Category Archives: National Security

07.05.16
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Paul Ryan and Gun Control: Profile in Courage

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“I’m in line for the Presidency!” 

Nearly two weeks after House Democrats staged a historic sit-in to demand action on gun control legislation, the Republican speaker of the House has agreed to hold a vote on a single gun-related bill: a measure to allow the attorney general to delay the sale of a gun to a suspected terrorist for three days, similar to a Senate measure backed by the National Rifle Association. (The Guardian)

At the blog, we have a saying: if the NRA supports it, there’s a decent chance it might not be the super best idea. I understand that’s not much of a saying, but the bluenoses at the bumper-sticker shop won’t let me go with “Fuck The NRA.” Also, that seems like a dangerous sticker with which to drive around. In life, I’ve found that it isn’t a good idea to piss off the irrational and heavily-armed.

Paul Ryan has learned the same lesson, and quickly, reacting to the hideous level of gun violence in America by backing the most toothless possible bill, and one that should make civil libertarians squirm, beside. Not only will this do extremely little to stop mass shootings- I’m guessing that neither Jared Laughner nor Adam Lanza not his mom were on that list- but will do nothing to stop the daily thrum of handgun-based murder, accidents, and suicide that threaten to revoke our status in the civilized world.

Ryan’s response to violence is to pretend that he was outraged by the sit-in in Congress, led by John Lewis, a man with more courage in his shoes than Ryan has accumulated in a life of cheese-filled toadying. Our previous VP nominee, who couldn’t even carry his hometown, called the action a “publicity stunt” and a “low moment” for Congress, which surprised a lot of us who are old enough to remember shutdowns over budgets, dozens of attempts to repeal the ACA, and the continuing career of Louis Gohmert.

He was right though, that it was a publicity stunt. A lot that John Lewis has done in his life has been for “publicity”, which is a cynical way of saying “getting people to pay attention to something I’d rather sweep under the rug.” It turns out that’s the way to get things done. Raise awareness, march in the streets, get people fired up, and then go out and vote. It worked in the 60s (the repudiation of Goldwaterism and Johnson’s supermajority), and it worked for the Tea Party, who turned their atavistic outrage into electoral success, at least at district levels.

That’s the only way to make a change. Democrats have to win big, and sweep out the bastards. It isn’t enough to put pressure on them. As we’ve argued here a few times, a lot of the mooks in Congress aren’t dancing to the NRA’s tune because of money; they are true believers. They buy the whole spiel about freedom. They won’t change because of politics. Yes, the NRA’s money, along with gerrymandering, keeps them safe from having to make a choice, but the bulk of them would choose guns. Guns over everything else.

That’s why they have to lose. The anger has to translate to votes. Polls showing American outrage don’t matter to them. Sweeping out enough to give the gun control side the power is the only thing that will work.

Above, I kind of joked that “In life, I’ve found that it isn’t a good idea to piss off the irrational and heavily-armed,” but that’s really the nut of it, isn’t it? The “freedom” to carry guns everywhere takes away everyone else’s freedom to feel safe. I don’t know if the person walking into the store is a mass-shooter or just a gun-nut, who could turn into a shooter if I told him that he’s making everyone else feel nervous. You just don’t know. And so, like with ISIS, we’re all on the front lines of the NRA’s war on human decency, and their generational battle against human life. Unlike with ISIS, we can do something about it.

 

07.05.16
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Better the Infidel Than The Apostate: Medina Bombings and the ISIS Endgame

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Saudi Press Agency/EPA

It’s been a particularly bloody week in ISIS’s history of violence. Since Tuesday, we’ve seen an attack on Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, a slaughter in Bangladesh that was carried out by radicalized elites, an apocalyptic bombing in Baghdad that was mostly overlooked, and the suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, including near the Prophet’s Tomb in Medina, Islam’s second-holiest city. As of this writing, ISIS has yet to claim responsibility for the Medina bombings, which means it may not have been an attack planned by ISIS, but rather one “just” inspired by it. However, the wave of bombings throughout Saudi Arabia is indicative of some coordination.

This has led, understandably, to a lot of talk about the next phase of ISIS. Speaking to the CFR last week, John Brennan  “warned that the trajectories for the ISIS religious state, or caliphate, and global violence point in opposite directions. ‘As the pressure mounts on ISIL,” he said, “we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.'” The headline to the Times piece linked above captures most of the analysis: “As ISIS Loses Land, It Gains Ground In Overseas Terror.”

I think this is largely true. There’s no doubt that they are doubling down on large-scale overseas attacks, and are mutating to the point where it is hard to say what ISIS even is: is it caliphate-based and centrally-coordinated like pre-9/11 al-Qaeda, or is it franchised out, like Qaeda starting in the middle of last decade? Or, perhaps more frightening, is it just a particularly carnage-based idea?

I think it is the latter, which is why I think we’re seeing the endgame of what ISIS has been. Note that endgame doesn’t mean the world is particularly close to defeating ISIS, mostly because I don’t think “defeating” is even possible. It’s a generational battle to have the ideology be discredited and to have them stop serving as an inspiration for those who feel that life should be offering more.

Because that is what they do: they offer a sense of greatness in a world that seems to have lost its moorings. This doesn’t mean that they only appeal to the poor and dispossessed; if the last 100 years have taught us anything, it is that the truly scary people are the ones who are comfortable and feel guilty about it, or feel that they shouldn’t be comfortable, but be truly great. Think of the middling student who reads Ayn Rand and begins to believe that his relative failure is due to a conspiracy of the weak. That’s the mindset.

That’s why these attacks, during Ramadan, are so important to ISIS, but also represent their eventual breaking apart. Going after Medina, and attacking largely Muslims (the Bangladesh attack partially notwithstanding) is key to their success. That’s how they attract the truly dispossessed, because they further cut up the world, slicing belief into an ever-narrower portion. It’s exciting to say that, yes, the Turks are Muslims, but bad ones. I mean, Ataturk should pay, symbolically, for being secular. It’s thrilling to say that bombing Baghdad is the blood price that has to be paid for a more just world. It’s radical and dangerous to attack the holy cities. That’s the kind of sick passion that inspires people into being radicalized: the idea that they are the most committed. It makes up for a lifetime of drifting, even if (especially if) that lifetime is only 19 or 20 years. A wasted year or two seems longer to the young, and a certain kind of mindset wants to rectify that through absolute purity.

(It’s important to remember that in many ways the modern radical Islamic movement wasn’t kicked off by the Iranian revolution, which was more concurrent, or even by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but by the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, also in 1979. It’s weirdly a footnote now, but this audacious attack on the corrupt monarchy was inspirational to the future leaders of al-Qaeda.)

Why this represents their eventual breaking apart, though, is the same reason any revolutionary group ends up either coalescing into an actual political entity (Hezbollah) or burning itself out (Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda). The need to up the ante constantly, to keep swimming, means that you’ll alienate more people than you attract. The entire Muslim world seems to be speaking out against the Medina attacks.  The well from which they draw their legitimacy- the well of violence- is the one that will eventually poison them, and they’ll discredit themselves.

It’s a long and uphill battle, and whether through direct coordination or through inspiration, it’s one in which we’re all on the undrafted frontline. As they break apart, and as the slowly lose militarily (and don’t expect progress here to be a straight line), they’ll increase these attacks in an attempt to maintain primacy. It’s no comfort to the dead that this will also be their downfall.

06.28.16
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Breaking! Benghazi Was Dangerous Nonsense, Designed to Further Iraq Amnesia

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“Now, I may just be a simple southern lawyer…”

What happened at Benghazi on the night of September 11th, 2012, was a tragedy, one borne of the impossible gravitational pull the Middle East has on US politics, an inability not to intervene. There were errors and mistakes, confusion in the fog of a new kind of war, one in which soldiers and civilians dance across a blurred line, and one that the US has not yet learned to fight. Four men, who were dedicated to making the world a better place– to making a land that was not their home a freer and more just place, after the grotesque misrule of Qadaffi– died that terrible night.

What it was not was a political scandal. I’ve been following politics since, at the age of 5, I tried to convince my parents that Mondale was a better choice than Reagan (and I was right, goddammit). Even counting the impeachement trial, and even counting Reagan’s lack of impeachment for Iran/Contra, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an exercise in politics so cynical, so craven, and so full of errant hypocritical nonsense. The proof?

Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued itsfinal report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.

It’s hard to imagine anything more outrageous than some of the top cheerleaders for the war in Iraq suddenly being brought to tearful anger over the pointless loss of American lives in the Middle East. These men and women gave high-flung flag-drowned speeches about the bravery of Chris Stevens and the other three, and how Obama, (and then Hillary, once it became clear she was running) betrayed that bravery. Suddenly, US lives, slaughtered in a distant land, meant something. Many of these were the same people who objected vociferously, with insinuations of fifth-column perfidy, at showing soldiers’ coffins arriving at Andrews. But these corpses had to be dragged to the roof, rattled by hoarse screaming and soaked in crocodile tears.

Not for nothing, but I think the Venn diagram of “thinks it was tragic what happened in Libya” and “angry at Obama for not invading Syria” has a lot of overlap.

What do these people think will happen? What do they think is the price of intervening around the world?

The answer is they really don’t think about it at all. In a way, I don’t even think this was purposefully cynical, for some of them. They are so hardwired to believe whatever is the most talk-radiofied nonsense possible that they probably honestly think being misleading on a Sunday show after the fact is a capital crime. I know anecdotal Facebook posts are the worst kind of analysis, but I saw people who were asking if this was the “biggest scandal in American history. After all, no one died at Watergate.” The representatives, who have the same sources of misinformation, are little different. Some are cynics. Many are just slickly-packaged balls of hippie-punching anger and cognitive dissonance.

That doesn’t make it better, nor does it excuse the horrible outcome of their actions. Because while it seems that this craven exercise in nonsense is just pointless, it is much worse. Not because it hurt Hillary vis a vis Trump, although it might have. But the cynicism and anger matters.

As the Times said, this investigation took longer and cost more than Congressional investigations in 9/11, into Katrina, into Pearl Harbor, into the freaking assassination of JFK, and certainly than into the colossal lies and idiocy that led us not just into Iraq, but that led to such a bloody disaster.

That matters. It’s an attempt to erase history, to put up such a wall of bullshit over the single greatest US foreign policy disaster of my lifetime, and possibly in US history, given the enveloping chaos that spread over the region in the wake of the invasion (the impact of which can be felt as far away as the Brexit). It’s all part of what Pierce calls “the great mulligan”, the idea that US history restarted on Jan 20th, 2009, and everything that happened afterwards is the fault of Obama.

It’s how craven warhounds like John McCain can say that, in Iraq, Obama “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.” Because having a country that is so unstable that the only way to prevent its collapse is to keep and indefinite number of troops there an indefinite length of time is, certainly, to be considered a victory. But the facts don’t matter. All that matters is to throw up a smokescreen, pinning all the blame on Obama, the one politician who learned (belatedly, and even then only partially) to resist the Middle East.

That the investigation took so long and turned up so, so little wasn’t a bug. It was a feature. It was the goddamn point. The point was to throw up an impenetrable barrage of lies so thick that we couldn’t see back beyond 2009, couldn’t peer into the wreckage of the early millennium. It’s part of the collective amnesia that the right has been trying, with much success, to inflict on us for almost eight years. They’ve been beating us over the head until we’re too numb to fight back. They know that Benghazi, for impossible and insane reasons, has more political resonance than Iraq. We’re to Never Forget what happened in Libya, and never speak of 2003.

06.25.16
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Trump Backs Down on Muslim Ban, Is A Tremendous Liar

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Pictured: Well-decided terror countries. Look at them!

Donald Trump, whose major foreign policy trip was to promote his golf course (which will do very well if the markets collapse, so pretty sweet, right?), today seemed to back down on his insane and racist and unworkable plan to ban all Muslim immigrants. He didn’t mean all of them. Just the ones from “terror countries.”

Slate!

The day began with the presumptive Republican nominee appearing to contradict his vow to fully ban Muslims from entering the United States, telling reporters on a golf course in Scotland that he wants to restrict entry by people from a number of “terror countries.” That came after he said that it “wouldn’t bother me” if a Scottish Muslim entered the United States. Which countries would he consider to be “terror countries”? Trump didn’t specify. “They’re pretty well-decided. All you have to do is look!”

Even then though it didn’t sound like Trump was saying citizens from certain countries should be fully banned, suggesting there could be a vetting process that would allow exceptions. “I don’t want people coming in from the terror countries. You have terror countries! I don’t want them, unless they’re very, very strongly vetted.”

WaPo!

Afterward, Hicks said in an email that Trump’s ban would now just apply to Muslims in terror states, but she would not confirm that the ban would not apply to non-Muslims from those countries or to Muslims living in peaceful countries.

This is obviously a very interesting and well-thought-out policy! It’s pretty well-decided which ones are. Just look. Probably Yemen, and Syria and Iraq for sure, and let’s not count out Somalia. Iran, yeah. Saudia Arabia, and maybe the Gulf States. Not Qatar, I like Qatar, I have some very quality people who I did business with. Oman? Eh, better safe than sorry. Mauritius? Never heard of it. But yeah. Morocco, Libya, of course. Indonesia, I remember Bali, so yeah. Malaysia? Are they Muslims? It sounds Asia-y, not Muslim-y. They’re in. Muslims from India? Only if they are from the very terror parts.

Look, you’re going to hear about this, and his promise that he won’t deport every Mexican because “people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody” (actual quote!), and you might hear that he is pivoting toward the general. Being all Presidential. He’s backing down from the very keys to his success, and his sworn promises. Presidential!

But what this confirms, once again, is that he’s making everything up as he goes along, because he has literally no idea about anything in the world. “The terror countries” is a perfect example. He can’t be assed to think of anything, so he just makes up a phrase and demands it into meaning. His spokesperson, Hope Hicks (turn out to vote), has to pretend this is an actual policy with actual meaning, because, remember, in Trump world, what he says, no matter how dumb (“until we figure out what’s going on!“)  is contorted into gospel by his surrounding sycophants.

The media might say this is pivoting. It is just another sign of how deeply unserious a man this is.

06.24.16
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Trump on Turnberry: Every Campaign Ad From Here On Out

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump poses with a bagpiper as he arrives at his revamped Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry Scotland, June 24, 2016. (Photo by Andrew Milligan/PA/AP)

Dude wheezing into a sheep’s bladder is a billion times more dignified. Image from MSNBC

“If the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly,” he said, referring to the location of his resort. “For traveling and for other things, I think it very well could turn out to be positive.”
-Trump, today, as the world burns.
Issac Chotiner, who is just doing invaluable work at Slate, has a terrific column about Trump’s “absurd, solipsistic” response to Brexit, but he published it too early, before the above statement came out. (He also perfectly describes Boris Johnson as “a slightly sinister and slightly absurd Trump-lite figure”) There is nothing more Trumpian than celebrating chaos simply because it benefits him. This has to lead off every single Hillary ad for the next six months.
Of course, that might not even be the low point of his presser, as MSNBC said:
Trump proceeded to hold a press conference in Scotland, against the backdrop of one of the most important political moments in the modern history of the United Kingdom, where he spoke at great length, and in great detail, about his new golf resort. The Republican candidate boasted about refurbished holes on his course, plumbing, putting greens, and zoning considerations.
This is the least, and therefore most serious candidacy in the history of the Republic. The Leave idea might be transatlantic, and even global (or Western), but I don’t think that will be enough. Hopefully, just Trump being Trump will convince even more people that he is singularly unfit to be on the library board of a bookless town, much less the President. We can only hope.
06.23.16
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Brexit Quote of the Night: Labour and Immigration

Via The Guardian

Chuka Umunna, the London Labour MP, said that the referendum result highlighted “particular issues” for the Labour Party adding:

I don’t actually think for a lot of our supporters and voters sovereignty was quite the issue that immigration became. Why did it become such an overwhelming issue in spite of all the warnings of the experts? A lot of people said that you are saying this about the economy but we don’t actually feel we have a lot from that economy for the moment.

This is something, I think, we’re all learning not to underestimate. Economic issues matter enormously, but they matter this year, to an extent, in how they can reframed in an “us vs them” sort of way. The EU has been rent asunder by immigration, especially the Syrian crisis. This is a 100-yr fallout that isn’t just redefining the Middle East, but redefining Europe for a generation. America’s massive annexations in the 1840s are becoming the turning point of today’s politics. The world as we knew it for all of most our lives isn’t falling apart, but it is changing quickly, and when that happens, scapegoats are to be found, and demagogues can rally the dislocated.

I don’t think what happens there is what happens here. Too many differences. But the same issues are coming to ugly play in much of the “developed” world.  We live in the flicker.

06.17.16
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McCain: Obama “Directly Responsible” For Orlando: Dispatches From The Land of Cognitive Dissonance

As we briefly discussed in the Quick Hits, John McCain knew who was to blame for a violent, sexually-confused psychopath buying an assault weapon and pledging vague and meaningless allegiance to a terrorist group.

(via @benjysarlin)

Now, McCain went on to say that he hold’s the President’s policies responsible, not Obama himself. Ben Mathis-Lilley of Slate says that “In summary, John McCain is not going to be the Republican Party’s voice of reason on this one,” but in a way he sort of is. After all, unlike a lot of his colleagues, he isn’t whispering that Obama wanted this to happen (or, like the presumptive nominee, he isn’t shouting it). Unlike Ted Cruz, he isn’t saying that the FBI would have kept up their investigations on Mateen due to a series of incomprehensible and contradictory boasts and the fact that he went to Mecca, indefinitely, if only Obama said “radical Islamic terrorism” every once in a while.

The Cruz line is interesting, because, as Simon Maloy points out, the FBI is doing exactly what Ted Cruz says they should do: investigate anyone who might have any connection whatsoever to terrorism, even if it is specious at best. (Even though he, in theory, is against “Big Government”, and the tyranny of insurance regulations, these sorts of prolonged and rights-denying investigations are ok.) But for Cruz, the FBI would have somehow found something, found a non-existent connection, and arrested and stopped Mateen for a crime he hadn’t committed, for allegiances, even tenuous ones, he had yet to pledge, if only the magic words were uttered. It’s less the obvious anti-democratic and terrifying nonsense here, although that’s important, as it is the level of mental contortions that make even John McCain’s fabulisms look logical.

Obviously, Obama demolished this line of thinking, as he has before, but that doesn’t matter. The words “Radical Islam” have achieved totemic power on the right. Their incantation of it isn’t so much to stop ISIS, but to create a witch’s brew of allegations against Obama. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make any sense. In a political climate where certain phrases, like Keystone XL and (of course) Benghzai, take on a meaning far beyond their actual physical weight or strategic merit, the President’s refusal to say a phrase becomes all-encompassing. It becomes an article of faith.

This sort of faith-based fippery of the professional amnesiac is what is driving nearly all of  Republican thinking, especially on foreign policy. They don’t even engage with Obama’s arguments for why he doesn’t say the phrase. There is even a case. Not on their terms, but it is possible to say “Oh, come on- explaining why you won’t say it is basically saying it. At this point, it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t. It’s not like ISIS is waiting for you to say ‘Radical Islam’ before they get really cocky.” But nope. There is no actual debate. They just get angrier and angrier at it, because it is a worldview, not a thought.

This brings us to McCain. He’s running for office, as we said, so he has no interest in being even a semi-decent person, but it’s more interesting that he blames Obama, directly, for ISIS. On one level, that’s politics, of course- he’s not going to blame himself! But it’s also a matter of deeply internalized cognitive dissonance. The right has wholly swallowed up the idea that we were about to win in Iraq, because it was relatively peaceful, until we pulled out, and then ISIS formed. On a very surface level, that makes some sense. It did happen like that, chronologically.

But think about it more. That basically means that our “victory” was such that as soon as we left it all fell apart. Our great triumph was a “peace” held together only by limitless troops staying there from now until infinity. But that doesn’t matter. The myth has, contra Lord of the Rings, faded into history, and become reality. The present started in January of 2009.

The whole right-wing foreign policy mentality consists of this kind of magical thinking. When McCain says that Obama is responsible for Orlando, or when moderate New Jersey governor Chris Christie says that we have to hit them where they live, when they live here, they aren’t fringing out. They are in the dead-center of their mainstream, and, given the reality they have constructed, are acting perfectly reasonable.

 

06.17.16
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Bernie Staying In; Hillary’s Savvy, Billionaire Fight, and More Political Quick Hits

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  • There is a trace amount of frustration, and even panic, in Bernie Sanders not taking the time yesterday to drop out and endorse Hillary. But that’s fine. He did the right thing. In not dropping out, he can continue to grow his left coalition, and keep pressure on for the Fight for $15, other labor issues, and everything else related to inequality. He pledged to make sure Trump doesn’t win, which precludes a lengthy run. And by telling his supporters that he knows “we must continue our grassroots efforts to create the America that we know we can become.” This is smart- building on the local and state levels, continuing with that energy, working to make a more progressive platform, and eventually reconciling differences with Clinton that turn into an endorsement. You can see the “We had serious differences, but over the last few months we have made our voice heard, and I can state that I unequivocally vote for Hillary Clinton, etc”.  This makes it seem- correctly!- like Bernie and his supporters will have a big influence. There will be a very small “sellout!” crowd, but those will mostly be people who were attracted to politics as a form of self-expression, a way to show that they were the real rebels, and whom identity as leftier-than-thou was more important than then actual election.
  • Speaking of that, unless something comes out that Bernie backstabbed Hillary, kudos to her for recognizing the passion of the Sanders campaign, and making sure that they can be eased off the hook. If Bernie’s speech was the result of an agreement at their meeting, she played this very well. It’s hard for a politician who has won to not spike the football a bit, but not only is she being gracious, she’s letting Bernie go out on roughly his own terms. This is really smart politics, and speaks very highly of her character.
  • Billionaire fight! Billionaire fight! Writing in The Financial Times, (behind paywall, Re/Code recap here) big-time VC Michael Moritz tears Trump apart for his phony business schemes, his fake narrative, and how he “seems little more than a hustler who takes from the rich (lenders he has short-changed, partners he has sued) and also takes from the poor (hapless students of Trump University, tenants whom he has allegedly bullied).” He praises the same immigrants who Trump has denigrated for being the real winners, people who came with nothing and made something of themselves, like Andy Grove or Jerry Yang. He also picks a side in the Trump/Bezos spat, in which Trump has revoked the WaPo’s access and threatened to use the power of the IRS and other government agencies to go after Bezos. It’s a tribute to Trump’s utter loathsomeness that you instinctively side with Bezos, instead of the normal reaction, which is “fuck Jeff Bezos”.
  • Speaking of jerks, hey guys, John McCain is running for office this year! It means that any reasonableness he might have is completely launched out the window and he once again reveals himself to be the grasping, desperate, unprincipled and self-righteous huckster he is. He can’t side tooooo close to Trump on most issues, because Hispanics do exist in Arizona, but he certainly doesn’t want to get tooooo far away either, because white racists make up his base, so what to do? Oh yeah- ISIS is Obama’s fault for not keeping and indefinite amount of American troops in Iraq indefinitely. This makes him directly responsible for Orlando, which was a devious ISIS plot. That’s the way to show steady leadership, John!  You can deconstruct a lot of right-wing lunacy, and the weird moonscape of their mentality, just from this. Maybe it deserves its own post.
06.16.16
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Obama and Radical Islam

 

The President in winter

 

 

Privately, Obama expresses the deepest loathing for ISIS and other radical Islamist groups. ISIS, he has noted, stands for—quite literally—everything he opposes.

Jeffery Goldberg has, somewhat surprisingly, become the great chronicler of Barack Obama’s foreign policy thinking. Goldberg, who has a reputation of being pretty staunchly pro-Israel (a reputation which often unfairly paints him as unthinkingly Likudnik), doesn’t seem like a go-to source for a President who is often painted as anti-Israeli, or at least not reflexively pro-Israeli enough. It makes sense, though: Obama has a far great love of engaging with thoughtful people with whom he has some disagreements than with people automatically on his side. Goldberg fits this, as he’s fair enough to try to understand someone’s thought process even if he isn’t a fan of the final result.

It’s this sort of thoughtfulness on behalf of the President that is a reflection of his relationship with radical Islam. Obama’s critics see him as ruthlessly partisan and completely insulated, which is far from the truth, as his working friendship with Goldberg demonstrates (also, his attempts throughout the entire first term and some of the second to work with Republicans). They also see him as indifferent to radical Islam, as at best uncaring about it, and at worst hoping that it wins. Trump saying this explicitly this week was seen as a scandal; in fact, it was little different than what Republicans have been saying since he took office.

Goldberg’s Atlantic article yesterday, “What Obama Actually Thinks About Radical Islam”, is a deep dive into the President’s relationship with one of the animating forces in global politics, and an area that has consumed much of his Presidency, in a way he was desperately hoping to avoid. He thought that through persuasion and better intentions he could reset the relationship that the US had with the Middle East, and maybe even move toward peace with Israel.

This sounds naive, and maybe it is, but it is worth noting that literally every President in the last 50 years has thought the same thing, albeit with different courses of action. But, much like reaching out to recalcitrant Republicans, this also failed. Goldberg’s discussion of what happened next sort of sums up, for me, Obama’s policy motivations.

He gave the Cairo speech in 2009. By 2012—as the revolutions of the Arab Spring were curdling, and as Libya drifted toward chaos, despite a partial U.S. intervention—Obama developed strong antibodies to what I call the Carly Simon Syndrome, which is an affliction affecting American policymakers so vain that they probably think Islamist extremism, and everything else, is about them. Obama, unlike many American analysts, does not suffer from this delusion. He sees the problems affecting parts of the Muslim world as largely outside American control. At its best, this belief keeps him from rushing into disasters not of America’s making; at its worst, it keeps him from taking steps that stand a chance of making things better.

 This is, and always had been, the dichotomy of the Obama Presidency, one rooted in a sort of vicious thoughtfulness: the idea that you can try, and if it doesn’t work, don’t beat your head against the wall. It is one that recognizes the better angels in people, and tries to engage them, but also the worst demons, and tries to step away. It is one that recognizes not just the limitations of American power, but of American influence.
In response to Goldberg’s enormous “The Obama Doctrine”, I labeled it “tragic radicalism“, because it understood that the worst in humans couldn’t really be resolved, at least not easily, and so it was better to step away. Because, while there is no doubt that many problems in the Middle East and broader Muslim world are a reaction to wesern humiliations, especially at the hands of America, it is also true that there is far more going on than that, and that there is little America can do to fix it.
While I fundamentally agree with that, there are also policy missteps that come from such a view. Because while Obama has antibodies to Carly Simon, he also is somewhat vulnerable to it, although not in such a virulent manner. He does recognize that American influence is still a force for good and ill in the world, but in trying to mitigate the ill while still balancing our interests, we do things like intervene in the wrong limited way in Yemen: drones but little political support. There is a certain hand-washing that both downplays the real influence America has, and works to obfuscate the unhelpful foot-stomping going on below.
The more I think about it, the more I think “tragic radicalism” is the wrong phrase, since it seems to place emphasis on the latter, and doesn’t make it clear that “tragic” here is in the dramatic sense of the word.  Although not as pithy, “radical sense of the tragic” might be more accurate. It’s an understanding of human motivations that has led to some great things, but also to a sort of sighing away when the worst in us burbles madly to the surface. I do think he is impacted deeply by the horrors on his watch, especially Syria, but that just confirms his view of human nature.
All that said, I’m going to quote a couple paragraphs in full. As you listen to Trump talk about, well, anything, I think it is good to reflect on what a remarkable human being we’ve had in office for the last eight years.

 

In one conversation, parts of which I’ve previously recounted, Obama talked about the decades-long confrontation between the U.S. and communism, and compared it to the current crisis. “You have some on the Republican side who will insist that what we need is the same moral clarity with respect to radical Islam” that Ronald Reagan had with communism, he said. “Except, of course, communism was not embedded in a whole bunch of cultures, communism wasn’t a millennium-old religion that was embraced by a whole host of good, decent, hard-working people who are our allies. Communism for the most part was a foreign, abstract ideology that had been adopted by some nationalist figures, or those who were concerned about poverty and inequality in their countries but wasn’t organic to these cultures.”

He went on to say, “Establishing some moral clarity about what communism was and wasn’t, and being able to say to the people of Latin America or the people of Eastern Europe, ‘There’s a better way for you to achieve your goals,’ that was something that could be useful to do.” But, he said, “to analogize it to one of the world’s foremost religions that is the center of people’s lives all around the world, and to potentially paint that as a broad brush, isn’t providing moral clarity. What it’s doing is alienating a whole host of people who we need to work with us in order to succeed.”

06.15.16
by

Well, We Have to Bomb Somebody!

 

Coming soon…

 

I think just being around Donald Trump makes everyone dumber. Not that I thought Chris Christie was ever an astute foreign policy thinker, but yeesh…

“It’s unacceptable to allow this kind of stuff in our country and for us not to fight back, and we need to fight back, and that’s all these people understand,” Christie told the radio show. When the hosts smartly pressed the New Jersey governor on exactly where that fight should take place, he responded: ““You gotta get over there and start making them pay where they live. It’s an ugly and difficult thing but if we don’t get over there, they’re coming here, and they showed it again this weekend.”

Count the cliches!

  1. “that’s all these people understand.” This is always a good one, because it makes you sound really tough and realistic. Look, I don’t like violence, but it’s the only language we have in common. No translation needed. You should generally crack your neck after you say this.
  2. “start over there”. This is fantastic. It deals with the “if we stop them there, they won’t come here” reasoning which was one of the big reasons for why we are  supposed to fight ISIS in Iraq, even though the invasion created the conditions for regional collapse. But it’s even better because Christie has no idea what “over there” he’s referring to. As Will Bunch said, he “wants the U.S. military to drop bombs on Port St. Lucie, Florida,” since that’s where Mateen lived.
  3. “making them pay where they live”. He got this directly from a movie. I’m not sure which one. Maybe a cheap knockoff of The Sopranos, one in which the hero is a tough-talking, and tougher-acting, governor, played by Steve Schirripa. I’m not saying Christie wrote this movie (working title: The Boss of Jungleland), but I’m certainly not saying he didn’t.
  4. “ugly and difficult thing”. Translation: this’ll be great, but I have to use the somber face.
  5. “if we don’t get over there, they’re coming here, and they showed it again this weekend.” Mostly a repeat of number 3, because Christie literally has less than three sentences worth of foreign policy knowledge, but with a neat little bow that highlights the cruel absurdity of everything he is saying. They showed again that they’re coming here, like 30 years ago, and creating sexually-confused psychopaths who wrap their hatred up with the thinnest veneer of religion.

The thing is, this incoherent nonsense is essentially no different than what you hear from Lindsay Graham, who, anti-Trump charm tour notwithstanding, still believes we have to invade literally everywhere or we’re all gonna die. There isn’t a major GOP foreign policy “thinker” who doesn’t advocate this in some form or the other. We have to go there so they can’t come here. Action simply for the sake of action. The Max Power way. Christie isn’t saying just because he’s a dumb guy on foreign policy. He’s saying this because it is perfectly in line with his party’s mainstream ideas.

I don’t know guys. Newt “Bring back HUAC!” Gingrich has some strong credentials, but if Christie keeps sounding like such a dumbass he might get that Veep nod.