This is a good opportunity to put down some markers on what’s going on in Iraq.

1. There is no ready replacement for Maliki.
2. Maliki is working from a very familiar Middle Eastern playbook and one that should be expected from any leader operating in a tribal society who maintains his power by doling out favors.
3. Consequently, any substitute for Maliki won’t do anything much different.
4. ISIS doesn’t negotiate. They might delay but they won’t negotiate.
5. They’ve been more effective at governing in Syria than has been suggested in the American media. They’ll probably do the same things in Iraq as they have in Syria.

I strongly suspect that Ruth Marcus is misreading President Obama’s misreading of history:

On foreign policy, the signal episode of Obama’s overlearning the lessons of history is . . . pretty much the entirety of his foreign policy. It has been a reaction, understandable enough, to the adventurism of George W. Bush, primarily the ill-advised, ill-fated venture in Iraq.

Bush promised humility yet overreached; Obama vowed realism and yet underplayed the United States’ essential hand in world affairs. Hence the administration’s reluctance to intervene in Libya, the costly dillydallying over whether and how to help the rebels in Syria, the failure to push hard enough for a status of forces agreement that would have allowed U.S. troops to remain in Iraq.

The administration’s instinct to retreat and ignore festering problems has helped contribute to the cataclysmic result now playing out in Iraq. Yes, the original, far graver, sin was the decision to invade. The responsibility of the incumbent president is to deal with the mistakes he inherits.

I don’t think that the president has “overlearned” anything. He’s a specialist. I think his interest is limited to political history.

However important political history is, there is other history and I don’t think that President Obama believes that its lessons apply to him.

I’m a bit surprised by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s New York Times op-ed. In it she urges the president not only to use military force in Iraq against the ISIS terrorists but to expand hat use into Syria:

President Obama should be asking the same question in Iraq and Syria. What course of action will be best, in the short and the long term, for the Iraqi and Syrian people? What course of action will be most likely to stop the violence and misery they experience on a daily basis? What course of action will give them the best chance of peace, prosperity and a decent government?

The answer to those questions may well involve the use of force on a limited but immediate basis, in both countries. Enough force to remind all parties that we can, from the air, see and retaliate against not only Al Qaeda members, whom our drones track for months, but also any individuals guilty of mass atrocities and crimes against humanity. Enough force to compel governments and rebels alike to the negotiating table. And enough force to create a breathing space in which decent leaders can begin to consolidate power.

Here is the part that puzzles me:

This is not merely a humanitarian calculation. It is a strategic calculation. One that, if the president had been prepared to make it two years ago, could have stopped the carnage spreading today in Syria and in Iraq.

I don’t know that anyone has been urging action against both the Assad regime and the rebels. My recollection is that they’ve been urging us to support “moderate rebels” against the regime as though the various groups were completely discrete and there were a litmus test for distinguishing between the moderates and immoderates.

On the other hand if our main priority had been preventing the rise of radical Islamist militants like ISIS we’d’ve supported the Assad regime.

Update

As is not entirely surprising, the editors of the New York Times sound a similar note:

If Mr. Obama decides to take military action, he must make it clear that it would not be done to support Mr. Maliki’s government, but to disrupt the militants’ momentum while the Iraqi Army regroups.

In the meantime, the administration has to develop better intelligence on the militants’ movements. It plans to provide more weapons to the Iraqi Army, even though major units disintegrated as the militants swept through northern Iraq. American officials say there are still capable Iraqi units to build on, but that seems a risky bet.

Whatever action Mr. Obama takes, it must be grounded in a larger political strategy that considers the full spectrum of sectarian dangers that are roiling the region. On Monday night, militants reached Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad, before being turned back. In a horrific show of sectarian reprisal, 44 Sunni prisoners held in a Baquba police station, controlled by the Shiite-led government, were killed by the police as the Sunni militants attacked the station.

There is nothing that quite compares with the incredible joy with which a Samoyed greets the snow. It is her element. She was born for it. The cold was so bitter during Kara’s earliest puppyhood that we have every reason to believe that the first time she went out-of-doors was when she came to us.

It may be due to that that Kara’s attitude towards the out-of-doors is different from that of our other Samoyeds. She likes it, of course, but she doesn’t crave it the way our others do. She likes being indoors nearly as well.

The world is so big and I am so small. It doesn’t stand a chance.

Outdoor plumbing in the winter time isn’t as cozy as it sounds.

I’m not sure what she’s going after in this picture.

Everything is so interesting. What is that peeking out through the snow? And is it edible?

It’s always nice to have someone to look up to. Especially when that person has an extremely interesting toy.

Tom Bevan presents five reasons that Hillary Clinton will not run for president:

• She’s a poor campaigner
• Her desire to be president might not be great enough
• It won’t be a coronation
• Obama is leaving a mess
• The country is hungry for change

Rather than making an argument as to why she won’t run, I think that Mr. Bevan is actually making a better case for why if she runs she won’t win.

I think a better argument was made a while ago and which I took note of at the time, that this whole fan dance has been a cynical ploy for making money.

Quite to the contrary, I think that a taste for the presidency is an appetite that doesn’t go away and she’s had it for some time. Remember too, the notions of risk and reward required to seek and gain high political office are very different than yours or mine. Politicians are constitutionally optimistic, not inclined to consider costs, and inclined to over-estimate their own abilities. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mitt Romney ran again.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

All Things Pass

There’s more than one way of thinking about how events in Iraq will unfold.

The century-old Commonwealth Fund has published its findings comparing the U. S. healthcare system with those of other OECD countries:

The United States health care system is the most expensive in the world, but this report and prior editions consistently show the U.S. underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance. Among the 11 nations studied in this report—Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the U.S. ranks last, as it did in the 2010, 2007, 2006, and 2004 editions of Mirror, Mirror. Most troubling, the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, the U.S. is last or near last on dimensions of access, efficiency, and equity. In this edition of Mirror, Mirror, the United Kingdom ranks first, followed closely by Switzerland (Exhibit ES-1).

Read it and weep. Even more importantly from my point of view the second-worst system is Canada’s while the third-worst is France’s. Since Canada is the OECD country that most closely resembles ours culturally and from a lifestyle standpoint, I think that’s a significant finding, suggesting that even if we were to adopt, say, a single-payer system that would be merely the beginning of the reforms that would be needed here if we truly want to have the best of class healthcare system to which we aspire.

It won’t be enough to change who writes the checks. Under the circumstances we might want to consider figuring out what we’re doing wrong and what policies would foster the other changes we’d need to make. The politically-impossible change to a single-payer system could turn out to be the least of our problems.

Last week I bought an e-reader. I had a very specific reason. In connection with my new gig I recognized it would be prudent to read up on some subjects on which I’m presently a bit fuzzy which in turn entails buying and reading quite a number of relatively expensive books. Those books are available at significantly lower cost in electronic format.

Now buying something like this is a much more personal choice than you might think and the reality is that there is no one right answer. What looks fine to you might not look fine to me and vice versa.

After studying, reviewing, testing, and conferring on every e-reader and tablet I could put my hands on I finally decided (somewhat to my surprise) on the Kindle Fire HDX.

I found the ordinary Kindle e-readers completely unusable. I just couldn’t see them. I liked the top-of-the-line Nook but, sadly, the titles I wanted weren’t available in Nook format. The top-of-the-line Samsung tablet, too, was unusable. The text was just too blurry for my terrible vision.

It finally came down to the Apple iPad vs. the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9″. They were very close but the Kindle’s combination of size, weight, and clarity of text were the determining factors for me. Its screen has the highest points-per-inch of any screen on the market of comparable size and viewed purely as an e-reader that made the difference to me. I’ve already probably saved the purchase price of the gadget in purchased books. Not to mention the space.

Here’s a summary of Mohammed el-Erian’s summary of the IMF’s report on the state of the U. S. economy:

• Growth this year will be 2% or below
• Growth for the foreseeable future will be 2% or below
• Interest rates will stay low for a protracted period

Now here’s the assessment. If your financial plans include a portfolio that’s growing at 8% or faster, you might want to reconsider your plans. I’m talking to you, public pension plans.