Roxana Saberi and the embrace of Iran

Is anybody of a certain age getting a strange deja vu, Cold War feeling about the sentencing of journalist Roxana Saberi for spying in Iran? Anyone remember Nick Daniloff? Journalists are such easy pickings. Gathering information and disseminating it is anathema to nasty regimes.

The timing is interesting, coming just a few days after Iran signalled some interest in following Washington's warming moves. Perhaps poor Ms Saberi will be the pawn that allows some talks to get going.

In the meantime, it does come under the "early test for Obama" category, as the Los Angeles Times points out. He is going to have to be very angry and concilatory at the same time if he really wants to end the Axis of Evil nonsense. And all those full-mooners at Fox and in the Republican party will be baying away that they knew it all along. 

Waiting, not jumping in

Last laugh on a rather appalling "Meet the Press" last Sunday. For some reason the assembled crew seemed to think that Obama is failing because he hasn't fixed North Korea, Iran etc. And after all he's had, what, about four months. 

Biggest criticisms were about how the mighty U.S. was being held at bay by a bunch of scruffy pirates off Somali. No one chose to remember that the only reason the pirates had not been blown out of the water was that they were holding a U.S. citizen hostage.

Fast forward a few hours and NBC is showing impressive graphics about how the hostage was freed and the pirates dealt with in a very straightforward and deadly manner.

What Obama and the military appear to have done is to calmly look at the situation, plan for an opportunity to solve the problem and then done so about as efficiently as anyone could imagine. Our "Meet the Press" critics probably yearn for the Bush years when no one would have sat back and thought about it, just rushed in. 

I guess a thinking administration is going to need some getting used to in some quarters.

Obama sees some light

Obama's comments that there are tiny signs that the U.S. economy is improving is interesting because he would hardly have said this if it was going to backfire. He is much too clever for that. There are in fact a lot of little signs all over the place, including China, which, let's face it, is just as important as Washington these days.

So let's say the world economy does start to get better -- and financial markets seem happy to accept this -- what about the banks? Economists seem divided into two camps. One says we are having a pretty nasty recession but one that will end. The other says that banks are so beaten up and  indebted that the global economic foundations cannot hold. 

I guess I am in the first camp. The reason is basically that the second offers no hope to anyone. Agreed this is a different recession than others I have gone through. But markets and economies have shown in the past that they are primarily driven by sentiment. So when things start to look up, sentiment improves. Obama is feeding this.