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Excellent piece ....
There is nobody who has atoned as thoroughly for pumping up C-Plus Augustus's Excellent Mesopotamian Adventure than Peter Beinart, who recently unlimbered the lumber on the prescription for triumph in the Middle East proposed by John McCain and his faithful companion, Huckleberry J. Butchmeup.
"It's a wonderful illustration of the emptiness of much Beltway foreign-policy-speak. McCain and Graham want Obama to act both "deliberately" and "urgently" because they're both happy words. (As opposed to "lethargically" and "rashly," which are nastier synonyms for the same thing.) But when you translate these uplifting abstractions into plain English, you see how contradictory McCain and Graham's demands actually are. You can either demand that Obama not bomb Syria until he's ensured he has a plan likely to win international and congressional support, or you can demand that he bomb as soon as possible. You can't demand both."
What say you? I think only a couple of more months in the wilderness on the grasshopper-and-wild-honey diet and Beinart can come home again.
His piece put into stark relief something I've been turning over in my own mind since things started blowing up in the Levant -- a phrase we can use again, apparently, because the Hitlers du jour have adopted it as their own. I've watched the administration try to cool out the country, and I've assumed that there's a lot going on under the surface. (I certainly hope there is.) Then again, as Beinart points out, the Republican foreign-policy intelligentsia keep coming up with ideas that combine the geopolitical nuance of The Underpants Gnome with the strategic and logistical brilliance of El Mystico and Janet. Which brings us inevitably to the question: what if there is no "plan"? What if there is no strategy America can adopt that will help matters in any serious material way?
Any final military solution would require at least some American ground troops. Any political solution would require us to cut deals with horrible people (Assad in Syria) and/or with our putative allies who divide their time between buying off the savages and using them to try and scare the American people into sending our military back to save their oil-sodden asses. (And, yes, I'm fully fed up with being jerked around by the Qataris and the House Of Saud. Why do you ask?) And, even if we cut the deals, creating five friends and 5,000 more enemies in the process, how are they going to hold? What makes us think that, given our history in the region, we have the credibility to produce a lasting solution to the problem of people who just want to slaughter each other? What if, in the face of medieval savagery in the modern age, America truly is a helpless giant, if not a pitiful one? Can this country face that possibility without losing its mind?
I am not sanguine about the latter possibility. The drums are beginning to sound very loudly, and not just from the right, either. Democratic senators are trying to goose the president into doing...something. (Al Franken's letter sounds like John McCain on herbal tea.) The elite political media is uncrating the Kevlar and soldier hats that it thought it had put away for good. And local media is just going indiscriminately batshit. Up here in Boston, local TV has fastened on a guy who "may be" working with ISIS in Syria. (The man, Ahmad Abousamra, fled after being caught in the sweep that also netted Tarek Mehanna, who was convicted and sentenced to seventeen-and-a-half years in prison, but whose conviction was shaky enough that the Supreme Court will decide later this month to hear his case.) Given the coverage by the local TV drones, to say nothing of our plucky little tabloid, you'd think that Abousamra was in a Howard Johnson's on Route 16, plotting jihad over fried clams. I assume that local TV all over the country is finding its own little "piece" of the current horrors. Examples in comments would be welcome.
Perhaps all we can do is use our strength, and what little influence we have, to prevent humanitarian catastrophes on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps there is no overall solution that we can find. This runs contrary to the thinking that got us through the Cold War, of course, and it rubs up roughly against American exceptionalism, and it gives the Neustadt lie to all that John F. Kennedy imbibed so deeply, that to do nothing is always the worst thing, and that to do something is the truest measure of leadership, bearing burdens and passing torches and all, a philosophy that led even Kennedy down a few dark roads. Ninth-century blood feuds are working themselves out with 21st century weapons. The collective American political memory doesn't encompass anything like this. When these animosities were born in that part of the world, North America was peopled by moundbuilders along the Mississippi River. What if there is no American "plan" that will work, no American"strategy" that will suffice, no act of American "leadership" that will be adequate? What if the only real solution is for these people to decide on their own to stop slaughtering each other? What if the choice comes down simply to joining the bloodshed or not?
The invaluable Andrew Bacevich has been thumping this tub for quite some time now.
"After 9/11, similar mistakes - deference to the official line and to the conventional wisdom ("terrorism" standing in for communism) - recurred, this time with even less justification. The misbegotten Iraq war was one result. Yet even today, events in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere elicit an urge to "do something," accompanied by the conviction that unless troops are moving or bombs dropping the United States is somehow evading its assigned responsibilities. The question must be asked: Are Americans incapable of learning?"
I shudder to think about the answer to that question.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/No_Plan
There is nobody who has atoned as thoroughly for pumping up C-Plus Augustus's Excellent Mesopotamian Adventure than Peter Beinart, who recently unlimbered the lumber on the prescription for triumph in the Middle East proposed by John McCain and his faithful companion, Huckleberry J. Butchmeup.
"It's a wonderful illustration of the emptiness of much Beltway foreign-policy-speak. McCain and Graham want Obama to act both "deliberately" and "urgently" because they're both happy words. (As opposed to "lethargically" and "rashly," which are nastier synonyms for the same thing.) But when you translate these uplifting abstractions into plain English, you see how contradictory McCain and Graham's demands actually are. You can either demand that Obama not bomb Syria until he's ensured he has a plan likely to win international and congressional support, or you can demand that he bomb as soon as possible. You can't demand both."
What say you? I think only a couple of more months in the wilderness on the grasshopper-and-wild-honey diet and Beinart can come home again.
His piece put into stark relief something I've been turning over in my own mind since things started blowing up in the Levant -- a phrase we can use again, apparently, because the Hitlers du jour have adopted it as their own. I've watched the administration try to cool out the country, and I've assumed that there's a lot going on under the surface. (I certainly hope there is.) Then again, as Beinart points out, the Republican foreign-policy intelligentsia keep coming up with ideas that combine the geopolitical nuance of The Underpants Gnome with the strategic and logistical brilliance of El Mystico and Janet. Which brings us inevitably to the question: what if there is no "plan"? What if there is no strategy America can adopt that will help matters in any serious material way?
Any final military solution would require at least some American ground troops. Any political solution would require us to cut deals with horrible people (Assad in Syria) and/or with our putative allies who divide their time between buying off the savages and using them to try and scare the American people into sending our military back to save their oil-sodden asses. (And, yes, I'm fully fed up with being jerked around by the Qataris and the House Of Saud. Why do you ask?) And, even if we cut the deals, creating five friends and 5,000 more enemies in the process, how are they going to hold? What makes us think that, given our history in the region, we have the credibility to produce a lasting solution to the problem of people who just want to slaughter each other? What if, in the face of medieval savagery in the modern age, America truly is a helpless giant, if not a pitiful one? Can this country face that possibility without losing its mind?
I am not sanguine about the latter possibility. The drums are beginning to sound very loudly, and not just from the right, either. Democratic senators are trying to goose the president into doing...something. (Al Franken's letter sounds like John McCain on herbal tea.) The elite political media is uncrating the Kevlar and soldier hats that it thought it had put away for good. And local media is just going indiscriminately batshit. Up here in Boston, local TV has fastened on a guy who "may be" working with ISIS in Syria. (The man, Ahmad Abousamra, fled after being caught in the sweep that also netted Tarek Mehanna, who was convicted and sentenced to seventeen-and-a-half years in prison, but whose conviction was shaky enough that the Supreme Court will decide later this month to hear his case.) Given the coverage by the local TV drones, to say nothing of our plucky little tabloid, you'd think that Abousamra was in a Howard Johnson's on Route 16, plotting jihad over fried clams. I assume that local TV all over the country is finding its own little "piece" of the current horrors. Examples in comments would be welcome.
Perhaps all we can do is use our strength, and what little influence we have, to prevent humanitarian catastrophes on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps there is no overall solution that we can find. This runs contrary to the thinking that got us through the Cold War, of course, and it rubs up roughly against American exceptionalism, and it gives the Neustadt lie to all that John F. Kennedy imbibed so deeply, that to do nothing is always the worst thing, and that to do something is the truest measure of leadership, bearing burdens and passing torches and all, a philosophy that led even Kennedy down a few dark roads. Ninth-century blood feuds are working themselves out with 21st century weapons. The collective American political memory doesn't encompass anything like this. When these animosities were born in that part of the world, North America was peopled by moundbuilders along the Mississippi River. What if there is no American "plan" that will work, no American"strategy" that will suffice, no act of American "leadership" that will be adequate? What if the only real solution is for these people to decide on their own to stop slaughtering each other? What if the choice comes down simply to joining the bloodshed or not?
The invaluable Andrew Bacevich has been thumping this tub for quite some time now.
"After 9/11, similar mistakes - deference to the official line and to the conventional wisdom ("terrorism" standing in for communism) - recurred, this time with even less justification. The misbegotten Iraq war was one result. Yet even today, events in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere elicit an urge to "do something," accompanied by the conviction that unless troops are moving or bombs dropping the United States is somehow evading its assigned responsibilities. The question must be asked: Are Americans incapable of learning?"
I shudder to think about the answer to that question.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/No_Plan
