Sunday, September 7, 2014

Weekend Roundup

The Wichita Eagle op-ed page featured Trudy Rubin' Decision Time on ISIS today, three days after the column originally appeared. Having clamored for more war for years, she must be happy now that Obama has vowed to "destroy and degrade ISIS" and hopscotched around the world lining up a new "coalition of the willing" to share the dirt and blame for another foreign intervention in Iraq and Syria (the last one having been such fun). Rubin, meanwhile, has gone on seeking further dragons to slay: If Putin's actions in Ukraine aren't an invasion, then what is? Obama's been busy working on locking the US into a war there too. (See David Frum: Obama Just Made the Ultimate Commitment to Eastern Europe, something Frum is ecstatic about.) This series of events has reduced my opinion of Obama to its lowest point ever. Some of this I explain in my comment on the Peter Beinart piece below, yet even now I doubt that I've pushed that argument far enough. Perhaps one reason I'm so appalled is that there doesn't seem to be much uproar over what has to be judged the most significant American pivot towards war since Bush invaded Iraq. As Beinart puts it, "[Obama's] fierce minimalism fits the national mood. President Obama's Mideast strategy is not grand. It's not inspiring. It's not idealistic. But it's what the American people want and what their government knows how to do." Really?

That so few rank-and-file Democrats feel up to holding Obama responsible for his repeated belligerence probably has more to do with the perception that the Republicans have become a full-fledged threat to civilization. This is in stark contrast to the 1960s, when we had no trouble turning on Lyndon Johnson -- and when the Democratic Party essentially short-circuited the accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society out of a blind commitment to an insane war in Vietnam. Like Johnson, Obama seems bent on sacrificing whatever good he's accomplished on the altar of war. Little comfort that he hasn't accomplished much to squander.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Peter Beinart: Actually, Obama Does Have a Strategy in the Middle East: Argues that Obama is neither dove nor hawk, but "a fierce minimalist" -- which is to say he's a hawk who prefers small game taken with little risk or long-term commitment. Of course, that doesn't explain his "Afghanistan surge" -- in retrospect, that looks like a time-limited concession to the military, a way of saying "put up or shut up." Beinart goes further than the facts suggest:

    On the other hand, he's proven ferocious about using military force to kill suspected terrorists. [ . . . ] By contrast, Obama's strategy -- whether you like it or not -- is more clearly defined. Hundreds of thousands can die in Syria; the Taliban can menace and destabilize Afghanistan; Iran can move closer to getting a bomb. No matter. With rare exceptions, Obama only unsheathes his sword against people he thinks might kill American civilians.

    It's not that simple: Libya never was a threat to American civilians (at least not until he intervened there). And he's actually broken new ground in using drones to kill American citizens. So I think the focus on "terrorist" targets has more to do with scale and risk. He's come to realize that the US military isn't very effective (and often is down right counterproductive) when deployed en masse, so he's avoided that. He also seems to recognize that the US military isn't very effective as an occupying force: they inevitably embarrass themselves, breeding resentment and rebellion. On the other hand, give him the opportunity to kill some "terrorist" and he's happy to pull the trigger. Republicans taunt him as weak, so he's anxious to prove he's a natural born killer. One could do worse than minimizing risk and damage, but "minimalism" is a trap Obama walked into, either because he has no principles or because he has no willpower to defend them against his security bureaucracy.

    Also see Kathy Gilsinan: To Kill a Terrorist, about one of Obama's minimalist "success stories": the killing of Somali "terrorist" leader Ahmed Abdi Godane. The most likely result there is that Al-Shabab replaces Godane with another even-more-embittered leader and nothing more changes. And I might as well point out Beinart's more recent post, Pursuing ISIS to the Gates of Hell. Obama's vow "to destroy and degrade ISIS" remains a bit muddled (why put the weaker verb second?), and framing it with a "Jacksonian" revenge drama doesn't help.

  • Andrew O'Hehir: From 9/11 to the ISIS videos: The darkness we conjured up:

    I think it's worthwhile to revisit the examples of Stockhausen and Baudrillard, and their ideas too, in considering a new outrage that is both literal and symbolic: the ISIS beheading videos. The criminal acts depicted in those videos are on an entirely different scale from 9/11, and it's important not to lose sight of that fact amid the understandable shock and revulsion they have engendered. But the intended effect is strikingly similar, and the ISIS videos are conceptually and historically related to 9/11 as tools of provocation and propaganda. They are designed to make a ragtag band of apocalyptic rebels look like a symmetrical adversary to the world's greatest military power; to incite an exaggerated response from that power, driven by panic and hysteria; and to attract rootless millennials, both from the West and the Muslim world, to their incoherent cause. So far it seems to be working.

    I'm far less certain that the intent behind the beheading videos is to provoke the insane response that Obama and nearly everyone on his hawkish right have committed to, but that's the effect. Rather, they show a profound inability to step outside of their own skin and see themselves as others will see them -- a trait that Obama et al. sadly share with them. If they were smart, they'd court journalists and get them to at least cast reasonable doubts about their fanaticism. Of course, if they were smart, they'd recall Islam's past tolerance for other religions, a principle ("no compulsion in matters of faith") which had allowed Christians and Yazidis (and Jews) to persevere through more than a millenia of past caliphates. And they'd play up the fact that they're seeking freedom from despotic police states in Damascus and Baghdad. But no side is playing this smart: they each tailor their propaganda to suit their own prejudices, confirming their greatest fears and enabling their most vicious and violent cadres to commit acts that will only exacerbate the initial problem.

  • Nick Turse: American Monuments to Failure in Africa? Until the US military created the US Africa Command in 2007, you heard very little about American military operations in Africa, because there really weren't many. Now the US military is all over the continent, shooting people and blowing shit up but also spreading their budget around on "feel good" projects, much like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan:

    As with Petraeus's career, which imploded amidst scandal, the efforts he fostered similarly went down in flames. In Iraq, the chicken processing plant proved a Potemkin operation and the much ballyhooed Baghdad water park quickly fell into ruin. The country soon followed. Less than three years after the U.S. withdrawal, Iraq teeters on the brink of catastrophe as most of Petraeus's Sunni mercenaries stood aside while the brutal Islamic State carved a portion of its caliphate from the country, and others, aggrieved with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad, sided with them. In Afghanistan, the results have been similarly dismal as America's hearts-and-minds monies yielded roads to nowhere (where they haven't already deteriorated into death traps), crumbling buildings, over-crowded, underfunded, and teacher-less schools, and billions poured down the drain in one boondoggle after another.

  • More Israel links:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Kathleen Geier: Can we talk? The unruly life and legacy of Joan Rivers: Seems about right, though I'm less of a fan.

    Some critics claim to discern a humanistic project behind Rivers' comedy of cruelty. For example, Mitchell Fain argued that River "says things out loud what we're all thinking, in our worst moments," and that by doing so, "the monster gets smaller." What seems far likelier is that the monster gets socially sanctioned. For decades, a staple of Rivers' act have been nasty jokes about female celebrities who are fat, stupid, or slutty, and male celebrities who are allegedly gay. If she ever talked smack about straight male celebrities, I'm hard-pressed to think of any examples.

    That brings us to Joan Rivers' politics, which mostly were horrible. On the plus side, she was pro-choice, an early supporter of gay rights, and an Obama supporter. On the negative side, there is pretty much everything else. Rivers was a lifelong Republican, and made many comments over the years that left little doubt about her right-wing views. She hated the movie Precious, not for aesthetic reasons, but for frankly political ones ("I thought, Oh, get a job! Stand up and get a job!"). Just last month, she voiced strong support for Israel's military actions actions in Gaza and said that the Palestinians "deserve to be dead." She adored Ronald Reagan and shamelessly fawned over the British royal family. When writers on her show Fashion Police, who were working full-time and only making $500 a week, went on strike, she refused to support them. At times, her humor was outright racist.

  • John Mearsheimer: Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault: A useful corrective to a lot of prevailing assumptions. Clearly, the US (neocon) effort to extend NATO to the borders of Russia has been deliberately and unnecessarily provocative, although one could also argue that deep-seated fears that Russia might revert its past patterns, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, of trying to control what it thought of as its satellites had more to do with NATO's expansion. Moreover, while US-backed "democracy projects" were effectively an attempt at foreign subversion, it would seem that Russia has been organizing support in Ukraine as well. In America we reflexively assume we're acting with the best intentions, but with Cold War blinkers we make little distinction between democracy and neoliberal economic policies that lead to inequality and corruption -- something the post-Soviet bloc has had bitter experience with. There is much to be said in favor of UN-based programs promoting democracy and human rights throughout the world, provided such programs focus on need -- Saudi Arabia is always a good place to start -- rather than the neocon checklist of governments they dislike.

    More dissenting pieces on Ukraine:

  • Jim Newell: GOP's Kansas nightmare: How a red state is on verge of unthinkable upsets: I'd caution against counting these chickens before they hatch, but so far the evidence does suggest that the Democrats greatly improve their prospects at the polls when they bother to run candidates. The Senate contest this year represents a different twist on that, with Democrat Chad Taylor dropping out to let independent Greg Orman run unfettered. I'm not sure that was such a good idea, but Orman has a lot more money to work with, and he might woo more Republicans -- they're pretty regimented on the far right at the moment, but in doing so they've pissed a lot of their own off. Also see Nate Silver. As for the governor, Brownback is widely regarded as a complete fuck up -- I look forward to campaign commercials showing him and Rick Perry praying for rain. But oddly enough he's not only doubled down on the lie that his tax cuts are "working" -- I think that's a euphemism for rich-getting-richer; the new joke is that the only thing flatter than Kansas is the Kansas economy -- but instead of moving center to pick up votes he's been moving right for more money. To be specific, the Kochs have been trying to kill wind power subsidies, which many Republicans (including Brownback until his flip) favor because it means manufacturing and service jobs plus big royalties to farmers. The Kochs regard wind power as heresy against free markets, but if you want to dig a bit deeper, see Lee Fang: Charles Koch founded anti-environment group to protect big oil industry handouts.

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