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Sunday, September 13, 2015

Friday was the 14th anniversary of the 2001 Al-Qaeda "attack" against America, when nineteen Arabs (mostly Saudis) hijacked four airliners and committed suicide by flying those planes into iconic buildings in New York City and Virginia (and a Pennsylvania corn field). The media went berserk, describing all of America as "under attack." The political class decided this was war, and vowed to return the fight back to foreign lands -- which, after all, is the only experience any of them had ever had of war. Within days the intelligentsia, including way too many who had identified with the left, launched a pre-emptive attack on pacifists and anyone else who tried to talk reason -- especially anyone who expressed doubts that America was wholly innocent of wrong-doing.

I experienced those "attacks" from a barely comfortable distance, visting a friend, staying in her apartment above Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. I could stick my head out the window and see the smoking (still-standing) towers, and could watch masses of people trudging home on foot as the subways were stopped. One of my first thoughts was that I knew it wasn't an atomic bomb because the pedestrians' panic had subsisted a mere three miles into Brooklyn. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be under siege in Sarajevo -- the most graphic experience of war from the 1990s -- and concluded that this wasn't at all like that. War wasn't something that ordinary people in New York felt that day. War was just a concept in the fevered minds of the people who talk on TV. For people who were in lower Manhattan that morning, of course, it was immediate: a disaster on a scale no one had experienced or was prepared for. But just a few miles away from "ground zero" more than anything else it was damn inconvenient. Like the Con Ed blackout I lived through in the 1970s. Well, in some ways worse, but on that order.

Of course, if you knew someone who was killed that day, it also had a tragic dimension. I knew one such person, a niece (the wife of my first wife's nephew), and I spent a fair amount of time the next two weeks with the family, so I did feel something other than inconvenienced. But I didn't experience that as war, but as random, sudden, violent, shattering -- like when my uncle was killed by a drunk driver, leaving his wife and three pre-teen children to fend for themselves. My niece had two children, one so young he'd never remember her. The manner of her death was obscenely worse, giving us days of uncertainty and months before they identified some of her DNA in the megatons of rubble. And something like that happened to nearly 3,000 other people, their families and friends, in not much more than an instant. Still, that's only about one in 2700 New Yorkers (or one in 94000 Americans, just barely one-thousandth of 1%). No one else I knew in New York in those weeks had such bad luck.

I wish someone would sift through the new coverage and punditry we saw on TV those first few days and edit a fair sampling of the insanity we saw. I clearly remember Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu smiling and cackling about how this was "very good" for Israel, and John Major lecturing on how much the Uk could teach America about how to handle terrorism. I remember a bit of fuzzy nighttime footage of a rocket explosion near Kabul being aired over the presumptive banner line "America Strikes Back." I remember the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, standing on the Capitol steps and daring Al-Qaeda to take their best shot at her. I spent much of the day thumbing through a book of photographs called Century, looking at images of the real wars that plagued the past century while the phony warriors nattered on TV. It helped to keep it all in perspective, something almost everyone was losing.

For me, it wasn't hard to see that no good would come of such war fever. But how much bad would come was always hard to grasp, or even imagine. One might cite the nominal costs of 14 years of non-stop war, of endless war, of war with no prospect of victory or redemption -- over 6,700 US soldiers dead, many more maimed (physically and/or psychologically), trillions of dollars spent, and many times that much death, destruction, and destabilization that those wars have inflicted abroad -- but I'm ever more worried about the cognitive toll those wars have taken on American society, indeed on the ability of Americans to think clearly and to engage the world constructively.

Another thought I had on 9/11 was even rarer, and I think more profound: it occurred to me that the "attacks" were a "wake up call" -- a reminder to look into your own self to see whether anything you've done might have contributed to this tragedy. Needless to say, no notion was more unwelcome in post-9/11 America. The idea isn't to partition blame. Rather, it is to make certain that we do not spread the blame with future acts. Within a few months the United States had done just that: protected against self-awareness, obsessed by a sense of self-righteous victimhood, Bush marshaled the full force of American military power not against the individuals who plotted 9/11 but against whole nations of people who had nothing to do with the "attacks." He thereby greatly compounded the crime many times over, something he could do because so few Americans questioned the assumptions he made: that America's fortunes depended on the world's fear of America's military power; that the "attacks" had been an affront to that power, which could only be restored by reassertion; and that the United States, due to its unique virtue, was uniquely entitled to project that power over the rest of the world; and that the American people would continue to support a bold leader (like Bush) who would restore America to its rightful greatness.

It is difficult to overstate the amount of hubris, let alone ignorance, that feeds this worldview. Fourteen years later, by any objective measure, the stance has failed. Yet when Obama, recognizing that America's power to impose its will on Iran's leaders and people was limited, resorted to negotiating a framework that would at least ensure that Iran could not develop nuclear weapons -- the same "hot button" issue that Bush had used to provoke his ill-fated war in Iraq -- every single Republican senator and presidential candidate rose in opposition. Their objections have nothing to do with what Iran may or may not do. They object to the deal because it represents a retreat from their belief that American might (American greatness) is the answer to all problems in the world.

Nonetheless, it is not just the Republicans who continue to cling to these core assumptions. You'd be hard pressed to find any example where Obama has rethought why America is involved in the Middle East, or reconsidered what effect that involvement has had. The Iran deal is merely a change of tactics: he continues to assume that Iran is America's (and Israel's) mortal enemy, and that it meant to escape the omnipresent threat of American (and Israeli) attack by developing its own nuclear deterrence. The difference is that Obama chose a more realistic, more effective, and less risky method of preserving nuclear monopoly than, say, Bush did while allegedly pursuing the same goals viz. Iraq.

Of course, realism, effectiveness, and risk-limits are among the things Republicans hate about the deal. They suggest that Obama is not a true believer in America's greatness. Perhaps they even recall the Bush-era neocon mantra, "anyone can go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran." Obama isn't their idea of a real man. Simple as that.

Some scattered links this week:

• Josh Marshall: You'll Want to Read This: Marshall, in his intro and outro, shows he doesn't really known what to make of "TMP Reader JB" -- "no one bats 1000% at this" [presumably he means a batting average of 1.000, which means 100% of at bats turned into base hits] -- but it's helpful that he published it last year and reminded us of it this year.

  Could an attack happen tomorrow? Of course. But once every 13 years would still be an anomalous event, not a systemic threat. Remember the talk as the rubble smoldered of hundreds, maybe thousands, of "sleeper cells" lurking out there, waiting to strike? Well, we now know there were none at the time, and apparently none were formed even after we have fought two wars and killed thousands of innocent civilians since 9/11. One would think our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etcetera would spawn at least a few motivated and effective enemies bent on revenge through domestic attacks. Apparently not.

  So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights. I'm not saying this was obvious when 9/11 happened. Far from it. I was just as freaked out as anyone else at the time and I think it would have been foolish to ignore the threat. But the fact is if we had we would have been far better off, because as it turns out there were not hundreds of other Mohammed Attas out there in the wings. In fact, there were none, at least not with any meaningful capabilities (which would exclude folks like the shoe bomber and the Tsarnaev brothers). We know this to be the case because if such people did exist we would have been hit 100 times over by now. It is too damn easy to sow terror and chaos with motivation and even a below average IQ. Think Newtown or D.C. sniper.

  A few sad teenagers have committed far, far more domestic terror attacks than all the Islamic militants in the world over the past decade, and that is an outcome I think very few would have predicted, myself included, in the aftermath of 9/11. I'm sure the Rudy Giuliani set would love to take credit for the lack of attacks, but I think any serious expert on stopping domestic terrorism attacks would agree that the only way to bat as close to 1000 as we have is if your enemy is fictional.

  This is a little confused, but the basic point is surely correct: that the long-term incidence of terror attacks is extremely marginal and doesn't justify such major expense as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, while those wars generated a lot of resistance locally, they don't appear to have generated any blowback inside the homeland. This suggests that Bin Laden's focus on the "far enemy" hasn't found any further adherents. (This may be changing in that ISIS has started to encourage sympathetic "lone wolf" attacks against hostile countries like the US and France, but that appears to be secondary to their recruitment campaigns, and it's not clear that they are organizing such attacks.)

  I would stress three points: (1) that the current and future incidence of terror attacks would go way down if the US wasn't intervening and otherwise supporting violence in the Middle East; (2) that continued US support for violence, including support for repressive measures by corrupt and reactionary regimes in the region, will build up a reservoir of ill will that will be increasingly difficult to defuse over time; and (3) the longer we engage in wars in the Middle East, the more Islamophobic our domestic population becomes, and that prejudice is likely to generate more jihadi recruitment and/or "lone wolf" incidents. So while I agree with "JD" that the actual incidence of domestic terror events doesn't justify the outsized response, I would also argue that the "war on terror" generates a lot more terror than would otherwise happen.

  This doesn't mean I'm against TSA security efforts (I can think of a half-dozen things about airlines that bother me worse), or that I object to the government keeping track of who's buying fertilizer or AK-47s (not that anyone's doing the latter). I do think some of the law enforcement efforts go too far. Like so much wartime hysteria in the nation's history, they are less intended to protect the public than to drive a wedge between the war agenda and people who might question it. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s to the PATRIOT Act in the wake of 9/11, war fever has repeatedly tarnished the democracy and freedom allegedly being fought for, often in ways that once peace returned would be looked back on with embarrassment. (The one exception, by the way, was the War of 1812, scrupulously managed by the one president who understood the constitution above all others, James Madison.)

• Mark Z Barabak: Republican voters turn their rage against party establishment: Front page article in Wichita Eagle this morning, but I can't find it on their website:

  After years of raging against President Obama, unhappy conservatives have a new target for their anger and disgust: the Republicans in Congress.

  The GOP seized control of the House in 2010 and four years later took the Senate. Yet even with those majorities, Republican lawmakers have failed to achieve such conservative priorities as rolling back Obamacare, their derisive name for the national health care law, or cracking down harder on illegal immigration.

  The controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline is no closer to being built -- indeed, it may soon be dead -- tough anti-abortion legislation has languished in the Senate, and a fiercely disputed nuclear deal with Iran seems virtually certain to take effect, despite near-unanimous opposition from Republicans in Congress.

  In short, as many see it, the promise of the 2010 tea party movement and its 2014 echo have been dashed on the marble steps of the Capitol.

  "People feel betrayed," said Greg Mueller, a longtime conservative activist and campaign strategist. "They feel like they keep working and fighting to elect Republicans to get us back to a limited-government approach to life, and all they get is more spending, more taxes and people who are afraid to fight liberal Democrats."

  What a bunch of conceited, whiny, self-important, ignorant assholes! In 2008, after nearly eight years of the most inept and corrupt Republican Administration in history, 69,498,516 Americans voted for change, for Barack Obama as president, 9.55 million more than voted for his Republican opponent, and they elected a heavily Democratic Congress with a supposedly "fillibuster-proof" Senate, and what did we get for all that effort? Not much. Then a few thousand bitter enders hold a few rallies, wave flags and spout Revolutionary War slogans, and the media goes crazy for them, and the Kochs write them checks, and all of a sudden they feel entitled to run the country their Party had just spent eight years driving to ruin. (Remember the bit about how Obama was running ruinous deficits? During the middle of a recession the Republicans created and were doing everything they could to extend?) And even after all that Tea Party enthusiasm, Obama was easily reelected in 2012 -- no longer promising change, just sanity relative to the parched earth obstructionism of the Republicans.

  I'm pretty sure no one on the right feels more disappointment in their elected partisan leaders than I do. Obama spent most of his presidency unwilling to even speak up for the promises he made in his 2008 campaign, much less to act to stand up for the people who voted for him (a big part of why so many didn't vote in 2010 -- turnout dropped from 129 to 82 million -- and 2014, handing Congress to the big money-backed Republican minority). But though I complain, I'm too used to losing to whine. My first political efforts, after all, opposed the Vietnam War. The rule of thumb is that politicians may appeal to the voters during a campaign, but once the ballots are counted they have to operate in a world dominated by moneyed (and other hidden) interests, a world of obstacles for anyone marginally on the left. Conservatives should rationally see such unelected power as their final bulwark against change, and indeed that's what happened to Obama. On the other hand, the whiners aren't rational. They expect their favored politicians to serve their every whim, no matter how dumb and debilitating: why not shut down the government in order to prevent women from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health care provider? Who needs Social Security checks anyway? And if it wasn't Planned Parenthood, it would be something else -- shutting down the government has become an annual ritual with them, anything "to get us back to a limited-government approach to life." (Anything, that is, but defunding the military, the government's most bloated and inefficient and, nonetheless, counterproductive bureaucracy.)

• Paul Krugman: Charlatans, Cranks, and Apparatchiks:

  The Jeb! tax plan confirms, if anyone had doubts, that the takeover of the Republican Party by charlatans and cranks is complete. This is what the supposedly thoughtful, wonkish candidate of the establishment can come up with? And notice that the ludicrous claim that most of the revenue effects of huge tax cuts would be offset by higher growth comes from economists who, like Jeb!, are very much establishment figures -- but who evidently find that the partisan requirement that they support voodoo outweighs any fear of damage to their professional reputations.

  While the intellectual implosion of the GOP is obvious, however, it's less obvious what is driving it. Or to be more specific, stories that explain why one set of crank ideas flourish don't seem to work well for other sets of crank ideas.

  Krugman examines two cases of crank economic ideas -- opposition to expansionary economic policy and claims that cutting taxes on the rich will grow the economy -- and finds their rationales are different, but doesn't go much beyond that. I think the former case is more cynical: Republicans only oppose expansionary monetary policy when Democrats are in office and might get credit for growing the economy; otherwise, well, Cheney said "deficits don't matter" and Nixon said "we're all Keynesians now." Sure, there's some residual Gold-buggery in the Ron Paul camp, but that's marginal.

  As for reducing taxes on the rich, that's a policy constant that has been served by every conceivable rationale -- Lafferism is only one such ploy for the exceptionally gullible. And while rank and file Republicans may not get excited about creating a more inequal society, they'll usually buy the notion that tax cuts should be matched by spending cuts, especially subsidies to "those people." But if Krugman is having trouble finding "a general theory of crankification," that's because he's looking at economics, not politics. Once Republicans decided that any argument that sounded remotely plausible could be used to support their favored policies, validity ceased to be one of their concerns. Then they found that by cultivating the ignorance and illogic of their followers they could greatly expand their crackpot arguments and, well, the rest is show biz.

• Middle East links: Seems like more war all the time. Perhaps unfair to blame all that on the region's number one arms supplier. Kind of like blaming junkies on pushers.

  • Yousef Munayyer: Gaza is already unlivable:

    The United Nations said on Sept. 1 that the Gaza Strip could become unlivable by 2020 without critical access to reconstruction and humanitarian supplies.

    For Gaza's beleaguered residents, none of this is surprising. Gaza is already uninhabitable and has been on a fast track to a complete collapse. The U.N. issued similar warnings three years ago, even before last summer's 50-day war, which left more than 2,200 Palestinians dead and countless others injured -- most of them civilians.

    "Three Israeli military operations in the past six years, in addition to eight years of economic blockade, have ravaged the already debilitated infrastructure of Gaza," the latest U.N. report said. "The most recent military operation compounded already dire socioeconomic conditions and accelerated de-development in the occupied Palestinian territory, a process by which development is not merely hindered but reversed."

    Actually, what's needed isn't humanitarian aid but a political agreement that splits Gaza free from the isolation and deprivation imposed by Israel (and, for that matter, Egypt's dictatorship).

  • Sara Yael Hirschhorn: Israeli Terrorists, Born in the USA: Did you ever wonder why so many of the illegal settlers in the West Bank, especially the ones most notorious for acts of violence, originally came from the United States? This piece doesn't delve very deeply into why, aside from mentioning the model of Meir Kahane, but I can think of several factors that might predispose Americans to seek out a situation where they can lord it over others with impunity. Israel is one such place. For a current example of such impunity, see Palestinians in Duma are angry that no one has been charged for murders, after 38 days.

    By the way, but I don't see much fundamental difference between these young Americans to go to Israel to join the settler movement, or for that matter to serve in the IDF, and those who go to Syria to fight for ISIS. Both derive from mistaken senses of identity. Both get to mistreat people and feel superior for doing so. Sure, the US government tolerates one case while pushing the other -- even when the other doesn't happen (see Adam Goldman: An American family saved their son from joining the Islamic State. Now he might go to prison.)

  • Nima Shirazi: Slaughtering the Truth and the False Choice of a War With Iran: Anne-Marie Slaughter supports the Iran Deal, for bad reasons, because she's a bad thinker:

    Five years after supporting the invasion of Iraq, Slaughter was annoyed by the "gotcha politics" of being held accountable for her bad judgment, grousing in The Huffington Post that "debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion."

    In 2011, after leaving the State Department, Slaughter lent her full-throated support to the NATO bombing campaign in Libya, extolling herself as a champion of humanitarianism and democracy and then hailing the operation as an unmitigated success. It's been anything but.

    A year later, she was calling for US allies to arm rebel forces against the Assad government in Syria, writing in The New York Times, "Foreign military intervention in Syria offers the best hope for curtailing a long, bloody and destabilizing civil war."

    In 2013, Slaughter openly lamented her support for the invasion of Iraq a decade earlier. "Looking back, it is hard to remember just how convinced many of us were that weapons of mass destruction would be found," she wrote in The New Republic. "Had I not believed that, I would never have countenanced any kind of intervention on purely humanitarian terms."

  • Nicola Abé: The Vanishing: Why Are Young Egyptian Activists Disappearing? Back around 1970 I read a book by Egyptian Marxist Anouar Abdel-Malek (1924-2012) called Egypt: Military Society which argued that the military in Egypt was the sometimes hidden/often not backbone power in the nation. I was reminded of this in 2011 when Mubarak was moved out of power in response to mass demonstrations, and shortly later when the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi was deposed by a military coup. Arguably, Morsi overshot his mandate and abused his power, but the same is true of the new dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

    More than four years after the Egyptian revolution, the government headed by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is cracking down on unwelcome journalists, former revolutionaries and, most of all, Islamists. In the name of fighting terror, laws are enacted that limit freedom of the press and freedom of expression. In some cases, government forces are breaking the country's laws, in what sometimes feels like a retaliation campaign against those who drove out former dictator Hosni Mubarak and believed in democracy.

    Young people are being detained -- on the street, at work and at home. They are interrogated without arrest warrants or access to an attorney, and their family members are kept in the dark about their whereabouts. There were occasional cases like these already under Mubarak, but since Interior Minister Magdy Abdul Ghaffar came into office in March, the police are disappearing scores of people, especially members and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the new regime collectively treats as terrorists. Human rights activists believe there are up to around 800 such cases in Egypt today.

  • Eric Schmitt/Ben Hubbard: US Revamping Rebel Force Fighting ISIS in Syria: The American decision to fight both Assad and ISIS (and possibly other anti-Assad and/or anti-ISIS forces) with hired local proxies continues to be plagued by . . . well, everything. It is one measure of the blind faith Americans put in armed force that they are stuck in this schizophrenic nightmare.

    The Pentagon effort to salvage its flailing training program in Turkey and Jordan comes as the world is fixated on the plight of thousands of refugees seeking safety in Europe from strife in the Middle East, including many fleeing violence of the Syrian civil war and oppression in areas under the control of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Officials in Washington and European capitals acknowledge that halting this mass migration requires a comprehensive international effort to bring peace and stability to areas that those refugees are now fleeing.

    The 54 Syrian fighters supplied by the Syrian opposition group Division 30 were the first group of rebels deployed under a $500 million train-and-equip program authorized by Congress last year. It is an overt program run by United States Special Forces, with help from other allied military trainers, and is separate from a parallel covert program run by the CIA.

    After a year of trying, however, the Pentagon is still struggling to find recruits to fight the Islamic State without also battling the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, their original adversary.

  • A Downward Spiral: The Saudi war in Yemen, where the Saudi attack on the local Houthi tribe has been joined by Qatar, UAE, Egypt, and (soon) Sudan, in one of the most naked examples of belligerent aggression the world has seen recently:

    The action certainly has the whiff of revenge. Onlookers have already been questioning what the coalition's campaign, now in its sixth month, hopes to achieve. It is unclear how much support Iran has given to the Houthis, which is one of the main justifications for the coalition's action. Quashing the Shia Houthis is nigh on impossible. Gulf officials and media talk bombastically of preparations to take back Sana'a from them and reinstall Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi as president (the Houthis drove him out of the country in March). But Yemen has long been treacherous territory for foreign invaders, and Gulf armies are relatively inexperienced.

    Since committing ground troops in August, the coalition has taken control of Aden, the southern port city, and is advancing on Taiz. But it is struggling in Maarib, the gateway to Sana'a, where the extra troops, backed by armoured vehicles and missile launchers, are said to be massing. The fighting will only get harder since the Houthis' remaining strongholds are in mountainous redoubts.

    The high toll exacted on civilians may be losing the coalition the support of allied fighters on the ground, a mixture of tribesmen, units of the fractured army and Islamist types including al-Qaeda fighters. "Everyone has now lost someone," says Mr Boucenine. He says civilians make up an increasing proportion of the dead, now approaching 5,000.

  • Amanda Marcotte: Conservatives' Freakout Over Iran Has Absolutely Nothing to Do With Iran: Picture is from the Trump-Cruz rally against the Iran Deal. I saw a bit of Trump talking there and it was the first time he really scared me.

    Obama's plan looks like a done deal, but now the clowns are spilling out, honking their noses and trying to get attention by screaming about how we're all going to die now. As Nick Corasanti of the New York Times reports, a veritable who's-who of unserious but self-important demagogues, led by known foreign policy experts Donald Trump and Sarah Palin, have descended on DC to impart their collective wisdom about diplomacy, which appears to amount to implying that the president's testicles aren't big enough.

    Ted Cruz in particular seems to think that this is his moment to prove to the doubters that he is a big tough guy who gets things done because he's tough and that's what tough guys do. He, along with other House conservatives, is leading a plan to derail the deal by harping on legal technicalities, with Rep. Peter Roskam fully admitting it's a "process argument."

    Now we have Rep. Louie Gohmert threatening to resign over all this. Clearly, Congress will be bereft of this leading luminary who graces this country with conspiracy theories about Jade Helm, how ISIS is being snuck in by Mexican drug dealers, and how God will destroy the country for legalizing same-sex marriage.

    In other words, two of the worst Republican traits of the past 20 years -- pointless obstructionism for the sole purpose of sticking it to the Democrats and mindless demagoguery about the nefarious Middle Eastern threat to convince voters of your manhood -- are joining together to create a massive, misshapen beast that represents everything that's gone wrong with politics in the 21st century.

  • "Jimmy Carter's cancer is God's punishment for his behavior toward Jews," says leading Israeli newspaper: Stuff like this make you think God's some kind of jerk, or maybe I just mean people who presume to speak for Him? Carter's negotiation of the 1979 peace treaty between Sadat and Begin was a great gift of peace for Israel, one that has lasted to this day, even though Begin reneged on the promise of "autonomy" for Palestinians, and three years later squandered the blessing of peace by invading Lebanon.

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