Dennis Ross' Iranian Challenge

Dennis Ross' recent appointment as special envoy to the Gulf and Southwest Asia got a relatively quiet rollout, certainly compared to the high-profile photo-ops with the president, vice president, and the secretary of state when they rolled out special envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan. That comparison has reflected a degree of confusion about Ross' mandate and authority, writes Michael Crowley in The New Republic.

Crowley cites critics and supporters of Ross -- a veteran of Republican and Democratic administrations going back to the Reagan administration -- who question his ability to deal with Iran, even his depth of understanding of Iran.

He may not have included Iran in an extensive book on the Middle East peace process, as Crowley notes, but he does have a public track record on Iran, such as this essay he wrote for Newsweek magazine in November 2008, called "Iran: Talk Tough with Tehran."

You can get a more extensive idea of what's driving our envoy to Iran and its neighbors by watching the video below from his June 27, 2007, speech and question-and-answer session at The Commonwealth Club. It's clear that he has a challenging job, but his public track record is worth examining.

As Social Networking Sites Grow, Politicians Get On Board

Social networking sites used to be viewed as just the newest addition to the strange, constantly connected and technologically obsessed youth generation. But times are changing. Social networking sites are no longer used exclusively by the oh-so-misunderstood world of 20-somethings. They are becoming more and more popular in the oh-so-misunderstood world of politics.

Recently, Politco named “The 10 Most Influential D.C. Twitterers.” The good news? It’s bipartisan! The number 10 political Twitterer is Al Gore, who Twitters mostly about, you guessed it, the environment. At number seven is conservative Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who writes about his daily events in a manner only decipherable by some:

posted at 1:15PM on Feb. 13, “CSPAN 530pmEST. FIANAL vote stimulous)porkulus bill I vote NAY. Pres signs 800B$ bill Mon primetime TV.”

President Obama, the man whose very own technology-focused campaign has much to do with Washington’s new embrace of social networking sites, comes in at number four on Politico’s list. And topping it all off, at number one, the king of the Washington Twitterati is none other than Karl Rove, who seems to be amassing a Twitter-GOP coalition.

Of course, though the most unexpected group of Twitterers, our country’s politicians are not the only new group of people now taking advantage of social networking sites. Many businesses and organizations now have MySpace pages and Facebook groups, including The Commonwealth Club. The New York Times wrote an article last December on “How to Use Social Networking Sites for Marketing and PR.” And recently ABC announced that San Francisco school teachers are going to be taught how they can integrate social networking sites into their curriculum, the hope being “that if a student is having trouble raising his hand and asking a question, then maybe he'll feel more comfortable reaching out to his teacher on his MySpace page.” What was once viewed by many as an intrusive form of technology may now become an educational tool.

David Ewing Duncan, who moderated The Commonwealth Club event “Online Personas: Defining the Self in a Virtual World” on November 30th, 2006, stated that J. A. Barnes, who coined the term “social networking” in 1954, “decided that the ideal number of people to interact in a social network was 150 people. … The combined networks of the panelist sitting to my left…[are] about 40 million, 50 million people.” Those panelists represented the popular social networking sites Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and LinkedIn. Those combined 50 million people in 2006 have turned into 175 million users for Facebook alone, according to Facebook, with its fastest-growing demographic being people over 30. Social networking sites are simply too vital in this day-and-age to be ignored by any generation or occupation. On April 4th, John Blossom, the author of Content Nation, will speak at The Commonwealth Club on how to use social media to create new opportunities in one’s personal life and career.

Who would have thought that one day the most off-the-record among us, the people that make up our government, would voluntarily be sharing their every move? Social networking has changed our reality, and now more than ever we are all connected.

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GM Loses Some Swagger

When General Motors Chairman Rick Wagoner visited the Commonwealth Club in May of last year, he spoke with uncommon boastfulness despite the fact the automaker was in severe dire straits even then. In a speech that mainly covered the company's foray into green technology, he said:

Over time we have a natural advantage by our experience here and our depth of technology, and we plan to win. We welcome the competition, but when I come back to see you in 10 years there may be other guys in, but we plan to be leading the parade in this area.

Famous last words?

The good news is GM's $30.9 billion loss last year was not the company's worst ever. That was 2007. While Wagoner visits Washington asking for as much as an additional $16 billion just to keep the assembly lines rolling, the aftermath of GM's possible demise is being felt outside our borders.

Reports today say GM is preparing to ask European countries such as Germany for over $4 billion in aid to keep its Opel brand operating. This comes a day after GM announced it would cut 1,600 jobs and furlough another 900 at a plant in Brazil.

The situation in the U.S. continues to be perilous for GM. Wagoner reportedly told the auto task force created by the Obama administration that GM would cut the company's brands to four and eliminate 47,000 jobs as a part of a vast restructuring plan. In addition, an agreement with the United Auto Workers over a contractually obligated $5 billion payment to the union's health-care trust has not come to pass.


Wagoner mentioned GM's health-care predicament during his Commonwealth Club address, arguing that it inhibited the company's growth. “I have long been outspoken on the fact that the health-care costs in the U.S. is significantly damaging the manufacturing competitiveness of this country and the competitiveness of our economy, and I continue to feel that is true,” he said.

The plight of General Motors with its corporate tentacles extending far from Detroit might be a prime example of how GM's decisions and its fate not only affect the streets of Flint, Michigan, but employees in small European towns and workers in auto plants in South America.

Sanger: The U.S. Could Be in Afghanistan for Next 30-50 years

The United States could be enmeshed in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas for the next 30-50 years, according to The New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger.

In San Francisco to promote his new book, The Inheritance, Sanger told members of The Commonwealth Club of California Wednesday that securing the typically unaccessible border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is likely to be a cornerstone of American foreign policy for decades to come. “I suspect no American president can afford to allow that sanctuary to continue along the border and while there is a border for us, there's no border for them,” said Sanger. “This is why you're going to see President Obama extending the U.S. military operation and the covert operations over the border into Pakistan.”

The mountainous region know for craggy cliffs and impassable roads feature a unique opportunity for insurgents to hide from military intervention. This is the area that includes the infamous Tora Bora region where Osama bin Laden was able to escape capture shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. “There are not really many places in the world that are really effective sanctuaries for al Qaeda and the groups that will succeed them,” Sanger told Commonwealth Club President and CEO Gloria Duffy, who moderated the program. “There was a lot of talk after 9/11 about where does al Qaeda go when they no longer go the tribal areas? Well, the answer is: they go to the tribal areas.”

With Afghan presidential elections slated for the summer, Sanger doubts that a nation that has never been effectively held together by a central government can do so in the future. “If you decide that the country is going to be run by a series of different tribes and then you go out and do the equivalent of what we did in Iraq -- buying off the tribes -- to keep the peace and keep the country from again being that sanctuary,” said Sanger, “everybody who has looked at this hard says to me and everyone else, This is harder than Iraq.”

While the Obama administration has ramped up efforts to eventually switch the focus of military operations from Iraq to Afghanistan, Sanger says the strategic political question lies in Pakistan because of the prevalence of nuclear weapons in the country and the United States' interest in keeping those weapons from falling into the wrong hands. Sanger says he believes that the Pakistanis do a credible job of basic security of their weapons inventory, but he worries about their ability to keep nuclear knowledge within the state's laboratories. “Pakistan is a close ally on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for their own reasons, they have been supporting the Taliban,” said Sanger, “I don't think the civilian leadership wants to do that, but certainly elements of the army and the ISI do, and they want to do it because they think we're leaving Afghanistan and when we do the Indians will move into Southern Afghanistan and, to their mind, will surround Pakistan and crush them.”

In the end, the troubling conundrum that faces the United States is, When does your ally become your enemy? While having drinks with a senior military officer, the source told Sanger, “You know David, the problem with Pakistan is: 'How do you invade an ally?' That is the Pakistan problem.”

Acclaimed author and expert on the Taliban Ahmed Rashid will discuss the issues involving the Afghanistan and Pakistan border in addition to his new book, Descent into Chaos at The Commonwealth Club of California on March 11 at noon.

Administration: Nationalization of Banks is not Happening

The Citibank web site has its famous marketing slogan atop its home page, "Citi never sleeps." The motto means customer's can do their banking anytime, but with nationalization of banks becoming more likely by the day, it could be an admission of many sleepless night to come.

The past week has seen more than a whisper campaign from some Democrats and few leading economists that the short-term remedy for the banking system is nationalization. Sen. Chris Dodd has said it may "unavoidable", which is nearly equivalent to saying, "Folks, get ready. It's happening." It's no wonder the stock market is beginning to reflect concern about what a collapse of Citibank, Bank of America or Wells Fargo could mean to the economy, and the Obama administration may be slowly setting the stage for nationalization. For the time being, though, President Obama and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke say nationalization is not on the radar. Bernanke's comments stoked Wall Street, and that may have been his intent, while Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Jim Lehrer, “I think that’s the wrong strategy for the country and I don’t think it’s the necessary strategy.”

The Washington Post reported that the Obama administration tweaked the terms of government assistance by demanding common stock in lieu of cash. "The change paves a road toward nationalization for the most troubled large banks," according to the Post. A piece on Bloomberg.com goes further in calling nationalization inevitable.

Nationalizing the nation's top banks has its critics, of course. With taxpayers already shouldering a large burden of risk that is likely to increase in the future, backing the financial sector may be too much. Some economists even believe another stimulus bill of nearly the same sticker price will be needed within two years. 

James S. Turley, Chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young told The Commonwealth Club of California earlier this month that state ownership is a bad idea over the long haul:

The thing I hope doesn't happen is government officials get too comfortable with state ownership in the various industries they are investing in. And I hope they don't see this as the long-term solution.... Let me be clear, I think it was important that the government stepped in during these unprecedented times, but it is not a good idea and no thinks that governments over the long-term allocated capital as efficiently or effectively as free markets.

On the other hand, many commentators say that taxpayers saw little in return in the form of consumer lending after the initial $350 billion bailout money passed late last year, and news reports of lavish executive spending and multi-million dollar bonuses left a lingering distrust toward the banks.

How poor is the health of the nation's biggest financial institutions? The grand sage of the credit mess, New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini laid it out in this week's issue of Time, saying Citibank is "on the way to ICU," Bank of America should "prepare the transfusion" and surprisingly, Wells Fargo needs a "Defibrillator. Stat!"

Just 16 months ago, Bank of America and Citigroup were quarterly flipping top positions for the title of world's largest bank. Today, they may be on the verge of being owned by the biggest economy in the world.

Bush Truth Commission on the Horizon?

Will we see a replay of the 1970s-era Church Commission? What would that do for our political landscape?

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Salon that some type of truth commission seeking to highlight Bush administration actions torture and other war crimes is imminent. According to the story, Whitehouse responded in effusive terms to a question of whether the public knows much about the past eight years. Here's how the reporter described his response: "His eyes grew large and he nodded slowly. 'Stay on this,' he said. 'This is going to be big.'"

In the current edition of Time, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee of which Whitehouse is a part, called for a truth commission modeled in part by the Church Commission of the early 1970s, which uncovered illegal surveillance methods by the CIA and FBI. In light of a divided electorate, Leahy believes Americans need to know the truth, saying, "Rather than vengeance, we need an impartial pursuit of what actually happened and a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past."

Sen. Frank Church, whose commission ultimately led to the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), spoke in similar terms during a speech at The Commonwealth Club in 1975:

[Intelligence agencies] must function in the most delicate of all realms: mandated to maintain security without impairing freedom. if they engage in wrong-doing, it is not a casual matter that can be safely swept under the rug....

If we fail to restore a proper regard for the common good within the framework of the law, then creeping anarchy will gradually replace the rule of law altogether. In its wake will surely come the repressive measures that frightened people will then find preferable. There can be no successful preservation of liberty outside the law.

Since 2006, when the Democrats gained a majority in Congress, many liberals have criticized Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for failing to push for congressional hearings of alleged indiscretion or for impeachment of President Bush. Last week, Pelosi told Rolling Stone she believes senior Bush administration officials could be prosecuted: "The American people deserve answers."

But today Pelosi sounded less enamored with Leahy's proposal, because of the possible inclusion of immunity. In an interview today with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, the speaker said, "What I have some concern about, though, is it has immunity. And I think that some of the issues involved here, like the services part, politicizing of the Justice Department, and the rest, they have criminal ramifications, and I don't think we should be giving them immunity."

Regardless of the political merry-go-round, it appears that some sort of hearings into the misdeeds of the Bush administration are squarely on the radar of Democrats.

San Francisco Chronicle: The First of the Last Papers?

Read a 3/10/09 update on this story: Tentative union agreement in Chronicle case


In 2007, UC Berkeley Professor of Journalism William Drummond challenged a Commonwealth Club panel on journalism with this: "It's always been a great puzzlement to me [that] in an area where people are intelligent, affluent, sophisticated -- how come even now, how the LA Times is still a major newspaper of considerable import, and San Francisco has never produced that kind of product?"

If that was a long-standing question of Bay Area media watchers for years, the answer is not likely to become any easier now. The San Francisco Chronicle could be sold or even closed if owner Hearst Corp. is unable to get significant cuts to operating costs in the next few weeks. Yes, weeks -- not months, not years. The cuts might be unachievable; some estimates are that the company would have to cut as much as 47 percent of staff.

But others are suggesting that San Francisco could soon become the first major U.S. city without a paid daily newspaper (we do have, of course, the free daily SF Examiner and a number of local news and opinion blogs, in addition to broadcast media). Even if the paper survives, if it loses so much of its staff, will it be able to cover the city and region the way it historically has? (Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer is also facing a Chronicle-like end.)

With losses of $50 million a year, and more predicted for 2009, the Chronicle was in serious trouble even before the economy went off a cliff in 2008. (For a good overview of the challenges facing newspapers and other local traditional media, listen to audio of Professor Drummond's Sept. 27, 2009, Commonwealth Club panel discussion, "The State of Journalism," with industry pros Leslie Griffith, Robert Rosenthal, Kevin Keeshan, and Steve Wright.)

If we are about to enter a post-Chronicle era, that does not mean there is less news to report and be interpreted. The Commonwealth Club hosts a wide range of speeches and panel discussions by newsmakers, and this blog is just one effort we undertake to try to get this news out into the public consciousness, making connections between speakers here with timely issues in the news.

There are also, of course, many blogs, written by everyone from teenagers to laid-off newspaper reporters, and these blogs do everything from highlighting important news that is overlooked by the major media, to pushing partisan agendas. We will likely see a continued multiplication in blogs covering our local scene, and we will likely see some aggregation of blogs into super-blogs (hyperblogs? can we coin a term here?) like Huffington Post. Michael Kinsley, former editor of The New Republic and Slate.com, and the former editorial page editor of the LA Times, recently recanted somewhat on his earlier criticisms of news bloggers and offered a more optimistic assessment of their value, during a speech at The Commonwealth Club December 9, 2008 (listen to audio; see the video).

What will the future of Bay Area journalism be?

Where do you get your news? How good is it? Leave a comment and join the discussion.

Sanger: Iran Is a 'Few Screwdriver Turns' from the Bomb

In David E. Sanger's new book, The Inheritance, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times writes, "the Iranians may be so close to a bomb -- a few screwdriver turns away -- that there is no hope of stopping the country from becoming nuclear capable."

In yesterday's Times, Sanger and William Broad reported the Iranians have created "more than a ton" of enriched uranium -- a third more than previously known, which the article cites as enough to build an atomic bomb. If the Iranians now have sufficient amount of enriched uranium, Sanger's assessment is proving quite prescient.

In the book, Sanger also writes Olli Heinonen, the International Atomic Energy Agency's chief inspector, saw 2008 as a "breakthrough year" for Iranian uranium enrichment capabilities. 

The summer before, Heinonen had predicted that by the end of 2008 the Iranians would likely be running upward of 4,000 of the high-speed machines [centrifuges] -- enough to make a bomb's worth of uranium in a year's time if they choose to enrich to bomb-grade purity. His prediction proved just about right.

While the new Obama administration has indicated its willingness to talk to Iran, the increased likelihood of a nuclear Iran could change some opinions in Washington, possibly allowing some hawkish members of Congress to revert to the previous administration's stated intentions to disrupt at any costs -- through sanctions or military action -- Iranian designs on creating a nuclear bomb.

The Bush administration had contemplated military airstrikes against Iran publicly since 2006, but Sanger reports in his book that the consensus for success was lacking. "Military experts who have studied the options say an airstrike could be devastating," writes Sanger, but also that it would not be quick. He quotes a former head of intelligence for the Middle East and the Defense Intelligence Agency as saying, "You are talking about something in the neighborhood of a thousand strike sorties and it would take all kinds of stuff -- air, cruise missiles, multiple airstrikes -- to make sure you've got it all." Some estimates, according to Sanger, have such a campaign lasting a week or two and making U.S. interests in the region vulnerable to attack from Hamas and Hezbollah.

Iran may have the enough nuclear materials, but they do not yet have a bomb. It is quite possible that the mullahs and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not seek the actually warhead but merely seek what Sanger calls "a virtual bomb".

In the Second Nuclear Age, countries don't need to compile huge stockpiles of the sort that the Americans and Soviets amassed during the Cold War. All they need is a "virtual bomb," a credible capacity to build one in a few months and credible willingness to do so.

It appears the Iranians have achieved both points. How will President Obama react to this new nuclear paradigm?

Chief Washington Correspondent for The New York Times, David E. Sanger will discuss the challenges President Obama faces from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and China at The Commonwealth Club of California Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 6 p.m.

Author Thomas Ricks with Jon Stewart

Comedy Central and The Commonwealth Club must share the same booking agent. Last month author and political commentator Matt Miller, who spoke last week at the club, appeared with Stephen Colbert. Acclaimed author Thomas Ricks sat down with Jon Stewart to discuss his latest book, The Gamble, which details the last two years of the war in Iraq. The author will appear at The Commonwealth Club Monday, Feb. 23 at 6 p.m. Watch the Daily Show interview here:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Thomas Ricks

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