Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic makes a pretty good argument against voting for either Romney or Obama for president:
Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can’t bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, and they’ll nod along. Say that you’d never vote for a politician caught using the ‘n’-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can discern Mitt Romney’s flaws, which I’ve chronicled in the course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama.
Don’t they see that Obama’s transgressions are worse than any I’ve mentioned?
I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers.
That’s just the opening. It gets better and more specific from there.
At this point I’m leaning “No”.
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One thing I think is missing from this discussion is that Presidents typically have limited options. Candidates promise a lot of things on foreign policy, but once they get into office, they quickly realize that their grand ideas either won’t fly or won’t work the way they’d hoped.
With respect to terrorism, there simply aren’t a lot of options. President Obama chose drone strikes because that is about the only game in town. Pakistan won’t allow cross-border special ops raids, much less a large incursion of conventional forces. Covert agents on the ground have a limited effect because of the tribal nature of the people which makes recruiting very difficult. And you still need a way to eliminate the bad people.
Similar restrictions apply in a place like Yemen where the host government doesn’t want a lot of visible “boots on the ground” but is willing to tolerate drones along with assistance to the host government. In Somalia things are a bit more free so things like SoF raids and the conventional use of manned aircraft are all possible and have been used.
So what are any President’s options in these areas? They can do nothing, but that is politically unacceptable for reasons that should be obvious. Or they can use drones. There simply aren’t many other alternatives. We’ve already seen that Pakistan is not capable of policing it’s frontier areas. We already know that Yemen is incapable of the same. What else is there? Maybe we could start using suicide bombers?
It’s the only game in town if you believe that practicing counter-terrorism in Afghanistan and the FATA actually makes U. S. citizens and interests more secure than they would be if we didn’t practice counter-terrorism in Afghanistan and the FATA. I don’t think that case has been made and I don’t see them even trying to make. They’re just assuming it’s so, presumably on the tiger repellent theory.
If, on the other hand, you believe that practicing counter-terrorism, etc. is neutral with respect our security but politically necessary, it’s immoral. If you believe it’s counter-productive, it’s really immoral.
I think Friedersdorf sees them largely as equivalent immoral/evil with greater uncertainty surrounding Romney. Let me put it this way….Friedersdorf’s assesment for Romney is that he expects him to be as bad as Obama, but that there is a chance he’ll be worse, and a smaller chance he’ll be “better”. So to say he thinks voting for one candidate over the other is 2x as bad is not really fair to his position. He see’s both purusing disgusting policies he wants nothing to do with and he will do the one thing he can do (aside from killing Anakin) and that is voting for another candidate who has stated views much more similar to his on foreign policy…yeah that guy wont win, but at least he did what little he could.
Let me see….last time we got involved in something sneaky and questionable in Afghanistan (think the 1980s) we ended up with significant blow back that at least in part lead to 9/11.
Yeah, doing nothing is such a horrible idea.
How about we just stop killing people in other countries…often times people who aren’t terrorist?
I know, crazy fucking idea.
Reasonable people can disagree on that. I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer. The question I tried to get to, though, is “what are the alternatives?” Politically, doing nothing is a nonstarter for all the same reasons that a simple withdrawal from Afghanistan continues to be a non-starter (though the day is fast approaching when that will change). So, if not drones, and if not “nothing,” then what?
Probably true, but then my cynical opinion is that a moral foreign policy is not possible. What does this or any President believe? I have no idea.
As for what I think we should do, I would keep the drone strike option, but use it less frequently and with greater oversight. In short, I would make their use more intelligence-focused than kinetic focused.
Let me try to make my argument in my clumsy game theory mode. By the way, this came to me after I asked my 8 yr old if he had thought about the Presidential elections and who he supported. “Anybody but Obama.” I asked why, and to make a long story short, the Obamas, particularly Michelle, have made themselves the fact of school lunches in the public school system across the country. The food sucks because of them. You’ve heard it here first: there will be no second generation Obamas in the White House; the well has been poisoned.
Anyway, most people have a set of preferences (A,B,C,D . . .), which don’t entirely coincide with the choices offered by the two party system. Conor, like my son, is representing himself as being a single issue voter, which I describe here as “Not A.” (Icepick may be correct that Conor might have other preferences at work, but I’m confining myself to the four corners of the piece). In my mind, here are the rational order of preferences:
1. Romney. Its not clear what his stance would be on A, it could be better or worse. To some extent it can’t be worse, because inedible food cannot be made more inedible. Obama’s precedents cannot be completely retracted. However, _if_ Romney were to beat Obama, the after-election analysis should hopefully identify several issues that caused him to lose, such as the state of the economy, disaffection from his Left on war-related issues and loss of the critical public grade school vote in states that don’t require photo i.d.s. Future Democrats will be discouraged from such risks in the future and the value of Obama’s precedent on Democrats in the future will be lessened.
2. The Not A Candidate. (See below)
3. Gary Johnson. The problem with Johnson as a protest vehicle is that he is clearly a Republican, running a protest on a few issues outside of Republican orthodoxy. His votes send virtually no message to Obama or the Democratic Party, and they send a variety of competing messages to the Republican Party. If there was a more specific “Not A” candidate, running exclusively on the single issues that Connor or my son care about, the protest would be more effective. The Free Soil party sent the message to the Republicans that if you adopt Free Soil, you can win the 1860 election.
4. Obama. Obama’s re-election will indicate support for his policies, particularly on issues relating to handling the war, since the Congress has little input. He’s probably just as likely to increase policy A in his remaining four years.
Again, I don’t think this analysis works for most voters, just strong single-issue voters. Most people do rationally engage in a series of trade-offs or prioritizations. And it might make sense for Republican reformers to vote for Johnson for other reasons.
There is no pressure from the anti-war/civil libertarian left. There’s just a few individuals like Conor F. and Glenn G. that almost certainly live in jurisdictions where their vote doesn’t count anyway. Witness that complete lack of concern with anything Conor F. mentions in his piece. It isn’t like he’s breaking new ground on anything other than how he intends to vote.
Or look at the story Mataconis (at OPB) has up about wiretap usage exploding under Obama. When this stuff came to light under Bush it was a crime against humanity and Michael Reynolds was wondering if Bush was about to overthrow the government. Now? The best any of the lefties can muster is “Well, we’ll need to pressure him after the election.” Yeah, that’ll work.
They don’t give a shit about this because they’re in power.
OTB, not OPB. I need a new copy editor.
Greenwald is principled. I think we’ve got to give him that. IMO that’s the difference here. I believe that we should act in accordance with principles. Many people clearly do not. This ties in with a post that I’ve been thinking about for some time and I may get to it now.
Yeah, I haven’t always been a Greenwald fan, but he has moved up considerably in my estimation (about which I’m sure he’s thrilled!) by opposing his own when they step out of line with their stated principles*. He’s not part of the “B+ ’cause he’s one of us” crowd.
* Or rather their stated principles when out of power.
This ties in with a post that I’ve been thinking about for some time and I may get to it now.
Let me guess, it will be structured along the lines of “How I learned to stop worrying and love the ________, just so long as MY guys are in power.”
Sorry, I wasn’t thinking in that last post. You don’t do satire.
I am with Andy here. The consensus opinion among both parties supports drone use. If Gary Johnson is elected, we will have drone attacks. What should be questioned is our overall strategy in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. As long as they keep sending an occasional bomber, we will continue CT operations. Like Andy, I would prefer that this be handled as an intelligence/policing issue. Since we dont have free access to the area, drones will remain on the table.
Steve
If I could be anything in the world, it would be a writer of humor. Robert Benchley is one of my idols. Thurber. Twain. Will Rogers. Thorne Smith (if you like light fantasy). I think that Dave Barry is the most fortunate man in the world.
Although I’m funny in real life (more Clifton Webb than Robert Benchley, unfortunately), writing humor is just not one of my gifts.
Obama ran for POTUS criticizing Bush and McCain for not being aggressive on targeted killing in Pakistan. Remember Obama’s line: “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow Bin Laden to the Gates of Hell, but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.” I think Bush/McCain were more concerned about maintaining, wherever possible, the Westphalian concepts of borders as promoting international security. Obama changed the war in Afghanistan to AfPak, and converted the border regions into a remotely controlled police state.
Arguably we should not be surprised. I am though, I thought some of the language was simply political, a means of needling Republicans for failing to capture Bin Laden. But Obama also indicated that he would work with Pakistan and give them the opportunity to do the right thing. I assumed this meant diplomatic channels will be exhausted first to see how far Obama could push Pakistan, but the escalation of attacks on Pakistan were reported within days of Inauguration. Perhaps the policy switch was flicked by Obama; perhaps the Pentagon saw an opportunity.
And the massive increase in surveillance, in my view, is the result of a shift in WOT policy from war and nation building to containment and policing. You don’t need to be spying on American citizens when your at war in Iraq; you do need to do so when your focus is on terrorists as criminal organizations, whose associations need to be identified, disrupted and terminated.
For me one of the most distressing moments of the last several years came when, in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, various individuals in the Obama Administration spoke of the action in terms suggesting that it was a form of law enforcement. The phrase “brought to justice” comes to mind.
I can understand breaking into an enemy leader’s home and killing him or her in war. But that’s not law enforcement, it’s war. If this is what the proponents of treating the War on Terror as law enforcement meant, I think we should all be worried.
@Dave- I think we need to move our thinking into the 21st century. In the ideal, we arrest the bad guy, cuff him, read him his rights and have a trial. That has worked well for years when crime was largely a local problem. People robbing stores and banks. It changed a bit when organized crime came along, so we got national crime fighting abilities (FBI). Now, we have criminals who live continents away, who have relatively easy access to large force multipliers. The bad guys have altered their methods. We need to change ours.
How would you suggest we deal with groups that can sit in another country and attack us with total immunity from their local govt? I know this is not easy, and we need to be wary of creating more enemies than we eliminate (see Kilcullen’s work), but is inaction the solution?
“I can understand breaking into an enemy leader’s home and killing him or her in war. But that’s not law enforcement, it’s war.”
How much personal risk do you expect our troops to take in these situations? I think we should give them a lot of slack.
Steve
Heh, now that I agree with. I was asking my son about this as well. You guys probably know he is a swimmr, a club swimmer (i.e. he swims pretty much all year…for 6 days a week for about 2 hours a day) and his caloric needs are way above normal. But he eats his entire lunch and has developed an interesting strategy with his friends when they give him part of their lunch they don’t like: he eats that first. That way if they ask for it back a few minutes later, too late.
Not sure what impact it will have on the election, but who knows. Sometimes weird things have oddball effects.
Then all the candidates are immoral an evil and voting for any of them is also, immoral and evil because you are tacitly giving your approval for immoral and evil policies.
Just thought I’d point out the logical conclusion.
Why do you dismiss this so blithely? Maybe it is, at least given some time. If the U.S. didn’t get involved in various regions around the world and dragged into that quagmire the Middle East would Osama Bin Laden have targeted the U.S.?
We spend vast amounts of resources in these little military adventures and what do we get for it? A stable world? Low oil prices? Safety?
Let me see….I’d say, no, no and no.
So seriously, why do we do it? What is the end result we are pursuing and can we achieve it with the methods we have selected so far? Start by answering that. If you can’t, the STFU and STFD.
steve:
I’ll limit my reactions to your comment to just two. First, as an exercise sit back and think for a while about the critical success factors that made the 9/11 attacks possible. By that I mean the smallest number of distinct factors that enabled the terrorists to execute a successful attack.
If Al Qaeda’s leadership, defined as a specific, relatively small (tens or hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands) group of individuals, is one of the critical success factors, then eliminating that leadership should drastically reduce the likelihood of another successful terrorist attack. If not, then going after Al Qaeda’s leadership, while emotionally satisfying or even politically necessary, doesn’t do much about preventing the next terrorist attack.
I think it’s pretty obvious Al Qaeda’s leadership wasn’t one of the critical success factors. YMMV but if you think otherwise you might want to submit some evidence. The leadership as of 2001 hasn’t had operational control for a decade. I think they’re pretty irrelevant.
Second, I think that nations should make war against nations, not individuals. Basic Westphalianism. Further, I think that one of the critical success factors is national sponsorship. We have nations we should have gone to war against. We just don’t like the implications.
steve, I think we need to move back towards the “self defense” justification that the U.S. was operating under before 9/11. That means targeting killing should be proportional and discriminatory in the targeting, it can be preemptive to known or continuing threats. Unfortunately, we appear to have moved from considering whether Bin Laden could be safely targeted, to whether a driver should be killed. But the driver might be number 21 in al Qaeda? I don’t think that can be justified as self defense. It also doesn’t mean assuming that all military age men in a strike zone are combatants; that’s not discrimination.
We appear to be trying to maintain the convenient fiction that the U.S. is operating under the AUMF against those who engaged in 9/11 or supported it. We now have 17-yr old jihadists being pursued, who were of the age of reason when 9/11 occurred. Yet we connect the 17-yr old by association to Bin Laden. In part this looks like a law enforcement analysis. Criminal law attaches legal responsibility to those who join a criminal conspiracy based upon shared design and some positive act in furtherance of the conspiracy, so the car driver is treated as responsible for an armed bank robbery as the stick-up man, as would be the person who provides a meeting place or money to buy supplies.
I obviously don’t have access to the intel the POTUS has, but I think like most people, the numbers of attacks seem excessive and the risk assessment is too far out of whack.
We have nations we should have gone to war against. We just don’t like the implications.
What do you me “WE”, Paleface? I was completely in favor of holding the House of Saud responsible after 9/11. But it helps to have friends in high places, so not only was that not an option, that wasn’t even a thought exercise.
As for critical success factors, I haven’t been worried about hijackers crashing passenger jets into buildings since 9/11. Not passenger jets full of Americans, anyway. The 1970s taught one lesson on how to behave as a hostage in that situation, the 2000s have taught another lesson entirely. I’ve been much more worried about letting airliners from countries like Egypt fly into our airspace. No one would know it was a hijacking if the flight crew were the ones that did it. Which gets us to just how inadequate our security measures are, but what the Hell, at least they make everyone take off their shows and take pictures of our naughty bits….
Dave- I will disagree on the importance of AQ leaders. I think they were quite important in the 9/11 attack. After that, they became less important. Like many corporate brands, they had their brief moment in the sun, but could not sustain. I think it was worthwhile to target that leadership when they were making that decision in real time. There was no way to predict their lack of relevance in the future.
Given that, I supported invading Afghanistan. There was substantial evidence that the govt of Afghanistan aided and abetted the efforts of AQ. What I disagree with is most of what happened after that.
I would note that you have failed to articulate a preferred response to what we now face, compared with law enforcement issues in the past.
@PD- I am mostly in agreement I think. I dont see the value in continuing to try to kill large amounts of Taliban. They are mostly focused on Afghanistan, not the US. What we do need to decide, is if we want to do anything in response to foreign nationals who attack us from places where we are unable to send police/troops. We cant afford to invade every country where somebody is based and attacking us. We dont know how to nation build. I think Steve V’s idea that we should just bend over and take it is also wrong. I think limited, targeted responses, including drones and killing, should be our primary options. Couple this with a strong intel effort to catch those entering the US.
Steve
I think that such actual threat from Islamist terrorism as exists in this country should have been and should be addressed by significantly more rigorous oversight of travel to and within the United States by non-citizens.
Couple this with a strong intel effort to catch those entering the US.
In all seriousness, is there any evidence that we’re better at intel than we are nation building?
We’re not bad national builders; there are just bad nations to build.
We’re not bad national builders; there are just bad nations to build.
Well, it helps to follow a decent blue print. For example, take a nation-state that is already a civilized nation-state, bomb it back to the stone age, kill a significant fraction of the population to get the point across that you didn’t approve of whatever the Hell it was you didn’t approve of, and go from there. It helps if the people in question have a strong work-ethic and a sense of cultural cohesion.
In other words, not Afghanistan. Pretty much not any -stan. Pretty much no Third World country period.
WTF did I say that. I’m saying that your preference for running around killing people around the world isn’t helping. Maybe if you stopped wanting to kill people and started voting in that manner our security position might, eventually, improve. It doesn’t mean we just sit on our asses and let them shoot us. Take all those resources we fuck away killing people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere and work on improving our intelligence operations to stop them from getting to us.
Seriously, you guys just seem to love killing people…well through proxies so you can claim no responsibility.
There you go again thinking government is something that does its job well.
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