I got a release from Lindsey Graham last night — I’m just now getting to it in my email — that quoted the senator as saying the following:
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a leading Republican voice on foreign policy, launched a sharp attack against the Obama administration on Wednesday, saying the president’s lack of leadership would “lead to an explosion in the Middle East.” … The American disengagement, lack of leadership, and leading from behind is leading to uncertainty and doubt on all fronts. … There is no substitute for leadership by the United States and every group within the region is uncertain about who we are and what we believe.”
The thing is, when I watched the accompanying video, for the first few minutes I didn’t hear that sort of tone. Instead, the senator said the sorts of things I would expect a politician who cares about foreign policy to say. He talked about how this should not be allowed to weaken our strong ties to the new democratic leadership of Libya. He stressed that the attack — whether calculated or spontaneous — was the work of a tiny minority who do not reflect our relationship with that country.
He even expressed agreement with what Secretary of State Clinton had to say. And I like that, even though part of it may be the longtime mutual admiration society that Hillary and Lindsey have going.
Then, toward the end, he launched into the GOP talking points about the administration’s alleged failures. About the only thing I might agree with him on is that I wish we were acting more effectively to keep Assad from killing his own people in Syria.
But in his eagerness to criticize, the senator implied, if he did not exactly say, two things he should know are not true:
That somehow the mess of the last couple of days is the administration’s fault.
That the way forward in light of the ongoing “Arab Spring” movement is simpler and clearer than it is.
Given his respectful ties to some of the key people in the administration’s national security team, and the many areas of agreement he has with them, I would think Senator Graham would be hesitant to throw out the people he knows in favor of the uncertainties Romney would bring.
But that’s me engaging in wishful thinking, I guess. Just because Sen. Graham is occasionally an iconoclast, I like to tell myself he can be that all the time. Obviously, I’m not in charge of his re-election in two years…
This morning, I passed a couple of American flags at half-mast, and for about 10 seconds went through the usual frustrating exercise of trying to remember who died. Then I realized that it was the 11th already.
OK. I can see that we would mourn. Unfortunately, 11 years later, that seems to be the only part of our national response that we’re able to agree on in the public sphere, in terms of shorthand, easily understood responses.
As I look at the cartoon commemorations by Robert Ariail and Bill Day, above and below, I don’t see either as capturing what seems to me the proper response — although Robert comes closer. The idea that we’re simply marking another year is true enough. But the implication that we are prisoners of something (who marks time by scratching on a wall? prisoners do) seems off to me. As for the cascade of tears in Bill’s cartoon — well, that was a common cartoon response in 2001, but 11 years later, Lady Liberty needs to have pulled herself together enough to figure out what to do next.
I say this not to criticize my friends the cartoonists. The problem is that they feel obligated to do something to mark the day, and yet there IS no clear, shared, national response that is better defined than what they did. If you’re a cartoonist, you know what to do on the Fourth of July. There is a whole vocabulary of clearly understood images and shared values through which you can communicate to a reader. On 9/11, not so much. There’s sadness, and there’s the passage of time.
For my part, right after the attacks, I had a pretty clear idea of how we ought to respond. Yes, there would be a military response — that seemed obvious to everyone at the time — but I saw the need to go far beyond that, in terms of broad engagement with the world, economically, diplomatically and in humanitarian terms. You can read the editorial I wrote for Sunday, Sept. 16, 2001, on this old blog post.
While I would change a word here and there with the benefit of hindsight, the general thrust of what I believe should be the proper response would be the same.
The bad news is that as a nation, we have practically torn ourselves apart arguing over proper responses since then. On the other hand, the good news is that among our nation’s leaders, there is more of a consensus on what to do. Back to bad news, that doesn’t really extend much beyond aggressive military actions (for Bush, it was invasions; for Obama, a pattern of assassinations). Our leaders’ responses tend to be ad hoc, rather than arising from a coherent vision of the United States playing a constructive role on all fronts in the world.
I’ll be interested to see what speeches our presidential candidates give today, to see what their visions are. Because as a nation, I still think we need a coherent, common vision of the proper way to react to 9/11.
I had to groan when I saw the headline saying that the Obama campaign was accusing political opponents of using “Swift Boat tactics.” That’s because, not having been in a coma the past eight years, I know that when Democrats say those words, they’re not referring to the use of light watercraft to fight the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. If only they were.
Instead, as we all know full well, they’re invoking charges brought by a group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which raised questions about John Kerry’s war service. Democrats to this day so deeply resent what that group did that they have turned “Swift Boat” into a verb, one that refers to actions they regard as mean, nasty, unethical, uncalled-for and generally beyond the pale.
I am unable to agree with Democrats on this because, well, that group raised questions I was wondering about myself (such as, where are the scars from those wounds that sent him home?). But as a nonveteran, I felt I had no moral standing to raise them. I mean, maybe he did get to go home quicker than other veterans, but he was still there longer than I was.
So I initially sort of appreciated veterans publicly asking those questions, no matter with whom they were affiliated. But in the end, that discussion got into a lot of petty back-and-forth accusations about exactly what happened when and who did what to whom, and the whole thing wasn’t really helpful, and just left a general sour taste behind. And I’d just as soon not have such things front-and-center in a presidential election.
But I don’t see it the way Democrats do. So I groaned when I saw the words.
But then I read on, and saw what elicited the phrase.
The Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund seems to exist primarily to call into question, as we head into the home stretch of the election, any credit the President might received for killing Osama bin Laden. (That is far from the only question it raises, but that’s the one with the emotional punch.) And that is just beyond cheesy. It’s too petty for words.
This is nursery-school playground-taunt territory. Clearly, whoever was president at the time this happened gets a certain amount of credit for what happens on his watch — just as he gets the blame when it goes wrong. Jimmy Carter didn’t make that Iran rescue mission fail, but he certainly took the rap for it.
Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did. The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not.
It’s easy to believe, in the moment he says that (at 6:55 into the above video), that this guy has been a Tea Party spokesman. He evinces that certain disdain-that-dare-not-speak-its-name that TPers seem to reserve entirely for this particular president.
But aside from the tone — I mean, come on. Nobody in the country is stupid enough to think the president personally suited up, went along on the mission and shot bin Laden himself, and no one in the country has tried for a second to make anyone think that. The simplest voter in the country would laugh at the proposition. So in what way do you suppose that the president is in any way trying to take anything away from the super-soldiers who carried out this amazing raid? Perhaps the most laudable thing the president is congratulated for having done was choosing to send in the SEALs as opposed to copping out with a bombing raid. And if you don’t think it took political courage to make that decision, you don’t know anything about politics or special ops, whatever your resume says.
I go further than that. My initial reaction was that hey, that Obama is a lucky guy to have been in charge on this particular watch. But as I learned more and more about the decision-making process that preceded the operation, I saw multiple points at which the wrong decisions could have been made, and POTUS made the right calls, even when very experienced smart people in his administration were doubting that was the way to go.
The bin Laden operation, furthermore, fits within an overall pattern that had distinguished the Obama administration well before that night in Abbottabad — a sharp increase in aggressively pursuing our nation’s enemies, in Pakistan and wherever else they hide.
Of course, the fig leaf this group is offering for its pettiness is that it is objecting to the very fact that I know as much about the long-term operation as I do. It’s accusing this administration of leaking government secrets for the purpose of its own political aggrandizement. (Which presents an interesting contradiction: If the administration is leaking actual, true intel, and that information shows the president in a good light, then how do you say the president doesn’t deserve credit for what happened?)
That’s a serious charge. I’ve seen no evidence that national security has in any way been compromised in this instance — but of course, I don’t have enough access to classified information to know for sure.
But I do know this: As I mentioned above, this president has been far more aggressive than any recent predecessor in using deadly force to take out terrorists, making George W. Bush look almost timid by comparison. While I have applauded the president for this, I acknowledge such an unprecedented pattern of aggression calls, in a liberal democracy, for a certain amount of sunshine. We need to know, at least in general, about the way the president makes decisions.
By the way, I’m not outraged at the parties who appear in this group’s video, which is the centerpiece of the campaign. I don’t doubt their sincerity. There is a fundamental cognitive disconnect between people who devote their lives to serving their country in the more sensitive parts of our national security apparatus, and people who are elected and directly accountable to the voters of this country. The national security types live by operational security, and have a tendency to see any kind of public disclosure of what they do as a close cousin to treason, rather than the exercise of political accountability. Political figures can indeed go too far in the service of self-interest. But even legitimate disclosure, the kind of thing a political leader should disclose, will not be acceptable to people who, just as legitimately, define their success in large part by their ability to keep secrets.
My beef is with the people who put this piece of emotionally-charged propaganda together, and released it at such a moment. The release of this video, at this time, would make the charges in the video itself about the president’s timing in announcing bin Laden’s death rather laughable. Except, you know, there’s nothing funny about it. (And I don’t even quite follow the logic that it was somehow politically advantageous to the president to announce the success of the operation immediately. If he’d done it a week later, as they suggest, he’d have gotten just as big a political boost.)
The amount of information that is appropriate for keeping a president accountable will always be debatable, and we should engage in it energetically, to the extent we can do so without damaging the very security we seek to protect (ah, there’s the ironic rub).
Security officials and members of both parties in Congress have sharply criticized leaks about classified operations under Mr. Obama, and some Republicans have complained about news briefings on the Bin Laden raid and assistance to filmmakers making a movie about the operation.
The next sentence reminds us of something else the group pointedly ignores:
But the administration has also overseen an unprecedented number of prosecutions for press disclosures, and in June, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. directed two United States attorneys to investigate leaks discussed in the Opsec video.
The petty way this group has gone about conducting its political offensive makes me less inclined to take it on faith that they know things that I do, and those things make the president look bad.
Perhaps the verb for this, going forward, should be “Opsecing.” No, that doesn’t look right. “Opsecking?” Nah. Still needs work…
Maybe Hillary Clinton’s tongue-lashing last week has had a good effect:
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia on Monday signaled that it would not sign new weapons contracts with Syria until the situation there calms down.
The country will continue with previously agreed exports, but will not be selling new arms to Syria, Vyacheslav Dzirkaln, deputy chief of the Russian military and technical cooperation agency, told Russian news agencies on the sidelines of the Farnborough air show southwest off London.
Putting it in conflict with the West, the Russians have blocked the U.N.’s Security Council from taking strong, punitive action against the Assad regime and are seen as the country’s key arms supplier. Syrian activists say that about 14,000 people have been killed in an uprising in the country since March 2011…
Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier on Monday said that Russia is still committed to a peace plan by U.N. envoy Kofi Annan, saying that the Syrian government and opposition groups should be “forced” to start a dialogue….
OK, it’s not a huge concession, but it’s a concession, which is encouraging.
This is interesting, from further down in the story:
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month issued a harsh reprimand to Russia, saying that Moscow “dramatically” escalated the crisis in Syria by sending attack helicopters there. The State Department acknowledged later that the helicopters were actually refurbished ones already owned by the Syrian regime.
Doh! Oh, well. I guess that’s something else Hillary can claim credit for, in keeping with the old joke: Guy stands on the corner snapping his fingers. Cop comes along and says to stop loitering and move along. Guy says, “I’m not loitering; I’m keeping the elephants away.” Cop says, “There are no elephants around here.” Guy says, “See what a great job I’m doing?”
(CBS News) On a mission to shatter the image of her husband as rigid and unrelatable, Ann Romney told CBS News she worries that President Obama’s entire campaign strategy is “kill Romney.”
“I feel like all he’s doing is saying, ‘Let’s kill this guy,” she said, seated next to her husband, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in an exclusive interview with CBS News chief political correspondent Jan Crawford. “And I feel like that’s not really a very good campaign policy.
So, since Mitt Romney’s still kicking, that’s a really good argument that he never made the list.
Of course, I then read on to see that Mrs. Romney didn’t come up with the word herself; some idiot in the Democratic Party did:
In August, some Democratic strategists let leak to the press that Obama’s top aides were looking at a massive character takedown of Romney in light of a deterring economy; “kill Romney” was a phrase used by one. “That was their memo that came out from their campaign,” Ann Romney said. “And it’s like, ‘not when I’m next to him you better not.”
Still, I wouldn’t bandy that word about so carelessly. Not with this president.
Found myself back at Barnes & Noble again today, and remembered something else I took a picture of last week when I was there.
Above is a shot of one of the “New in History” shelves. OK, it’s slightly doctored. Hell in the Pacific was actually on a lower shelf and I moved it up to take this, but they were all in the same category.
Sometimes it seems that the only time “history” was happening was from 1939-45, the bookstore shelves are so dominated by that period. Or maybe it’s just because Father’s Day was coming up. In any case, it seemed that about 50 percent of all history books were about WWII, and another 40 percent was about other wars in which the United States was involved.
And I say that as a big fan of military history, and particularly the WWII period. But still, let’s have SOME perspective, people.
The least you could do is provide some variety in the titles. Does no one at the publishing house notice when it’s getting monotonous?
That is all, men. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. This is my rifle; this is my gun. Off yer dead asses and on yer dyin’ feet. And other cliches of the era…
Looking at Foreign Policy‘s recommendation of a book titled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” I’m reminded of something I read in the WSJ this morning.
The administration has made little secret of its near-total reliance on drone operations to fight the war on terror. The ironies abound. Candidate Obama campaigned on narrowing presidential wartime power, closing Guantanamo Bay, trying terrorists in civilian courts, ending enhanced interrogation, and moving away from a wartime approach to terrorism toward a criminal-justice approach. Mr. Obama has avoided these vexing detention issues simply by depriving terrorists of all of their rights—by killing them…
Of course, he goes on to criticize, likening Obama’s personal selection of enemies to kill to LBJ’s micromanagement of bombing targets in Vietnam. He also accuses the administration of politically motivated intelligence leaks way worse than those laid at Scooter Libby’s feet.
House unanimously passes “born alive” bill (?????) — Note the question marks, and the lack of a link. I haven’t seen an MSM story on this. Will Folks is running a press release saying this happened (and as he notes, “The above communication is an email from a politically active organization”), and I received a release from Senate Republicans congratulating the House. No independent news coverage yet. But it seemed like something that would generate controversy, and I didn’t want to ignore it.
They Moved a Robot With Their Minds (NYT) — “Scientists said a tiny brain implant allowed two people who are virtually paralyzed below the neck to maneuver a robotic arm.” Wow.
I just thought I’d add some elaboration on the Medal of Honor presentation. From the AP story:
Obama presented the Medal of Honor to Sabo’s widow, Rose Mary, and said doing so helps right the wrongs done to a generation that served freedom’s cause but came home to a brooding and resentful nation.
“Instead of being celebrated, our Vietnam veterans were often shunned,” Obama said in a hushed East Room. “They were called many things when there was only one thing that they deserved to be called and that was American patriots.”
Spec. Leslie H. Sabo Jr. of Elwood City, Pa., was serving with U.S. forces near the village of Se San in eastern Cambodia in May of 1970 when his unit was ambushed and nearly overrun by North Vietnamese forces.
Comrades testified that the rifleman charged up from the rear, grabbed an enemy grenade and tossed it away, using his body to shield a fellow soldier. And shrugging off his own injuries, Sabo advanced on an enemy bunker that had poured fire onto the U.S. troops — and then, pulled the pin on his own grenade.
“It’s said he held that grenade and didn’t throw it until the last possible moment, knowing it would take his own life but knowing he could silence that bunker,” Obama recounted. “And he did. He saved his comrades, who meant more to him than life.”
Sabo was 22 years old when he gave his life for his comrades.
The P.M. flashes his famous V-for-Victory sign. We can't tell, from this photograph, whether he was flashing an "E" sign with the other hand.
After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration’s claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not “why publish?” but “why would we withhold information of significance?” We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so.
— Bill Keller, then-executive editor The New York Times June 2006
The apology came a bit late for Kennedy, who died in a traffic accident in 1963.
This is not to confuse him with another Kennedy who also died in 1963, and had earlier persuaded The New York Times to back off the Bay of Pigs story for national security reasons. (See Keller quote above.)
The icing on this tale came today, when we learned that the AP knew last week that the United States was closing in on Underwear Bomber II in Yemen — but withheld the news at the request of the government. That’s what the WSJ reported this morning, anyway:
U.S. officials had known about the plot for about a month, and President Barack Obama was briefed on the plot in April. White House officials had persuaded the Associated Press, which had an account of the plot in hand as early as last week, to hold off on publishing because the intelligence operation was still under way.
This is fascinating. It was one thing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with government censors in 1945, when the entire country was united in the all-out effort to win WWII, and cooperation with the censors was reflexive.
But today? When it is fashionable to call the War on Terror the “so-called War on Terror”? When, as Keller mentions above, the leftward side of the political spectrum persists in excoriating the media for not being skeptical enough prior to the Iraq invasion? For a major media entity to respond with a snappy salute to a government request to be discrete is decidedly remarkable.
This will no doubt spark dark rumblings — and probably already has; I’m not bothering to look — among Republicans about whether the AP would have agreed to this request if it had come from the Bush administration.
Interesting question.
What do you think about all of this? Oh, you want to know what I think. Well, I don’t know enough to have an opinion yet. I’d like to know what the AP knew, and what it was told before it made the decision to hold back on the story. The default position for a journalist is to report a story when you know it’s true, as Keller reported. But this sounds like it’s one of those rare cases in which lives may have been saved by holding back — which would justify the decision to wait.
President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room of the White House discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is pictured at right. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
OK, my Corleone metaphor aside, let’s address the actual political question before us: Does Barack Obama deserve any particular credit for “getting” Osama bin Laden, or would “anyone have done what he did?”
This is actually a very important question. When deciding who should be one’s president going forward, there is no more important question than whether he would be an effective commander in chief (or in the case of the incumbent, whether he is an effective commander in chief).
Republicans, including some who should know better, are essentially saying Obama did nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. They are wrong. I initially thought as they did — not that I wanted to take anything away from the president, but because I thought it was true — but as I read and learned more about the decision-making process leading to the raid on Abbottabad, I changed my mind.
Last night, I inadvertently saw a few seconds of TV “news.” John McCain was saying that of course Mitt Romney would have done the same thing, or something along those lines.
Well, as it happens, we have strong reason to believe that Jimmy Carter would have ordered such an operation. He actually did order a roughly comparable one. It failed, as military operations sometimes do. (The one Obama ordered could have failed, too, at a number of critical points. That’s one reason he deserves credit for having the guts to give the order.) But he ordered it. It was a big deal that he ordered it. His secretary of state resigned over it.
But would “anyone else” have done the same? There is little reason to think so. It would have been Bill Clinton’s M.O., for instance, to have flipped a couple of cruise missiles in that direction. And as we saw in Kosovo, he had a predilection for air power rather than boots on the ground. But… and this is a huge “but”… is it fair to make the assumption that the real-life Bill Clinton of the 1990s would have been as reticent, as cautious, post-9/11? It’s impossible to say.
What we do know is that in real life, there was sharp disagreement and debate in the Obama administration over how to proceed — whether to believe the assumptions based on incomplete intelligence (for doing that, George W. Bush earned the never-ending “Bush lied” canard), whether to act on them at all, whether to send in troops at all or simply bomb the compound, whether to send a joint force or a coherent Navy team, whether to notify the Pakistanis or just go in, whether to try to capture bin Laden or go in intending to kill him, whether to bring back his body or send it to sleep with the fishes.
And when I say debate within the administration, I don’t mean between what the Republicans would characterized as the Democratic sissy politicos, but among the professionals — the generals and admirals and Sec. Gates.
And at critical stages, the president and the president alone seems to have made very tough calls. And the right ones. Most importantly, he decided to send in men rather than just bombs. That way, he could make sure, he could minimize collateral damage — and the U.S. could reap an intelligence bonanza.
That took nerves not everyone would have. So many things could have gone wrong doing it this way — and nearly did. In what had to feel like a replay of Jimmy Carter’s debacle, we lost a helicopter. But having learned that lesson, we had backups.
Some Republicans would have you believe that giving Obama credit would take away somehow from the superb, almost superhuman job that the SEALs and the rest of the military and CIA team did. Nothing could be further from the truth. It stands as one of the most amazing coup de main operations of the past century. They performed as brilliantly as the Israelis did at Entebbe, for instance. But they had their roles to play, and the commander in chief had his. And all involved did their jobs remarkably well.
I refer you to two posts I wrote last year, as I came to the conclusion that Barack Obama personally deserved credit for the leadership calls that led to our killing bin Laden. Here they are:
In invite you to go back and read them, to see how I reached a conclusion very different from the line we’re hearing from Republicans now.
There is no way of knowing whether Mitt Romney would have made the same calls. I suspect that he might have erred on the side of caution, but I could be completely wrong about that. He might have acted in exactly the same manner. But what I know is that Barack Obama did — and that what he did is not just “what anyone would have done.”
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
I was just this minute repeating to one of my ADCO colleagues my oft-state theory about how Bush was Sonny Corleone, and Obama is Michael. Bush was the blusterer who telegraphed his moves and failed to get his enemies. Michael’s the nice, reasonable, I-want-to-negotiate, blood-is-a-big-expense guy who turns out actually to be far more aggressive than his predecessor. Just when you think he’s totally absorbed in domestic policy (the equivalent of the old Don puttering about in his tomato garden), WHAM!, he whacks some guy in a country where you didn’t even know the U.S. was operating. No seeking permission from the U.N. No paving the way rhetorically. Just bada-BING! and we get another terrorist’s brains all over our nice Ivy League suit.
Anyway, I had just been saying all that, and my iPhone buzzed, and I got this headline:
Obama in Afghanistan to sign security pact
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — In an unannounced trip, President Barack Obama has arrived in Afghanistan to sign an agreement cementing the U.S. role in the country after the war ends in 2014….
Right now, he’s probably sitting down with some Taliban leader who think’s he’s safe because his bodyguard is a police captain, and the Taliban guy is saying, “Try the veal; it’s the best in Kandahar.” And Obama is excusing himself to go to the men’s room, where they’ve got one of those old-fashioned toilets — you know, the kind with the chain…
On a previous post, we got into a discussion of the importance of character in political candidates. (I have come over time to believe that it is paramount, to the point of paying far less attention to policy proposals by comparison. And of course, as you know, I am positively inimical to ideologies.)
We had a good discussion, and achieved some degree of synthesis. Along the way to that, Phillip happened to mention the fact that many in politics use military service or the lack thereof as a shorthand marker for character. This is certainly true. But as we discussed the relationship of such service to character, I went on a tangent… and decided it would be worth a separate post, as follows…
I believe that our politics started becoming dysfunctional, in the ways that I decry (hyperpartisanship, adamant refusal to listen to, much less work with, the “other side”), when we ended the draft.
Before that, you didn’t find many men (most officeholders today are men, and it was more true then) who had not spent at least a portion of their youth in the military. That certainly exposed them to having to work with all sorts of people from different backgrounds (as Phillip noted here), but it did something else: it forged them into something larger than those differences.
The WWII generation in particular may have had its political differences, but those guys understood that as a country, we all share interests. They may have been (in fact, were) liberals or conservatives or Northerners or Southerners or what have you, but they understood that they were Americans first. For those who served after the war, when the military was on the cutting edge of integration, it helped give black and white a sense of shared identity as well. (Indeed the shared experience of the war, even though it was in segregated units, helped lay the groundwork for the next generation’s gains toward social justice.)
As the first wave of young men who had NOT served (starting with those who were of an age to have served, but had not, such as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich) arrived in the top echelons of political power in the country, they brought with them a phenomenon that we hadn’t seen among their elders… a tendency to see fellow Americans who disagreed with them politically as the OTHER, even as “the enemy,” and a practically dehumanized enemy — one that must be opposed at all costs.
That said, Bill Clinton does deserve credit for rising above that new partisanship in many cases (welfare reform, deficit reduction) in order to accomplish things. And Newt Gingrich often worked with him to accomplish such goals.
But below them, among the young guys coming up in politics — the ones hustling around statehouses and working in campaigns — there was a generation rising that really could not think of the OTHER SIDE as someone to be communicated with, much less worked with.
I really believe that if those young guys had had the experience of being thrown together, outside of their communities, their cliques and their comfort zones, their heads shaved and put into uniforms, and required to work together in a disciplined manner toward common goals — THEY would be different, and consequently our politics would be different.
Mind you, I’m not saying we should reinstitute the draft in order to make our politics more civil (although there may be other reasons to have one). But I am saying that I believe today’s extreme polarization is in part an unintended function of that development in our history.
Maybe you consider the end of the draft to have been a good thing. What I’m asking you to do is consider that even good things can have unintended ill effects. The opposite is true as well. Y’all know how deeply opposed I am to abortion on demand. But it seems reasonable that it would have the effect claimed in Freakonomics of reducing crime over time (by instituting a sort of pre-emptive capital punishment of unwanted children, who are more likely than the wanted to become criminals). Just as it has had the undesirable effect in parts of Asia of drastically reducing the number of females in society.
Good actions have good and bad consequences; so do bad ones. It’s a complicated world.
Graham Introduces Resolution Ruling Out ‘Containment’ Strategy of Nuclear-Armed Iran
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today introduced a resolution that puts the Senate on record as ruling out a strategy of containment for a nuclear-armed Iran. The bipartisan resolution currently has 27 Senate cosponsors.
“I’m very pleased the Senate will speak with a strong, unified voice that a nuclear-armed Iran is an unacceptable option for our own national security and the security of our allies throughout the world,” said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “My resolution will afford every Senator the opportunity to speak on this issue and I expect a strong bipartisan vote in support. Having a political consensus between the White House and Congress that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable is a giant step forward in sending an important message at a critical time.”
The Graham resolution:
· Strongly rejects any policy that fails to prevent the Iranian government from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and would settle for future efforts to “contain” a nuclear weapons capable Iran.
· Urges President Obama to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.
· Urges continued and increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran until they agree to the full and sustained suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, complete cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on all outstanding questions related to their nuclear activities including implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Additional Protocol, and the verified end of their ballistic missile programs.
“It’s obvious to most people that once Iran obtains nuclear capability others in the region will respond in kind,” said Graham. “A nuclear-armed Iran also makes it exponentially more likely this information could fall into the hands of terrorist organizations.”
“I believe, to some extent, sanctions are working and believe they can be successful in helping turn around Iran’s nuclear ambitions,” said Graham. “However it is imperative the Russian and Chinese assist the international community in changing Iranian behavior.
“Finally, as President Obama said in his State of the Union address, ‘All options must remain on the table’ when it comes to stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” concluded Graham.
Co-sponsors of the Graham resolution include: Senators John Boozman (R-Arkansas), Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts), Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia), Dan Coats (R-Indiana), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Dean Heller (R-Nevada), John Hoeven (R-North Dakota), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut), Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), John McCain (R-Arizona), Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), Bill Nelson (D-Florida), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Pryor (D-Arkansas), James E. Risch (R-Idaho),Marco Rubio (R-Florida), and Chuck Schumer (D-New York).
#####
That’s a pretty good list of sponsors he’s got. And like Graham, I, too, endorse what the president said in the SOTU.
They’re not the Justice League of America, or even the Avengers (although the name sometimes fits). They don’t wear colorful tights. But SEAL Team Six is the closest thing we’re likely to see in real life to a band of superheroes.
KHARTOUM, Sudan — American Navy Seals swooped into Somalia early on Wednesday and rescued two aid workers, an American woman and a Danish man, after a shootout with Somali gunmen who had been holding them captive in a sweltering desert hide-out for months.
Under a cloak of darkness, the Seals parachuted in, stormed the hide-out, killed nine gunmen and then whisked the aid workers into waiting helicopters, Pentagon officials said. The Seals were from the same elite Navy commando unit — Seal Team Six — that secretly entered Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden in May, senior American officials said, though the rescue mission in Somalia was carried out by a different assault team within the unit…
I'm pretty sure this is NOT what SEAL Team Six looks like...
They just keep doing these amazing things that no one else seems able to do anymore, outside of the IDF and Mossad, and what have they done that seemed quasi-superhuman since the raid on Entebbe?
You know what else? We don’t know their identities. They could be named Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, for all we know.
OK, I’ll stop with the riffing on the superhero thing. But I like that we don’t know who they are. It allows us to see them as an extensions of all of us, however unheroic most of us may be.
Only one dark lining in this silver cloud: Ron Paul might get the notion that with these guys active, we can just do away with the rest of our military, and still be fine. And the idea could catch on…
Charleston’s City Paperrecords another skirmish in the internecine battle between Republicans over America’s role in the world:
After the Republican presidential debate in Myrtle Beach last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News, “I hope people in the country understand that we’re Ronald Reagan Republicans in South Carolina. We believe in peace through strength and we’re not isolationists.”
In an interview the next day, Graham’s fellow South Carolinian Sen. Jim DeMint said on Fox Business,”If we spread ourselves too thin around the world we’re not going to be able to defend the homeland, particularly with the level of debt that we have right now. It’s foolish for us to think that we can have military bases all over the world, spend billions of dollars when we’re going broke back home. It just isn’t going to happen.”
Austerity may be a bad word to Graham when it comes to Pentagon spending, but for DeMint it’s the very definition of conservatism. When Republicans like DeMint and his Senate ally Rand Paul say that Pentagon spending cuts must happen, Republicans like Graham and his Senate ally John McCain call such actions “isolationist.” When Paul was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, McCain said he was worried about the “rise of isolationism” in the GOP. When Paul later led the charge against President Barack Obama’s military intervention in Libya, both Graham and McCain trotted out the isolationist label again…
Back on a previous post, Burl asked me whether I’ve ever read a book he sent me a year or two ago — which has weighed on my conscience ever since, sitting there among all the others I keep meaning to read.
Well, as it happens, that was one of the “two or three” books I was reading and rereading over the past week. Now, I’ve set the others aside, and have just started to get serious with Black Ocean.
I’m only on page 88, but I have some observations already (just to prove to Burl that I’m reading it).
One is that I’m enjoying watching familiar people pop up in the book. I felt foolish for not realizing who “Ed Burroughs” was until he mentioned his “ape-man.” But then, how would I have known before that? I then checked Wikipedia, and found that the real-life Burroughs was, indeed, in Hawaii at the end of 1941.
Then Sammy Amalu’s name cropped up, which was really weird, because something — I forget what now — a page or two earlier had caused me to think of Sammy, then Google him on my iPhone. I think the thing that made me think of him was a mention of pidgin. And I thought I remembered that Sammy used to hold pidgin in great disdain and refuse to speak it to anyone. (By the way, Burl, did you and Sammy work together?)
Then there was a passing reference to “the Kanahamoku brothers.” Well, I know who one of them was.
I’m sure there are loads of other references that I’m just not getting, because I only lived in Hawaii for a little over a year — things that Burl will get because he has spent most of his life there, as both a journalist and historian.
This weaving of real and fictional characters is reminiscent of the style of Harry Turtledove, who dares to make historical figures main characters in his works of alternative fiction. Burroughs, for instance, is already playing a role as significant as that of Col. Leslie Groves in Turtledove’s Worldwar series.
Oh, did I mention, to those of you who don’t know? Black Ocean is a novel with the premise that the Americans attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, at which time the islands were controlled by the Japanese.
The second thing I’m noticing is that, at least at the outset, Black Ocean is both very much like, and very much unlike, Len Deighton’s SS-GB.
Both are set in 1941. Both take place on islands that, contrary to history, are in Axis hands at that time. Another way that they are alike is that Tad Morimura — a Honolulu policeman who now works for the Japanese — is investigating a death (actually, several) that will run him afoul of the Japanese military, the deeper he goes. In SS-GB, Douglas Archer is a renowned Scotland Yard detective who is now working for the German SS (the Germans having invaded England and won the war). He, too, is looking into matters that will get him into serious trouble with the Nazis (or the English resistance, which seems to pose just as much of a threat to him).
But the differences, so far, are more noteworthy than the similarities.
To begin with, I don’t know what’s happened that changed the direction of history. I thought, for a moment, that when Morimura was explaining to a Japanese Army officer the history of the Hawaiian royal family’s relationship with Japan, that there would be a clue — but I don’t know enough about Hawaiian and Pacific history to know where things diverged, other than that the princess Kaiulani (whom I had to look up, even to know who she was) survived her youth to become an aging queen.
By contrast, I knew from the very beginning what had happened in SS-GB. It was what everyone had feared — Hitler had not squandered his opportunity to invade, and had prevailed, well before the Americans could get into the war.
This makes me much more comfortable with the Deighton book than I am so far with this. And I find myself wondering, is this my own Anglocentrism? Am I more comfortable with it simply because I feel so much more comfortable with British history and culture? There’s no doubt that I’m better able to identify with the characters and understand where they are coming from — how they feel about the German occupation, and how conflicted they might be carrying on with their jobs under such domination.
Whereas, with Black Ocean… I don’t really understand where anyone stands. But I reject the idea that this is because of my own Western frame of reference, or (more disturbingly) that I simply understand and care more about the concerns of Anglo-Saxons than about the Japanese and Filipina and other ethnic characters in the book Burl sent. I really think it’s because the author, Rick Blaine, is being so coy with me as a reader. Yes, a man of Japanese ancestry (although he grew up in Hawaii) like Morimura is going to have an even more nuanced relationship with the Japanese authorities than the thoroughly English Archer did with the Nazis, if only because the Japanese, apparently because of their own racist assumptions, trust him more.
But there’s more than that. Blaine has really muddied the waters. In Deighton’s book, ordinary Englishmen chafe as you would expect them to at the Jerry yoke, griping openly when only their countrymen are around. But in Black Ocean, the locals take Japanese control of the islands more in stride, even alluding to “patriotism” in terms of being loyal to the current order.
A lot of things make sense, such as the Japanese military’s attempt to pin a murder on American provocateurs, or preparing the islands’ defenses. Other things don’t, such as… the journalists at the Star-Bulletin (Burl’s paper) in many ways have to deal with the hassles of occupation — tapped phones, and pressure to cover things a certain way. But beyond that, they seem to (thus far) assume more freedom than you would think they would have under this regime. For instance (SPOILER ALERT!), why would the Japanese assassinate the newspaper’s publisher, apparently not for playing ball, and no one at the paper, initially at least, suspect their hands in the killing? So far, the folks at the paper seem to assume a cocoon of invulnerability like you would typically find at an American paper, not at a paper in a place under the control of Japanese imperialists (but then again, I do know so little about how the Empire of Japan would have related to local media, and I still don’t understand the nature of the Japanese presence).
So what happened, and when did it happen, and how did it happen? I suppose I’ll have to keep reading to find out.
Our friend Michael Rodgers brings this to my attention:
Brad,
Have you seen this video with Newt in Charleston?
The reactions of the crowd are revolting. Why would they cheer so
much? After all, the people of South Carolina want the flag down.
Our will is being thwarted by our legislature. That’s where we are
today. This issue is just one example of far too many issues where
partisan politics and legislative dominance trample over what’s
clearly right.
BTW, the Republican presidential primary in SC is just a few days
after MLK day. It’s Saturday the 21st, when MLK day is Monday the
16th. Should be an interesting week.
Regards,
Mike
Well, I have to say first that Newt answered the question about the way I would — although perhaps for different reasons, since he’s running for the GOP nomination here. Of course what we South Carolinians fly on the State House grounds is our business and no one else’s. And if I were a presidential candidate passing through from elsewhere, if asked, I would say, “That’s your problem, not mine.”
If someone from elsewhere could somehow coerce South Carolina into removing the flag, nothing would be accomplished. The only way that anything is accomplished by furling the flag is if South Carolina grows up enough to decide, on its own, through our elected representatives, to take that step.
That step is long, long overdue. Every day that we leave it there is an insult to our ancestors as well as to ourselves and our neighbors today. We’re not hurting anyone in the world but South Carolina by flying it, and it’s incumbent on us to decide we’ve engaged in far more than enough nonsense, and put the thing away. A banner designed to be taken into battle in a war we lost 146 years ago should be under glass in a museum (and we have one for that purpose), or represented with a modest bronze plaque, not flying as though it and what it stands for is alive.
It’s no one else’s concern. Of course, it helps them decide what they think of us. But so far, we’ve been satisfied to let them think what they like. Which is fine, in a way. Because in the end, we need to get rid of the flag because we understand that it’s wrong, that it’s something we need to put behind us. If we did it simply because of what others thought, and still wanted, deep-down, to fly it, nothing would be accomplished. We would not have grown as a people.
Everything I’ve ever written about the flag has been aimed at persuading my fellow South Carolinians who are not yet convinced that we need to go ahead and take it down. It’s about us, the people of this state. Always has been.
OK, we just left, and already they’re up to these kinds of shenanigans in Iraq?
Washington— U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John McCain (R-Arizona) released the following statement on recent developments in Iraq:
“We are alarmed by recent developments in Iraq, most recently the warrant issued today by the Maliki government for the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tariq al Hashimi. This is a clear sign that the fragile political accommodation made possible by the surge of 2007, which ended large-scale sectarian violence in Iraq, is now unraveling. This crisis has been precipitated in large measure by the failure and unwillingness of the Obama Administration to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government for a residual presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, thereby depriving Iraq of the stabilizing influence of the U.S. military and diminishing the ability of the United States to support Iraq.
“If Iraq slides back into sectarian violence, the consequences will be catastrophic for the Iraqi people and U.S. interests in the Middle East, and a clear victory for al Qaeda and Iran. A deterioration of the kind we are now witnessing in Iraq was not unforeseen, and now the U.S. government must do whatever it can to help Iraqis stabilize the situation. We call upon the Obama Administration and the Iraqi government to reopen negotiations with the goal of maintaining an effective residual U.S. military presence in Iraq before the situation deteriorates further.”
####
Let’s hope it’s not as bad as Sens. Graham and McCain worry that it is. I mean, hope’s all we have left, right?
I was pleased when I heard, on the radio yesterday, President Obama saying this at Fort Bragg:
As your Commander-in-Chief, I can tell you that it will indeed be a part of history. Those last American troops will move south on desert sands, and then they will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high. One of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of the American military will come to an end. Iraq’s future will be in the hands of its people. America’s war in Iraq will be over.
I appreciated it because he said “America’s war in Iraq will be over.” At another point in the speech, he referred to the “end of our combat mission,” which was even better, and emphasized that what was happening was that responsibility was being handed over to Iraqi forces.
I was grateful that he had not said this was “the end of the war.” (I was also gratified that he, only slightly grudgingly, spoke of the troops accomplishment: “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” Something that, of course, we would not have done had Mr. Obama had his way.)
This was, unfortunately, about the only place where I would be so gratified. Elsewhere in the speech, he said “end of the war” over and over and over again. But I don’t blame the president. The news media were worse:
And on and on. Among those I saw in a quick survey, only NPR got it right, in a headline that said “Iraq Mission Ends.”
Maybe I’m the only one who cares. But I became hypersensitized to the matter over all these years of antiwar folks saying “end the war,” when what they meant was that they wanted the U.S. forces to withdraw. Which is an entirely different thing.
The “end of the war in Iraq” is either something that happened several years in the past (the interpretation I prefer), or, more ominously, has yet to occur. There are a number of ways that you can speak, legitimately, of “the end of the Iraq war:”
You can say it ended with the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, as that was when “war” in the Clausewitzian sense of armies clashing on battlefields with battle lines, and the control of a government at stake.
You can say it ended with the Surge, which settled down the various insurgencies that erupted after the fall of Baghdad, leading most people speaking of a “war” continuing to that point.
You can say it never ended, because Iraq’s security is far from that, say, of a Switzerland.
But in that last case — if you believe the “war” has continued up to this point — then withdrawing U.S. forces most assuredly does not “end” that war. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything more likely to make fighting flare back up dramatically.
I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope that President Obama (and Bush before him) are right in their projection that things are sufficiently stable for Iraq to deal with the security vacuum created by a U.S. departure. I don’t know whether they are or not.
But I know this: Speaking of what is happening this month as “the end of the war” is highly inaccurate.
On a comment thread recently, we had another one of our periodic discussions of who (among political types) served in the military when and who did not, with all the attendant side comments about how those fellas on the other end of the political spectrum (whichever end you happen to be on) are a bunch of duty-shirking cowards, etc.
At some point, of course, I got into the thing about how I never had the chance to serve because of the rather minor problem of chronic asthma (for which I’m taking prednisone again this week, and it’s working fine, thanks).
I was reminded of this today, because Maj. Gen. James Milano spoke to the Columbia Rotary Club, and he once again mentioned a statistic that boggles his mind and seldom fails to impress others…
What percentage, he asked Rotarians, of Americans aged 17-24* can meet the basic qualifications to serve in the U.S. Army today?
The answer: 23 percent. “And we’re not looking for astrophysicists and Olympic athletes,” he elaborated.
So… more or less, that means that 77 percent of young Americans are what previous generations described as 4-F.
We have an all-volunteer military, and with the economy the way it is, the Army can kind of pick and choose among recruits, but only 23 percent are up to snuff.
He didn’t break it down in terms of how many were due to this or that cause, although he listed some disqualifiers:
Asthma. (So no point in my stepping forward.)
Having been on anxiety medications.
Basically, being on any medications as of the day you report. If you can’t do without, you can’t join the Army.
Criminal record (which the general broadened, saying “any type of immoral behavior,” but no one asked for an elaboration and he didn’t offer one).
Lack of a high school diploma. The Army was taking GEDs before, not now.
Bottom line, he seemed mostly worried about general lack of physical fitness. You can be 4 percent over the weight limit when you show up for basic, because they’ll work that off of you with little trouble. But beyond that, forget it.
Once the Army’s got you, you’ll probably make it, though. The general said recruits are treated these days like professional athletes in training — zero fried foods, with drill instructors looking at what you put on your tray and letting you know if you’re not picking the right items in the chow line. Physical trainers work to prevent injuries, and help soldiers overcome them when they occur. Consequently, there’s only about a 7 to 8 percent washout rate due to physical problems.
The general worries a great deal about our out-of-shape country, sitting around eating at least one fast-food meal a day, watching TV, gaining fat and losing bone density. Among 12-19 year olds today, he said, one out of five are obese and soon it will be one in four. In 1970 (when, ahem, yours truly was in that demographic group), it was one in 20. “What are we doing? Where are we going? What are our priorities, here?”
He also worries about the fact that more than half of kids today are born to single moms. He was careful to say he wished to cast no aspersions, but he worries about it. Over a third of his female drill instructors being single moms themselves (and 7 percent of the male DIs having sole custody of children), and the Fort operating a child care center from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day, he’s had plenty to worry about.
Anyway, there’s a sampling of what’s on the mind of the modern major general.
* Kathryn and others who were there: I wrote down 17-24 percent, but later, when he talked about taking people up to 35, I wondered whether I had misheard, and maybe it was supposed to be 17-34. What did you hear? In any case, a lot of out-of-shape young folks.
