Sunday, August 10, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Some scattered links this week:

  • Phyllis Bennis: Obama's Iraq airstrikes could actually help the Islamic State, not weaken it: Could be -- at any rate they will more clearly align the US as the enemy of Islam, a meme that's already in fairly broad circulation both there and here (although thus far only Osama bin Laden bothered to construct the "far enemy" theory to strike at the US -- most Jihadists prefer to fight their local devils). For example, TPM reports: Graham Urges Obama Act in Iraq, Syria to Prevent Terrorist Attack in US -- he actually means "to produce terrorist attack in US" since no one in Iraq or Syria would be sufficiently motivated to attack the US unless the US was acting in their own countries. Of course, the idea that the only way to prevent something is to motivate it is a peculiar affliction of the fascist mindset, rooted not in logic but in the taste for blood. (Speaking of warmongers, TPM also reports, Clinton Knocks Obama's 'Don't Do Stupid Stuff' Foreign Policy Approach on Syria -- lest anyone think that if given the chance she would flinch from doing "stupid stuff." In another TPM report, Shock and Awe, Josh Marshall quotes an anonymous long-time Iraq war consultant on ISIS tactics -- similar to Taliban tactics right down to the shiny new Toyota pickups -- and suggests that Obama will see some initial successes against ISIS frontal attacks, at least until they adjust. I've noted before his the first flush of US airpower and advanced weapons creates a false sense of invincibility, "the feel-good days of the war," which soon ends as "the enemy" adjusts tactics and as the US blunders from atrocity to atrocity. So, pace Bennis, the short-run game is likely to look good to the hawks, and being hawks they're unlikely to ever look at something that produces perpetual war as having a downside. No, the problem with Bennis' piece is that she want to argue US policy in Iraq on the basis of what it means to Iraqis, instead of the affect intervening in Iraq will have in the US. Foreign wars are catnip for the right because they propagate hate and violence and they show the government doing nothing to make American lives better (even the ruse that they create jobs has worn thin).

    And, of course, there's always the oil angle: see, Steve Coll: Oil and Erbil. So far, Obama has been more active in defending Kurdish autonomy than backing Iraq's central government. Coincidentally, ExxonMobil and Chevron have made major deals with the Kurds, bypassing the central government. Favorite line here: "ExxonMobil declined to comment."

    Erbil's rulers never quite saw the point of a final compromise with Baghdad's Shiite politicians -- as each year passed, the Kurds got richer on their own terms, they attracted more credible and deep-pocketed oil companies as partners, and they looked more and more like they led a de-facto state. The Obama Administration has done nothing to reverse that trend.

    And so, in Erbil, in the weeks to come, American pilots will defend from the air a capital whose growing independence and wealth has loosened Iraq's seams, even while, in Baghdad, American diplomats will persist quixotically in an effort to stitch that same country together to confront ISIS.

    Obama's defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal -- as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example -- are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company, as Al Swearengen [a reference back to HBO's series, Deadwood] would well understand. Life, Swearengen once pointed out, is often made up of "one vile task after another." So is American policy in Iraq.

  • Elias Isquith: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback on his growing unpopularity: It's Obama's fault! Brownback won the Republican Party nomination last week, with a 63-37 margin over Jennifer Winn. Winn had no political experience, and no money. Her campaign was managed by a libertarian who came out not of the Tea Party but the Occupy movement. Winn's primary motivation for running was the experience and sense of injustice she felt when her son was arrested for drugs. A big part of her platform was calling for legalization of marijuana. She was not, in other words, a natural fit with any identifiable fragment of the Republican Party in Kansas, and still Brownback -- a sitting governor, two-term Senator, former Congressman, rich, pious, with a postcard family, someone who's never faced a closely contested election in his life -- still couldn't run up a two-to-one margin among his own people. So, yeah, he should take the result as a wake-up call. Instead, he explained:

    "I think a big part of it is Barack Obama," Brownback said, referring to his only securing two-thirds of the primary vote. "[A] lot of people are so irritated at what the president is doing, they want somebody to throw a brick."

    Brownback continued: "I think it's a lot of deep irritation with the way the president has taken the country, so much so that people are so angry about it they're just trying to express it somehow."

    Why Kansas voters would be so irrational as to punish Brownback, who in many ways represents everything Obama does not, for the president's sins, the governor did not say.

    Having just suffered through a big-money Republican primary, it's obvious that Republicans in Kansas are totally convinced that everyone in the country (well, except, you know, for them) utterly can't stand Obama or anything associated with him (especially "Obamacare"), so they've concluded that the sure path to election is to go as far over the top in denouncing Obama as possible. But just working yourself up into ever greater levels of hysteria doesn't make that claim any more credible. On the other hand, Brownback has nearly wrecked the state government he was entrusted with nearly four years ago, and he can hardly blame what he did on anyone else.

    John Cassidy: Memo to Obama's Critics: He's Not Callow Anymore has an explanation why Republicans have turned up the vitriol against Obama, what with the Republican House suing the president while many among them talk of impeachment: "But it isn't his inexperience and glibness that's infuriating them. It's the fact that he's learned to play the Washington power game, and, perhaps, found a way to go around them." What Obama's done with all that executive power hasn't been very impressive -- except in Israel-Iraq-Syria-Ukraine foreign policy, where every step he's taken has been wrong, something Cassidy doesn't appreciate -- but Republicans were so used to pushing Obama around that any attempt to call their bluff is seen as a calamity. (I am, by the way, not very happy with Cassidy's recent posts on the four ISIU wars, nor his defense of Obama in them. Nor are the Republicans much concerned there, except inasmuch as they can paint Obama as weak. Too bad: when they impeached Clinton way back when, I wrote that I would have cast a guilty vote, not on the basis of the charges but due to his mishandling of Iraq. Obama is little if any better now.)

  • Ed Kilgore: The Tea Party Is Losing Battles but Winning the War: Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, so well ensconced in Washington he no longer bothers to own or rent any residency in the state he represents, defeated a rather weird Tea Party challenger named Milton Wolf by a 48-41 margin: Wolf's sound bite description of Roberts was "liberal in Washington, rarely in Kansas." Roberts had never been accused of being a RINO, but fearing Wolf's challenge he became noticeably more dilligent about his conservative bona fides over the last year (before that he was mostly known for routing federal money to agribusiness interests). So Kilgore chalks this up as yet another case of the Tea Party moving the Republican Party to the right even when they fail to get their crackpots nominated. (Wolf, an orthopedist, reportedly had a nasty habit of posting his patients' X-rays on Facebook along with denigrating "humorous" comments.)

  • Ed Kilgore: The "New" Rick Perry: "New" as in he's distancing himself from the "old" Perry who self-destructed in the 2012 presidential race, presumably to run again in 2016.

    As for Perry's famous message of presenting Texas as an economic template for the country, I think it's a mistake to view this as easy, non-controversial mainline GOP rap that the rest of us can live with. What Perry exemplifies is the ancient southern approach to economic development based on systematic abasement of public policy in order to make life as profitable and easy as possible for "job-creators," at any cost. If it sort of "works" (if you don't care about poverty and low wage rates and inadequate health care and deliberately starved public resources) in Texas thanks in no small part to the state's fossil fuel wealth and low housing costs (though as Philip Longman demonstrated in the April/May issue of WaMo, even that level of success is debatable), it sure hasn't ever "worked" in similarly inclined but less blessed places like Mississippi and Alabama, where the local aristocracy has been preaching the same gospel for many decades.

  • Mike Konczal/Bryce Covert: The Real Solution to Wealth Inequality: In The Nation, this appeared as "Tiny Capitalists":

    Democrats and Republicans advocate different solutions to inequality, but both seek to shift financial risk from the state to the individual. Republicans promote the "ownership society," in which privatizing social insurance, removing investor protections and expanding home ownership align the interests of workers with the anti-regulatory interests of the wealthy. Democrats focus on education and on helping the poor build wealth through savings programs. These approaches demand greater personal responsibility for market risks and failures, further discrediting the state's role in regulating markets and providing public social insurance.

    Instead of just giving people more purchasing power, we should be taking basic needs off the market altogether.

    Consider Social Security, a wildly popular program that doesn't count toward individual wealth. If Social Security were replaced with a private savings account, individuals would have more "wealth" (because they would have their own financial account) but less actual security. The elderly would have to spin the financial-markets roulette wheel and suffer destitution if they were unlucky. This is why social-wealth programs like Social Security combat inequality more powerfully than any privatized, individualized wealth-building "solution."

    Public programs like universal healthcare and free education function the same way, providing social wealth directly instead of hoping to boost people's savings enough to allow them to afford either. Rather than requiring people to struggle with a byzantine system of private health insurance, universal healthcare would be available to cover the costs of genuine health needs. Similarly, broadly accessible higher education would allow people to thrive without taking on massive student loans and hoping that their "human capital" investment helps them hit the jackpot.

    Emphasis added to the key point. Aside from moving basic needs off market, we would also be moving them into the realm of society-guaranteed rights. Also, from optional (something enjoyed by an elite) to mandatory (something securely available to all). Conversely, the political agenda of trying to impose greater market discipline over any area of life is meant to increase inequality, and to make its consequences more acute.

  • Paul Krugman: Libertarian Fantasies: I've always had sympathies for libertarian thinking: the lessons of the "don't tread on me" American Revolution were imprinted early, and the notion that the state was out to keep me from enjoying "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was backed by clear evidence from my teens, most perniciously through the draft and the drug war. However, I eventually realized that while self-interested public menaces like J. Edgar Hoover occasionally worked in the public sector they tended to be the exception, in corporations they were the rule, so ubiquitous that their corruption lapped over and gnawed at the very idea of public service. But things like the continuing drug war show that their is a need for libertarian types. Unfortunately, they rarely stop at defending freedom from real threats. Many become obsessed with false threats, and have no clue how to go from critique to policy, mostly because their anti-government bias blinds them from the possibility of using government for increasing freedom. (For instance, I'd say that the FDA increases my freedom as a consumer by saving me time worrying about contaminated food. You might say that the FDA limits the freedom of food producers to cut costs and poison people, but there are a lot more of us than them, and regulation is a fairly efficient scheme to even out minimal quality costs and avoid a disastrous "race to the bottom.") Krugman has his own examples, concluding:

    In other words, libertarianism is a crusade against problems we don't have, or at least not to the extent the libertarians want to imagine. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of monetary policy, where many libertarians are determined to stop the Fed from irresponsible money-printing -- which is not, in fact, something it's doing.

    And what all this means in turn is that libertarianism does not offer a workable policy agenda. I don't mean that I dislike the agenda, which is a separate issue; I mean that if we should somehow end up with libertarian government, it would quickly find itself unable to fulfill any of its promises.

    I read a lot of Murray Rothbard way back when, and he actually spent a lot of time coming up with private sector solutions to functions like justice that are invariably performed by government. I easily understand why a public justice system may become corrupt and repressive -- traits ours exhibits way too often -- but I couldn't see how Rothbard's scheme could every work, even badly. Rothbard's cases for private firefighters and other services were more workable, but everything he came up was vastly more inefficient than what we already have.

  • Gideon Levy: Go to Gaza, see for yourself: An Israeli journalist, recently named by a right-wing Israeli commentator as someone Israel should lock up in a concentration camp:

    Let's talk about Gaza. The Gaza strip is not a nest of murderers; it's not even a nest of wasps. It is not home to incessant rampage and murder. Most of its children were not born to kill, nor do most of its mothers raise martyrs -- what they want for their children is exactly what most Israeli mothers want for their own children. Its leaders are not so different from Israel's, not in the extent of their corruption, their penchant for "luxury hotels" nor even in their allocating most of the budget to defense.

    Gaza is a stricken enclave, a permanent disaster zone, from 1948 to 2014, and most of its inhabitants are third- and fourth-time refugees. Most of the people who revile and who destroy the Gaza Strip have never been there, certainly not as civilians. For eight years I have been prevented from going there; during the preceding 20 years I visited often. I liked the Gaza Strip, as much as one can like an afflicted region. I liked its people, if I may be permitted to make a generalization. There was a spirit of almost unimaginable determination, along with an admirable resignation to its woes.

    In recent years Gaza has become a cage, a roofless prison surrounded by fences. Before that it was also bisected. Whether or not they are responsible for their situation, these are ill-fated people, a great many people and a great deal of misery. [ . . . ]

    But in Hebrew, "Gaza," pronounced 'Aza, is short for Azazel, which is associated with hell. Of the multitude of curses hurled at me these days from every street corner, "Go to hell/Gaza" is among the gentler ones. Sometimes I want to say in response, "I wish I could go to Gaza, in order to fulfill my journalistic mission." And sometimes I even want to say: "I wish you could all go to Gaza. If only you knew what Gaza is, and what is really there."

  • Andrew O'Hehir: Is Obama haunted by Bush's ghost -- or possessed by him? Lots of things have bothered me about Obama, but his disinterest to put any real distance between his administration and the Bush one on issues of war, peace, and security is foremost -- all the more so because by the time Bush left office those policies had been shown to be utterly bankrupt, and because Obama was elected with a clear mandate for change.

    As we were reminded earlier this week, Obama's efforts to separate his own management of intelligence and spycraft from the notorious torture policies of Bush's "war on terror" now look exceedingly murky, if not downright mendacious. Throughout his campaigns and presidential years, Obama has relied on shadow-men like former CIA director George Tenet, former counterterrorism chief and current CIA director John Brennan and director of national intelligence (and spinner of lies to Congress) James Clapper, all of whom are implicated to the eyeballs in "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the other excesses of the Bush regime. [ . . . ] Despite all the things he said to get elected, and beneath all the stylistic and symbolic elements of his presidency, Obama has chosen to continue the most fundamental policies of the Bush administration. In some areas, including drone warfare, government secrecy and the persecution of whistle-blowers, and the outsourcing of detainee interrogation to third-party nations, Obama has expanded Bush's policies.

  • Stephen M Walt: Do No (More) Harm: Subtitle: "Every time the U.S. touches the Middle East, it makes things worse. It's time to walk away and not look back." Good argument, but could use a better article. Walt's list of all the things that have gone wrong is detailed and long enough, but when he tries to apply his "realist" paradigm he doesn't come with any clear sense of the American interests in the region that he assumes must exist. (Closest he comes is the desire to keep any [other] nation from controlling the Persian Gulf oil belt, which at the moment is so fragmented it hardly calls for any US action at all. He misses what strike me as the two obvious ones: peace and a sense of equality and justice throughout the region, which would in turn undercut past/current trends toward militant and repressive Islam.) He rejects isolationism, but that may well be the best solution one can hope for given how pathological US intervention has been. (After all, alcoholics are advised to quit, rather than just scale back to the occasional drink non-alcoholics can handle without harm.) He does suggest that the US give up on trying to guide any sort of "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, he goes to far as to say that we shouldn't bother with Israel's imperious fantasies if that's what they want to do -- evidently being a "realist" means you never have to think in terms of principles. On the other hand, isn't such a total lack of scruples a big part of how the US became the Middle East plague it so clearly is?

  • Israel/Palestine links:

Also, a few links for further study:

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