The editors of Bloomberg, in reaction to President Obama’s bomb strikes against ISIS, the “Islamic State”, in Iraq, write that he’s doing the right thing for the wrong reasons:
President Barack Obama’s decision to launch airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq was correct — though not for the reasons he gave. This jihadi movement is a major threat to the U.S. and its interests in the Middle East. That’s what justifies use of force against it.
Announcing the action, Obama stressed his determination to keep the U.S. out of a new war, and said the airstrikes were an exception to his policy of non-involvement. He said the threat of genocide against the Yazidi people and the risk to U.S. personnel stationed in the Kurdish capital Erbil had forced his hand.
Those were reasons to act but not the main reason. Caution in the use of force is always wise, and Obama is certainly right that Americans don’t want to fight another war in the Middle East — but let there be no illusions about the larger danger posed by Islamic State.
If we are to wage war against all enemies, it might be prudent to make a prioritized list.
Rather than the right thing being done for the wrong reasons I think that bomb strikes against the Islamic State are the wrong thing for the right reasons. Wanting to save Iraqi Christians, Yezidi, and, indeed, all Iraqis from the tender mercies of the Islamic State is benign. Taking actions that won’t protect them, might kill them, and isn’t supplemented by anything other than the hope that the government of Iraq will get its act together is, well, less benign.
Napoleon once said if you start to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you set out to save Iraqis fleeing the Islamic State, do it. Don’t impose limits, restrictions, and caveats that will prevent you from achieving that objective. I don’t think that Americans support the measures that would be necessary to accomplish the objective. We shouldn’t pretend that they do.
Presumably because I didn’t demand a coffee mug or tote from them, last year one or another of the institutions I contribute to bestowed on me a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. I’ve glanced at the issues as they arrived in the mail; I haven’t read any of them.
The most recent issue had a feature on the “25 best characters on television” which piqued my interest. It’s a mark of how out-of-touch I am with modern-day television that I only recognized one of the characters/actors in their list but I agreed wholeheartedly with it: the delightfully-named Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in BBC’s Sherlock.
Many actors play classic roles but very few transform the roles or come to own them.
The classic Conan Doyle character Sherlock Holmes has been played by dozens of actors over the years on stage, radio, films, and on television, from William Gillette right up to the present. Only a few have owned the character. That’s why, for example, for a whole generation or more other actors could play Sherlock Holmes but they would always be compared, usually unfavorably, with Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes. No one on either side of the pond could imagine anyone else playing Holmes.
That is until Jeremy Brett. Brett’s nervy, intense Holmes, so different from Rathbone’s intrepid man of action, transformed the role.
I think I may have written favorably of Sherlock in the past. How when his John Watson introduced himself as “an army doctor returned from Afghanistan” the hairs on the back of my neck literally stood on end. It resonated. I got it.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s quirky, mysterious, almost mystical Holmes has once again transformed that classic character and a new actor now owns the role.
The Obama administration should seriously consider investing in better back-up systems, as emails requested by Congressional Republicans keep disappearing into the cyber abyss.After admitting to losing emails key to a congressional investigation of the Internal Revenue Service as well as a separate batch of emails at the Environmental Protection Agency, the administration said Thursday that some Obamacare emails also “might not be able to be retrievable.â€That’s what Health and Human Services officials told lawmakers in a letter sent on Thursday. The emails were requested by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), who has been leading a spate of congressional investigations into IRS targeting of conservative groups as well as into Obamacare’s rocky rollout.
It is absolutely possible that what we are seeing here and on the part of the IRS officials are cover-ups without any underlying crimes. That’s characteristic of what’s called a Laager mentality. Wouldn’t be surprising under the circumstances.
Two summers ago a home invasion by gang members on the city’s South Side went wrong when one of the robbers shot another one in the back of the head, according to Chicago police. Sixteen-year-old Douglas Bufford was killed, and 19-year-old Jermalle Brown was charged with first-degree murder. His trial begins on Aug. 15, and it may attract more attention than usual in a city plagued by violent crime, just as his arrest did. Why? Because at the time of the shooting, Douglas Bufford and Jermalle Brown were also on the Illinois state payroll, earning $8.50 an hour to hand out antiviolence pamphlets.
Remember: when you pay a thug not to hurt you or destroy your property, it’s extortion. When you pay a thug to distribute pamphlets, it’s an antiviolence program.
More gallows humor:
Down the grant chain, there was little more accountability. Benton Cook, who led two NRI programs, to the tune of $4.15 million, for the Chicago Area Project, had a felony record for writing bad checks in Tennessee, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He was paid $146,000 over two years as a program coordinator at the Chicago Area Project—a social-services organization for preventing juvenile delinquency that was selected as a recipient of NRI funds despite owing the state more than $200,000 for a failed summer-jobs program in 2008.
Other NRI expenses included hiring a petting zoo and ponies for an event and a $1,000 golf outing, according to the state audit report. One organization used NRI funds to pay back taxes from four years earlier, the investigators found. Work programs—including the one that hired Jermalle Brown and Douglas Bufford—paid young people to distribute antiviolence pamphlets promoting, among other activities, striving for “inner peace” and attending yoga classes.
Project Hope, another recipient of NRI funds, was supposed to help young ex-inmates avoid recidivism. But the Sun-Times found that the nonprofit was operating out of a day-care center in a suburb of Chicago other than the community the grant was supposed to serve. Nor could the organization show what it had done with its $15,770 grant, according to the paper.
Of course, the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative’s $54.5 million does come from tax revenues but it’s chump change. You’ve got to wonder about the untold (and unaudited) billions that are flowing from the pockets of Illinois citizens into who knows whose pockets.
I’ve told this anecdote often enough but it bears repeating. When I was in college I had a year-long argument with my professor of American Diplomatic History about whether the United States had a foreign policy or not. He said it didn’t; I said it did.
I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it succinctly then but I do now. U. S. foreign policy, unlike that of many other countries, is an emergent phenomenon arrived at through the individual decisions of presidents, American politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and American consumers. We have a foreign policy. It’s just not a top-down policy.
To whatever extent we have a foreign policy one of its components is to keep the governments of neighboring countries weak. Our pilot project for that was Mexico and even the most generous reading of the interrelationship between our two countries reveals how hard we’ve worked on that project over the years.
We are now extending that policy throughout the world, something understandable in a world in which technology has brought nearly every country in the world closer in practice than Mexico was to us 50 years ago. We want weak governments everywhere. Except for here, of course.
Remember that when you read about the collapse of the Westphalian system. It didn’t jump. It’s being pushed and we’re the main pushers.
And just for reference we don’t make war with the Mafia. We don’t enter into negotiations or declare truces with them. There’s a real danger in starting to treat NGOs the way we would states.
A resest on the personal income tax system with fewer, lower deductions, i.e. “loopholes”, and lower marginal rates.
Bringing the corporate income tax into line with prevailing international practices.
Streamlining the regulatory system.
Putting the Federal Reserve on a rules-based regime.
His proposals remind me strongly of the column I wrote about a couple of days ago. You’d think his proposals were commonsensical and would attract bipartisan support but, alas, no.
As a group they are proposals that might attract Republican support, indeed might even be a Republican wish-list, but would be castigated by many Democrats as helping the rich, corporations, unleashing poisons on the American people, and snake oil.
We are long overdue for an overhaul of our personal income tax system. Tax systems are like ships. They leave the boatyard bright, shiny, and slick but after many years are covered with barnacles that slow progress to a crawl. You would think that corporate “inversions” would spur action. I mean action other than insisting on loyalty oaths as, for example, getting into line with the corporate tax laws of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany just to name a few.
I have been proposing simplification of our regulatory system for decades. Federal regulations alone run to nearly a quarter of a million pages while state and local regulations contribute probably ten times as many. The upshot of that is that nobody understands our system of regulations. Asserting that simplification is impossible or undesireable is absurd on its face.
And, of course, with a rules-based regime there would be little need for a Federal Reserve board. I can hear the howls of protest from here.
PRESIDENT OBAMA was right to order military action to prevent a potential genocide in northern Iraq and to stop forces of the al-Qaeda-derived Islamic State from advancing on Baghdad or the Kurdish capital of Irbil.
but criticize his lack of a coherent strategy for the Middle East:
However, the steps the president authorized on Thursday amount to more of his administration’s half-measures, narrowly tailored to this week’s emergency and unconnected to any coherent strategy to address the conflagration spreading across the Middle East.
I don’t think they’re looking at the big picture. The president has a coherent strategy it’s just not a foreign policy strategy. It’s a political strategy.
The president is under intense political pressure from some quarters to do something. Bomb strikes against ISIS are something. He’s under equally intense political pressure not to do anything that might be effective, e.g. sending troops, and that pressure is coming from among others his political base.
Under the circumstances ineffectual bombing is probably his best political strategy.
Ilya Somin critiques the legal justifications for President Obama’s use of force against ISIS in Iraq:
US airstrikes ISIS in Iraq have now begun. There may well be good moral and strategic rationales for the president’s action. But there are still serious questions about his legal authority to order it. There are several possible legal justifications for the airstrikes. But none can justify more than very limited military action without additional congressional authorization.
The Obama administration has not yet put forward an official legal rationale for its actions. Cornell professor Sarah Kreps predicts that it will probably rely on the president’s inherent powers as commander in chief of the armed forces under Article II of the Constitution. If it is adopted, this theory is vulnerable to the objections I made in my last post. The commander-in-chief Clause makes the president the highest ranking general and admiral, but does not give him the power to initiate war without congressional authorization.
Perhaps the president would not need congressional authorization if all he seeks to do is protect US personnel already in Iraq from attack. But The President’s speech last night clearly indicates that he intends to go beyond this, as he also emphasized the need to prevent ISIS’ attempted genocide of the Yazidi minority. Michael Ramsey, a leading academic expert on constitutional war powers, reaches a similar conclusion (see here and here).
As I noted in my earlier post, congressional authorization might not be required for very small-scale airstrikes that are not extensive enough to qualify as a war. So far, I don’t think that threshold has yet been crossed. But there is a real chance it will be soon.
The whole post is worth reading. Reader’s Digest version: as I said in my previous post, the president is not on particularly solid legal ground here.
Although I frequently disagree with Pat Lang’s prescriptions since I respect his opinion so deeply I always take his analysis of situations in the Middle East seriously. Here’s Col. Lang’s prescription for Iraq:
An insurgent force that can; wage propaganda war, has lots of money, a coherent ideology and the ability to organize and operate armored kampfgruppen (battle groups) is a very dangerous opponent. IMO that force potentially threatens the state system throughout the Sunni Middle East and is a menace that must be halted.
To build an effective local coalition of forces against IS (a concert of the Middle East?) one must stop trying to unseat the existing governments. They are the only possible basis for such a coalition; Iran, Turkey, whatever government exists in Iraq, Jordan, Syria (Bashar), Egypt, Kuwait (for the basing), Saudi Arabia (for the money and basing), Qatar (for the basing). Unfortunately, to bring these forces together, Obama’s government would have to acknowledge the folly of its college bull session foreign policy over the last six years.
I think I’d want to add at least one additional woman to Virginia Postrel’s list of women who “helped to define by their example what it meant to be a ‘modern woman'” and it’s someone who might surprise you: Ethel Barrymore.
Most of us who know who she was remember Ethel Barrymore, sister of John and Lionel, as a regal dowager in movies of the 1940s like The Farmer’s Daughter, The Paradine Case, and (a favorite of mine) Portrait of Jennie. However, forty years before when she was the toast of Broadway (pictured at left) a phrase was coined to describe her: glamor girl. She was the original glamor girl. For that reason alone she’s worth a mention.
