods that we are happy to purchase at places like Wal-Mart because they are less expensive than their American-made competition used to be, back when America was making stuff.

Lead in our children's toys, melamine in our pet food, and now some mysterious gas trapped in our drywall that sabotages our air conditioning and rots the wiring in our flat-screen TVs...could it all be part of a mysterious Manchurian Candidate-type plot to rot us from within? A silent, creeping terrorism that we won't be aware of until it's too late?

Confucius say: He who buy cheap junk always get more than he bargain for.

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Take any organization, founded for whatever reason, and pretty soon its first order of business becomes self-preservation.

Back in the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church needed money, the Pope sold indulgences whereby wealthy mortals could assure their souls a shortcut past Purgatory and straight through the Pearly Gates.

When Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine, the March of Dimes reinvented itself as a crusader for pre- and neonatal care.

So now comes Hamas, whose popularity with Gazans is in decline because it is failing to deliver on all those mundane promises about lowering crime, keeping the lights on, and getting the garbage picked up. A dingy light bulb clicks on over some strategist's head, and he says, "I know, let's go shoot rockets at the Israelis! They'll retaliate in force, as they always do. We hide amongst our own people, they get mowed down, we fight back in their name, and even though we're sure to lose, we're heroes! We sweep the next elections!"

That's all well and good, except for the people who got mowed down. Nobody asked them.

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In his inauguration speech today, President Obama addressed the Islamic world directly, saying that those who were willing to work with us in building things, rather than destroying them, would receive the hand of friendship.

Here is one place where his heretofore burdensome middle name probably helps him. He has an enormous reservoir of political capital abroad as well as in this country. If he uses it more wisely than his predecessor, it could go a long way toward alleviating at least one of the many vexing problems that face us--that being our standing in the rest of the world.

I understand that one of Obama's first overseas trips will include Indonesia, the land where he spent a portion of his childhood. Can you imagine the reaction in the world's most populous Muslim nation when he makes a few remarks to them in their own language?

A far cry from a President who even had difficulty making a few remarks to the American people in their own language.

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When you give the gift of democracy to a people, the vote doesn't always turn out the way you had hoped.

Take the Palestinians (no Henny Youngman jokes, please), who freely and openly elected a government whose central platform plank was the destruction of the State of Israel. Their vote may have been out of desperation, despair or anger, but they made their bed, and the Israelis are now making sure they sleep in it.

It was Hamas, not average Gazan civilians, who fired the rockets into Israel, but the only way Gazans are going to be convinced to change their government is to show them that there is no future for them in supporting their current one.

If this keeps up, Hamas' support in Palestinian public opinion polls may sink even lower than George W. Bush's in American ones. In the regrets department, our two peoples have a great deal in common.

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One can understand why the Arab world would see things from the Palestinian point of view, although innocent victims are innocent victims whether they belong to your own nation or someone else's.

What I don't understand are the negative feelings toward the Israeli incursion by nations that ought to know better. Do the French honestly think that they would act any differently if rockets were raining down daily on their beloved Arc de Triomphe, and flattening everyone in the vicinity?

The only thing the Israelis have done that the rest of us haven't is to retaliate surgically by going straight to the source of the threat and attempting to eliminate it with overwhelming force and an eye toward minimizing "collateral damage."

For some reason, they haven't been stupid enough to get bogged down in a multi-year, phenomenally expensive war with a nation that had nothing to do with the original problem.

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It's a fitting coda to the utter pointlessness of Bush's invasion of Iraq. Even the people we liberated at the cost of so much human life and treasure are literally hurling their very worst insults at our president as he tries to run his final "victory" lap.

Bush laughed off the incident in his simple-minded way, but it really is tragic that our massive undertaking has come to this. Is there any positive outcome, anything at all, that we can point to? We got rid of Saddam. Great--Iran is taking advantage of the power vacuum, as are the various domestic Iraqi sects and factions he managed to keep in some kind of restless order.

At the very least, we were hoping to leave behind a pro-American client state in the middle of a hostile region.

Instead, the locals are hailing the shoe-thrower as a national hero.

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After Italy capitulated in World War II and then declared herself to be on the side of the Allies, Winston Churchill famously said, "With the Italians as friends, who needs enemies?"

One has to wonder what kind of foreign aid first allows the Pakistanis to export nuclear technology to our enemies, and then permits them to get huffy about U.S. incursions over a border that they are incapable of policing themselves.

Would the old Soviet Union have tolerated this kind of behavior from a client state? No howski. First, a warning--then Islamabad brulee. Certainly no more military funds.

No wonder the world has lost its respect for America when our puppets are doing all the yanking on the strings.

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Last week the Lowe Down shipped out to Vienna, Austria, of all places, to give a series of lectures at the behest of the U.S. State Department. The Europeans are fascinated by the U.S. elections this year, to the point where our campaign reports lead their news programs. The average Austrian I met knew more about the dynamics of our election than most Americans.

You'd never know, from following our media, that the Austrians are in the midst of a bitter parliamentary election of their own. Their campaigns are limited by law to six weeks (so civilized), and to an American, the bewildering array of party names looks like somebody spilled a bowl of alphabet soup on the table.

The SPO and the OVP had a Grand Coalition for awhile, but that broke up, necessitating this snap election. But the right-wing FPO is coming up on the outside. Then, there's the crackpot ultra-right BZO, and some worry that they might pull off some political jiujitsu and grab the Chancellorship. (It can happen: Remember Kurt Waldheim? The old ex-Nazi with memory problems won the Austrian Presidency and was banned from travel to the U.S.)

As if that weren't enough, the Greens are splashing around in the soup with their own agenda, not to mention a Scrabble-bag full of marginal two-bit parties that might forge coalition blocs of their own.

Many of the issues in the Austrian elections, which will be held on Sept. 28, are eerily similar to ours. Anti-immigrant sentiment (the FPO is pushing a law to make them learn German or go home), gay marriage, social security, inflation. Over there, the Turks are to them what Latin immigrants are to us.

One other thing...they don't care at all what a pol does in his private life. It's irrelevant to them in terms of his or her electability. John Edwards would still be a contender over there. What they hate are dirty, Karl Rove-style politics. This always backfires onto the perpetrator.

This pretty-boy (I'm talking about the one on the poster. The guy standing there looking like a typical ugly American is your intrepid editorial cartoonist) is Heinz-Christian Strache, the face of the FPO, the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party. Often, you see his poster (political posters number in the millions in Vienna) defaced with a red stick-on clown nose. The message translates as "Social Security for OUR people," which is code for "native Austrians." There is a strong xenophobic streak over there, and the emphasis in this poster is on denying social security to immigrants and other undesirables.

Why was I there? The State Department thought the Austrians would be particularly fascinated by an American editorial cartoonist who explained our elections to them and amplified his comments with examples of his work.

As you can see by this photo of a Viennese crowd breathlessly awaiting admission to one of my lectures, the trip was a success in terms of promoting our country's image abroad. I dragged out some of my college German from 35 years ago for my introduction, which, thankfully, appeared to win over the mob, "Ich bin ein Berliner"-style. Fortunately, almost everybody understands English over there to some extent. If you read this blog regularly, you've probably seen most of the cartoons that I displayed over there, so I won't bore you further with them now.

For those of you who understand German, I've placed links below to the websites of the Austrian dailies that covered my visit. Even if you don't sprechen Deutsch, there are some interesting pictures in there.

Also listed is a story in English by a young reporter from the local newspaper in the Quad Cities, which, as every red-blooded American knows, means Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline and Rock Island. She happens to be over there on a journalism fellowship.

Lastly, I did a radio interview (in English) for Austrian state radio, which is linked below. The best thing about it, I think, is the accent on the guy who interviewed me. He's originally from Barbados, picked up the plummy Queen's English at Oxford, and looks like Sydney Poitier in his younger days.

Auf wiedersehen!

derStandard.at

diepresse.com

Here's the Quad City Times piece (in English):
qcTimes.com

Click here to hear the radio interview

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The Founding Fathers were pretty smart when they inserted the word "more" into the phrase, "in order to form a more perfect union," in the Constitution. They were recognizing that humans are fundamentally flawed, and that the best they could hope for was to keep improving the forms of government they devised.

The problem with a state-run operation like China's is that the State derives its authority from the assertion that it is inherently perfect, and therefore knows best. Hence, we see the Chinese doing things at the Olympics like substituting a girl with perfect teeth to lip-sync for the real performer, who will now grow up imagining herself to be forever unacceptable to society.

Gymnastics, apparently, favors the really young. So, what does the State do when there's a mandatory minimum age of 16 for contestants? They doctor their papers. This perfection thing is serious business. I was watching the poor Chinese girl who snagged only a bronze in the All-Around behind two Americans. You could read the shame all over her face, a shame that will be handed down in her family for generations. It's a good thing the Chinese won gold in the team competition, or they'd all be herding yaks in Gobi Desert Re-education Camp #14 by now.

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At first glance, this probably looks like another gag cartoon about how stupid George Bush is. It isn't. That line of humor and commentary was exhausted a long time ago. This cartoon is about the frustratingly powerless position we now find ourselves in when it comes to influencing world events.

Our President must honor the Chinese with his presence at their Olympics because they hold so much of our national debt that not to do so might offend our biggest bankers, regardless of their record on human rights.

And now, thanks to being overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must look on helplessly and cluck, cluck while Russia swallows our staunchest ally in Eastern Europe. Remember when President Bush visited Georgia back in 2006 (you probably don't)? "You Georgians have chosen to stand up for democracy," he said to the cheering multitude (more or less), "and the people of the United States will stand with you."

Now the Georgians, as well as Bush, are learning that he misspoke himself ever so slightly. What he meant to say was, "We will stand by."

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You have to feel for the McCain campaign. He visits a marketplace in Baghdad, and the only thing that gets mentioned is that he had to wear body armor and walk with a protective cover of helicopter gunships. Or, that he can't tell Shia from Sunni and has to be reminded of the difference by Joe Lieberman.

Obama, on the other hand, takes a little trip abroad and the media types start acting like teenyboppers at a rock concert who can't wait to throw their underwear onto the stage. No, it ain't fair, but unfortunately war heroes, while worthy of our respect, don't make for sexy TV ratings.

Our better angels tell us the media are supposed to be a public trust, but in the end, only the BBC can afford to be boring, because it's government subsidized. Obama, God bless him, moves car insurance, Boniva, retirement plans, erectile dysfunction meds, Activia, Touch of Gray, and all the other essential components of American life that undergird the First Amendment. McCain, unfortunately, only reminds people that they need them.

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In all the excitement with the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, gas prices, and the economy going to hell in a handbasket, it's easy to forget there are other things going on in the world that make our issues pale by comparison. It's also easy to forget that there is somebody still occupying the White House, trying to be relevant.

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When you're standing there, gnashing your teeth at the gas pump, have you ever given thought to the fact that our insatiable appetite for gadding about in huge cars has caused so much land to be planted for corn to make ethanol that we're helping to drive up grain prices around the world? I hadn't either, until a short time ago.

So now people are starving--and rioting--so that we can have the freedom to take that impulse trip to the mall. It IS written into the Constitution, after all. Maybe these high fuel prices will force us, in our overriding self-interest, to re-think our responsibility to the rest of the world...

Nah.

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The Chinese, in their ancient wisdom, have provided us with the bond that unites mankind.

Drawing the Earth gives me a rare opportunity to use my compass, which normally lies around in a drawer waiting to stick me in the finger when I'm scrounging around for an eraser or something.

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With absurd fanfare, the Cuban government allows its people to possess things they cannot afford. Sounds like our own credit card business.

I had fun drawing this cartoon.

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It will be interesting to see how "tough" President Bush is able to get with China on the human rights issue during the period before the Olympic Games begin, considering that the Chinese hold such a massive amount of U.S. debt.

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