Not cheeky in the way these young women got infamously cheeky — we wouldn’t want to see that sort of mucking about, would we? — but in the English slang sense.
Kathryn brought this to my attention, and it brought a smile. Hands across the water, and all that. No harm in a bit of fun within the context of the Special Relationship. Cheers…
Kept hoping — against hope, of course — this debt thing would get resolved before I had to say something about it. I’ve had observations to make about it along the way, but just haven’t wanted to get into it. I hate the subject; it bores me to tears. But it also makes me angry. Part of the anger is over the substance, of course. But part of it is that they’re making me think about this stuff. This is why we have representative democracy, you see. We elect people to go off and handle this stuff and make sure they don’t drive the country onto the rocks — and NOT bother us with the excruciating details.
They’re not getting the job done. Part of the reason, of course, is that there are a bunch of people in the House — the Tea Party guys — who don’t get what the responsibility of public office is all about. They think their bumper stickers slogans, the things that got them elected, are reality, and don’t understand that the world is more complicated than the concepts that got them elected. Unfortunately, they also have a certain cognitive block from ever learning they are wrong. Most people go into elective office with all sorts of misconceptions and foolish ideas. Most, whether they are “liberal” or “conservative,” realize with experience that there are broader responsibilities to the country (and in this case, to the entire world, since the already-weakened worldwide economy is poised to go over the brink with us). It’s not just about how they and their constituents feel about things, and unfortunately they have very powerful resistance to learning, ever, how wrong they are.
Part of the problem is that a significant part of their ideology involves rejection of the idea that experience is valuable. This is a common populist fallacy, of course, but it’s particularly malignant in this case, in terms of its effect on the world. People who go to Washington — or Columbia, or wherever — and study issues and come to understandings different from the prejudices they had originally… are considered sellouts, under this ideology. Such people who embrace larger responsibilities are not wiser in this view; they are corrupted.
Another obstacle is that this ideology is particularly nihilistic toward what happens to the world at large, as long as the ideology is served.
This makes it very dangerous for people with such a worldview to hold office. Oh, it’s not so bad to have one or two of these anti-Mr. Smiths at the table (Mr. Smith went to Washington to make the world a better place; these guys go to Washington to tell the world to go to hell). Unfortunately, the party that now holds a momentary (and at my age, I consider two-year cycles to be “momentary”) majority in the House knows that it holds that tenuous power because of the knot of such people in its midst. And is held hostage by it.
Speaking of “hostage,” did you see that performance by Boehner last night? He was like the prisoner forced to recite the propaganda with an AK-47 pointed at his head just off-camera. The only think lacking in his performance was the blinked Morse code (or maybe it was there; I don’t read Morse) saying “I don’t really believe this stuff; I just have to say it.” But his tone and body language did that. The performance brought to mind all those meetings I read about in which Boehner was the Soviet commanding officer caught in the middle, trying to do the right thing, and Eric Cantor was the sneering zampolit, ready to report him to the Central Committee for the slightest lack of revolutionary zeal.
Obama, by contrast, was more convincing last night. Part of that was pure talent. I’m not accustomed to watching Boehner, but I doubt that he’s nearly the orator Obama is. Almost no one is, particularly at communicating sober conviction.
I heard some commentary on the radio (NPR) this morning that said neither man gave America what it wanted last night — a way out — but simply acted as apologist for his own side’s position.
I suppose that’s true. But Obama’s position is the defensible one. He wants cuts and revenue increases, which is what a rational person who is not blinded by ideology would choose. Neither is what said rational person would want. Until the economy is ticking along a lot more strongly, both spending cuts and tax increases could have a chilling effect.
But here’s the thing: NOT getting control of our mounting debt, under these circumstances, would have a much worse effect. It’s not just about raising the debt ceiling. If you do that, and don’t reduce the gap between spending and revenue, we’re still likely to have a devastating downgrade of the nation’s credit rating. And we can’t afford that.
To let one’s natural reluctance to cut spending or raise taxes get in the way of dealing with that would be unconscionable. And letting a narrow ideology (particularly one that holds that it is ALWAYS right to do one and NEVER right to do the other, regardless of circumstances, which is the height of foolishness — but I guess that’s a workable definition of ideology) get in the way is much, much worse.
When I saw this headline this morning in the WSJ — “Inside the Mind of the Oslo Murderer” — I thought, “Here we go again, with someone presuming to know something he couldn’t really know.”
I was wrong. You might want to go read it. It’s written by a guy who apparently helped inspire the shooting suspect:
But I was stunned to discover on Saturday that Breivik was a reader of my own work, including my book “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within.” In comments posted in 2009 on a Norwegian blog, document.no, Breivik expressed admiration for my writings, but criticized me for not being a cultural conservative (although he was pleased that I was not a Marxist, either)….
In his manifesto, which is written in such good English that one wonders whether he had the assistance of a native speaker, Breivik quotes approvingly and at length from my work, mentioning my name 22 times. It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the past couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo.
It is also chilling to see the way he moves from a legitimate concern about genuine problems to an unspeakably evil “solution.”…
That’s gotta make a guy think twice about what he’s written.
It did not change the writer’s mind, however. And it would be facile to say that it should have. Of course, he may advocate many offensive ideas — I don’t know, not having read his books. But the fact is, Islamism does present a challenge to liberal societies. The main challenge being how to absorb large numbers of people whose cultural frame of reference is at odds with liberal values, without losing sight of those values.
Watching PM David Cameron being grilled in the House of Commons yesterday over the hacking scandal, I was struck by the fact that Speaker John Bercow kept reminding me of somebody…
He would interrupt the grumbling and harrumphing with calls to order that were occasionally starchy (such as when he said this is the “Mother of Parliaments,” and therefore should show the world how it’s done with decorum), but occasionally with jolly good humor.
And then it struck me — Terry Jones of Monty Python.
OK, they don’t look exactly alike, but if you see them in action, they have a similar manner about them. Maybe they were just fraternal twins…
You’ll never guess why I was looking at the above picture.
No, really.
Remember when I mentioned communitarianism back here? Well, I was looking for a link in connection with that, and I ran across Amitai Etzioni’s Twitter profile, and Twitter told me about some other guys who Tweet about similar topics. So I thought I’d check them out.
This guy’s profile led me to this magazine website, and I found this picture at the bottom of the page. I don’t know why it was there. It seemed to be a stand-alone, rather than illustrating some article. I don’t know what it was saying about the nation and the world and geopolitics, but I think it was very profound. Something about strength, combined with balance. Symmetry comes into it somewhere. Warm sunshine also. Water. Um, other stuff…
Nothing like esoteric, academic treatments of foreign policy, I always say….
Well said, Murray Kimber. See more of his stuff here. Buy something from him.
No, this is not a reference to the report that terrorists are now planning to board planes with surgically-implanted bombs — although we can talk about that if you’d like.
I was just facetiously invoking Tom Wolfe’s characterization of the hysteria in this country when Sputnik went up. I don’t think any politician actually said “the Soviets would send up space platforms from which they could drop nuclear bombs at will, like rocks from a highway overpass,” but I enjoyed Wolfe’s hyperbolic description of the concerns of House Speaker John McCormack.
Anyway, I thought of that when I realized that the Russians are about to have the monopoly on space travel:
The last U.S. space shuttle is scheduled to blast off Friday. After that, the U.S. and other nations will rely on vintage Russian spacecraft to ferry their astronauts to the $100 billion station. Russia will hold a monopoly over manned spaceflight, and tensions already are rising. The Russians are in the process of nearly tripling the cost of using their Soyuz crew capsules for transport to the orbiting base, and other countries have little choice but to pay up.
“We are not in a very comfortable situation, and when I say uncomfortable, that is a euphemism,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency, one of five international agencies that jointly manage the orbiting laboratory. “We made a collective mistake.”
While there is less chance today of our going to sleep “by the light of a communist moon” (as LBJ warned), I still find this development disturbing.
I miss the halcyon days when this country did exciting stuff in space (and the Shuttle, essentially a space bus driving around the block, never quite qualified). I’m ready for Mars.
Or rather, done in by the lack of business.
This is the first instance I can think of in which a newspaper shut down over a scandal:
LONDON — The tabloid at the center of the British phone hacking is to be closed after a final, ad-free Sunday edition this weekend, according to a top official at News Corp., James Murdoch, in a sudden statement that underscored the devastating effect of allegations that targets included not only a 13-year-old murder victim but also relatives of fallen soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The statement was so sudden that the paper, News of the World, was still advertising a subscription deal on its Web site.
The new reports of stunning intrusions came a day after Britain’s Parliament collectively turned on Rupert Murdoch, the head of theNews Corporation, which owns The News of the World, and the tabloid culture he represents, using a debate about the widening phone hacking scandal to denounce reporting tactics by newspapers once seen as too politically influential to challenge.
Whether this is a precedent or not depends upon your definition of “newspaper,” of course.
For years, Samuel Tenenbaum has tried to turn the attention of economic development types in SC toward Israel. This is understandable, given that Samuel is the father of our state’s endowed chairs program, and Israel’s tech prowess.
But I hadn’t seen the same argument presented in strategic terms until I read this piece this morning:
America’s enemies understand deeply and intuitively that no U.S. goals or resources in the Middle East are remotely as important as Israel. Why don’t we?
Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package. It is steadily increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments…
While it wasn’t the main point of the piece, I also was struck by what a neat summation, from the pro-Israel perspective, this was of why the peace process hasn’t worked in recent years:
Actions have consequences. When the Palestinian Liberation Organization launched two murderous Intifadas within a little over a decade, responded to withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza by launching thousands of rockets on Israeli towns, spurned every sacrificial offer of “Land for Peace” from Oslo through Camp David, and reversed the huge economic gains fostered in the Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1990, the die was cast…
Not the whole story. But neither is blaming Israel.
Yeah, I used that headline once before. But I’m making the point again.
This morning’s lead headline in The Wall Street Journal was tiresome:
Economic Outlook Darkens
Markets Stumble as Factories, Hiring Slow Down; Biggest Drop in Stocks in a Year
The drumbeat of bad news about the U.S. economy got louder on Wednesday, rattling financial markets and driving stocks to their biggest drop in a year.
The U.S. factory sector, which has been an engine of the recovery, notched its biggest one-month slowdown since 1984 as companies hit the brakes on hiring and production. Another report showed private-sector hiring dropped precipitously in May, prompting economists to ratchet down their expectations for the closely watched nonfarm payrolls report due on Friday.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 279.65 points, or 2.2%, to 12290.14, its biggest point decline since June 4 of last year. Investors piled into the safety of Treasury bonds, sending yields on the 10-year note below 3% for the first time this year. Yields move in the opposite direction of price….
Sheesh. I’m not going to go on and on about my own unified field theory of the economy (after all, I couldn’t even get y’all to watch that hilarious Keynes and Hayek rap video), but in a nutshell it is this: All the bad economic indicators result, at some point down the line, from someone having a lousy attitude.
That applies whether you’re talking the stock market, or manufacturing figures, or retail sales, or jobs, what have you. We start tightening up, and things get as bad as we thought they were, or even worse.
So snap out of it, people! I’m a veteran of the front lines of this singularly monotonous war, and have no glory or medals to show for it. Just a lot of PTSD. Don’t need any more, thanks…
I said this as a comment back on a previous post, and liked it enough to say more prominently…
After reading that quote I cited in the WSJ about how the Obama administration is, ever so quietly, without saying anything overt, taking advantage of its stunning effectiveness in taking out bin Laden:
This month’s military strike deep inside Pakistan is already being used by U.S. officials as a negotiating tool — akin to, don’t make us do that again — with countries including Pakistan thought to harbor other terrorists. Yemen and Somalia are also potential venues, officials said, if local-government cooperation were found to be lacking…
… I got to thinking how this was similar to the effect that Bush’s invasion of Iraq had on thugs like Moamar Qaddafi — for a very brief time, before everybody around the world figured out that (given our internal dispute over that invasion) W. wasn’t likely to get the chance to do that ever again…
And then it hit me: In terms of the politics of projecting a credible threat that gets others to do what you want (an idea that I realize makes a lot of us squirm), George W. Bush was like Sonny Corleone. The blusterer, the guy you just know is going to jump in the car and come after you in a mad, blind rage if you touch his sister. The guy who doesn’t want to negotiate; he just wants Sollozzo dead. And ultimately, the guy who has trouble achieving all his goals.
Barack Obama, by contrast, is more like Michael. The clean-cut college kid who was never involved in the muscle end of the business, who held himself aloof from that, even expressed distaste for it. The guy who was supposed to be “Senator Corleone, President Corleone,” and not a wartime don. The guy who speaks softly and reasonably, and never utters a threat. The guy who takes out the heads of the other four New York families in one stunning stroke, right when you’ve forgotten about the bad blood. The guy who keeps on speaking reasonably after that, but nevertheless everybody respects him now, in the uomo di rispetto sense…
Not that, you know, I’m saying either president is a criminal. Far from it. I’m just using very familiar fictional characters in order to draw a comparison…
Coverage of President Obama’s speech today is concentrating on one big item related to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians: “Obama Sees ’67 Borders as Starting Point for Peace Deal.” Plenty is being said about that.
Setting that aside, here are my favorite parts of his speech today:
He didn’t sugarcoat the way people have been manipulated in the region for too long: “In the face of these challenges, too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression. Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from somebody else.”
He made sure no one could doubt where we stand on the change sweeping the region (while specific responses to specific situations may, and should, vary): “Not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy, and there will be times when our short term interests do not align perfectly with our long term vision of the region. But we can – and will – speak out for a set of core principles – principles that have guided our response to the events over the past six months:
How much of what THEY know do WE need to know?
Here’s a consideration I hadn’t though much about before now, and should have (given all those spy novels, and military history books, and Tom Clancy thrillers I’ve read):
Has the U.S. Said Too Much About the Bin Laden Raid?
Military officials fret that constant stream of leaks may hinder future missions, put Navy SEALs at risk.
By Josh Voorhees | Posted Friday, May. 13, 2011, at 11:09 AM EDT
In the nearly two weeks since the U.S. operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, a near-constant stream of detailed information about the raid’s specifics has seeped out from White House officials, lawmakers, and pretty much anyone else with security clearance.
But that’s not how things were supposed to be, at least not according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out Bin Laden,” Gates told Marines at a Wednesday town hall at Camp Lejeune. “That all fell apart on Monday—the next day.”…
The White House announced last week that it was done briefing reporters on the specifics of the mission, but that has done little to stop the ongoing flow of new details from being reported. The latest major leak came Thursday night, when CBS News gave a detailed play-by-play of what the Navy SEAL team’s helmet cameras captured during the raid….
There is the danger that the more we know about details of the raid, the greater potential for threatening our capability to do something like it in the future.
For instance, the lede story on The Washington Post‘s front page yesterday told us that a key element in preparing for the raid involved high-altitude drones flying WAY deeper into Pakistan than the Pakistanis suspected we were going. So that we could get higher-resolution photos than you get from satellites. And if you consider how high-resolution satellite photos can be, these images must have been pretty awesome. So… you have a revelation of greater technical capability than the world might have expected, and of a tactical deployment that no one knew about.
Of course, it’s a two-edged thing. Let enemies and potential enemies know what you can do, and it could intimidate them into deciding they don’t want the United States as their enemy after all. Or at least, it MIGHT work that way with some — say, your less fanatical foes. But let anyone know what measures you are capable of, and it empowers them to develop countermeasures. That’s a huge theme in military history — measures and countermeasures — and it never ends.
We may find all these details fascinating — I know I do. But how much of it do we really need to know?
The Old Man in Mexico with some American comrades.
Something about our finding and killing bin Laden in his home after all these years got me to thinking about Leon Trotsky.
Yeah, I know — not the same thing at all. We’re not the USSR, and President Obama isn’t Stalin. And people knew Trotsky was in Mexico, and he wasn’t killed by Spetznaz commandos (and I think it would kind of anachronistic if he had been).
But still, it made me think of him. The mind sometimes makes strange leaps.
Trotsky wasn’t far from my mind because a while back, I started reading a recent biography about his Mexico years. I had been attracted to it by a review in the WSJ, and asked for it and got it for my birthday or something last year. I had been really curious about the story of a top icon of the Russian Revolution living south of our border, and largely supported by American Trotskyists.
But after the first few chapters, and reading all about the soap opera with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and ALL the propaganda from Moscow and from Trotsky himself over the show trials and so forth, I got bogged down.
And the thing that wore me down the most, that frankly bored me to tears, was all the long-distance ideological arm-wrestling. You know how I have little patience with ideologues. There were all these titanic arguments going back and forth between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists about who was the REAL commie, each side working so hard to delegitimize the other (with the stakes being life or death for Trotsky), essentially accusing each other of being RINOs — Reds In Name Only.
And I just couldn’t care about any of them. I mean, talk about pointless. Trotsky was as ruthless as they come, while Stalin was one of the great monsters of the century. And it was pathetic that leftists in this country would actually take up the cudgels to defend or make excuses for either of them. The arguments over doctrine — stupid, irrelevant points of doctrine argued heatedly among people who, ironically given what they believed in, were on the wrong side of history — were particularly tedious.
At some point, I need to get back to the book and see how the guy with the ice ax got in and did the deed. But I haven’t been able to make myself do so yet…
In case you weren’t worried enough about this whole relationship thing with Pakistan:
Well, this isn’t going to make an alreadytense relationship any better.
A brief firefight between Pakistani ground troops and NATO helicopters erupted early Tuesday morning near the Afghan boarder. Pakistan claims that two of its soldiers were wounded as a result of the clash, and officials are demanding a meeting with NATO leaders to address the situation, Reutersreports.
Pakistan has admitted that the ground troops opened fire first, but maintains that they were in the right because the two helicopters had crossed into Pakistan’s airspace from Afghanistan, the New York Timesreports. Western military officials, meanwhile, have so far declined to say whether the helicopters were indeed over Pakistan…
I just shared with you a poll about what normal Americans think about killing Osama bin Laden. Here’s what Noam Chomsky thinks:
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s…
“Uncontroversially,” he said. Which sort of makes him demonstrably, inarguably, objectively — that is to say, “uncontroversially” — wrong, doesn’t it?
As usual.
Ran across that this morning, and had been meaning to share it with you all day. Talk about your outliers. Talk about your people who are very, very lucky that they live in this particular country — or in a pluralistic liberal democracy, in any case.
Chomsky ended his statement with,
There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.
Yep.
As you may know, bin Laden was a Chomsky admirer. Liked to quote him.
That's 2nd Lt. Prince Harry (Henry Charles Albert David) of Wales on the right, Lt. Col. Bill Connor on the left, in 2008 (or late 2007; I'm not sure): "He called me Bill and I called him Harry."
Remember all the back-and-forth between the candidates for Democratic Party chair back before the convention, some of which I kept track of here (to the point that I was sort of sorry I started)?
I just didn’t get those kinds of releases from the candidates for GOP chair beforehand. Oh, I saw some back-and-forth on Twitter about how Nikki Haley was backing one candidate, and her critics at SCTruth were backing another, and so forth and so on. But they didn’t give a lot of context, and if there was a battle of emailed press releases, I missed it. Even though I had specifically asked to be kept in the loop (and folks, I seldom ASK for press releases), and at least two of the three campaigns said they’d send me whatever they sent out.
But about all I received via that medium in the last days was this one Facebook alert from Bill Connor, on the day of the royal wedding:
“Brad,
Thought you might like this bit of history in honor of the Royal Wedding (the picture is on my fb profile). Hope you are well!: http://www.facebook.com/l/ae801_1klnj9MQbQucenXRWIjsA/seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004253009_harrypal01.html“
As it happened, I had already known that about Connor. In fact, he had written us an op-ed piece about it, right after his highness had spent a brief time serving alongside SC Guard troops in Afghanistan (before the word got out and they had to yank him out of the country). The above photo ran with that piece.
Anyway, so much for any of the fairy-tale effect of the royal wedding rubbing off. Bill Connor came in third in the competition state GOP chair.
Which reminds me — I need to get winner Chad Connelly in here for a “Brad Show.”
Did you see this in The New York Times:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The head of Pakistan’s army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said Thursday that he would not tolerate a repeat of the American covert operation that killed Osama bin Laden, warning that any similar action would lead to a reconsideration of the relationship with the United States.
Of course, this stimulates three immediate reactions:
Yeah, I know this is about Pakistan’s extremely fouled-up internal politics. But you know what? I’ve had it up to here with Pakistan’s extremely fouled-up internal politics. Reconsider away, fellas, and make up your minds which side you’re on in this war.
Yeah, I know I’m sounding like the arrogant Ugly American (with “big, tough, confrontational talk” of my own) in dismissing your hurt pride in this way. But finding out you’d been letting bin Laden hang in the ‘burbs with your own generals for the last 6 years sort of put me in an ugly mood.
Meant to blog about this all day, but wanted to do a little research first. I’m out of time, and before the day ends, I’m just going to throw it out there…
I was disappointed by Lindsey Graham’s criticism of the Obama administration for deciding not to release photos of Osama bin Laden’s bullet-riddled body:
WASHINGTON — Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., criticized President Barack Obama’s decision Wednesday not to release death photos of terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Graham on Monday had congratulated Obama on Sunday’s daring raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, but he said withholding photos of bin Laden’s corpse would raise questions about whether he is really dead.
“The whole purpose of sending our soldiers into the compound, rather than (delivering) an aerial bombardment, was to obtain indisputable proof of bin Laden’s death,” Graham said.
“I know bin Laden is dead, but the best way to protect our decisions overseas is to prove that fact to the rest of the world,” the second-term senator said. “I’m afraid the decision made today by President Obama will unnecessarily prolong this debate.”
Obama, though, said releasing photos of the slain terrorist would amount to gloating that would only inflame anti-American sentiment and do nothing to satisfy skeptics.
“That’s not who we are,” Obama told CBS in an interview. “We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”
Especially since I seem to recall Lindsey Graham saying additional Abu Ghraib pictures should not be released, using pretty much the same arguments the White House uses for not releasing this.
By the way, in going to look up an Abu Ghraib link, I just noted that Mother Jones notes the same inconsistency that I do. Mark this day, folks — Mother Jones and Brad Warthen having the same thought.
Sen. Graham’s argument now is that we must shut up doubters by proving we did, too, kill bin Laden.
But you know what I think? I think this decision fits perfectly with the series of good decisions the president has made in this situation, from the start. He was right to send in the SEALS rather than B-52s so that we’d know we got him (not to mention the intelligence treasure trove that would have been destroyed in a bombing). He buried him at sea so that not one could make a fetish of his body or his grave. Then he similarly refused terrorists a rallying point by refusing even to let them see photos of the body.
The president knows he’s eliminated bin Laden (let anyone who says otherwise produce him as evidence). That’s enough for him. It’s enough for me, too.
This is one of the problems with new media. Sometimes you spout off before you have taken in enough information and processed it. After the Obama administration analyzed intel for eight months, and STILL only had a little better than a 50-50 supposition that bin Laden was in the house, maybe I should have taken a little more time to pass judgment. After all, my original training was in a medium when I could take all day, or — in the case of my columns — all week to make up my mind. Consequently, I can only think of one or two columns ever that I later regretted writing.
Blogging is different. I try to make sure I really mean what I say here, too, but sometimes my interlocutors get my dander right up, as Professor Elemental would say, and I give ill-considered answers.
Such is the case with my reaction to a comment by our old friend Bud the other night. Here I was very pleased with President Obama’s performance in the bin Laden case, and saying so, when I read this by Bud:
Let’s not forget the tireless work the president did as commander in chief to bring this operation to a successful conclusion. It really does matter who our leader is. Thankfully we have someone competent in charge.
… it tapped me on a sore spot. The comment itself was pretty innocuous by Bud standards, but in it I read the ghosts of so many other comments by Bud along the lines of EVERYTHING George W. Bush ever did was wrong, especially invading Iraq, and so I responded:
Bud, we should all give President Obama full credit for playing his leadership role well. But don’t make the political mistake of thinking this happened because he is president. This is more about stellar work by nameless, ground-level people in our military and our much-maligned intelligence services.
There is one sense in which Obama was a critical factor, though. It’s complicated. I think I’ll do a separate post about it…
That separate post was the one in which I argued that it was Obama’s laudably bellicose attitude toward going after our enemies hiding in Pakistan that made a positive difference here….
And as I was writing that, my sense that Obama being president WAS critical to the way this happened started to take hold. Not that Bud was right or anything; I still object to the way he characterized it, especially later when he said, “I find it so refreshing to have a competent, bright, hard-working leader in charge. He’s not rashly going in to places like Iran and Libya. Not sure why we still have troops in Iraq but otherwise Obama is doing an outstanding job keeping our foreign involvements to a minimum.”
But that’s quibbling over personal quirks.
Bottom line is, the more I’ve thought about it the last couple of days, then more I have decided that on the MAIN, unadorned point, Bud’s right: There are elements to what happened that are uniquely Obama. Not that it wouldn’t have happened under other presidents — JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. — but maybe not exactly this way, or this successfully.
I was thinking that this morning when reading The Wall Street Journal’s detailed story on how the raid unfolded, “U.S. Rolled Dice in bin Laden Raid:”
An early favorite: a bombing raid. That approach would minimize risk to American troops and maximize the likelihood of killing the residents of the compound. But it might also have destroyed any proof bin Laden was there.
A helicopter raid would be more complex, but more likely to deliver confirmation. Some officials were wary of repeating a fiasco like “Black Hawk Down” in Somalia, when U.S. forces were killed after a botched raid on a warlord… [By the way, one quibble on this story: That last sentence was inaccurate. The raid was NOT on the warlord, but to grab some of his lieutenants, and it was successful, not “botched.” The lieutenants were neatly grabbed and the operation was essentially over when the militia managed to hit two helicopters with RPGs.]
On April 19, Mr. Panetta told the president the CIA believed bin Laden was there. Other advisers briefed Mr. Obama on preparations for an assault, including the outcomes of the dress rehearsals. Mr. Obama told them to “assume it’s a go for planning purposes and that we had to be ready,” an administration official said.
That same day, Mr. Obama gave provisional approval for the commando-style helicopter assault—which was launched from Jalalabad, Afghanistan—despite the added risk. Senior U.S. officials said the need to get a positive identification on bin Laden became the deciding factor.
You’ll notice that Bill Clinton wasn’t on my list above. That’s because I’m practically certain that he would have opted for the bombing. And the more I think about it, the less I’m positive about the other presidents.
Whereas Obama made exactly the right call. The Seal raid was the way to go. And the president was completely right not to tell the Pakistanis — another point where I have my doubts about some of those earlier presidents (for instance, Bush pere was all about some multilateralism). There is a certain confidence — something important in a leader — in Obama’s choosing the riskier option in the absence of certainty, and then, once HE was satisfied that this was bin Laden who was killed, having the body buried at sea. The president was saying, LET the conspiracy theorists claim it wasn’t him — I know it was, and I’ve eliminated his body or his grave becoming an object for our enemies to rally around.
The president may be a lousy bowler, but he makes good calls in a tough situation. That is my considered opinion — now that I’ve taken time to consider.
By the way, I might not have decided to write about this change of mind — it happened sort of organically the more I read, rather than in a “Eureka” moment — if I hadn’t read two other items in the WSJ this morning. As it happens, they were opinion pieces by people who are as firmly entrenched on the right as Bud is on the left. But whereas Bud’s reflexive anti-Bush rhetoric put me off from being convinced of his point (that, and the fact that I just didn’t have enough info yet to reach that conclusion), their unadulterated praise of someone they usually criticize really drove the point home in a way that not even I could miss it.
Bret Stephens’ piece was headlined, “Obama’s Finest Hour:”
Thane’s point isn’t that vengeance is better than justice. It’s that there can be no true justice without vengeance. Oddly enough, this is something Barack Obama, Chicago liberal, seems to better grasp than George W. Bush, Texas cowboy.
The former president was fond of dilating on the point, as he put it just after 9/11, that “ours is a nation that does not seek revenge, but we do seek justice.” What on Earth did that mean? Of course we sought revenge. “Ridding the world of evil,” Mr. Bush’s other oft-stated ambition, was nonsense if we didn’t make a credible go of ridding the world of the very specific evil named Osama bin Laden.
For all of Mr. Bush’s successes—and yes, there were a few, including the vengeance served that other specific evil known as Saddam Hussein and those Gitmo interrogations that yielded bin Laden’s location—you can trace the decline of his presidency from the moment he said, in March 2002, that “I really don’t care [where bin Laden is]. It’s not that important.”…
Good points, although I may not be totally with him on the virtue of “vengeance” alone. Note that he makes a point similar to one I made yesterday, as my mind was starting to change (sometimes, and this may be hard to understand, I change my mind as I’m writing something — on the blog, you can sometimes see it happen, as I argue with myself) — that when it comes to Pakistan, Obama is more of a go-it-alone cowboy than Bush. Which to me is a good thing.
Then there was William McGurn’s column, which was about how Republican candidates (obsessed as they are with fiscal matters) have a long way to go to catch up with Obama on foreign policy:
It’s not just that Barack Obama is looking strong. For the moment, at least, he is strong. In the nearly 10 years since our troops set foot in Afghanistan, a clear outcome remains far from sight, and many Americans have wearied of the effort. As President Obama reminded us Sunday night, getting bin Laden doesn’t mean our work there is done—but his success in bringing the world’s most hunted man to justice does reinvigorate that work.
It does so, moreover, in a way that few of Mr. Obama’s recent Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office have matched. The killing of bin Laden was no one-shot missile strike on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory suspected of making chemical weapons, as ordered by Bill Clinton. Nor was it a failed hostage rescue in Iran à la Jimmy Carter. Instead, it was a potent combination of American force and presidential decisiveness.
First, Mr. Obama authorized a ground operation with Navy Seals far inside Pakistani territory. Second, he did not inform the Pakistanis.
These are the kinds of hard decisions that presidents have to make, where the outcome is likely to be either spectacular success or equally spectacular failure. For taking the risks that would paralyze others, and for succeeding where others have failed, the president and his team have earned the credit they are now getting.
Also good points. And hearing such good points made by people who don’t like the president nearly as much as I do made a big impression on me.
So in the end, I find myself agreeing with those guys, and with Bud, on this point: Having Obama as president made a big difference in this case.
Back on the initial post about the death of bin Laden, I got into an argument with some of my liberal Democratic friends about the extent to which “credit” is due to President Obama for this development.
Don’t get me wrong — I thought the president performed superbly. I was in considerable suspense last night between the time we knew bin Laden was dead and the president’s speech, wondering how he would rise to the moment. I needn’t have worried. He met the test of this critical Leadership Moment very well indeed.
Also, he seems to have made the right calls along the way since this intel first came to light. That’s great, too.
Where I differed with my friends was in their assertion/implication that this success was due to Obama being president, as opposed to He Who Must Not Be Named Among Democrats. Which is inaccurate, and as offensive as if this had happened on Bush’s watch and the Republicans claimed it was all because we had a Republican in the White House.
ANY president in my memory (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, who had a tendency to resist boots on the ground and go with cruise missiles, which would have been the wrong call in this case) would have made more or less the same calls on the way to yesterday’s mission, although few would have delivered the important speech last night as well. (Obama’s the best speaker to occupy the White House since JFK — some would say Ronald Reagan, but his delivery never appealed to me.)
That’s the thing — Obama, to his great credit, has generally been a responsible and pragmatic steward of national and collective security. As most people who actually get ELECTED president tend to be. The continuity that his tenure represents may frustrate some of his base, but I deeply appreciate it, and have from the start. (I first made this observation before he took office.)
But I hinted that I thought that maybe there was ONE way that they were right, although it was not for a reason they were suggesting…
Here is that one way: Obama has been far more aggressive toward going after the bad guys in Pakistan. Which I think is a good thing. I’ve always thought it was. In fact, I first wrote about that in August 2007. At the time, Obama was criticized by many — including Hillary Clinton — for this:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obamaissued a pointed warning yesterday to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying that as president he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists….
The muscular speech appeared aimed at inoculating him from criticism that he lacks the toughness to lead the country in a post-9/11 world, while attempting to show that an Obama presidency would herald an important shift in the United States’ approach to the world, particularly the Middle East and nearby Asian nations…
I applauded it.
And now we see that proposed doctrine translated into reality. Actually, we’ve seen it for some time. Pakistan has gotten pretty testy with us for our across-the-border strikes, which have been far more common under Obama than under his predecessor.
On Sunday, convinced that our most prominent individual enemy was “hiding” practically in the open in a Pakistan suburb, Obama sent in the troops and got him — and didn’t bother telling the Pakistanis until it was too late for them to interfere.
For THIS he deserves great praise. But folks, that’s not the sort of things that folks in his Democratic base praise him for (aside from some nodding that he was right to say Iraq was the “wrong war” — just before they demand we get out of what Obama terms the “right war” immediately).
This was not Obama being sensitive, or multilateral, or peaceful, or diplomatic, or anything of the kind. This was Obama being a cowboy, and going after the guy in the black hat no matter where he was. This was out-Bushing Bush, to those who engage in such simplistic caricatures.
This is not a surprise to anyone who has watched Obama carefully, or even halfway carefully. But it should be a HUGE shock to the portions of his base who are still fighting the Vietnam War, the ones who backed him because they thought he was an “antiwar” candidate.
I’m reminded of Kent State. First, don’t get me wrong — the killing of those students was a horrific tragedy, that was in no way justifiable. I, too, feel chills when I hear Neil Young’s song. Shooting unarmed civilians is never excusable. I felt the full outrage of my generation when that happened. But I’ve always thought the tragedy was deepened by the fact that the protest that led to the shootings was to an extent wrong-headed.
Folks in the antiwar movement were SO angry that Nixon had pursued the enemy into Cambodia. This, to them, was a war crime of extreme proportions.
Me, I always thought it was sensible and pragmatic. You don’t let people shoot at you and then “hide” by crossing a political barrier, not unless you like having your own people killed with impunity.
Yeah, I realize there are important differences in the two situations (the most obvious being that the Cambodian incursion was on a much larger scale). But I think it’s very interesting that some of my most antiwar friends here — antiwar in the anti-Vietnam sense — are even more congratulatory toward our president than I am, when he, too “violated sovereignty” to kill Osama bin Laden. What if Nixon had sent troops to a mansion outside Phnom Penh to kill Ho Chi Minh? The antiwar movement would have freaked out — more than usual. Again, not quite the same — but you get the idea.
One of my antiwar friends recently was arguing with me that the antiwar movement has, indeed, faded away. I had said it had not. But the more I think about this, the more I think Phillip was right. I try to imagine how the antiwar left would have reacted to such a move as this 40 years ago. And yes, we have changed. Then, college students rioted in outrage. Today, they gather outside the White House and party down with American flags. Both reactions seem to me inappropriate, but I’m hard to please.
One thing does please me, however: I do approve of President Obama’s performance on this (as I do, increasingly, on many things).
