Cached
Begin with the fact that the United States was not the first country calling for military intervention in Syria after pictures of what appeared to be the dead from a chemical attack surfaced. That honor went to France, Turkey and Britain, each of whom called for action. Much as with Libya, where France and Italy were the first and most eager to intervene, the United States came late to the feast.
Group items tagged
1More
The Word - American History X'd - The Colbert Report - 0 views
-
The Tennessee Tea Party demands that textbooks remove references to the Founding Fathers' slave ownership and violence against Native Americans. 2012-31-01 - Video Clip | Comedy Central
36More
Obama's Tightrope Walk - 0 views
-
-
The United States did not have any overriding national interest in Syria.
-
The United States is in the process of recovering from Iraq and Afghanistan, and is not eager to try its hand at nation building in Syria, especially given the players.
- ...30 more annotations...
-
What started to draw the United States into the matter was a statement made by the president in 2012, when he said that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line.
-
He didn't mean he wanted to intervene. He set the red line because he figured that it was the one thing Assad wouldn't try. It was an attempt to stay out, not an announcement of interest. In fact, there had been previous evidence of small-scale chemical attacks, and the president had dodged commitment.
-
A significant faction pressed him on this in his foreign policy apparatus.
-
The point is that, leaving Iraq, this faction felt that the United States failed to carry out its moral obligations in Rwanda, and applauded the intervention in Kosovo.
-
This faction is not small and appeals to an important tendency in American political culture that sees World War II as the perfect war, because it was waged against an unspeakable evil, and not for strategic or material gain.
-
That war was more complicated than that, but there was an element of truth to it. And the world, on the whole, approved of American involvement there.
-
Secure behind distance and power, the United States ought not be a typical insecure political power, but should use its strength to prevent the more extreme injustices in the world.
-
There was a romantic belief that the crowd in the street was always more virtuous than the tyrant in his palace. Sometimes they were right. It is not clear that the fall of the Shah reduced the sum total of human suffering.
-
Obama had learned a thing or two about the crowd, Arab and otherwise. He was far less romantic about their intent, particularly after Libya. After Libya he was also aware that after the self-congratulations, the United States would have to live with the chaos or new tyranny. He didn't want to attack, and that was clear in the first days after the affair.
-
There were two reasons.
-
First, he had lost confidence in the crowd.
-
Second, he had vowed not to go to war as Bush had, without international support validated by the United Nations
-
Pressed by the human rights faction in his administration to take action in Syria, he was also under pressure from three key countries: Britain, France and Turkey.
-
Obama resisted not the principle of attack but the scale Turkey wanted.
-
This was one that the British had helped concoct, and the parliament voted against it, with many parliament members saying the United Kingdom was no longer the Americans' lap dog.
-
Obama, who had worked so hard to avoid leadership, had become George W. Bush to the British Parliament.
-
The Russians were completely committed to the survival of the regime.
-
The United States was less passionate, but Obama, while willing to do the minimum gesture possible to satisfy his human rights impulse, did think about what would come later and didn't want to see the regime fall. In this, the Russians and Americans had common interests.
-
The Russian calculations came down to its read of the United States, which is that it was not in a position to impose an international system in the region because of internal political weakness.
-
Therefore the Russians had a rare opportunity to impose if not a system, then a presence. Most of all, the Russian view was that it had nothing to fear from the United States, in spite of its power imbalance. Obama was not likely to take action.
-
Others, like Poland, that had been with the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan also bowed out. The Poles are interesting because they had been the most eager for collaboration with the Americans, but felt the most betrayed by not getting an American commitment for significant military aid and collaboration.
-
By the end of the week, the Russians were hurling insults at Obama, the British finally freed themselves from American domination, and the Turks were furious at American weakness.
-
-
The French -- and France's interventionist flow is fascinating (Libya, Mali, now Syria) -- stood with the United States. This is a tale to consider in itself, but not here. And the Canadians decided that much as they disliked chemical weapons use, they would not be available. The wheels just came off the strategy.
-
It is easy to blame Obama for losing control of the situation, but that is too simple. Every administration has its ideologues, and every president wants allies and no one wants to go to war without those allies flying aircraft beside them. And it would be nice if the United States could be just another country, but it isn't. The moment that it enters a coalition, it leads a coalition.
-
The United States had a strategic interest in neither faction taking power in Syria -- its Lebanonization. That is brutal, but it is true, and the United States was not the only country with that interest.
-
The real problem is this: After the Islamist wars, the United States has, as happened before, sought to minimize its presence in the world and while enjoying the benefits of being the world's leading economy, not pay any political or military price for it.
-
It is a strategy that is impossible to maintain, as the United States learned after World War I, Vietnam and Desert Storm. It is a seductive vision but a fantasy. The world comes visiting.
-
driven by an insufficient national strategy, the president was trapped by internal ideologies, the penchant of foreign allies and the temptation to do something, however ineffective. But as we know, the ineffective frequently becomes more expensive than the effective, and choosing where to be effective -- and where to pass -- is essential.
-
This is not over yet. If Congress votes for strikes, it is likely that Obama will do something. But at that point he will be doing it by himself, and the inevitable death of innocents in even the smallest attack will bring him under fire from some of those most insistent that he do something about the war crimes in Syria.
-
Yes, because all national actions happen flawlessly, with no negative repurcussions, as long as your heart is in the right place.
-
-
It is not easy to be president, nor is it easy to be the world's leading power. It is nice to be able to sit in moral judgment of men like Assad, but sadly not have the power to do anything. Where life gets hard is when sitting in moral judgment forces you to do something because you can. It teaches you to be careful in judging, as the world will both demand that you do something and condemn you for doing it.
-
"Last week began with certainty that an attack on Syria was inevitable and even imminent. It ended with the coalition supporting the attack somewhere between falling apart and not coming together, and with U.S. President Barack Obama making it clear that an attack was inevitable, maybe in a month or so, if Congress approves, after Sept. 9 when it reconvenes. This is a comedy in three parts: the reluctant warrior turning into the raging general and finding his followers drifting away, becoming the reluctant warrior again."
21More
Strategy, Ideology and the Close of the Syrian Crisis - 0 views
-
In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture.
-
In the past month, the president of the United States treated the act of bombing Syria as a gesture intended to convey meaning rather than as a military action intended to achieve some specific end. This is the key to understanding the tale that unfolded over the past month.
-
The threat of war is useful only when the threat is real and significant. This threat, however, was intended to be insignificant.
- ...17 more annotations...
-
When he took office, Obama did not want to engage in any war. His goal was to raise the threshold for military action much higher than it had been since the end of the Cold War, when Desert Storm, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and other lesser interventions formed an ongoing pattern in U.S. foreign policy.
-
Strategy and the specifics of Syria both argued for American distance, and Obama followed this logic. Once chemical weapons were used, however, the reasoning shifted. Two reasons explain this shift.
-
One was U.S. concerns over weapons of mass destruction.
-
Tens of thousands have died in the Syrian civil war. The only difference in the deaths that prompted Obama's threats was that chemical weapons had caused them. That distinction alone caused the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to change its strategy.
-
The second cause of the U.S. shift is more important. All American administrations have a tendency to think ideologically, and there is an ideological bent heavily represented in the Obama administration that feels that U.S. military power ought to be used to prevent genocide.
-
This feeling dates back to World War II and the Holocaust, and became particularly intense over Rwanda and Bosnia, where many believe the United States could have averted mass murder. Many advocates of American intervention in humanitarian operations would oppose the use of military force in other circumstances, but regard its use as a moral imperative to stop mass murder.
-
His solution was to loudly threaten military action that he and his secretary of state both indicated would be minimal. The threatened action aroused little concern from the Syrian regime, which has fought a bloody two-year war. Meanwhile, the Russians, who were seeking to gain standing by resisting the United States, could paint Washington as reckless and unilateral.
-
Obama wanted all of this to simply go away, but he needed some guarantee that chemical weapons in Syria would be brought under control.
-
For that, he needed al Assad's allies the Russians to promise to do something. Without that, he would have been forced to take ineffective military action despite not wanting to.
-
Therefore, the final phase of the comedy played out in Geneva, the site of grave Cold War meetings (it is odd that Obama accepted this site given its symbolism), where the Russians agreed in some unspecified way on an uncertain time frame to do something about Syria's chemical weapons. Obama promised not to take action that would have been ineffective anyway, and that was the end of it.
-
the point of the agreement was not dealing with chemical weapons, it was to buy time and release the United States from its commitment to bomb something in Syria.
-
The United States and Russia both want the al Assad regime in place to block the Sunnis. They both want the civil war to end, the Americans to reduce the pressure on themselves to aid the Sunnis, the Russians to reduce the chances of the al Assad regime collapsing.
-
The most important outcome globally is that the Russians sat with the Americans as equals for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Russians sat as mentors, positioning themselves as appearing to instruct the immature Americans in crisis management. To that end, Putin's op-ed in The New York Times was brilliant.
-
This should not be seen merely as imagery: The image of the Russians forcing the Americans to back down resonates all along the Russian periphery. In the former Soviet satellites, the complete disarray in Europe on this and most other issues, the vacillation of the United States, and the symbolism of Kerry and Lavrov negotiating as equals will shape behavior for quite awhile.
-
The Obama administration has demonstrated a tendency to judge regimes that are potential allies on the basis of human rights without careful consideration of whether the alternative might be far worse. Coupled with an image of weakness, this could cause countries like Azerbaijan to reconsider their positions vis-a-vis the Russians.
-
The alignment of moral principles with national strategy is not easy under the best of circumstances. Ideologies tend to be more seductive in generalized terms, but not so coherent in specific cases. This is true throughout the political spectrum. But it is particularly intense in the Obama administration, where the ideas of humanitarian intervention, absolutism in human rights, and opposition to weapons of mass destruction collide with a strategy of limiting U.S. involvement -- particularly military involvement -- in the world. The ideologies wind up demanding judgments and actions that the strategy rejects.
-
The result is what we have seen over the past month with regard to Syria: A constant tension between ideology and strategy that caused the Obama administration to search for ways to do contradictory things.
-
"It is said that when famed Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich heard of the death of the Turkish ambassador, he said, "I wonder what he meant by that?" True or not, serious or a joke, it points out a problem of diplomacy. In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture. In the past month, the president of the United States treated the act of bombing Syria as a gesture intended to convey meaning rather than as a military action intended to achieve some specific end. This is the key to understanding the tale that unfolded over the past month."
4More
Outrage World - 0 views
-
One of my friends posted a link to last week's Jezebel post titled "The Daily Show's Woman Problem" as her Gmail chat status, alongside the words "Every woman must read this." Obediently, I clicked, and read a lengthy post that began with the assertion that The Daily Show is a "boys' club where women's contributions are often ignored and dismissed." When I finished reading, I was outraged! But not, as the majority of Jezebel readers and commenters seemed to be, at The Daily Show.
-
Reference this Buzz conversation: http://www.google.com/buzz/docbadwrench/PtNHujFYNv1/Interesting-article-at-Jezebel-Its-worth
-
-
-
Tagline: "How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up page views by exploiting women's worst tendencies." By Emily Gould at Slate on July 6, 2010.
1More
Sean Combs looks to establish a good comedy rap with 'Get Him to the Greek' - 0 views
-
"The hip-hop mogul is dead serious about being very funny in the movie." Referred to by Neil Howe at Lifecourse. Article itself is by Amy Kaufman at the LA Times on June 3, 2010.
5More
Louis C.K. Stares at the Void - 0 views
-
he dwells lavishly on his mortality
-
Louis C.K.—or, more precisely, the comic persona we see him deploy in segments of his consistently excellent stand-up act and in uneven short films amounting to blurts of surrealistic autobiography—isn't especially jaded or anxious.
-
The crux of the shtick is that he's free of illusions
- ...1 more annotation...
-
It is as if, beneath the anger that every good comedian must cultivate and cherish, he's achieved a kind of philosophical peace. Having meditated on the world's absurd injustices, he greets them with absurdity in kind. In all, the outlook qualifies him as a kind of existential hero.
-
"His new show, Louie, displays a fine dark humor." By Troy Patterson at Slate on July 26, 2010.
12More
5 Reasons Humanity Is Terrible at Democracy | Cracked.com - 0 views
-
Polls consistently show that we think those who disagree with us politically are simply bad people, on a personal level.
-
What's fascinating is how irrelevant our partisan political affiliations are, on a day to day basis, but oh how we imagine them to be the center of our being.
-
-
Now take a look at this study, which compared a person's average political knowledge with their primary source of news. The results were surprising: The most knowledgeable groups were viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hot on their heels? Fans of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
-
Never mind the fact that it's a pretty bad sign when the most politically educated people in the country are relying on either comedy shows or political pundits for their news. The key is that these outlets are primarily about ruthlessly mocking and dismissing the other side. Yet they attract more knowledgeable voters, not less.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
In the world of psychology, they call this attitude polarization; the more times the average person spends thinking about a subject, the more extreme his position becomes -- even if he doesn't run across any new information.
-
once you get to the point where you're rooting so hard for one side of an issue that you're just short of painting your chest in team colors, then all that time spent reading up on the issues stops being about becoming an informed citizen and becomes more about accumulating ammunition for the next argument.
-
#1. We Hate Each Other Over Imaginary Differences
-
For example, a study asked Americans of various demographics and political stances about the ideal way they feel wealth should be distributed across the country. Young or old, male or female, Republican or Democrat, the answers they provided were almost identical.
-
Don't get us wrong; it's not that there are no disagreements, it's just that we vastly overestimate the degree to which we disagree, because the differences are all we focus on.
-
For instance: During the Obama-McCain debates, their stated foreign policy stance was virtually identical. It was only on matters of how quickly a withdrawal would occur, not whether, if and how. This was almost completely glossed over by the left. In fact, the broad continuance of foreign policy is evidence of a geopolitical 'pull' that exists beyond partisanship and personalities.
-
-
We don't want the news to just give us information -- we want a story, and every story needs a villain, a battle between good and evil.
-
Knowing this, the news media decades ago started covering politics like a war, or a sport (in the biz, they call it "horse race coverage") where the reporting is entirely about which side is winning -- at the expense of figuring out the actual impact the resulting election or legislation will have on you as a human being. We tune in for "Us vs. Them," so that's what they give us.