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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: What comes after the prisoner swap? [1]
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Date: 2023-09-19
We begin today with Robin Wright of The New Yorker saying that in spite of Monday’s prisoner swap between the United States and Iran, it is doubtful that the Iranians will discontinue the practice of taking hostages.
According to Belgian government officials, Iran currently holds at least twenty-two Europeans, including a European Union diplomat. The release of Namazi and four other Americans, as part of a prisoner swap that culminated two years of plodding diplomacy, will almost certainly not bring an end to an Iranian tactic that has spanned more than four decades and imprisoned almost a hundred U.S. citizens. “Hostage-taking keeps the zealots in power, even at the cost of Iran’s remaining an international pariah/polecat whose passport is worthless, whose currency is worthless,” John Limbert, one of the fifty-two Americans held for four hundred and forty-four days after Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, told me. Detaining foreigners is also an essential ploy in the gamesmanship among rival factions inside Iran. Limbert added, “As long as the ultra-miga (Make Iran Great Again) faction there needs to show that it’s in charge, it will continue to take actions—like hostage-taking—to discredit its political rivals, no matter the associated costs.” One of Limbert’s captors told him in 1979, “This isn’t about you; this isn’t about the Shah; this isn’t about the U.S. It’s about us. We have our internal fish to fry.”
Patrick Wintour of The Guardian details some of the diplomatic risks that President Joe Biden took with this prisoner swap.
Biden has taken a double risk; he is taking flak from Republicans who argue the deal will encourage further state hostage-taking and who feel emboldened to claim that confrontation with Iran remains the only viable strategy, as it has ever since Donald Trump in 2018 abandoned the nuclear deal signed in 2015 by Barack Obama. He also faces criticism from less partisan sources. The deal, after all, has been struck at a time when the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, is selling Iranian-made drones to Russia to hammer down on Ukrainian cities. Some in the diaspora feel that by acting so soon after the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini in a Tehran police cell, the Biden team has shown it puts American self-interest ahead of Iranians’ struggle for human rights. It is at minimum a pragmatic admission that Raisi is politically secure, and the protests are over. In New York, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, Raisi’s aides say that Iran will push the US to see if the prisoner swap can lead to wider de-escalation in the region. The obvious place to start would be Yemen. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels were in Riyadh last week for unprecedented peace talks. But Biden would also like to see an elusive normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, something the US president will discuss with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, when they meet in New York.
Turning to domestic news, Melanie Zanona, Haley Talbot, and Manu Raju of CNN report that the House Republican conference got “increasingly nasty” as it went late into the night. The conflict? The House GOP’s struggle to agree on a plan to fund the government past Sept. 30.
Tensions are flaring inside the House Republican conference as it barrels toward a government shutdown, with the infighting spilling out into public view and growing increasingly nasty. [...] At the center of much of the drama: Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, attacking Speaker Kevin McCarthy in personal terms. But he’s also engaged in social media spats with fellow hardline conservatives who helped broker a House GOP plan to fund the government first revealed on Sunday evening. Rep. Byron Donalds, also a Florida Republican, shot back at Gaetz’s criticism of the plan, writing on social media: “Matt, tell the people the truth. … What’s your plan to get the votes to defund Jack Smith? You’ll need more than tweets and hot takes!!” [...] Even if the plan passed the House, it would most likely be dead on arrival in the Democratically controlled Senate. But McCarthy will need support from virtually all of his conference in order to pass the brokered deal through the narrowly divided House. McCarthy can only afford to lose four GOP votes on a continuing resolution deal without relying on Democrats.
Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post says that chatter regarding replacing Vice President Kamala Harris on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket needs to stop.
The concern that she wasn’t as popular as Biden in the 2020 primaries with African American voters is misplaced. Yes, Biden’s decades-long relationship with the African American community was unmatched at a time voters outside of California hardly knew Harris, but to claim she is not embraced and admired now among Black voters is to ignore reality. (Women of color on shows such as “The View” seem to have a better sense of key Democratic constituencies.) And if the critics offer to find another African American woman to replace her — an insulting suggestion that any Black woman will do — they surely cannot expect to mollify Democrats or satisfy skeptics about a new, untested vice president. Perhaps the insufficiently diverse political media is out of touch with an increasingly non-White electorate. And finally, there is a reason no president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has swapped out a running mate. Such an action signals discord and regret about a president’s first major decision and has virtually no upside. Few, if any, voters decide to vote against a presidential candidate because of the running mate. (Sarah Palin in 2008 was a rare exception.) It’s hard to imagine a voter who, after assessing Biden’s record and, yes, his age, would decide simply because of Harris to vote … wait?! … for four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump and whatever MAGA running mate he picks? It strains credulity. (And to the extent that Harris-skeptical voters would opt for some sure-to-lose third-party contender, they would have to be comfortable with the risk that Trump would win.)
Hear that, Mr. Ignatius?
Kate Starbird writes for the Lawfare blog about the anticipated difficulty of handling election disinformation as the 2024 elections near.
False rumors will likely flourish and disinformation campaigns (orchestrated by various actors) will take off during the primaries. Disgruntled party members will likely express doubt in the results if their candidate loses, and members of other parties—as well as foreign disinformation agents—will be incentivized to amplify those doubts. Meanwhile, social media platforms have stepped back from both transparency and moderation. In the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, social media platforms were criticized for failing to enforce the civic integrity policies that may have helped stem the rhetoric that motivated the violence. Instead of strengthening enforcement, as we head into the 2024 election, those policies have been walked back. Quite problematically, the platform formerly known as Twitter (now X), once a vital resource for real-time news, has abandoned many of the policies and design innovations that protected users from harassment, deception, and manipulation. For example, in April of this year, Twitter removed its “state-affiliated media” labels that allowed users to identify content coming from government-controlled media. Simultaneously, companies including X have powered down their free application programming interfaces, denying researchers and journalists access to data sources that we relied on for years to rapidly identify, analyze, and distinguish between organic rumors and disinformation campaigns. So, what do we do?
Ian Millhiser of Vox previews the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court docket.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times points out that Mitt Romney is criticizing a party that he helped to create.
Why didn’t Republicans pay a big political price for their hard right turn? Largely because they were able to offset the unpopularity of their economic policies by harnessing the forces of religious conservatism and social illiberalism — hostility toward nonwhites, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, immigrants and more. In 2004, for example, Bush made opposition to gay marriage a central theme of his campaign, only to declare after the election that he had a mandatefor the aforementioned attempt to privatize Social Security. Big-money donors attempted a similar play when they poured cashinto the DeSantis campaign early this year. It’s doubtful that they shared Ron DeSantis’s obsession with being anti-woke, but they thought (wrongly, it seems) that he could win on social issues and then deliver tax and spending cuts. But eventually the forces that economic conservatives were trying to use ended up using them. This wasn’t something that suddenly happened with the Trump nomination; people who think that the G.O.P. suddenly changed forget how prevalent crazy conspiracy theories and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Democratic electoral victories already were in the 1990s. The current dominance of MAGA represents a culmination of a process that has been going on for decades.
Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer asserts that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s handling of the latest COVID-19 surge indicates that democracy will be in danger if any Republican takes the Oval Office in 2025.
Indeed, at a moment when objective testing — such as levels of the coronavirus in municipal sewage wastewater — is showing a COVID-19 spike equal to some of the worst peaks in 2020 and 2021, Florida is already at severe risk. In fact, the state with one of the five oldest populations in the United States is currently leading the nation in new COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 residents, and those numbers have been increasing. Given the health danger, it’s sad but not a total surprise that DeSantis — whose White House bid is badly foundering and trails far behind Donald Trump — would demagogue around vaccines. It was the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 that thrust the then-first-term GOP governor onto the national stage, with his aggressive stance on reopening schools and businesses — popular with voters even if the science is mixed. But DeSantis — like Trump and other top Republicans — initially encouraged the initial vaccine when it was introduced in December 2020. Now, the Florida governor panders to an increasingly conspiratorial and anti-science base of the GOP primary electorate. If it were an isolated incident, Florida’s stance in opposition to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration would be viewed as a stunning assault on the nation’s public-health infrastructure. But it’s not an isolated incident. Rather, it’s another glimpse — courtesy of authoritarian governors and lawmakers in Florida, and also the nation’s second-largest state in Texas, and elsewhere — of the looming disaster for democracy if Republicans retake the White House on Jan. 20, 2025.
Hussein Eddeb and Taha Jawashi of Middle East Eye says that PTSD and other mental health issues are a growing concern for Libyans that survived the Derna floods.
In Derna’s gutted streets, people with glazed looks pass by rescue workers recovering dead bodies. Around 20,000 people are believed to have been killed when Storm Daniel battered eastern Libya, overwhelming an aged dam and causing flash flooding on a catastrophic scale. In recent days the aid response has concentrated on collecting the dead, fearing the spread of disease. But for the tens of thousands of Derna residents who survived the flood, a mental health epidemic is also a pressing concern. “I have encountered many survivors exhibiting post-traumatic stress symptoms, causing them to feel like they are trapped in a never-ending nightmare, constantly awaiting someone to wake them up from it,” Aida al-Nafati, a mental health specialist from Tunisia supporting people in Derna, tells Middle East Eye. “It's almost a form of denial of the disaster, and fear often lingers after the trauma.”
Finally today, Farnaz Fassihi of The New York Times previews Tuesday’s meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, in which leaders of four of the five permanent Security Council members will be absent.
This year’s gathering was planned with an eye to growing demands from the nations of the “global south,” an informal group of developing and underdeveloped countries. They have been frustrated by the world’s attention on the conflict in Ukraine while their crises have received minimal attention and funding, diplomats said. Responding to those demands, the U.N. has scheduled discussions during the General Assembly on climate change, sovereign debt relief and ways to help struggling countries reach the U.N.’s development goals on prosperity, health, development, education and gender equality. [...] Analysts said world leaders skipping the U.N. risked weakening the institution when it was already struggling to remain relevant. The U.N.’s various agencies are still at the forefront of organizing and providing humanitarian aid. But as the war in Ukraine has raged and a head spinning series of military coups have overthrown governments from coast to coast in Africa, the U.N’s role as a negotiator and mediator has been marginalized for the most part.
Everyone have the best possible day!
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