“Not All Interventions Are Imperialist”: On Syria, The Left Should Not Forget History
The most vocal opposition to President Barack Obama’s promise to send arms to the Syrian rebels is coming from the political left—to which I normally would consider myself allied. Writing in the Huffington Post, M. J. Rosenberg calls it a return to “19th century imperialism.” John Nichols writes in The Nation that “the notion that the Syrian mess is an American problem, or that the United States can or should choose a favorite in the fight, is highly debatable.” Similar statements can be found in Mother Jones and In These Times.
The left’s opposition to American intervention is Syria is not tactical or prudential. These authors are not arguing that intervention is futile because the rebels have already lost or because al Qaeda has penetrated the opposition or because the war has become a proxy contest in the Middle East. These are legitimate tactical concerns, but the left’s opposition is based on principle, not tactics. It says that the United States should not engage in interventions at all. The most common reference point is George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But Rosenberg also groups Obama’s intervention in Syria with the interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan (in the early 1980s and after September 11), and Libya.
I think this position is wrong. By identifying Obama’s impulse in Syria with Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada or Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the left rules out any possibility of a benign intervention for humanitarian or for worthy geopolitical ends. I also think this position is contrary to the traditional stance of the American and European lefts toward foreign civil wars or wars of independence. That, of course, doesn’t show the position is wrong; but it does suggest that these leftists are betraying their own, and my, historical ideals.
What is happening in Syria is different from, say, what was happening in Iraq in early 2003, the Dominican Republic in 1965, or Grenada in 1983. The Obama administration is not using a supposed threat to American interests to intervene unilaterally and impose its will on a country that is relatively at peace, nor is it intervening (as it did in Guatemala or Vietnam) to back an unpopular regime against a rebellion. American intervention in Syria most closely resembles intervention in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The U.S. is acting with other countries, and it is not trying to impose its own rule or to prop up a client regime.
In Syria, there is a civil war going on, and there is a reasonable moral case for backing the rebels against the government. The war began with the Assad regime brutally suppressing peaceful democratic reform protests. The war has already taken as many as 120,000 lives. Assad forces have laid waste to major cities. Some dictators retain a lingering loyalty to their nation and its people, but Bashar Al Assad appears engaged in a war of personal survival. It’s not genocide, but a patria-cide—and belongs on the list of crimes against humanity that other nations should not tolerate.
My own position reflects the historical stance of the American and European left going back to the American and French revolutions. The left in the United States and Europe repeatedly pressured sympathetic governments to defend liberty and independence internationally. Nichols, following the lead of other anti-interventionists on the left and right, quotes John Quincy Adams from 1821 saying that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But it’s worth looking at the context in which Adams made that statement. A whole variety of movements, editorial pages, and politicians, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were urging Adams to back the Greek struggle for independence against the Turks and Latin American countries’ struggles against Spanish rule. There were a few hotheads calling for the U.S. Navy to steam into the Aegean, but the bulk of proposals, and the ones that concerned Adams, were for recognition or for sending emissaries to the Greeks or Latin Americans. But Adams rejected any initiative.
Over the next 150 years, the left in the U.S. and Europe has urged support for the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Spanish Republicans in the Civil War, the African National Congress in apartheid-era South Africa, and independence for Algeria, Vietnam, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Henry Wallace—recently held up by Oliver Stone as a paragon of the left—supported American intervention in the Korean peninsula in 1950. Until recently, the left has always drawn a distinction between these kind of interventions and interventions aimed at buttressing imperial or neo-imperial rule. So the left opposed intervention in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Iraq. But operating in the shadow of these fiascos, much of the left today has refused to back any intervention. That has included Syria today, the Balkans in the mid-1990s, and, incredibly, the attempt to drive Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991.
I remain perplexed about what the United States can do to help the Syrian rebels. I am not a military expert, and I don’t know what is involved in setting up a no-fly zone. I think that whatever we do, we have to do with other countries. And I believe that we have to avoid any commitment to policing a post-Assad Syria. These are reservations that the Obama administration seems to share. But I have no doubt that we should try to do something to rid the world of the Assad regime. And I say that as a card-carrying member of the American left.
By: John B. Judis, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 22, 2013
“Apocalypse Not Now”: Just About Everything Is Getting Better
As a culture, we seem to be in an apocalyptic moment. Judging from the movie trailers, it looks like the human race is basically screwed this summer in After Earth, World War Z, and This Is the End—a comedy!—while Washington (and its black president) will be besieged by cyber-terrorists in White House Down. In the real world, we’re bombarded with warnings about our debt crisis, our economic crisis, and of course our political crisis, which is to say, our government’s inability to deal with all its other crises. Republicans in particular have become perennial prophets of doom, warning that President Obama’s foreign policies will destroy our standing in the world, that Obamacare will destroy our health care system, that out-of-control spending, growth-killing taxes, and loose monetary policy will turn us into a dystopia of inflation, high interest rates and economic paralysis.
Relax!
Things are OK. And while you can’t tell from following the news—the press doesn’t like to report on planes that land safely, or seemingly obvious stuff that didn’t happen yesterday—things are getting better. The apocalypse is not nigh.
We are now in the fourth year of a slow but steady recovery. The economy is adding about 200,000 jobs a month, and has added 6.8 million private-sector jobs since the end of the Great Recession. The stock market is at an all-time high, and has almost doubled since Obama took office. The housing market is rebounding. It’s true that 7.5% unemployment is way too high, but it’s better than the double-digit unemployment we had in the wake of the financial meltdown, when the apocalypse really was nigh. The government has even turned a profit on the reviled Wall Street bailouts that ended the meltdown.
Yes, the economy would be doing even better if it weren’t being dragged down by the “sequester,” $85 billion worth of haphazard spending cuts resulting from Republican demands for government austerity. Those were misguided demands after a financial crisis, the kind of demands that have turned Europe into an economic basket case. But so far, at least, fears that the sequester could scuttle the U.S. recovery have proven to be overblown. Consumer confidence just hit a six-year high.
What about the fears that inspired the sequester and the rest of the austerity push, the fears that spiraling deficits would turn us into Greece? Well, the Congressional Budget Office now estimates the deficit at $642 billion, the lowest since the crisis; it’s been cut in half since Obama took office, the fastest reduction since World War 2. We’re not Greece. The bond markets certainly don’t think so; interest rates are at historic lows. And the runaway inflation that Paul Ryan and other loose-money critics keep predicting has yet to materialize; inflation is actually below the official Federal Reserve target of just 2 percent.
In fairness, while America’s short-term deficit is shrinking fast, our long-term deficit is still a concern, because soaring health care costs have threatened the future of Medicare and Medicaid. But there’s good news there, too. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Foundation, health care spending is now growing at the slowest rate in five decades, which is why Medicare’s trustees just upgraded the program’s budget outlook. And there is strong evidence that Obamacare’s efforts to reorient the medical system to reward providers who keep their patients healthy instead of providers who perform more services are working. For example, Obamacare imposes financial penalties on hospitals with high rates of readmissions and central-line infections; predictably, hospitals have improved their performance in both areas. The health information technology revolution—launched by Obama’s 2009 stimulus—is also bending the cost curve, dragging a pen-and-paper system into digital age.
Meanwhile, U.S. combat forces are out of Iraq, and they’ll be out of Afghanistan next year. U.S. carbon emissions are at their lowest level in two decades, and so are U.S. oil imports. By historical standards, taxes are very low and spending is very modest. General Motors and Chrysler, wards of the state four years ago, are posting their best sales numbers in years. Gays are serving openly in the military, solar installations have increased over 1,000% in four years, a cool robot is taking cool pictures of Mars, and Tesla just paid back its government loan with interest. Things are getting better, and better is better than worse.
But the headlines are all about supposed scandals—stupid IRS agents in Cincinnati, overzealous leak investigations at the Justice Department, a dopey dispute over Benghazi talking points. These are the kind of things that politicians can obsess about when there’s no crisis on the horizon; the last time the national outlook was this bright, Republicans impeached the president for sexing up an intern. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not as if the latest wannabe-scandals are distracting official Washington from any important work it might be doing. Sure, Congress ought to do something about climate change, but as long as Republicans control the House, Congress isn’t going to do anything about climate change.
I guess that qualifies as a crisis. But one of the lessons of the Obama era, along with the general advisability of DOING STUFF regardless of the political implications, is that positive change can happen in spite of a dysfunctional system. You couldn’t build a summer movie around that—”In a world where complex legislation is implemented effectively…”—but it’s still a feel-good idea, even if it seems to have limited box-office appeal.
By: Michael Grunwald, Time Magazine, June 9, 2013
“Edward Snowden’s Grandiosity”: A Classic Rorschach Test, How You See It Depends On What You Bring To The Seeing.
Edward Snowden was appalled.
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the then-anonymous Snowden told reporters as his leaks first emerged.
Well, so can Google. And Facebook. And most companies’ internal networks. Creepy? You bet. Calamitous? Not so clear.
Snowden hoped to go to Iraq at 19 when he joined the Army because he “felt like he had an obligation as a human being to help free other people from oppression.”
Commendable, if a bit grandiose. But Snowden’s superiors couldn’t measure up to his ideals. “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,” he said in his coming-out interviews.
That doesn’t describe officers I know who spent years risking their lives trying to help Iraqis forge a better destiny.
Then even a president failed him. It was no single thing President Obama did, you understand. “It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” Snowden said.
It’s staggering to contemplate. In the old days, when the scales fell away from the eyes of one callow Rand Paul donor, the result might have been a few beers at the dorm as everyone lamented how compromised adult life really is. Today, a disappointed young libertarian contractor with a security clearance can blow the lid on lawful intelligence methods thousands of Americans spent billions of dollars developing.
The Snowden case is a classic Rorschach test. How you see it depends on what you bring to the seeing. Do you empathize more with those who govern — and who, in this case, are charged with protecting us? Or has the history of abuse of power, and the special danger from such abuses in an age in which privacy seems to be vanishing, leave you hailing any exposure of secret government methods as grounds for sainthood?
There are people I respect who say Snowden is a hero. I think they’re dead wrong.
Thinking about “big data” is a little like imagining how things look to God (assuming God exists). God may love you personally, but she’s a little too busy to worry about whether you get that raise you deserve. The National Security Agency (NSA) may have access to every bit and byte in the land, but the unfathomable river of information their algorithms must mine means no one’s focusing on the text you sent to that guy in accounting.
(To test Big Brother’s reach, my daughter and I e-mailed on how to work with a Chechnyan rebel group to develop weapons for an attack on U.S. soil, as part of a “play” we’re writing based on recent events. No knock at the door. Yet.)
Is there potential for abuse? Of course. An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.
The conversation would be entirely different today if we’d had a series of attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page (with which I don’t usually nod in agreement) wrote, if the nation suffered another 9/11 or an attack with weapons of mass destruction, “the political responses could include biometric national ID cards, curfews, surveillance drones over the homeland, and even mass roundups of ethnic or religious groups.” Practices like data mining, the Journal added, “protect us against far greater intrusions on individual freedom.”
But because vigilance and luck have left us safe thus far from more massive attacks, Snowden felt entitled to indulge the call of his precious conscience. Has any leaker ever been armed with more perfectly crafted sound bites as “the architecture of oppression” and “turnkey tyranny”?
I’ve been spied on continuously by private-sector firms as I’ve written this column. As I typed “Snowden” on Gmail, I got ads for new mortgage rates. My search for “secrets” drew ads for Secret deodorant. My behavior has been fed into algorithms and sold to advertisers. At least the NSA isn’t getting rich tracking my every move.
Daniel Ellsberg says Snowden is a “hero.” Let me suggest a different prism through which to view that term. Somewhere in the intelligence community is another 29-year-old computer whiz whose name we’ll never know. That person joined the government after 9/11 because she felt inspired to serve the nation in its hour of need. For years she’s sweated to perfect programs that can sort through epic reams of data to identify potential threats. Some Americans are alive today because of her work.
As one security analyst put it this week, to find a needle in a haystack, you need the haystack. If we’re going to romanticize a young nerd in the intelligence world, my Unknown Coder trumps the celebrity waiting in Hong Kong for Diane Sawyer’s call any day.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 11, 2013
“Bleed Until Bankruptcy”: Top Senate Republicans Want To Keep Playing Into Al Qaeda’s Strategy
Back in 2004, in a video addressed to the American people, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden described his “bleed until bankruptcy” strategy. “All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies,” bin Laden taunted. “So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”
The twin goals of this strategy were to drain the U.S. of resources by baiting it into expensive, open-ended military interventions like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the resulting anger over those interventions causing more people to join Al Qaeda’s cause.
I was reminded of that by these specific remarks from President Obama’s speech on counterterrorism yesterday:
The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.
There was a lot to chew on in the president’s speech, and obviously we’ll have to wait and see how much weight the president actually puts behind some of the reforms he suggested, but I think this core passage represents another important shift away from the rhetorical construct of a “Global War on Terror.”
Meanwhile, on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, four of the Senate’s leading hawks — Republican Senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC), Saxby Chambliss (GA) and Kelly Ayotte (NH) — responded as you might expect to the prospect of the loss of that rhetorical construct, which has proven extremely politically beneficial to hawks over the last decade.
“I believe we are still in a long, drawn-out conflict with Al Qaeda. To somehow argue that Al Qaeda is ‘on the run’ comes from a degree of unreality that, to me, is really incredible,” said McCain, adding: “Al Qaeda’s ‘on the run’ is expanding all over the Middle East from Mali to Yemen and all places in between and to somehow think that we can bring the authorization of the use of military force to a complete closure contradicts the reality of the facts on the ground. Al Qaeda will be with us for a long time.”
“The President’s speech today will be viewed by terrorists as a victory,” Chambliss declared.
Graham took the chance to ding the president on Iraq: “Iraq is a country that went through hell, was inside the 10-yard line, the surge did work and it’s falling apart because the president chose not to leave any American soldiers behind when 10,000 or 12,000 would have made a difference.”
Leaving aside why Graham thinks 10,000 or 12,000 U.S. troops would have made a difference in Iraq when over 100,000 couldn’t stop it from descending into civil war in 2006 (not to mention the tension between claiming to support democracy in Iraq while bashing the president for not working harder to circumvent democracy in Iraq in order to keep U.S. troops there), it’s remarkable that these Congressional leaders essentially want America to keep playing into Al Qaeda’s “bleed until bankruptcy” strategy.
By: Matt Duss, Think Progress, May 24, 2013
“Through His Own Arrogance”: Dick Cheney Opens Himself To Subpoena Regarding 9/11, Iraq, Torture And Valerie Plame
When a former member of the Executive calls for Congress to subpoena another former member of the Executive, it is a game-changer. No longer can he rely on “Executive Privilege” to block his own testimony.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has suggested that the GOP subpoena former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again on Benghazi.
Fine and dandy. Let us first subpoena Mr. Cheney to testify about 9/11, Iraq, torture and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Unlike former Secretary Clinton, who has testified to Congress for hours on Benghazi, Cheney has never testified for one minute before Congress on any of these matters.
Indeed, Congress never really investigated 9/11. It appointed a commission more than a year later to determine what changes needed to be made in U.S. security, not to assign accountability. One might ask Cheney who is accountable for 9/11, who lost their jobs over it. That is what Senator John McCain (R-AZ) keeps asking about Benghazi, yet I have never heard the official answers to those questions regarding 9/11/2001.
Regarding 9/11, Cheney had been chosen (in the same way that he was ‘chosen’ to be VP nominee) by Bush to be in charge of security. The most important point to recall is that, despite all the warnings from January 25 from the then-White House counterterrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, Cheney never even called a meeting of the “principals” responsible for national security to discuss those warnings until 9/4/2001, and that meeting was perfunctory. (Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke, p. 237). It is also worth noting that New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who had no classified information, called it in a June 26, 2001 column, “A Memo from Osama bin Laden.”
Regarding Iraq, the Committee could probe how Cheney and his staff used Judith Miller to publish articles in the New York Times on Saddam’s WMD that were sourced from Cheney and that Cheney then quoted without revealing he was essentially quoting himself. They might ask him about the certainty of his public pronouncements when the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) expressed serious doubt about many of its own findings. The Committee might ask him about his references to Mohammed Atta in Prague, and, well, one would scarcely know where to begin, or end.
Regarding torture, there is recent bipartisan report that the Bush Adminstration engaged in torture and that the highest levels of government (read, Cheney and Bush) bear direct responsibility. Even the commission’s co-chair, NRA apologist and former Republican Congressman Asa Hutchinson, agreed with that finding.
The report has gone almost unnoticed. Perhaps the Cheney hearings can bring it to the fore where it belongs.
And then, of course, there is Valerie Plame. The Committee might ask him the justification for revealing classified information at all, and, by so doing, providing aid-and-comfort to enemies of the United States.
So, here’s the deal. Hillary Clinton has already testified on Benghazi once. When Dick Cheney appears before Congress to answer questions about his actions that caused the death and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people, some from incompetence, some as a result of outright lying- — then he can come talk to us about Hillary Clinton testifying again.
By: Paul Abrams, The Huffington Post, May 10, 2013
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