Now that the House has voted in favor of arming the Syrian rebels:

The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday afternoon to greenlight President Obama’s controversial proposal to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in effort to defeat the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Lawmakers approved the amendment by a 273-156 vote after six hours of debate. The amendment, which includes no new money to pay for the operation, was then incorporated into a larger spending bill that will fund the U.S. government through Dec. 11 and avoid a partial government shutdown.

“As we continue to take targeted military action against ISIL terrorist targets, today’s vote is another step closer to having the authorization to train and equip vetted elements of the moderate Syrian opposition so they can defend themselves against, and ultimately push back on, ISIL forces in Syria, while creating the conditions for the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all,” Obama said in a statement Wednesday evening. ISIL is an another acronym for the terror group.

Let’s consider a couple of questions. First, how will the Senate vote?

Will the Senate:

1. Vote in favor
2. Vote against
3. Not vote on it

My prediction is that the Senate will narrowly approve the measure. Most or all Republicans will vote in favor of the funding the rebels, Democratic senators in Red states will vote in favor or funding the rebels, the Democratic Senate leadership will vote in favor of supporting the rebels, and most other Democrats will oppose it.

Next question. A year from now what will have happened?

1. Nothing much. Things in Syria and Iraq will look much as they do now.
2. We will have destroyed ISIS/ISIL
3. We will have ground troops fighting ISIS/ISIL because the objective of destroying it can’t be realized otherwise.
4. ISIS/ISIL will hold Baghdad
5. The objective in arming the Syrian rebels and/or bombing ISIS/ISIL will have been redefined to approximate conditions on the ground more closely
6. Something else (specify)

I think that nothing much will be different but there’s a 1:3 chance that ISIS/ISIL will have taken Baghdad.

I can’t wait until I’m at liberty to tell you about the next project I may be involved with. All I will say is “Be careful what you wish for.”

Before it slipped down the memory hole, I wanted to mention one aspect of my visit to Old Blighty, now sadly ended. The last time I had been in the UK was fifteen years ago. Then as had been the case in my several previous visits I was impressed by the observation that every visit to the restroom was like a visit to a plumbing museum. Not only were the fixtures old their variety was incredible. I am convinced I didn’t see any two the same. I was also convinced that being a plumber in the United Kingdom must have required at least a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the complexity of interconnecting so many different systems.

No more. On this visit every fixture was remarkably the same. My speculation is that it was a consequence of an attempt at becoming more “green”. Low flow shower heads, toilets, and so on.

I also found the many signs, billboards, etc. proclaiming the naturalness or low resource utilization of the premises a marked difference from my previous experience.

As I looked out over the headlines this morning, on Ebola (likely to become endemic in West Africa now), ISIS (we’re going to oppose them with a limited strategy), and Ukraine (still unclear why we’re supporting the government there), I notice that each of these had something in common: they are only threats to us as a consequence of policy. In each instance there is a strained case for our involvement.

The best case is with respect to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. There are humanitarian reasons we should be involved there but even those are conditional. We should only be involved insofar and to the degree that we can actually help there.

I understand the policies at stake but it’s not clear to me that the risks and rewards of the policies are being distributed equally. It seems to me that increasingly we’re all bearing the risks while the policies only benefit a relative few.

This statement should fill us with foreboding:

Years of increasingly choking smog have sparked public anger and even led to protests. In 2013, a government survey of 74 Chinese cities found that all had pollution levels that exceeded levels the World Health Organization deems safe.

“We will resolutely declare war against pollution as we declared war against poverty,” Premier Li Keqiang said in March. The plan calls for the closure of old and dirty steel, cement, and coal plants: An estimated 1,725 small-scale dirty coal plants are expected to be shuttered. The government also declared it would spend $275 billion in the next three years to reduce pollution.

According to the World Bank more than half of China’s people live on $4 or less per day. A quarter live on $2 or less per day. 10% live on $1.25 or less per day. And that’s after 35 years of modernizing their economy.

Here’s the kernel of John Kass’s acerbic Chicago Tribune column on President Obama’s announcement of his intention to move against ISIS:

The president has lived all his political life on rhetorical tricks, political theater and magic. Remember, he was even applauded for telling us that he sometimes felt as if he was the empty vessel of our dreams.

All of this was made possible by another trait he learned years ago while serving his apprenticeship with the Democratic Party bosses from Chicago: avoiding direct confrontation.

That’s not leadership training. That’s political survival training. Facing the Islamic State, and trying to shore up a crumbling, tiny coalition to fight them, is different.

I think he goes too far. It isn’t that the president’s thinking is muddled. It’s that he can only lose by clarity. If he actually lays out clearly what he thinks should be done, some group or other is bound to be bitterly opposed to it.

However, that is the job.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my grandfather made his living doing dialect humor. He and his vaudeville partner did an act portraying an Irishman and a “Dutchman”, i.e. German. Oddly, my grandfather who self-identified as Irish, played the Dutchman.

There’s an old wisecrack, done in dialect, of unknown provenance: “Too soon ve get oldt, too late schmardt.” I think that’s certainly the case in this Rolling Stone article on the challenge that China presents to any attempt at reducing the world’s output of carbon:

The blunt truth is that what China decides to do in the next decade will likely determine whether or not mankind can halt – or at least ameliorate – global warming. The view among a number of prominent climate scientists is that if China’s emissions peak around 2025, we may – just barely – have a shot at stabilizing the climate before all hell breaks loose. But the Chinese have resisted international pressure to curb their emissions. For years, they have used the argument that they are poor, the West is rich, and that the high levels of carbon in the atmosphere were caused by America’s and Europe’s 200-year-long fossil­fuel binge. Climate change is your problem, they argued – you deal with it. But that logic doesn’t hold anymore. China is set to become the largest economy in the world this year, and in 2006, it passed the U.S. as the planet’s largest carbon polluter. China now dumps 10 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That number is expected to grow to 15 billion tons by 2030, dwarfing the pollution of the rest of the world. If that happens, then the chances that the world will cut carbon pollution quickly enough to avert dangerous climate change is, according to Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K., “virtually zero.”

The one question I have about this article is how in the heck can you write an article about China and carbon production without mentioning that China has been adding 100 new 6 MW coal-fired power plants for the last decade? Just for comparison, on an annual basis the U. S. doesn’t add any. Maybe it’s there and I missed it. If so, it’s buried pretty well.

Ignore whether we should worry about carbon production. Just ignore it for the sake of argument. Can you write anything resembling a balanced article without mentioning the rate at which China’s production is increasing? Or its investment in infrastructure supporting that production?

It seems to me that anybody who argues against Thomas Piketty’s views of capital and income inequality will inevitably be dismissed as opposing a tax on wealth for self-serving reasons.

James Taranto offers another example of the president engaging in something that’s a bad habit of his, musing out loud:

He’s a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, a better political director than his political director, and to hear President Obama tell it–or, to be precise, to hear the New York Times retell others’ retelling of Obama’s telling it–he’s a better terrorist than the terrorists:

If he had been “an adviser to ISIS,” Mr. Obama added, he would not have killed the hostages but released them and pinned notes on their chests saying, “Stay out of here; this is none of your business.” Such a move, he speculated, might have undercut support for military intervention.

Perhaps the president wishes he had pinned such a note to the chests of the journalists with whom he purportedly shared this brainstorm last Wednesday afternoon. “Although three New York Times columnists and an editorial writer were among those invited,” the Times reports, “this account is drawn from people unaffiliated with The Times, some of whom insisted on anonymity because they were not supposed to share details of the conversations.” The Times report doesn’t name any of the attendees, but the Puffington Host’s Michael Calderone does.

As comical as it is for the president of the United States to imagine himself giving political advice to a terrorist army, Obama’s musings are also revealing. He imputes to the Islamic State the objective of forestalling U.S. military intervention. It understates matters considerably to observe that there is no obvious reason to suppose that is so.

For me, musing is fine. It’s not a good practice for the president of the United States.

However, I do think that the incident is revealing but not in the way in which Mr. Taranto suggests. Why do people think that the audience for the beheading of Americans and a Brit by ISIS is the United States or Britain? I think they were just handy Westerners. I think the audience for these actions is Muslims in the Middle East.

ISIS is portraying itself as the “strong horse” and the legitimate carrier of the banner of Islam for all Muslims, with the right to make demands on all Muslims. It’s a specific challenge to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and any other notionally Muslim country that won’t march to its banner but particularly Arab Sunni Muslim countries. It’s not about us at all.

Update

After noting the psychological impact the beheadings have wrought on Western audiences, Pat Lang remarks:

Secondly, these are mightily potent weapons in the struggle for control of the collective Sunni mind. The gesture of defiance explicit in the deeds appeals greatly to people who seek an absolutist answer to the riddle of existence. Fighters and money seem to be joining the cause and the horror of IS actions contributes to that achievement.

In my view that’s the primary purpose of the actions. They’re a recruiting tool.