By Kori Schake

This weekend we celebrate our country's independence and the courage of those brave men who met in congress in Philadelphia to chart a path to greater liberty. Despite the considerable effort Jefferson goes to in the Declaration to enumerate the crown's depredations, and the very real grievances Americans had against the British government, we stand now far enough from the colonial experience to acknowledge we rebelled against perhaps the most humane and legally responsible government of its time.

And yet we rebelled. We are a country founded on the belief that people have rights, and they loan them in limited ways for limited purposes to their government. We were made great by distrust of a largely beneficial British government, and we remain great by distrust of our own. 

Which is what makes our president's response to Iran's elections so discouraging. America's reflex -- our natural position as a country -- is to stand with a people against their government when that government is infringing upon their natural rights. But our president chose the course of deference to an authoritarian government as it repressed its own people.

We do not know whether the Iranian election was fair. It certainly strains credulity to believe Ahmadinejad won more votes than any Iranian office-seeker of all time. Or that he decisively carried every demographic in every region. But to be honest, the June vote was never going to be all that significant. What we call Iranian "moderates" are not; advocates of real change in Iran are stricken from the ballot by the hundreds. 

Nor do hundreds of thousands of Iranians filling the streets prove the election was invalid, as moving as their mute protests were. Ahmadinejad's support was likely to be rural, not urban. Muqtada al-Sadr turned similar numbers out into the streets of Iraq's cities, and we did not consider that invalidating of the elected government. Our founding fathers, John Adams in particular, worried about democracy emboldening the mob instead of the people.

But it is the behavior of the Iranian government in reaction to the protests that we should unequivocally object to. Iranian protestors were not hurling Molotov cocktails and kidnapping government officials. They were engaged in a disciplined civil disobedience of the kind that changed our country many times: independence, the civil rights movement, anti-war campaigns. We belong by their side.

Our president expressed "deep concern" and urged the Iranian government to respect its people. He had to be pulled by public reaction into condemning the Iranian government as it threatened executions of protestors. This from a president who repeatedly lectures us that there is no conflict between our values and our interests.

His "realism" and caution now are of a kind with his initial reaction to Russia's invasion of Georgia last summer, when he urged both the invader and the invaded to exercise restraint. President Obama is a "realist," unwilling to impinge on our national interests or the established international rules of state sovereignty, even when those interests and rules crush the hopes of others striving to gain by peaceful means what we have long enjoyed.

This all makes me a little homesick for what came to be called "the freedom agenda" in the Bush administration -- now that we are hearing what the alternative sounds like, now that we are taking the measure of ourselves as a nation, and now that we are willing to consign other people's freedom to our interests. It makes us a little less a force for good in the world, a little less deserving to say we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

By Phil Levy

The Obama Administration last week launched a new World Trade Organization case against China. The United States complained that China has limited exports of industrial materials like bauxite and coke. These limits drive down prices for Chinese producers and raise prices for foreign users. The effect is to subsidize Chinese firms at the expense of foreign firms. We are officially shocked -- shocked! -- that any nation would do such a thing.

This case raises questions of both legal and economic principle. The legal question of whether China's specific measures contravene WTO agreements is best left to the lawyers. The economic question is whether such subsidies are just. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk argued emphatically last week that they were not. He said the policies created "unfair preferences" and "skew the playing field against American workers and businesses." The answer? "Now, more than ever, we must fight against this kind of domestic favoritism," Kirk said.

To be sure, there are commendable aspects of last week's WTO complaint against China. From an economic standpoint, the Chinese measures do constitute a subsidy, and if the United States is to attack them, it is best to do so at the WTO. What's more, it is nothing new for the United States to object to foreign subsidies. The United States is still pursuing a WTO case against Europe for its financial backing of Airbus. In that case, the United States argues that Europe's provision of funds for aircraft design, retooling of manufacturing sites, and debt forgiveness all gave the European aircraft consortium an unfair advantage over its American rival, Boeing.

These cases show that the United States is opposed to other countries distorting markets in favor of their own domestic producers. And yet, consider three headlines of recent months:

1. The Obama administration has provided tens of billions of dollars in support for Chrysler and General Motors. This money, which no private investor would provide, is intended to finance the companies' emergence from bankruptcy and allow them to create new automobile designs. Further, the U.S. Department of Energy last week began to disburse $25 billion in low-interest loans to let domestic auto factories retool their manufacturing sites to produce more environmentally friendly cars. There certainly seem to be conceptual parallels to the Airbus complaint.

2. President Obama signed into law the "Buy America" provisions of the stimulus bill, which are intended to direct business toward domestic producers of goods like steel. After an outcry over an early draft, these provisions were scaled back so they would only hit countries like China, which is not a signatory to WTO government procurement rules. In practice, though, uncertainties over implementation rules have meant that trading partners like Canada and the UK have been hurt as well. This is clear domestic favoritism.

3. The president strongly embraced legislation limiting carbon dioxide emissions, the Waxman-Markey "cap and trade" bill, that passed the House on Friday. Among other things, that legislation aims to raise the domestic price of emissions, but it distributes significant batches of permits free of charge to favored industries. The effect is to subsidize the producers.

Each of these three measures has been contentious; taken together they present a very murky picture of the U.S. stance on subsidies. But who really needs consistency, anyway? There are all kinds of intricate rules at the WTO, and we have good lawyers. Why not just throw everything at dispute settlement panels and see what we can get away with?

There are a couple reasons why not. First, the WTO is not well-equipped to fill in the blanks on contentious and complicated issues like a government's power to subsidize. Those questions are best resolved through negotiation, not litigation. Second, in order to flourish, the global trading system must be perceived as fair. This is unlikely if its principal member is simultaneously subsidizing its own industries while attacking other countries' efforts to do the same. The United States needs to provide principled leadership -- and practice what it preaches.  

Ambassador Kirk is absolutely correct that we should reject arguments for domestic favoritism. But he may also want to raise that point at the next Cabinet meeting. 

By Christian Brose

A minor request for the Obama administration: Amid your full-court press against Israeli settlements, would you please muster a bit more ire and determination to rectify this absurd situation:

Eighteen months have passed since the Paris donor conference, where members of the international community promised the Palestinian government $1.45 billion in assistance for its 2009 budget. The Palestinian Authority (PA), however, has received less than a quarter of this amount, and Arab governments in particular have fallen short, contributing only $78 million of the $600 million pledged. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad has been forced to borrow $530 million from local banks this year in order to pay the salaries of PA employees, who with their families constitute one-quarter of the Palestinian population. When combined with the loss of internal revenue from the Gaza Strip since the Hamas takeover and the continuing Israeli restrictions on West Bank movement, the failure of donors to live up to their commitments threatens the tenuous economic progress the PA has made to date.

By Peter Feaver

The Obama administration has just been Woodwarded, as in Bob Woodwarded. If his Washington Post report is accurate, General Jones, the National Security Advisor committed a serious civil-military relations mistake that could haunt the administration over the coming year. Up until now the administration has been nearly pitch-perfect on the issue of how to talk to the military about securing military advice in high command decision making and how to talk about the military advice they get. But this report, which seems authoritative because it reads like a verbatim transcript of the meeting (is Bob Woodward on the trip?), sounds a very discordant note.

The note came during a meeting General Jones had with U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan. He was talking about the importance of the non-military aspects of the strategy -- we can't win in Afghanistan by force of arms, and that sort of thing. So far so good. Then there is this extraordinary exchange, as reported by Bob Woodward:

During the briefing, [Marine Brigadier General] Nicholson had told Jones that he was "a little light," more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. "We don't have enough force to go everywhere," Nicholson said.

But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. "At a table much like this," Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, "the president's principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan." The principals -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair -- made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson's Marines.

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, "oops," we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.

"They then said, 'If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,' " Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

Now suppose you're the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?

Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive]?"

Nicholson and his colonels -- all or nearly all veterans of Iraq -- seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get."

There is nothing wrong from a civil-military relations point of view for President Obama to decide that he is not going to approve any more troop deployments to Afghanistan. That is absolutely within his rights as commander-in-chief and, indeed, he alone has the political-military competence to adjudicate across all of the risk trade-offs that such a decision would entail.  It is his right to make that call even if his judgment is wrong about whether the new troops are in fact necessary to carry out the strategy. The president has a right to be wrong about commander-in-chief decisions.

But it is wrong for him, or his senior staff, to tell (or signal, or hint, or suggest to) the military that they, the military, should censor their advice and judgments based on what they think the President ultimately will decide. If it is the BGEN Nicolson's military judgment that he needs more troops to execute the mission, he should -- no, he must -- convey that information up his chain of command and the President must be made aware of that piece of military advice. Nicolson's military judgment could be superceded by a more senior military commander (say, General Petraeus) who may have a bigger-picture military perspective.  But a wise commander-in-chief wants to at least know about the perspectives of the lower ranking officers.

And, above all, a wise commander-in-chief does not want the military hearing from civilian presidential advisors (and in this context, retired General Jim Jones is a civilian presidential advisor) that they should not be candid in their advice lest it tick off the president or the secretary of defense. If Woodward's (and others) earlier reporting on the Bush years is accurate, the military got that impression, at least from Secretary Rumsfeld, and this had a deleterious effect on civil-military relations and on policymaking. In my judgment, the notion that President Bush did not want to hear whether the battlefield commanders believed they needed more troops was false; he did want to hear that advice and would have been appalled if one of his advisors had told the military, "don't ask for this because it will make the President angry."

According to Bob Woodward, that is exactly what happened recently in Afghanistan. I expect the Obama team will have to go into some serious damage control to deal with this story. If accurate, what is needed is an unambiguous statement from the President himself: "Give me your candid military advice, even or especially if you think the advice runs counter to what you think I will decide. Let me make the decisions. I will not always approve every request you send my way, but I will never approve of you trying to hide bad news from me because you think it will make me mad."

By Peter Feaver

I received a couple high, hard, fast ones from fellow FP blogger (full disclosure: and old friend) Tom Ricks recently.

What provoked his ire was a blog post of mine which expressed concern about whether it was prudent to stick inflexibly to the withdrawal schedule. I noted that people whose judgment I respected were on both sides of the "is it safe to do this now" issue. I concluded that I hoped it was safe to do so but I also hoped it would not lead to a stampede for the exit that would leave Iraq in a far worse position. My policy conclusion, Tom conceded, was the same as his own.

So what led him to reach deep into his junior-high gym-bag for such rocks as "kool-aidish" and "repeat after me?" Apparently my sin was I referenced an article by Fareed Zakaria that was entitled (by Fareed, not by me) "Victory in Iraq." In my blog post, I did not use the word "victory" to characterize the situation in Iraq. Check that, I deliberately did not use the word victory. Instead, I wrote "the opportunity for a decent outcome in Iraq seems tantalizingly close." But Fareed did use the v-word and I did link to it, albeit with an explicit sense of irony, and I guess that was enough for Tom to revisit the central theme of his work: Bush (and people who worked for Bush) merit history's condemnation because they/we made mistakes in Iraq.

Tom is perhaps the most celebrated advocate of this view and, like all partisans in a fight, he is keen to see that his villains stay in the stockade. Thus, when a former Bush-staffer like me says that we should be careful not to undo the progress we have achieved since 2007 -- or when another former Bush-staffer like John Hannah (the other villain in his piece) says that after all the mistakes the Bush administration made in Iraq it would be a shame to squander recent progress with a hasty exit -- we must be condemned, even though those points are exactly the ones that Ricks himself makes.  

I don't have quite the same animus he has and feel more comfortable in the role of an umpire who just calls them as I see them. Tom and I agree that the Bush administration made mistakes in Iraq and that these mistakes have had tragic costs associated with them. Where we appear to part company is here: I think that the Bush administration also did some things right in Iraq, notably President Bush's surge decision, and that this means that President Bush salvaged some things in Iraq that the next team should seek to preserve. And Tom and I appear to part company on one further matter: I believe the other team is up at bat now, and so it seems proper to attribute to them the consequences of their choices, just as we did with the consequences of the previous team's choices.

I think Tom is persuadable on this last point, because it is the logical conclusion of an insight I read from a trenchant observer of the Iraqi scene writing in 2008: "...the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."

So was Tom chiming 13 when he went after me? The umpire in me says that this was less a 13th chime and more a good-old-fashioned bean ball. I can take a bean ball or two just so long as they don't tap into something deeper still.