We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. But do we know how to recognise an act of terrorism when we see it?

The massacre at Fort Hood is definitely not being treated as terrorist attack in the US. Investigators have concluded that there were no co conspirators either inside or outside the US military and so they are content to treat this as the act of a crazed lone gunman.

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I was standing outside the front gate of Fort Hood in Texas when we heard that one of the victims shot dead on Thursday had been pregnant.

“Do we add that to the total dead?” asked an American producer. read more

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The Obama administration have all but admitted that their attempts to re-start the Middle East peace process have failed.

The State department are now advocating a new tactic – where both sides take “baby steps” toward lower level talks because they know there is no chance of getting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to sit down with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu for meaningful discussions anytime soon.

There has been a bit of fuss about whether Hillary Clinton made an error at the weekend when she described an Israeli offer to partially freeze settlement building as “unprecedented” even though it was far short of what the US had originally demanded – a total freeze.

But that wasn’t the real mistake. read more

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We are told that President Obama didn’t watch election night coverage last night of the bad results from Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere.

Instead he was apparently tuned to a two hour long HBO documentary about how he stormed to electoral triumph this time last year.

I was watching it too – so was everyone else in the C4 Washington bureau.

We were all enjoying reminiscing about the campaign and our small part in it. Even if we didn’t learn much that we didn’t know at the time. There were very few revealing moments.

We never saw the Obama facade crack.

Either this was the most disciplined, best run and resolutely self confident political campaign in history or this was the best controlled behind the scenes access in history.

But there was one glimmer of revelation – right at the end.

Soon after Obama was declared the winner but before he’d made his acceptance speech in Grant Park in Chicago a junior aide took a call on his cell phone.

We heard him brushing off the caller saying “The President Elect is keen to talk to the Prime Minister too – but he’s a bit busy right now”.

We can only assume it was Gordon Brown on the phone. Getting his first taste of how UK – Obama relations were to proceed.

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Apparently President Obama did not watch the “off year” election results come in last night.

He already knew it was going to be bad news. So today, on the anniversary of his own historic victory a year ago the Democrats are left wondering where all their voters went.

The key results that really matter are the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. Both had been held by democrats – both are now having Republicans move into the governor’s mansion.

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This time last year there were queues around the block outside polling stations all over America as people scrambled get into early voting to cast their votes for Obama.

Tomorrow, November 4th, marks the first anniversary of his election. And today Americans are at the polls again. So it’s perhaps inevitable that some people are saying today’s vote is referendum on Obama’s first year in office.

Those people are mostly Republicans who think they are about to have a good day and will be able to claim it shows that the president is failing. Not surprisingly the White House, who don’t expect they will have much to celebrate tonight, are saying that these elections have nothing to do with Obama at all – even though he has been pretty visible in helping to campaign for some of the Democratic candidates

The real mid terms happen next year when all of the House of Representatives and one third of the Senate will be up for re-election, along with dozens of governors and mayors This year – an “off year” in the jargon – sees just a few key ballots but they will be watched very carefully anyway.

There are three races its worth checking the results of when you wake up tomorrow:

New Jersey
If Governor John Corzine wins re-election in New Jersey the Democrats will be very relieved.

He’s been struggling against a heavyweight Republican opponent who had a double digit lead in the polls until Corzine started spending large amounts money on TV ads making fun of his opponent’s rather large waistline with lines like “Christopher Christie. He’s been throwing his weight around”.

Corzine has spent over $100m of his own money on this campaign so losing would really hurt – but his wealth just reminds voters that he got rich as a former Chief Exec of Goldman Sachs and no one likes Wall Street these days.

Virginia
Virginia is the most likely to deliver bad news for Obama. It was big news a year ago when he became the first Democratic nominee to win that state in a Presidential election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But it doesn’t look like the Dems will be able to win the governorship this year.

All those new voters in Virginia’s Northern suburbs who registered to vote for Obama last year simply aren’t motivated to come out and vote for the Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds. He hasn’t run a very good campaign and the advance spin from Democrats in DC seems to be that if he’d listened more to White House advice he might be in better shape. That’s one way to explain why they couldn’t hold onto Virginia for even a year.

New York 23rd District
But however bad the news is from Virginia Democrat are already sniggering about what’s happening in the race for a House of Representatives seat in upstate New York.

The Republicans had chosen a very moderate candidate to run in the 23rd District. Dede Scozzafava was exactly the kind of pro-abortion, pro-gay rights reformer that Republican party bosses think is required to win back all those swing voters who swung to Obama last year.

But she was called a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by so many in her district that a Conservative Independent candidate, supported by Sarah Palin, was polling better than her.

At the weekend Scozzafava not only suddenly dropped out, she even endorsed her democratic opponent.

The far-right are delighted. They say it proves there is no point in compromising their ideals to accommodate moderate candidates.

While the Democrats are convinced that if only the Republican party do cede control to the Sarah Palin/ Glenn Beck/ Rush Limbaugh wing of the party then a second term in the White House for Obama is all but guaranteed

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The White House is making it very clear today that it will not be rushed into any decision about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan – or how many they might send.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, is stressing the need for a “legitimate” Afghan government and a “credible partner” for the US to work with in Afghanistan. In other words: no announcements about troops until the mess that was the Afghan elections is sorted out – somehow

Here, Republicans are getting impatient and insist that the president must make up his mind soon. Otherwise it looks like America is being indecisive, and they say that emboldens America’s enemies like the Taliban.

Democrats who support the president’s right to take his time making up his mind counter that if George W Bush had spent a bit more time considering the right strategy in Iraq, then a lot of blood and treasure could have been spared.

And the longer the decision-making process goes on, the more comparisons are made with Vietnam – as they always are whenever US troops are sent anywhere. I can’t count the number of times I have heard Iraq being referred to as the new Vietnam. And now commentators are insisting that Afghanistan is even more like Vietnam that Iraq.

It’s not just because of what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan but also because of the way Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to pass progressive domestic legislation were made so much harder by the quagmire in Vietnam – and the parallels with the difficulties the Obama administration is having with healthcare reform now and will soon have with climate change legislation.

So as we watch this current president wrestling with the options for how to continue his war, it’s very interesting to read what key members of LBJ’s team now have to say about the agonised decisions that president had to make on Vietnam.

Shortly before he died, LBJ’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy told interviewers that Johnson wasn’t really listening to any of the advice he was being given. He said Johnson “wants to be seen having careful discussion and he does indeed want to hear what everyone is saying”.

But apparently the president wanted to hear all the arguments so he knew what the opposition was thinking, not because he wanted to listen to them. Strategy meetings and conversations on the war were a façade, said Bundy. “The process was for show and not for choice.”

No wonder the White House keep insisting that President Obama is seriously listening to every option that’s being presented to him in the situation room. Even the views of Vice-President Joe Biden, who wants to reduce US troop numbers and whose ideas are usually dismissed as too kooky to be realistically considered

Here are few interesting pieces on the Vietnam/Afghan parallels that have appeared in US papers in the last couple of days -

- New York Times: From Defeat, Lessons in Victory
- New York Times: The Vietnam War We Ignore
- Washington Post: The Anguish Of Decision – Vietnam In Hindsight

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Can you believe it was almost a year ago that “President Elect” Barak Obama told an ecstatic crowd in Chicago that “Change had come to America”?

With less than a month to go before the first anniversary of that speech a lot of people in America are asking themselves whether much of that change has yet been delivered? read more

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The sad truth about the deaths of 8 US soldiers in Afghanistan this weekend is that they were not even meant to be in the remote military base that was attacked.

They should have moved out months ago.

Their commanders had been planning to pull out since Dec 2008 but various problems – from a lack of cargo helicopters to move their stuff, to the extreme resitance of the Afghan government – slowed their exit.

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