President Karzai narrowly won a clearly fraudulent election. His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from consideration as a candidate, ruling out a run-off election. That leaves us with an Afghan government of little or no legitimacy, unworthy of our confidence or that of the Afghan people. Classical counter-insurgency strategy requires a government with the support of the people. We don’t have such an ally in Afghanistan.

What next? The Los Angeles Times editors put in their two cents:

The status quo cannot continue. Obama has yet to decide whether he will heed the call of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for up to 40,000 more troops, but he has said he will not walk away from the country altogether. If that’s the case, it seems Obama has no choice but to hold his nose and press on with a weakened ally. Given that, he must push for a national unity government in Kabul to broaden its base of support and, at the same time, help develop a more decentralized administration of a land that has always been a loose collection of tribes and districts. Decentralization would allow the West to spread its resources to regional leaders rather than concentrating them in the hands of Karzai and his clique. Any U.S. strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan and drawing support away from the Taliban depends on a political leadership perceived as legitimate and a government that serves its people.

The editors of the Christian Science Monitor offer a similar prescription with a little more flesh on the bones, proposing five ways for us to move forward:

1. Strongly encourage him [i.e. Karzai] to form a new “unity government” that includes Mr. Abdullah, who on Sunday graciously removed himself from the runoff race. Karzai needs a government with wider appeal and greater credibility if he is to effectively influence the entire country.

Abdullah, who was formerly Karzai’s foreign minister, contributes on both of those counts. He ran the race (and quit it) on an anticorruption message. He hails from the Northern Alliance that helped topple the Taliban (Karzai comes from the dominant southern Pashtun ethnic group).

2. Apply quiet behind-the-scenes pressure on Karzai. The tough-love public criticism of Karzai has worked mostly to ostracise the Afghan president. Sen. John Kerry’s more subdued, but still firm, weekend of persuasion last month produced the desired effect – Karzai’s agreement to a runoff.

3. Washington should move quickly to influence selection of the Kabul government’s new cabinet. Certainly America’s contribution of troops and treasure gives it that right.

Karzai will be tempted to reward friends with high-profile posts, but what matters is competency in governance, especially in three key jobs: defense, interior, and finance. The US has successfully urged competency before – for instance, in backing the current finance minister (and prime minister) of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad.

4. Shift aid and relationships to local and regional leaders. This point counts as much as the first three combined – probably more. Insurgents do their courting outside Kabul, and the US should, too.

For 1,000 years Afghanistan has been ruled with tribal, decentralized government. Experts suggest a constitutional change that takes some powers from the president and gives them to the parliament (one idea even considers the Swiss model of semi-sovereign cantons).

But the US shouldn’t wait for such a formal change. If insurgents are to be won over (or bought), if aid is to be turned into roads and schools, if trust and a justice system are to be regained – that must happen at the local and regional level. This strategy has the added benefit of a certain independence from Karzai – but it has to be managed carefully so as not to openly insult him.

5. Finally, the US and its allies need to provide the resources and commitment to support good governance and security at the national, provincial, and local levels. For instance, it does no good to train police if the Taliban lures them away with many more times the pay. And once Afghan security forces have been trained, they need their foreign “teachers” to follow up with them on patrol. That’s a people-intensive effort.

While I think that many Americans are tired of the war in Afghanistan and skeptical both of the support of our NATO allies and the confidence of the Obama Administration in the effort, I also think that withdrawing from Afghanistan presents tactical, strategic, legal, and moral problems. I would rather that we had never invaded Afghanistan. I would rather that we would have completed our objectives there by now. However, having invaded and not achieved our objectives I think that we need to find a set of objectives and a strategy for which the American people will at least tolerate a continuing involvement with the country.

If, alternatively, the Obama Administration is insistent on pursuing the old objectives and the stated strategy, it should be fully resourced and engaged in with confidence. It certainly won’t be a classic counter-insurgency strategy.

My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, “Europe’s Obama Fatigue,” is online.

Despite George W. Bush’s defiant “you’re with us or you’re against us” public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe.

[...]

It would be ironic, indeed, if the Europeans started longing for the good old days of the Bush administration. But that nostalgia is closer than you might think.

Supporting arguments at the link.

UPDATE: As one might expect, this piece is generating some strong rebuttals.

Daniel Larison argues:

You cannot gauge the importance or unimportance of Europe to the United States on the largely cosmetic, superficial and procedural clashes Washington has had with various European states in the last nine months. Under the previous administration, Europe continued to be “important” to the U.S. even when major EU powers opposed administration policy in very public, dramatic ways. To the extent that Obama is losing ground with Europeans, he had far more goodwill and support to lose; in almost every European country, he continues to rate higher after the drop-off from unrealistic expectations than Bush did at almost any point. Obviously relations were and remained far more strained under the last administration than they have been so far under this one. We notice the minor clashes that have taken place because there was a widely-shared, unreasonable expectation that amity and concord with Europe would prevail under Obama.

[...]

European and especially German interests were flatly ignored by Bush when it came to handling Russia. Promises to Ukraine and Georgia of eventual membership in NATO were given over strenuous German opposition. Were European interests and opinions being heeded then? No. The missile defense ploy prompted Moscow to threaten abandoning its commitments under the European conventional forces treaty and elicited a great deal of bluster from Medvedev about targeting Russian missiles on European soil. Was European security strengthened by any of this? No. What matter then if Bush went through the motions and observed the right formalities when he was getting the major decisions wrong?

Most western European allies were not seriously consulted, nor were their objections given much weight, when the Bush administration decided to push ahead with the missile defense plan. In all of the new commentary claiming that Europe has soured on Obama, this seems not to count at all.

Judah Grunstein adds:

[I]f George W. Bush learned to listen to Europe, and in particular NATO, it was largely after he’d been chastened by the failure of the Iraq war and the 2006 mid-term elections. Up until his final NATO summit, Bush continued to talk loudly about the largely unpopular measures of NATO expansion and missile defense. He listened in the sense that he allowed the alliance — led by France and Germany — to turn him back, but it was out of weakness, not out of strength. There was no movement at all when it came to climate change, which is a major driver of public opinion here.

As for Obama’s handling of Europe, I’d agree with the characterization of his aloofness, especially with regard to the current Afghanistan strategic review. But while my sympathies would normally be with Europe on this sort of thing, I do think that Obama invited the NATO allies last April to assume greater ownership of the Afghanistan war. Given their refusal to do so, I don’t blame him for the freeze-out now. That said, Obama’s brush-off of the U.S.-EU summit is inexcusable and reflects a myopic view of the EU’s potential, especially with the advent of the Lisbon Treaty.

I actually don’t disagree with either Dan or Judah on most of these points and think some of the disagreement comes from the provocative  title the FP folks chose.  My argument is neither that the Europeans have tired of Obama or even that Bush was particularly adept at transatlantic diplomacy.  Rather, it is that Bush cared more about Europe — and particularly the UK and New Europe — than Obama and therefore invested more of himself in the relationship.

It’s true that Obama’s stance on, for example, missile defense and NATO expansion is more popular in some quarters than Bush’s.  Indeed, I prefer his approach on the latter and quibble with him on the former mostly on how the rollout was done vice the policy itself.  But the policy differences are  a reflection of Obama’s prioritizing Russia’s views over that of Europe, especially East and Central Europe.   I think Bush was ultimately wrong in his zeal to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO but it was a policy preference motivated by the stated ideals of the Alliance of “a Europe whole and free.”

An incredibly junior foreign service officer has resigned over disagreement with our AfPak policy, prompting a high level scramble within the administration and a long feature in the Washington Post.

As I wrote in “While Obama Dithers,” a piece for New Atlanticist,

They’ve brought this on themselves.  Granted, President Obama inherited this war and his people may have fought it differently had they been in charge during the first seven years.  (An unlikely counterfactual, to be sure, since he was an unknown state senator at the time.) But it’s a fight he clamored for during the campaign, stressing it as “a war of necessity.” And he doubled down almost immediately, sending more troops and firing a well-respected four star commander to replace him with a counterinsurgency guru.  But now he’s dithering, signaling in the press that he’s lost confidence in the strategy and can’t make up his mind as to what to do now.

Yes, it’s complicated. There are a lot of unknowns and the number of American casualties is escalating.  But those men are dying while their commander-in-chief hems and haws, trying to decide whether to heed the expert advice of the general he hand-picked three months ago, do a 180 and go with a counter-terror strategy as preferred by Vice President Biden, or some politically expedient middle course.  Their public indecisiveness certainly isn’t doing much to bolster the resolve of the Matthew Kohs of the world, much less the young soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines being asked to risk their lives while they wait.

Much more at the link.

UPDATE: Alex Massey has published an excellent counterpoint, “Afghanistan: A Modest Case for Dithering,” that I’ve republished at New Atlanticist.

UPDATE II:  Kevin Drum shares my sense that this story is rather odd.

Hoh “already had a lot of frustration” after two months?  And he quit two months after that?  Unless Hoh is the fastest learner on the planet, that really doesn’t seem like enough time to get very far up the learning curve.

Otherwise, like me, he thinks Koh’s analysis has substantial merit.

Well, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has said that a third of the counted votes in the Afghanistan election were fraudulent and ordered a run-off between Hamid Karzai and second place finisher Abdullah Abdullah.  Karzai looks unlikely to comply and nobody really wants a run-off, anyway.

So, as I write in my New Atlanticist essay, “Afghanistan Election: Now What?” we’re left with some rather unpleasant alternatives.  If Karzai tells the commission to go to Hell and declares himself the winner, we’re in trouble.  If we have a run-off, we’re likely not going to have this resolved until next winter.

Politico’s Laura Rosen and others have said an arrangement is being worked out to allow Karzai to keep the presidency with Abdullah getting a significant portfolio. And, surely, the denial by both sides that this is happening can not be considered dispositive.

Further, as [WSJ's Gerald Seib] points out, “it’s also possible all this agonizing over the election matters more to outsiders than it does to Afghans. “  Not only is the central government less important in their daily lives that it seems from outside but, frankly, they’re not used to Western style democracy and may be willing to accept a few points of corruption as close enough.  Especially since Karzai’s likely to win a two-way race, anyway.

But the United States and its NATO allies, already facing declining domestic support for the war, needs to have at least the illusion of legitimacy to work with here.  Considering the bad alternatives on the table, a deal between Karzai and Abdullah, with a speech by the latter urging his supporters to back the new coalition government, may be the best outcome.

Bad options seem to be all we have these days.

Michael Goldfarb wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard blog with the provocative title “Rent-a-General Jim Jones,” arguing that the man who spent four decades serving his country as an officer in the Marine Corps, rising to Commandant and then Supreme Allied Commander, is a partisan stooge for the Obama administration.

As widely anticipated, an EU report on last year’s Russian invasion of Georgia finds plenty of blame to go around, finding that Tblisi “triggered” the conflict but that Moscow violated international law by its invasion and with numerous atrocities thereafter.

This leads John Cole to quip, “Was the McCain/Palin campaign right about anything?”

As I detail in my New Atlanticist post, “EU: Georgia ‘Triggered’ Russia’s Illegal Invasion,” this is quite wrongheaded.    Not because the McCain/Palin “We’re all Georgians now!” posturing was wise — it wasn’t — but because they at least understood the basics of international law in a way the EU panelists do not.

Only the most ardent Georgian nationalists believe that Mikheil Saakashvili was other than a reckless fool in his actions leading up to the Russian invasion. However, once one recognizes — as the EU panelists here explicitly do — that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are part of Georgia, it no longer much matters.

If sovereignty means anything, it means that leaders of a state have license to take actions within the confines of their borders as they see fit, so long as they don’t create adverse spillover effects for their neighbors.  Saakashvili’s actions against internal groups conducting illegal activities within the borders of his country, while unwise and perhaps even provocative, are simply no justification for an illegal invasion of its sovereign territory by another member of the United Nations. Period. End of story.

I don’t actually end the story there, of course, so click the link for more.

Photo: Reuters Pictures (cropped).

Back in 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously noted that while “Old Europe” (particularly France and Germany) was hard to work with, America could count on “New Europe.”   Fast forward to 2009 and we may have reversed polarity.

My latest New Atlanticist essay, “Losing New Europe, Too?” explores this evolution, including why Western Europe is back in the fold and why Eastern Europe has every reason to be disappointed.

The eagerness of “New Europe” to side with the U.S. came from the combination of the cold shoulder they were receiving from their Western neighbors and the warm rhetoric from across the Atlantic.  But it now seems obvious that the talk will not be backed with action at the cost of risking war with Russia, especially for those states in its “near abroad” that have not yet been admitted into the NATO club.  That realization obviously and reasonably puts a damper on “New Europe’s” enthusiasm.

Relations with “Old Europe,” meanwhile, will return to what they have been for the postwar period: a mature engagement between peers that will ebb and flow as the situation warrants.  Such a relationship can withstand sharp disagreements, angry words, and hurt feelings.  Resentments and rifts will occasionally arise but they will be temporary.  Our shared values and interests, however, are permanent.

Much more at the link.

Graphic via Economist.

In my latest for The National Interest, I argue that, despite the constant urging otherwise by former  Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO can survive failing in Afghanistan.

[T]he fact of the matter is that NATO went to war in Afghanistan, invoking Article V’s declaration that an “attack against one” shall be “considered an attack against them all” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban government that sheltered al-Qaeda has been ousted and hundreds of the terrorist group’s leaders have been killed. The original mission has long since morphed into an incredibly ambitious nation-building exercise with murky goals.

NATO would never have achieved consensus on undertaking such a mission, even in the emotional wake of 9/11. Why, then, should its future rest on its achievement?

Much more at the link.

In my early morning Teddy Kennedy Dead at 77 media roundup post, I observed, “That the Chappaquiddick scandal didn’t make the first several paragraphs — or even first page — of several of these obits is quite remarkable. It would be like writing an obit for Richard Nixon that didn’t mention Watergate or one for Michael Jackson that glossed over repeated allegations of pedophilia.”

Hanna Rosin expands on that point quite a bit, including implicitly pointing out that it was a rather large elephant in the room:

Google Trends this morning is a perfect window into our tabloid culture and the recesses of our depraved minds. While the papers are full of words like “dynasty” and “legacy,” Mary Jo Kopechne, according to Google Hot Trends, is uppermost in our thoughts. Her name comes up as number one in the ranking, and several more places on the list, misspelled. Chappaquiddick shows up high and often, too; once correctly, and then in several illiterate incarnations.

Partly, I blame this discrepancy on the American papers, which are still bent on hagiography. I prefer British obituaries, which tell it like it is. And partly, of course, this is the fault of our vapid tabloid culture. The only surprise today is that Kate Gosselin has been knocked back all the way to number 30. “Michael Jackson alive” is a popular trend. Yeah. Jamming with Elvis.

Finally, there is the issue of the obvious narrative the papers are not stringing together. In my mind, I’ve always equated Ted Kennedy with Chuck Colson, the disgraced Nixon aide who went on to found an admirable Christian organization called “Prison Fellowship.” Public officials who do terrible things and then say they’re sorry (often in a press conference or book) are a dime a dozen. But the ones who do something terrible and then repent indirectly in the form of a lifetime of dedicated public service are rare. Colson and Kennedy are just about the only two I can think of.

Mary Jo Kopechne is on our minds because this narrative about Ted Kennedy makes sense, in some intuitive, appealing way. Kennedy killed a girl. That’s his rosebud. He made up for it partly by declining the ultimate glory of running for president, and choosing the more humble path—helping the underclass using the slow, steady machinery of the Senate.

Other than the fact that Kennedy actually did run for president — in a bitter primary battle with President Jimmy Carter in 1980 — that all strikes me as right. And, indeed, the Guardian obit covers this neatly in a single paragraph:

Kennedy’s career was significantly blighted by the Chappaquiddick incident of 1969 in which the car he was driving ran off a bridge and plunged into the water, killing his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. While he never reached the pinnacle of power, Kennedy eventually shed his playboy image to become a serious political presence in the Senate. His death marks the twilight of a political dynasty and deals a blow to Democrats as they seek an overhaul of the healthcare system, one of Kennedy’s personal goals.

Teddy Kennedy lived an extraordinary life of tremendous accomplishment interspersed with some horrible scandals and family tragedy.  It’s why he was such a fascinating figure. But his story simply can’t be told without the word Chappaquiddick.

UPDATE:  E&P’s Sam Chamberlain tallied how far into the obits the first mention of the incident appeared:

NY Daily News- 13^th graf

Associated Press- 7^th graf

Boston Herald-  10^th graf

Boston Globe-  5^th graf

NY Times- 14^th graf

NY Post- 14^th graf

Washington Post-  9^th graf

Wall Street Journal-  6^th graf

LA Times-  12^th graf

Chicago Tribune-  12^th graf (same obit as LA Times)

Miami Herald-  10^th graf

Reuters- 18^th graf

USA Today- 19th graf

Politico- 24th graf

The Hill-NO MENTION

Roll Call-25th graf

National Journal-11th graf

Times of London- 8^th graf

In fairness, for a variety of reasons having to do with the printing and editing process from bygone days, a newspaper “graf” is often much shorter than a proper paragraph.  Still, the most notable single fact about Kennedy’s life was mentioned well after the average reader would have lost interest.

Until yesterday, it seemed a fait accompli that the vital NATO supply base in Krygyzstan was closing, owing to a combination of geopolitics and a strong bid by Russia.  Thanks to an eleventh hour deal, Manus Air Base will stay open after all.

I analyze this in some detail at the link.  The short story, though, is that Dave Schuler’s February assertion that the Russians had simply outbid the us for the rights was correct.

Let’s just say that you don’t want to get into a bidding war with people who can spend $1.3 trillion in a single afternoon.

At her lecture to the Atlantic Council last night, Madeleine Albright repeatedly uttered three words seldom heard in Washington:  “I don’t know.”

What struck me, though, was her humility on three of the most difficult issues facing the West right now: the ongoing chaos in Iran, the relationship with Russia, and the future role of NATO.  For all of those, she forthrightly admitted that she didn’t have the answers.

Albright is not a woman lacking in confidence.  One doesn’t get to where she has, let alone as a woman coming up when she did, by being a wallflower.   Certainly, too, her expertise on these topics is unquestioned.  The international relations school at the University of Denver is named after her father, she has her PhD in international relations from Columbia, and she has spent decades studying, writing about, and making public policy decisions on these issues.

Regardless, they are enormously complicated and there are simply too many variables to make definitive policy prescriptions, let alone predict the outcomes, from outside.  She’s being rather too modest to say she now knows only “what she reads in the newspapers” — she’s far too active in the foreign relations community for that to be true — but she’s right that none of us have all the facts.

More at the link on what we do and don’t know about these issues.

As the 20th anniversary of the Solidarity movement’s triumph approaches, Poland finds itself divided politically and unhappy with its current state of affairs.   As I argue in my New Atlanticist piece “Poland’s Democracy at 20,” this is a good thing.

Unhappiness with the quality of one’s politicians, too, is a sure sign of a maturing democracy.  Gone are the days when Poles were excited to vote; that’s now simply expected.  But the expectations of new democracies are absurdly unrealistic and thus inevitably dashed.

Twenty years ago, Poland was part of the Warsaw Pact; today it’s part of NATO.  Then, it was on the outside looking in at Europe’s prosperity; now it’s a member of the EU.  Then, it was under Soviet domination; now it’s free.   Then, its people hated the government and they do again.  At least this time, they’re free to complain about it without the risk of being arrested.

Much more at the link, including the irony of Solidarity threatening to shut down celebrations of its own movement with strikes.

AP Photo/Fionn Kidney

The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster:

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.  They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.

“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia. “I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin. “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

This was something of a perfect storm:  The sudden death of a notable but relatively obscure figure combined with a superbly crafted quote.

Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh says, “We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too.”  That’s generally been my practice.   Trouble is, once a quote is out there, it quickly loses its Wikipedia moorings.   My guess is that many of those who used the quote found it at The Guardian or elsewhere.   Yes, journalists use Wikipedia without attribution.   Even more lift quotes and story ideas from other journalists, with or without attribution.

I’ve been quoted or asked for interviews many times based on blog posts that were mostly excerpts of media stories or others’ blog posts.  Given the formatting of this site — which has long used very well marked blockquotes and which highlights the name of the source being quoted — that would seem rather obvious.  But those searching for information stumble on the site via Google search, where we tend to rank well, and see an authoritative byline and go with it.

Similarly, the Atlantic Council put out a report on Afghanistan in January 2008 which began, “Make no mistake: NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.”  A subsequent edition of the report two months later changed that to, “Make no mistake: The international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”  It has thus been more than a year since the original quote appeared on the Council website or was available in a fresh print copy.  I still see the original version with some frequency.   It’s the quote that’s being quoted, not the report.

Indeed, were this report on the fake quote written differently, I’d expect that people would have used this report of the fake quote — and reports on the reports on the fake quote like this one — as a source of the quote. I’m not sure if AP’s Shawn Pogatchnik, whose report I quote above, intentionally broke up the fake quote with the phrase “Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read” to forestall that happening or whether it’s a happy accident.   I have had enough blog comments and emails resulting from blog posts to know that quite a few people will mistake, say, a commentary about Jesse Jackson as a posting by Jesse Jackson.  People doing Internet searches will glom onto a single sentence and ignore everything else on the page.

Supreme Allied Commander John Craddock told the Atlantic Council that “the political leadership of NATO is AWOL” and that fixing the “imbalance” between an enormous strategic ambition and modest political will is vital for success in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Asked in the Q&A about today’s replacement of David McKiernan with Stanley McChrystal as ISAF commander, he twice demurred, calling it a “U.S. decision” rather than a NATO one.  He did allow that he was “informed but not consulted” on the decision.

I apologize for the dearth of posting the past couple of days.  Much of yesterday was spent in preparation for the Atlantic Council’s 2009 Leadership Awards, which were held last night, and this is my first break from the day-after followup on the website, which I’ve been working on since 6 this morning.

As I explain in my roundup post, “Council Awards Gala: A Night to Remember,” it’s been worth it.   Last year’s dinner, my first, honored Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, Admiral Mike Mullen, and Evgeny Kissin.   We managed to top that this year, recognizing the contributions of President George H.W. Bush, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, General David Petraeus, Sam Palmisano, and Thomas Hampson to the transatlantic community.   Short of resurrecting Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Ford, and Ludwig Beethoven, we’re not going to get a more distinguished group of honorees.

Petraeus argued in his speech that “NATO faces a very urgent moment” with the war in Afghanistan.  He’s confident that recent steps will ensure that war does not become Americanized.   As I explain at the link, I’m not so sure.

Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, introducing his former boss, said he’d walk through fire for President Bush and delivered a tribute that was alternately funny and touching.  As per usual, Bush used his speech to praise others and poke fun at himself.

We finished the night off in the bar where I had the great pleasure of having a cold one with Hampson and a few others, including my boss, Fred Kempe.   If you’re under the not unreasonable impression that a world renowned opera singer widely considered to be America’s greatest baritone is not a guy you’d like to have a beer with, you’d be wrong.    Even better, Fred was buying.