Rohde was the NY Times reporter kidnapped for months inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. He wrote a series of articles about his experiences. Let this be a lesson to young journalists…risking your life can be worth it…
‘Obama should have been criticized over his smarmy and vacuous claims to have a solution for the problem back in 2008, but the press was more interested in crucifying Bush and wounding McCain than in offering the public a serious account of a genuine dilemma. What was clearly true back in 2008 was that the U.S. had won a difficult and shaky victory in Iraq after a war that should in hindsight not have been launched, while the smaller and more justifiable war in Afghanistan still offered no serious prospect of a happy ending.’
And it still doesn’t…Mead takes the NY Times to task.
Here’s a documentary on the Green Berets passed along by a reader, which has good footage of what American special forces are being asked to do in Afghanistan: The fierce fighting. The tribal, poor and divided loyalties of what come to be Afghan forces. The thuggish tactics of the Taliban:
‘No ideology in the world right now is more inherently genocidal than that of ISIS.
It began its life as Al Qaeda in Iraq under the Jordanian jihadi Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, also known as the Sheikh of the Slaughterers. He hated no one on his planet—not Christians, not Jews, not atheists—as much as he despised Shia Muslims. The Shia, he wrote, are “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom.”
Food for thought: Not only did the current administration pull-back from Hilary Clinton’s more hawkish interventionist logic that helped get ‘kinetic military action’ approved in Libya, but even the humanitarian-cum-policy maker Samantha Power’s logic could reasonably be applied, a person who made a case for the use of force only once the genocide starts, as it has in Syria (who still recognizes her ideals depend on men willing to fight).
Instead, as I see it, American citizens got a speech trying to leverage the nation into another tired debate about gun control; dragging us all into the same ideological box, while offering no real new information, ideas, nor leadership.
So, is there more peace in the world now?
As previously posted: Richard Epstein ‘Barack vs. Bibi:’ takes the classical liberal, non anti-war libertarian position:
‘In the end, it is critical to understand that the current weaknesses in American foreign policy stem from the President’s adamant reluctance to commit to the use of American force in international relations, whether with Israel, Iran or with ISIS. Starting from that position, the President has to make huge unilateral concessions, and force his allies to do the same thing. Right now his only expertise is leading from behind. The President has to learn to be tough in negotiations with his enemies. Right now, sadly, he has demonstrated that toughness only in his relationships with America’s friends and allies.’
“Although the professional soldier accepts the reality of never-ending and limited conflict, “the liberal tendency,” Huntington explained, is “to absolutize and dichotomize war and peace.” Liberals will most readily support a war if they can turn it into a crusade for advancing humanistic ideals. That is why, he wrote, liberals seek to reduce the defense budget even as they periodically demand an adventurous foreign policy.”
What happens when you try and go ‘full peace’?
My two cents: We should figure out a good way to destabilize and destroy IS, depriving them of territory, revenue, clout and murdering capacity. Then, we should go forward; enacting and reacting to events (by proxy if necessary).
I can claim no expertise on the matter; except that of a moderately informed American citizen trying to keep up…
Key points: ISIS clearly represents a form of radical Islam; one with fascistic and Western elements, yes, but Islam-inspired nonetheless. To my knowledge, there are no non-Muslim, nor non-Muslim-aspiring converts and self-radicalizers joining this fight, nor seeking to advance ISIS aims.
I do not believe people in the West are at war with Islam, perhaps that’s not as obvious as it should be in certain quarters, but in other quarters it should be just as obvious the West has been in a form of warfare with radical, guerilla-style, Islamic-inspired terrorist groups for some time. These groups keep emerging out of Islamic societies, capable of attacking Western societies, and even radicalizing a few Muslims within Western societies.
Some of these radicals have been forged (supported even) out of direct contact with American military engagement in the past and present, and also other Western/Russian engagement, too. Some such radicals can even be born within, or travel freely to and from, Western societies and the front lines of their ordained battlefield, as many Muslims are voting with their feet; seeking more freedom, opportunity, and security than their own societies can provide, becoming immigrants, economic migrants, and in some cases, benefit-seekers, and in a few, rarer cases…radicalized terrorists and murderers.
Deeper down, though, it seems these radicals are being born out of the conflict within Muslim societies and those societies’ contacts/conflicts with both the West and what is generally called ‘modernity.’ Islam and Islamic societies are having a pretty rough time with so much change, and most Muslims’ view of how society ought to be, and what the good society is, and what will happen in the future, differs greatly from what many in the West live and propose.
So, how does the West respond, and according to which leaders and ideas?
Here he is in a VICE interview on the same subject:
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As to the American response, I’m quite sympathetic to viewing the President thusly: Take the easy path of blaming your ideological enemies at home when the fruits of your foreign-policy decisions are borne. Elide over the radical Islamic nature of the threat which can cost people their lives and likely prohibits reasonable policy-making. Gloss over the humanitarian disaster Syria’s become, largely on your watch.
If necessary, double-down on your own policy positions and political coalitions (climate change is the real threat, peace is next, the Syrian mess will be solved by humanitarian means alone, that’s what ‘good’ people do).
‘From the standpoint of American interests and of the well being of the Syrians, the primary responsibility that the United States has toward the people of Syria is not to offer asylum to something like 0.25 percent of its refugee population. The primary duty of this country was to prevent such a disaster from happening and, failing that, to support in-country safe havens and relief operations. No doubt President Obama and the unthinking press zealots who applaud his every move prefer a conversation about why ordinary Americans are racist xenophobes to one about why President Obama’s Syria policy has created an immense and still expanding disaster.’
Here are a few concerns I’ve produced in the last 20 minutes:
–In working to constrain the use and threat of military force to the strict conditions of the deal (the terms of which have gradually grown more lax), are you prepared to deal with the continued fallout of rewarding the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran alliance, traditionally adversarial to U.S. interests?
–In setting such narrow conditions for the use of American force, have you not inherently given Putin leverage in Ukraine and possibly increased the likelihood of raised tensions in the Baltics and a flare-up along old Eastern boundaries?
–Do you envision a longer-term American strategy regarding the bitter Syrian civil war, Assad’s regime still clinging to power (and chemical weapons), and the subsequent growth of Daesh/Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which also can threaten U.S. interests?
–By riding a wave American isolationist sentiment at home, funneling foreign policy decision-making through a smaller group of like minds and executive branch management (away from State and a lot of experienced, principled men and women), have you not weakened American foreign policy by splitting the parties and country along partisan lines in order to achieve your objectives?
Mead riffs on Obama statement from this interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg and Mead suspect that the anti-Semitism found in some quarters is not rational, and doesn’t lead to rational decisions.
Mead:
‘The problem here is that the President, ironically enough, doesn’t seem to understand diversity. He thinks diversity is trivial: that people of different religious faiths, ethnic backgrounds and ideological convictions are not all that different in the way they look at the world.’
and:
‘Essentially, Goldberg was asking the President whether his years in the White House have taught him that real diversity exists, and that it matters. He was asking whether the President understands that people from different cultures can sometimes operate on the basis of such radically different presuppositions that their mental world maps are fundamentally incompatible with the norms of reason as the President sees them. He was asking whether the President had considered whether Iranian leaders in particular reason so differently from standard cosmopolitan Washington liberal thinking that they may not, in fact, be approaching these negotiations from what the President, and most Americans, would recognize as a logical point of view’
The ‘rational actor’ model the President relies upon has distanced American interests from many allies, while getting America close enough to try and do business with various non-allies, adversaries, and traditional enemies. It has done so on the assumption that American threat and use of force is part of the problem. It has assumed that Vladimir Putin, the post-1979 mullah State in Iran, and the Castros in Cuba are rational enough to have a hand extended to them during this recent change in diplomacy.
This approach comes with the obvious risk that such a model may not be universally shared, but rather one among many concepts shared by a smaller subset of Westerners with a worldview of their own. It risks trusting that Vladimir Putin and the post-1979 mullah State (the Castros can probably really only hurt the Cubans under their control) will act under the presumption of a certain amount of good faith the ‘rational actor’ model requires. It presumes we can trust these guys enough to reach deals, even without the threat of force, and that we’re on the same ‘plane.’
Of course, it may be just as rational to guide policy based upon actual behavior, expecting such regimes to continue doing what they’ve been visibly doing. Both Moscow and Tehran have deep anti-American sentiment and have held loose alliance between themselves. They are busy maintaining, expanding and exploiting their spheres of influence by means that set themselves and their people against American policy, as well as Western and international laws and much else besides (claiming American policy, international laws and expectations are aggressions and constraints against their interests).
Informative piece which follows a Belgian jihadi from a Belgian Anjem Choudary wannabe organization to the Syrian desert.
***As to the title, I’m guessing you have to write titles like that at the New Yorker. For some people, understanding is to Terrorism what PTSD can be to War. If we just understand and explain terrorism, it might not go away, but it will get better. If we just have the experts explain why terrorists want to kill us, or why wars happen and how badly people can be affected by them, they might not go away, but it will all get better.
This can be an exercise in reinforcing a set of beliefs about the world rather than what’s going on in the world itself.
This can have political, social and institutional consequences that don’t necessarily make the world any better.
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Meanwhile, Iranian backed Hezbollah is still active, of course:
‘Reports out of southern Lebanon tell us that the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah continues to expand its network of tunnels along the border with Israel, preparing for another war. That’s not an accusation by Israeli sources, but a boast by Hezbollah, detailed in a series of recent articles in a Hezbollah-linked newspaper, As-Safir.’
A good analysis, likely worth your time. ======================
This blog remains skeptical, and mostly critical (surprise me) of the potential Iran deal so far, because, as Richard Epstein has pointed out, without the threat of force, the deal doesn’t have the leverage needed to really put pressure where it’s needed: Upon a throughly committed, anti-American incentivized group of mullahs and post-1979 revolutionaries running terrorism, militias, guns and money around the region (and sometimes further afield) to become as powerful as they can.
Deliverable nukes are not just a means for an authoritarian theocracy to keep repressing its own people (though there’s plenty of that) nor a way to quell Iranian hostility towards and isolation from international institutions (plenty of that, too), but also a way for deeper Persian, Shia, and national Iranian identity and pride to assert itself in a dangerous region under an authoritarian theocracy. The basic security issues are more than mullah-deep, and the basic security of the Saudis, Israelis, and other interested Sunni-led countries and parties leads one to conclude this could easily turn into an arms race.
This is very risky if you’d prefer peace, or fighting the wars that you need to fight for the security of yourself and your own people, for treaties, alliances and trade, basic human rights or whatever interest or ideal you’d like to see leading our policy in the world (I’d prefer to stay ahead of war in the first place). More details at the link:
‘Under the new approach, Iran permanently gives up none of its equipment, facilities or fissile product to achieve the proposed constraints. It only places them under temporary restriction and safeguard—amounting in many cases to a seal at the door of a depot or periodic visits by inspectors to declared sites.’
The negotiations may yet do a lot of harm because they may not be capable of stopping the Iranian regime from buying time, nor ultimately getting deliverable nukes, nor changing nor constraining their activities enough for the possible opportunity costs involved. Our authors finish with:
If the world is to be spared even worse turmoil, the U.S. must develop a strategic doctrine for the region. Stability requires an active American role. For Iran to be a valuable member of the international community, the prerequisite is that it accepts restraint on its ability to destabilize the Middle East and challenge the broader international order.Until clarity on an American strategic political concept is reached, the projected nuclear agreement will reinforce, not resolve, the world’s challenges in the region. Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement there—on complex new terms. History will not do our work for us; it helps only those who seek to help themselves
Addition: Richard Epstein ‘Barack vs. Bibi:’ takes the classical liberal, non anti-war libertarian position:
‘In the end, it is critical to understand that the current weaknesses in American foreign policy stem from the President’s adamant reluctance to commit to the use of American force in international relations, whether with Israel, Iran or with ISIS. Starting from that position, the President has to make huge unilateral concessions, and force his allies to do the same thing. Right now his only expertise is leading from behind. The President has to learn to be tough in negotiations with his enemies. Right now, sadly, he has demonstrated that toughness only in his relationships with America’s friends and allies.’
Another Addition: Adam Garfinkle has a thoughtful piece on American political discourse and the Iran deal.
Will the relatively weakened Sunni coalition try and use ISIS fighters as a proxy against Tehran, Damascus, Hizbollah and the government in Baghdad?
‘The U.S. hardly supports the malignant Assad, but all of Washington’s air strikes have landed on Sunni jihadist targets even after President Obama accused Damascus of deploying chemical weapons in civilian population centers. Like the government in Baghdad, the House of Assad is firmly in the Iranian camp. The state, along with the ruling family, is heavily packed with members of the Alawite minority, adherents of a heterodox religion that fuses Shia Islam, Christianity, and Gnosticism.’
Well, it’s nearly impossible to do deals with Sunni Ba’ath fascism, nor Saudi funded Wahhabism, but you can do deals with the mullahs in Tehran and the post-1979 crowd, desirous of deliverable nukes and working alongside Damascus, Hizbollah etc?
If there’s any one place on Earth right now where a nuclear arms race would be a bad idea, this is it.
‘…A given move is a success if the opposition fails to find a way to block it, the hemmers and hawers are proven wrong if the president isn’t impeached, and the state of your party doesn’t really matter because an unbound presidency is all that progressivism really needs.’
If, as this blog does, you don’t see too many limiting principles on much of modern liberalism, (i.e. how does one ever know how much equality, economic regulation, central planning, tolerance, democracy etc. is enough?), then progressivism and activism is a much trickier beast: Ideologically predisposed towards vast expansions of federal and executive power through activism and majoritiarian populism. This, quite aside from the executive-heavy trends we’ve been seeing in Washington the last generation or so.
Politicians aiming for the White House love controlling messages, and images, and Obama is no exception. In fact, being a relative unknown in 2008, he was particularly reliant on analytics, social media, and the promotion of an image of himself.
All those promises of transparency, hipness, coolness and pop culture work against many realities of politics, and the job itself.
The whole of Obama’s foreign policy comes under scrutiny, including backsliding away from the tougher line on Iran at the beginning of the p5 + 1 negotiations, into what is now only a ten-year time-line.
Mead:
‘So the Moderate Islamist strategy, essentially the only strategy that is un-horrible enough for liberal strategists to contemplate without self-loathing, is, while not totally useless, incapable of stabilizing the region or of making the terror madness go away—or even of keeping the threat within some kind of marginally acceptable bounds.
Even so, the proponents of this strategy can’t bear to let it go. The alternatives are so ugly and dispiriting, and so deeply unwelcome to the Democratic base, that the Obama wing of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment can’t bear to think about them, much less conduct American foreign policy on different and more realistic lines. (Camp Clinton, by the way, seems somewhat less inhibited.) As a result, the deeper the Obama administration’s Islamist strategy runs into the mud, the more bitter its proponents become about what they increasingly see as the Israeli millstone around the neck of American foreign policy. This is when high minded liberals and progressives find themselves tempted to echo the arguments of the anti-Israel paleocons, and when fantasies of an all-powerful, unpatriotic Israel Lobby begin to loom in their minds.’
Oh, there’s always someone to blame.
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Notice Dan Drezner doesn’t focus on Obama’s overall policy achievements, but rather on the little that Netanyahu’s speech may have achieved relative to its stated aims; his inability to sway the people actually making Obama, and Americas,’ foreign policy .
Which is true, as far as it goes:
‘Meanwhile, the GOP leadership in Congress, when they’re not busy disagreeing with each other over strategy, can take solace that they one-upped Obama in the war of foreign policy trolling.
And since the American public still supports cutting a deal with Iran, the Obama administration can be confident that their message of “let’s continue to make a good faith effort on negotiations” will be well-received at home.’
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As for me, I’d still like more realism, and think that there perhaps was a window for dealing with the mullahs in Iran, but that such a window has likely passed as the deal appears to get worse as the expectations get lower.
I don’t find much in common with Obama’s team and his pro-peace, activist base, and find little to recommend them from the consequences of his Middle-East policies in action so far. I think he’s got many wrong ideas and remain skeptical about how our leverage is being used in negotiating with such dangerous people.
Witnessing party Democrat reactions to the speech is sad enough, as is the grumbling and confusion over at the GOP and my general distaste for the political class at the moment. Such seems to be life in D.C., a two-party town, when it comes to dealing with Iran.
These are the people we’ve got.
***Addition-I’m assured by an emailer that the people in Iran who don’t favor the mullahs and may not favor deliverable nukes (for the glory of Persepolis, by Jove), are very ‘moderate’ indeed. Just like all those moderates in the Muslim Brotherhood, the moderates in Syria and Iraq, Egypt, Palestine and even Libya, they are about to burst into pure democratic social justice awareness and peaceful democratic self-governance.
Short of that, the global trans-national peace raft and coalition of concerned institutions has TOTALLY got ISIS, the mullahs, the Wahhabis, the Israelis, al Shabaab, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, the House of Saud, Hamas, Hizbollah, the King of Jordan etc…under control.
This is what global progress looks like, and if you disagree, you’re pretty clearly a warmonger.
Thanks emailer!
Another addition: As posted, what worldview could help account for our current foreign policy?:
‘Geithner has long wanted to exit GM soon, wanting to get out of the business of owning a large stake in an automaker. Some GM officials worried that after Geithner leaves in January, reaching a deal could have taken months, but Treasury officials disagreed.
Before the November election, the Obama administration had showed no interest in disposing of its 26.5 percent stake in GM — or 500 million shares — it had acquired in 2009 as part of GM’s bankruptcy restructuring.’
Over six years ago, when GM stock was selling at $2 a share and the debt-holders had been wiped out, this blog put up the video below. Here’s a brief 2:00 min explanation by Bill Ackman of Pershing Square on why the GM bailout was likely a bad idea:
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Certain people benefitted more than they would have otherwise, of course, like the UAW and it’s fair to say the Obama administration which needed the votes in Ohio to get reelected, but others, including investors who risked their own money, and the taxpayers, most of whom didn’t have a say beyond their votes, lost money. Obama, as politicians are wont to do, pretty clearly waited until after the election to quietly make the sale.
ZeroHedge has more here, and has been following the process for awhile.
My guess is Obama will try and maneuver away from the coming tax and regulatory fallout upon ordinary taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers from Dodd-Frank and Obamacare as it all begins to rain down.
The money has to come from somewhere, and it’s coming from you and me, through inflation, higher taxes, higher prices with costs passed down to the consumer, for starters.
My non-economist two cents.
Addition: David Harsanyi at Reason has more. Non-union employees pensions got raided and taxpayers foot the bill, so that Obama and the UAW can maintain power.
Perhaps we’re getting to that six-year point when the politics of the nation start becoming all about the next election and the changing-of-the-guard.
Continetti:
‘Far better for us all if the Congress refused the president precisely because he is unserious and untrustworthy with the security of the United States and the world, and spent the remaining two years of his presidency making the case publicly and robustly for the roll back of ISIS and the removal of Assad, an end to the Iranian nuclear program, a military buildup, and a renewal of the alliance system and of American support for Western principles of liberal democracy’
I suspect if the President wanted to fight ISIS the way a new AUMF implies might be necessary, he’d already be doing so. Rather, I think he wants to cement the idea the U.S. troops will be very limited on the ground and thus, his legacy. Hence, Continetti’s piece.
So, is a lower probability, higher-risk strategy of withdrawing most American military influence from the region while simultaneously working alongside strategic non-allies working (mostly Iran…the Moscow, Tehran, Damascus alliance…and by proxy Hezbollah and old Revolutionary Guard types)?
Do we have closer relations with our allies as a result? Have we set up incentives that would lead to the ‘international community’ the President so often invokes while using American military leverage to gain it?
As posted:
Here’s a quote from Anne-Marie Slaughter, on liberal internationalism (addition: which is probably a few ticks center-ward of further Leftward progressive, semi-radical peace and democracy advocates)
‘The central liberal internationalist premise is the value of a rules-based international order that restrains powerful states and thereby reassures their enemies and allies alike and allows weaker states to have sufficient voice in the system that they will not choose to exit’