Tag Archives: warfare

“Crush the Taliban to Save Pakistan”: Coverage of the Peshawar Massacre

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Apologies, but I’ve been too distracted by the Peshawar attacks and by grading to write the posts I promised to write on the psychiatric medications symposium. I promise to get to that soon. (I have a lamentable tendency to promise multi-part posts and not deliver on them, but I’m making it a New Year’s resolution to do otherwise.) Meanwhile, Peshawar it is.

There’s been some good commentary on Peshawar, much—though not all–of it by Pakistanis. I linked to some of this commentary in a previous post. Here’s some more–a lot more.

Here’s a good symposium in The New York Times—C. Christine Fair, Ahsan Butt, Musharraf Zaidi, and Pir Zubair Shah. The discussion, however, is misdescribed by the Times as a “debate.” In fact, the four contributors mostly agree with one another; no one says anything particularly controversial or new. It’s still worth reading, however, since much of what they say is true. Irfan Husain makes similar points at Dawn (Karachi) in “The Poison Within.” But the best single piece of analysis I’ve seen is this short piece in The Friday Times (Lahore) by Najam Sethi, “Deja Vu?” If you read just one thing about Peshawar, read that.

There’s been a loud and predictable outcry in Pakistan against the Taliban for the attacks. Among the more eloquent condemnations or lamentations I read were Maria Amir’s “Time to Confront the Taliban in Our Midst,” in Dawn, Pervez Hoodbhoy’s “It Wasn’t the Final Atrocity”  (also in Dawn), and Asma Jehangir’s “Pakistan’s Rulers Must Show an Honest Resolve to Fight Terrorism” in the London Guardian.

Nadeem Paracha’s brand of humor is probably an acquired taste, but I found his “Anatomy of an Apologist” (in Dawn) both grimly accurate and screamingly funny.

A few things I’ve read strike me as worth reading on diagnostic grounds for the muddled thinking they involve. This well-meaning piece by Imtiaz Gul (Friday Times) is a perfect example. Much of what Gul says is perfectly sensible, but I had to shake my head at this passage:

A Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) revenge strike was expected since the army launched the Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan on June 15. As the army focused increasingly on Waziristan and the Khyber region and exuded triumphant confidence, the TTP carried out the lethal attack last month at the India-Pakistan border, killing at least 60 people watching a flag-lowering ceremony. The month of Muharram passed relatively peacefully, prompting many of us to empirically conclude that the graph of violent acts had come down considerably.

But as it turned out with the Peshawar mayhem, the TTP, though badly bruised by the combination of the Operation Zarb-e-Azb and the CIA-led drone campaign which saw about a dozen strikes between mid June and early this month, had something else up its sleeves.

What Gul describes as an “empirical conclusion” is actually a blatant non-sequitur. The army launches an anti-Taliban operation; the Taliban strike back in November. A month passes, and Gul thinks: “Well, that’s that! They won’t attack again!” Then they attack again, and he concludes: “If the events of the last weeks were an indication the Peshawar attack was in the making ever since.” So which is it—did he expect them to attack, or did their attack come as a surprise after what he thought was a downward trend in attacks by them? Gul’s simultaneous presence on both sides of that question strikes me as representative of a deeply-rooted confusion in the Pakistani intelligentsia—caught between commonsense and wishful thinking.

For an even deeper muddle, I’d suggesting reading “Pakistan’s New Warriors Against the Taliban” and “Peshawar School Attack Indicts Pakistan’s Misplaced Priorities,” by Rafia Zakaria in Al Jazeera America. I have a lot of respect for Zakaria’s intellect and for her activism on other issues, but here her claims really border on the preposterous. The “new warriors against the Taliban” turn out to be Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri–names that will be meaningless to non-Pakistani readers, but will strike many (most?) Pakistan-knowledgeable readers as an inadvertent joke rather than a serious suggestion. (See below for discussion of Imran Khan.)

The second article of Zakaria’s articles claims, offhandedly, that the Peshwar attack proves that military options won’t work against the Taliban; hence we should dispense with them. That claim is a textbook case of ignoratio elenchi: a single successful attack by the Taliban cannot prove that military options against the Taliban are a failure; after all, the failure to use military options against the Taliban might lead to even more successful attacks by the Taliban. As Zakaria herself concedes, no policy is foolproof, so it makes no sense to seize on a single event as conclusive evidence of the failure of a policy. In saying that drone attacks “have done little to diminish the Taliban’s capacity to carry out such operations,” she flouts both common sense and systematic empirical evidence to the contrary. There is no conclusive evidence either way, but the existing evidence suggests that drone strikes are the best of the available options. I can’t really do justice to Zakaria’s argument as a whole right now, but some of what I say in the combox of my last post (in response to Matt Faherty et al) is relevant to Zakaria’s arguments as well.

Some Pakistanis have refused to condemn the attacks altogether. Notable among them is Zakaria’s hero Imran Khan, who is misdescribed as “condemning” the attacks in this statement (You Tube video, in Urdu). What he says in the statement is little more than a well-crafted contribution to the art of prevarication. He offers his condolences to the bereaved, tells us that he has postponed his own political activities for later in deference to the collective need for mourning, tells us that he’s on his way to Peshawar to seek more “details” before saying anything substantive, and then offers a very vague criticism of “whoever” might have committed this dastardly deed (“jis nay yeh kiyah“). As everyone by now knows, the Pakistani Taliban have taken responsibility for the shooting: though Khan speaks of the nation standing together in unity, what “everyone” knows seems to exclude Khan himself. I am not sure how Rafia Zakaria’s proposed “warrior against the Taliban” can deserve the description she gives him if he can’t even manage to condemn the Taliban for having engaged in a massacre of 130-odd children (not the Taliban’s first massacre, by the way, and not their last: just another massacre that “Taliban Khan” has failed to ascribe to the Taliban and failed to condemn under that description, while insisting on negotiations with them and ignoring the past history of failed negotiations with them).

Another Taliban-apologetic-seeming figure is Maulana Abdul Aziz, the imam of the notorious Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) in Islamabad who, when asked to condemn the attacks on a television talk show, refused to do so. Here’s the video (in Urdu). (Note: I had some technical difficulties in watching it all the way through. It breaks up a lot.)

Like Imran Khan, Maulana Abdul Aziz mostly engages in uncontroversial offerings of condolences, then changes the subject to the sins of Pervez Musharraf, then finally admits that the massacre “shouldn’t have” happened. There’s no disputing that it shouldn’t have happened, but saying that neither answers the question he was asked nor amounts to an authentic condemnation of the act. I admire the acuity and persistence of the show’s hostess, Nadia Mirza, who three times asks Abdul Aziz exactly the right question to ask under the circumstances: Does Maulana Abdul Aziz sahib intend, morally speaking, to equate the military’s campaign against the Taliban with the Taliban’s campaign against Pakistan? There’s nothing more clarifying than an answer–or a non-answer–to the right question asked in the right way. What we get here is a non-answer which licenses the inference that Abdul Aziz’s implicit answer is at least a yes: he at least equates the two things and may well regard the Taliban’s campaign as more justified than the government’s. Incidentally, Maulana Abdul Aziz can be very adamant about giving and demanding straight answers when it suits him to do so. (The preceding link goes to a You Tube debate in Urdu.) So we shouldn’t assume that he’s habitually too wordy to get to the point on the massacre.

There has been a popular uprising of sorts against Maulana Abdul Aziz and against the Lal Masjid as an institution. As an imam, Maulana Abdul Aziz is on the government’s payroll, and ordinary Pakistanis justifiably want him off of it. I agree with that, but I have to say that I find some aspects of the anti-Lal Masjid backlash a problematic and ill-conceived misplacement of priorities. It’s true that the “clerisy” has apologized for the Taliban and for terrorism. That’s evil, but it can’t legitimately (or efficaciously) be fought by anti-hate speech regulation, which is what many activists are now calling for. Pakistan needs more free speech, not less. Unless they’re making specific threats, the immorality of the “clerisy” ought to be brought into the open, and exposed to the light of day–not suppressed, repressed, and driven underground. Mill’s argument in chapter 2 of “On Liberty” is pertinent here. I wonder if anyone has ever translated it into Urdu.

Actually, what needs exposure and discussion is the connection between mosque and state in Pakistan, not a campaign of retaliatory anti-blasphemy laws, whether religious or secular. (Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration is pertinent here. Urdu translation, anyone?) A suggestion for inquiry: think about how Pakistan resembles Israel, and look at the trouble that Israelis have brought on themselves by insisting on the Jewish character of “the Jewish state.” Another suggestion for inquiry: think about the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and how such an amendment might work for or fit into Pakistan’s constitution. It might not, but it’s more worth discussing than the viability of anti-hate-speech legislation targeting the mullahs.

For deeper analysis, I’d recommend reading the work of Ahmed Rashid. You probably couldn’t go wrong by hanging on every word Rashid writes about Pakistan, but I’ve found his recent work for the New York Review of Books and the Financial Times particularly enlightening. It’s all good stuff, but I’d particularly recommend “Pakistan Must Unleash the Military Against the Militants,” “Pakistan’s Offensive Against Militants Is Right,” “A Different Pakistan,” and “The Motives Behind the Taliban’s Brutal Attack” (all accessed via the preceding link). Much of this functions as a riposte to those, like Rafia Zakaria, who think that the Taliban can somehow be handled by non-military means.

I disagree with Rashid, however, that the military means in question should be American. Rashid’s long to-do lists for the American government-in-South-and-Central-Asia are an unwitting description of the mechanics of imperialism. As I’ve suggested elsewhere (in response to another enthusiastic partisan of imperialistic to-do lists), it’s time for the U.S. to ratchet back its imperial involvement abroad, and at a minimum, to get the hell out of South-Central Asia–as our good president promised us when we elected him back in 2008.

Though he’s not nearly as well known as Rashid, my friend Khalil Ahmad of the libertarian Alternative Solutions Institute in Lahore has a similar take in this piece, “Hopeless in Pakistan,” sans Rashid’s problematic neo-imperialist prescriptions for the United States.

Meanwhile, it’s time for Afghans and Pakistanis to take ownership of their own war against the Taliban (possibly with the help of Indians), and time for us Americans to patch together our own country–a country whose health care system is a disaster, whose criminal justice system now regularly leads to riots, whose higher education system is a bit of a shambles, which hasn’t managed to come to terms with illegal immigration, and which faces a cybersecurity threat not from the Taliban but from North Korea. In other words, it’s time to put the specter of 9/11 behind us and move on to resolving the actual problems we face. There’s no contradiction involved in saying that, and in wanting the government of Pakistan to prevail in battle over the Taliban.

To bring things back to the present, read these two pieces in this morning’s New York Times, “Pakistan’s Old Curse,” and “Pakistani Forces Kill Dozens of Militants.” As memories of the massacre inevitably fade, these two articles indicate where the action will be in the future.

Postscript, January 8, 2015: Here’s a nice tribute to the victims, via Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Zehra Nigah, by my cousin Fawad Zakariya. It’s from his blog, “Moments of Tranquility” (the blog is in English, but this post is largely for the Urdu-competent). I was stunned to discover from the exchange in Fawad’s combox that You Tube is banned in Pakistan.

Newsflash: Pakistani Taliban Kill Lots of Innocent Children (Sardonic Edition)

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Here are my three favorite commentaries on the Pakistani Taliban’s recent attack on a school in Peshawar:

KABUL: The Afghan Taliban have condemned a raid on a school in Peshawar that left 141 dead in the country’s bloodiest ever terror attack, saying killing innocent children was against Islam.

Survivors said militants gunned down children as young as 12 during the eight-hour onslaught in Peshawar, which the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said was revenge for the ongoing North Waziristan operation.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has always condemned the killing of children and innocent people at every juncture,” the Afghan Taliban, which often target civilians, said in a statement released late Tuesday.

“The intentional killing of innocent people, women and children goes against the principles of Islam and every Islamic government and movement must adhere to this fundamental essence.”

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the official name of the Taliban) expresses its condolences over the incident and mourns with the families of killed children.”

The Afghan Taliban are a jihadist group loosely affiliated to the Pakistan Taliban, with both pledging allegiance to Mullah Omar.

That’s from “Afghan Taliban Condemn Peshawar School Attack,” in Karachi’s Dawn.

Here’s another great one, for those who know a bit about Pakistani politics. It’s from Imran Khan, leader of Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf political party.

“I have never seen an atrocity like this in my entire life…I cannot even comprehend how someone could kill children like this,” he said.

“If someone killed my children like this, I would seek to avenge it as well,” Imran said.

Yes, terrorist attacks are really unprecedented for the Pakistani Taliban. I mean, who ever heard of the Pakistani Taliban killing innocent people? In Pakistan, no less? Has Imran sahib informed the Royal Society?

Then there’s this gem:

Obama terrorizes and murders innocent Pakistani citizens.

That’s supposed to be a commentary on drone warfare against the Pakistani Taliban. I’ve italicized the word of interest. Here is what I find interesting about it.

Suppose that the U.S. packed up its drones tomorrow and left South Asia for good. What does the author think should happen next? Broadly speaking, there are only two options. Either the Pakistani military fights the Taliban or not.

(1) Suppose they fight the Taliban. Suppose they choose to do so by means of the least destructive method available to them– drones. (Actually, drones are not quite ‘available’ to Pakistan right now, but imagine that they were.) Suppose that these drones kill “innocent Pakistani civilians” as a side-effect of the attempt to fight the Taliban. Would Nawaz Sharif then be as guilty of “murder” as Obama has been alleged to be? Or do you have to be an American drone operator to satisfy that description?

(2) Suppose that the Pakistani military chooses not to fight the Taliban, on the grounds that doing so would lead to the deaths of “innocent Pakistani civilians” (as it surely would). Suppose that the Taliban then murder Pakistanis civilians with impunity for the next seven or eight years, as they’ve done for the last eight. In fact, imagine that the Taliban ratchet up their killings on the grounds that it’s easier to kill people when the army that’s supposed to be protecting them refuses to do so. Would the author be willing to accept those consequences as an implication of his fastidious strictures on drone warfare?

While I’m on this subject, let me ask one last set of questions. The Taliban are non-state actors–a kind of terrorist NGO. They are, in other words, de facto anarchists. According to anarchist theory, “the state” lacks legitimacy. So imagine we decide to  get rid of it.

Now imagine, further, that “we” are Pakistanis. (Yes, I realize that my thought-experiment is starting to strain credulity at this point.) Let’s imagine, then, that “we” Pakistanis abolish the Pakistani state tomorrow. I assume that the Taliban would not be deterred from further depredations by this act.

So here is my question, intended for anarcho-capitalists: In what sense would Pakistanis be better off without a state than with one in facing the Taliban? And how should they do it? Whatever the method, it must meet two specifications: (1) it must not involve the assistance of a state, and (2) it must not lead to the deaths of any innocent third-parties. In this season of miracles, that surely can’t be too much to ask.

Postscript, December 18, 2014: More coverage of Peshawar. A poignant passage from a story from this morning’s New York Times, “Horror Paralyzes Pakistan After Methodical Slaughter“:

Some mourners expressed frustration at the apparent impotence of their own security forces. “What is this army for?” shouted one man at the city’s main Lady Reading hospital, where he had come to collect the body of his grandson.

“Where are their atom bombs and airplanes now?” he said. “They were of no use if they cannot protect us from death in our daily lives.”

Better questions could scarcely be asked, and truer words could scarcely be uttered. But we’re talking about armed forces that have begun every war they’ve fought, and lost every war they’ve begun: they’re guilty of genocide (East Pakistan, 1971) and willing to start nuclear war with India over uninhabitable chunks of ice (Siachen Glacier), but incapable of grasping the fact that their deals with the devil have surrendered the entire northwest of the country to totalitarian psychopaths bent on mass murder in the name of God. Pakistanis should never forget that the partition of the subcontinent was intended to give the Muslims of the subcontinent a safe haven from religious persecution by Hindus. Somehow, it never occurred to them that “they” might persecute “themselves.” Call it another grim chapter in the annals of that supposedly impossible phenomenon–“reverse discrimination.”

Meanwhile, from the same article:

Back at the deserted Army Public School, snipers perched on the rooftops, watching for a potential follow-up attack. In the nearby tribal belt, the Pakistani Army mounted fresh airstrikes.

Were they merely “fresh airstrikes” or were they mass murder? Would they have been mass murder if carried out by drones more precise than the airstrikes? I renew the question.

I find it interesting that in the English language press, at any rate, a lot of Pakistani commentary has taken the form of anguished questions. This column by Sameer Khosa in Lahore’s Nation consists of almost nothing but questions until this passage at the end:

Let us finally put an end to the criminally dishonest nature of our conversation on the Taliban, and on the national security challenge as a whole. Because now, we have seen its cost and it is unbearable.

Carry these children in your heart always. Let their innocence be the antidote to the lies that are peddled to us. Let their curiosity about the world remind us to ask anyone who has a one-sentence-long solution to this problem how they propose it will end. Let us fight in their name. Let their gravestones say: tell us now that this is not our war. Tell us now that this is not personal.

The problem is, this is what Pakistanis always say after a Taliban atrocity, only to forget it until next year’s atrocity. I’m not criticizing Khosa; I’m criticizing his audience. What he’s saying is undeniably true. So is what these people are saying. And these two.  The problem is that it’s been true for years. Remember what happened in Peshawar last year? It was Malala before that, and the massacre of the Shias of Derra Adam Khel before that, and the Geo TV station before that, and the Bajaur market before that, and the attack on the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh before that, and the one on the Ahmadi mosques in Lahore before that, and the assassination of Benazir before that. How many “before thats” does a rational person need before he figures out “we have a problem, and we have to solve it”? (Here’s a list of TTP attacks.) Unfortunately, what Khurram Hussain is saying is true, too.

Anyway, I can’t help continuing the semi-sardonic theme of the original post. So, a few quotations in that vein:

Khursheed Shah says terrorism is national issue

Speaking to media representatives after attending the MPC, Opposition Leader in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah said there is a complete consensus among political parties of the country on the terrorism issue.

He expressed his resolve to stand shoulder to shoulder with the armed forces in their ongoing fight against terror. Shah also urged the media to play a proactive role in eradicating terrorists from the country.

The PPP leader said that even Israeli state does not carry out such atrocities on Palestinians like the terrorist did to young kids yesterday at the school in Peshawar.

That’s from Dawn, “No distinction now between good and bad Taliban: Nawaz.” I mean, if they’re worse than Israelis, then we really have to fight them. Incidentally, the U.S. just normalized relations with Cuba. Any chance of Pakistan doing the same with Israel sometime soon?

I certainly wouldn’t go quite as far as Sherry Rahman does here, but I see her point, and it’s a nice counter-narrative to those handwaving claims one hears about the virginal innocence of the Taliban’s clean-handed apologists and sympathizers:

PESHAWAR: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Sherry Rehman said Wednesday that if anyone engaged in the apologist narrative when it comes to terrorism and terrorist attacks, they would be considered as terrorists and allies of the terrorists.

Time has come for a decision and anyone who presents justification for acts of terrorism will be regarded as a traitor.

“Whoever is a friend of the terrorists is a traitor,” Rehman said addressing media representatives in Peshawar.

Rehman urged that the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will not remain the victims and instead become those who will lead the war against terrorists.

Of course, taken literally, Rahman’s policy would require locking up large chunks of Pakistan’s judiciary. But I don’t think Rahman quite means what she’s saying–at least not as stated. It’s still the heat of the moment.

I leave you, finally, with a Word Press Editor’s Pick for 2014, written in October by Mehreen Kasana, a Pakistani graduate student at a school in Brooklyn.

On my way to class, I take the Q train to Manhattan and sit down next to an old white man who recoils a noticeable bit. I assume it’s because I smell odd to him, which doesn’t make sense because I took a shower in the morning. Maybe I’m sitting too liberally the way men do on public transit with their legs a mile apart, I think to myself. That also doesn’t apply since I have my legs crossed. After a few seconds of inspecting any potential offence caused, I realize that it has nothing to do with an imaginary odor or physical space but with the keffiyeh around my neck that my friend gifted me (the Palestinian scarf – an apparently controversial piece of cloth). It is an increasingly cold October in NYC. Sam Harris may not have told you but we Muslims need our homeostasis at a healthy level. While our bodies regulate our internal fanatic temperatures to remain stable, sometimes it gets a little too chilly so we pull out those diabolical scarves and wrap them around our diabolical necks and diabolically say, “Holy shit. It is cold today, Abdullah.” To which Abdullah replies, “Wallah. My ass is freezing.”

Reading her, you’d think that the act of wearing a keffiyeh in Brooklyn or Manhattan was a wildly rare and transgressive occurrence. It isn’t. But let me add one more “maybe” to the list: maybe this is the kind of thing that happens occasionally, that the author could very well be imagining, that doesn’t matter much even if it happened, and that is best ignored rather than inflated into the occasion of a self-pitying drama of grievance stretching back to Hiroshima, the Raj, and the Atlantic slave trade.

See if you have the discipline to make it through the whole thing. Kasana doesn’t want to apologize for Muslim atrocities. That’s fine. I don’t think she should, and have said as much in the past. But try as hard as you can to make coherent sense of her claim that there is no distinction to be made between good and bad Muslims. And feel free to enlist the help of the Mahmood Mamdani article she links to in her post to do so. Yes, I realize that she’s rejecting the “binary opposition” of Good and Bad Muslim within a specific narrative. But at the end of the day, what does she think is left of the ordinary distinction between good and bad Muslims? Should we throw it out? I don’t know a single Muslim who thinks so. Try to make sense of what just happened in Peshawar while ignoring the distinction, and reflect on the results. Hard to do. So why should any non-Muslim apologize for making use of it? No apology, so to speak.

The Princetonian and the Discourses: James Baker III on ISIS

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One more post on ISIS-induced militarism, and I promise to let it go. For now.

James Baker III was the speaker at my college graduation. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything he said that day. He also presided (with President George H.W. Bush) over the first Gulf War, which I do remember protesting as a college senior. The argument I made at the time was that a first unfinished war would lead, inevitably, to a second war, and ultimately, to perpetual warfare over Iraq. But the costs of a finished war–one that overthrew Saddam Hussein–were far too high. So no war was better than either one or many. (The argument wasn’t original to me; I got it from my friend Tom Palmer, who came to campus at my invitation in the fall of 1990 to make the case against the war.)

Here is Baker, interviewed in the most recent issue of Princeton University’s alumni magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly. It’s a fairly typical performance of the non-descript/pragmatist/faceless bureaucrat variety. This time, however, I’ve decided to take some time out to pay attention to what he says–and what doesn’t get said.

It’s typical of Princeton Alumni Weekly that having managed to land an interview with yet another Big Name Princeton Statesman, they insist on throwing him softball questions carefully calibrated to avoid any and all fundamental issues that might induce discomfort. “The former secretary of state talks about fighting ISIS,” we’re told, “perhaps with Iran’s help.” Predictably, the question that goes unasked throughout the interview is: why must we Americans fight ISIS at all? Having granted the premise that we must, the remaining questions are only a matter of tweaking the details: how do we win on the cheap, by inducing other people to do our fighting for us? Even on this relatively narrow issue, Baker’s answers are illuminating: they reveal the mental processes of a bureaucrat completely indifferent to moral principles, whose basic concern is how to leave all options open in an essentially Machiavellian quest to promote the so-called “interests of the state.”

The fight against ISIS looks like another example of asymmetrical warfare. What would victory over ISIS look like?

President Obama defined it when he said that our goal is to degrade and destroy ISIS, but we’re going to have a really tough time. These people are smart, they’ve acquired a lot of resources, and they’re committed. They’re brutal, of course, but they’re good fighters. I do not think we are going to be able to degrade and destroy them with airstrikes alone. We’ll at least need to have special ops forces on the ground to guide the airstrikes and to help the Iraqi army, which so far has not proven to be of much use. So it’s going to be a long, hard slog.

Our goal is to degrade and destroy them. We’re going to have a tough time. Airstrikes alone won’t do the trick, and the Iraqis can’t do the trick, so we’ll at least need special ops forces on the ground.

A few observations about Baker’s rhetorical techniques:

(1) The repeated emphasis on we stresses to the reader that “we” are already invested in the fight. We can’t stop now: we got involved yesterday. To back out now would be cowardice.  So full speed ahead.

(2) He makes clear that ground forces are needed, and that the existing non-American forces cannot do the job. Since we Americans are already involved, however, we appear to have no choice (or so he implies) but to put some “boots on the ground.” But don’t worry. These boots-on-the-ground will not involve ordinary soldiers of the sort who might be your next-door neighbor or co-worker. They’re “special ops forces.” The mystique of the phrase makes them sound like ninjas of some exotic variety. And they won’t be fighting. They’ll be “guiding” and “helping.”

(3) Having assuaged any fears about putting “boots on the ground,” Baker insists cleverly on leaving his options wide open. He doesn’t say that we’ll only need to send special ops forces. He says that we’ll “at least” need them. Of course, “at least” is perfectly compatible with needing more than special ops forces. How many more is dictated not by James Baker or Barack Obama but by reality. But since “we” are already involved in the fight against ISIS, “how many more” means as many more as “we” need to do the job. And how many is that? Well, that’s an “unknown unknown,” as one of Baker’s successors put it.

That’s why Baker (and Obama) can afford to let the issue of precisely what is needed go unspoken. We only need to “know” that we “need” to fight; we don’t need to know, and can’t know, what the fight will require of “us.” When reality eventually makes its ultimatum–send yet more troops or be defeated by ISIS–reality can be blamed in its typically unpredictable way for “making” us send more than we ever bargained for, leaving the politicians who got us involved immune to criticism. Since no one ever quite decided to get us involved, no one can be held responsible for the degree of our involvement in the fight, and reality can be counted on to draw us further and further in–as it did in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and…Iraq. When it does, the only entity amenable to blame when things go wrong will be reality itself, and the only plausible remedy will be the renewed application of yet more force. “Fortune,” as Machiavelli puts it, “is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force….” (The Prince, ch. 25). Or by guile. He forgot to add that you can also revile her if you fail.

So get ready for a “long, hard slog,” even though no one has explained why any Americans should have to do any of the slogging. And get ready for it, Mr. and Ms. Average American Citizen, even though the slogging is only going to be done by a few special ops “helpers” and “guides” who aren’t supposed to be getting their hands dirty in this all-Sunni cagefight anyway. Taken literally, none of it makes any sense. But you’re not supposed to take it literally. You’re supposed to assume that James Baker, the former secretary of state, knows what he’s talking about–and that you don’t. If people took the James Bakers of the world literally, after all, they wouldn’t be in power.

The next few questions essentially do Baker’s work for him, establishing that no other set of ground forces can do the requisite job, except for the United States and Iran. Does that mean we Americans should send troops over there?

Would the American public support sending our troops back into Iraq?

No, and I’m not suggesting that we do that. This really should be the Sunni Arabs’ fight, but the truth of the matter is that it is more and more a huge civil war between the Sunnis and the Shia. Sending in large numbers of American troops would be a mistake, and I don’t think the public would accept it. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say we’re going to destroy ISIS, but we’re only going to do it from the air.

Note once again the characteristically non-confrontational and irrelevant character of the question asked of Baker. Instead of asking him straightforwardly whether American troops should be sent, the interviewer decides to turn him into an armchair sociologist. By this expedient, the relevant issue becomes the popularity rather than than the justifiability of sending troops (a common and predictable diversion in any Machiavelli-infected culture). The answer to the interviewer’s question is really too obvious to merit a place in the interview: there is no popular support for another “troop surge” in the Middle East, whether in Iraq or anywhere else. (Of course, given the notorious passivity of the American people, it’s not as though there would be much push-back if troops were sent, whether to Iraq or to Syria, or anywhere else. Eyes would still be glued to Kim Kardashian’s butt, one way or the other.) Baker realizes that this question is too soft even for his tastes, so he seizes the opportunity to make clear that he doesn’t intend to advocate anything as unpopular as sending American “boys and girls” (his phrase) to fight over there.

What follows this supposedly clear assertion is a disingenuous set of contortions. The fight over ISIS is really “the Sunni Arabs’ fight,” we’re told. Whew! What a relief! But wait a minute: if it’s a Sunni Arab fight, how is that “we” are so invested in it? We’re not Sunni Arabs. The relief at hearing Baker tell us that it’s not our fight only lasts as long as the realization that while he thinks it would be a mistake to send in “large numbers of troops,” we have no idea what “large numbers” means to him, and whatever it means, it’s compatible with sending in medium-sized numbers of troops. (Though Baker is no longer in power, I’m discussing all this as though he were; he certainly speaks as though he still is, and I don’t think his Obama administration counterpart is all that different from him.)

Baker goes on to point out that we “can’t have it both ways.” (He says “you can’t have it both ways,” as though we were the ones guilty of it, not him.) In other words, we can’t insist that the goal is to “destroy” ISIS but then to choose means insufficient to the end. Very true. But if we haven’t yet figured out how to generate means sufficient to the end of destroying ISIS–and selecting the most obvious and efficacious set of means to the end “would be a mistake”–then why adopt the end at all?  Why wander into a morass without knowing how we’re going to get through or out it? Can it really make sense to adopt the end of defeating someone in war, but not bothering with the question of how it’s to be done–especially when it’s not clear right now that the question even has an answer?

Coming the other way around, suppose that you do adopt the end. Having done so, suppose you reject the optimal means to the end, but hold out for the possibility of endorsing a second-best set of means just slightly different from the optimum. So you won’t send in “large numbers of troops” (whatever that means) you’ll just send a fair number (whatever that means). In that case, aren’t you just playing a game with your audience, in the hopes that they’re either not reading you very carefully or not paying close attention to what you’re saying? It almost sounds Machiavellian.

Baker’s argument involves one last move. He can preserve the consistency of everything he’s said if he introduces a non-American source of anti-ISIS troops whose presence is at least semantically consistent with a non-large American troop presence in Iraq and Syria. The interviewer lobs him just the question to make the point.

It is in Iran’s interest as well to defeat ISIS. Is there an opportunity to find some common ground with the Iranians?

If you accept that winning this war will require troops on the ground, that we don’t have any available, that Turkey is not willing to put troops in, and that the Gulf states don’t have that many troops to send, I’d much rather have Iranian troops in there fighting ISIS than I would American boys and girls. The Iranians helped us in Afghanistan in 2001, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that they could do it again.

If we did work with the Iranians against ISIS, it would have to be done very quietly, because we would lose our Sunni Arab allies and it would create a firestorm in Congress. But I would be surprised [if] we weren’t working in concert with Iran right now at some level. There’s not one country in the world that doesn’t have an interest in seeing ISIS destroyed, so I think this would be an ideal place to build a truly effective coalition.

Pause on that. It’s a work of art, at least if prevarication is an aesthetic genre.

First of all, if we are not sending troops to fight ISIS, in what sense would Iranian involvement be a case of finding “common ground” with them? In that case, they’d be doing the fighting, and we would not be doing it. That’s not a case of finding “common ground,” but of our free riding on their efforts.

Perhaps I’m overdoing the criticisms here, you say. So let’s suppose, ex hypothesi, that a free rider can seek common ground with the party on whom he’s free riding, at least if they both desire the same outcome. The problem is that in this case, aside from the narrow goal of defeating ISIS, the United States and Iran aren’t seeking the same outcome. Each nation wants to impose its own hegemony over the region, and that hegemony involves radically different interests and goals. (After all, would we cheer if Iran replaced ISIS by Hezbullah? Obviously, the Iranians would.) So it makes no sense to claim that we share common ground with them once one looks past the concern of the immediate moment.

While we’re on this subject: if we had common ground with the Iranians, it wouldn’t be problematic that they happen to be the unintended beneficiary of our having overthrown Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But it’s Baker who tells us elsewhere in the interview that the Iraq war led to a problematic augmentation of Iranian influence in the Gulf. How problematic could it be if we’re both on the same side?

For that matter, if the Iranians can be trusted to be our allies in the fight against ISIS, then why begrudge them the atomic bombs they appear to want to build? We don’t begrudge such things to the Israelis, the Pakistanis, or the Indians, after all. Recall that the fight against ISIS is motivated in part by fears about ISIS’s acquiring the remnants of Iraq’s WMD program. Are the Iranians to be trusted with that, but not with their own weapons program?

Second point: the Iranians “helped us in Afghanistan” in the sense of facilitating our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. (The Iranians were opposed to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and wanted us to do the work of defeating their natural Sunni enemies.) In that case, they were free riding on us. Does Baker really mean that because we allowed them to free ride on us, they’ll now decide that it’s time for a bit of reciprocation and therefore allow us, in turn, to free ride on them? I wouldn’t bank on it. Obviously, if they decide to fight in a “common” cause with us, they will want a quid pro quo that involves our putting some “skin in the game.” But that is just what Baker is at pains to (half) deny.  I suspect that that’s why, amidst all of the rhetorical and semantic confusion Baker introduces, he makes sure to end the whole passage with the word “coalition.” “Large numbers of American troops” may not be “available,” but ultimately, we must remember that we are part of a “coalition.” So maybe fewer-than-a-large-number of American troops will have to become available, lest we lose our place in the “coalition.” If that’s not what “working” with the Iranians means, I’m almost afraid to find out what it does mean.

Finally, note Baker’s assumption that Iranian involvement all has to be done on “the down low”–very, very quietly. Shhh! It might even be happening right now!  So let’s keep it a secret, shall we? It’ll be between you, me, and James Baker. Granted, this is the age of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks, where secrets have a tendency to get out, and yes, Mr Baker just let the secret of “our” Iranian operations out in the online version of Princeton Alumni Weekly. But hey, we’re gentlemen, aren’t we? What happens in Princeton Alumni Weekly stays in Princeton Alumni Weekly. If we’re very, very discreet, there’s still a chance that the Sunnis and Congress can be kept in the dark about our pro-Iranian tilt, just as they were kept in the dark about our pro-Iraq tilt back in the 1980s, or for that matter, our paradoxical pro-Iran tilt at the same time (cf. the Iran-contra scandal).

Perhaps we ought to give Machiavelli the last word here.

A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them…[T]hose [princes] who have been best able to imitate the fox have succeeded best. But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so read to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived. (Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 18).

All I can say is: they don’t call James Baker’s alma mater “Princeton” for nothing.

P.S., November 16, 2014: This morning’s New York Times Book Review contains a trio of must-read reviews of books on the aftermath and costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: John Nagl’s Knife Fights; Yochi Dreazen’s The Invisible Front; and Daniel Bolger’s Why We Lost. It makes for vital but depressing reading. If you aren’t depressed enough yet, feel free to read Gary Bass’s review of Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931, which ends with this cheery thought:

When democratic hopes for a perpetual peace inevitably withered, the fascists and totalitarians seized their fatal chance. As World War I was drawing to a close in 1918, Wilson said he was “thinking now only of putting the United States into a position of strength and justice. I am now playing for 100 years hence.” With only a few years to go until then, we are still reckoning with the awful aftershocks of that era’s failures.

Postscript 2, December 10, 2014: Just in case you thought that a discussion of James Baker, secretary of state in a previous administration, was irrelevant to the machinations of the current secretary of state, consider this article in today’s Times. In the hard copy New York edition, the title is, “Kerry Argues Not to Ban Ground Troops in Fight Against Islamic Militants.” Verbal gymnastics don’t get better than this:

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry urged Congress on Tuesday not to preclude the use of ground forces to fight the Islamic State as lawmakers consider setting limits on the nature and extent of American involvement in the military campaign against the group.

Mr. Kerry made his request in testimony before an unusual session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He underscored that the administration was prepared to negotiate over a measure authorizing the use of force, but he made clear that the administration believes it needs greater flexibility than many lawmakers seemed ready to allow.

“The president has been crystal clear that his policy is that U.S. military forces will not be deployed to conduct ground combat operations against ISIL,” Mr. Kerry said, using an alternate name for the group. “It doesn’t mean that we should pre-emptively bind the hands of the commander in chief or our commanders in the field in responding to scenarios and contingencies that are impossible to foresee,” he added.

Got that? The president has been crystal clear that U.S. military forces will not be deployed to conduct ground combat operations against ISIS. And that’s why the president is demanding that you give him the flexibility to deploy U.S. military forces to conduct ground combat operations against ISIS. It would be unreasonable, after all, for anyone to “pre-emptively bind” the president by a solemn promise that he himself made.

How is it that holding the most powerful man in the world accountable for not starting a war he promised not to start ends up sounding like a collective imposition of BDSM on an unwilling captive?

Postscript 3, December 14, 2014: I just happened to notice this article, “Following the Rise and Fall of Machiavelli,” in the Travel section of last week’s New York Times. It’s an interesting article, and obviously, I have no objections to the idea of visiting Florence to take a look at the world he inhabited (or visiting Florence for any other reason). But why the need to valorize Machiavelli as a political thinker and whitewash the argument of The Prince?

But even as Machiavelli was creating his masterpiece, he had fears it would be misinterpreted, seen by the court as less a letter of forgiveness to the Medicis than a master plan for Machiavelli and other ambitious types to orchestrate their own takeovers. After “The Prince” was written in 1513, his fears were almost immediately realized, the treatise was quickly vilified, and Machiavelli labeled “an agent of the devil.”

Now, however, just before the 500th anniversary of the presentation of “The Prince” to the Medicis in Florence, theorists and political scientists not only believe that in parts it was indeed misread, but also that it, in fact, marks the starting point for modern politics, serving as a highly persuasive treatise on diplomacy and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering required to curry favor in an ever-changing political landscape. “One must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves” — it was just this sort of pragmatic thought that has made him so important across the centuries. Leaders from John Adams to Bill Clinton have been influenced by Machiavelli, reciting from his work or studying his texts to put in context their own political times.

Amoral power worship is “the starting point for modern politics”? With handwaving views of that sort, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised or even much dismayed when our foxy leaders come to regard their own promises as traps, and make lying promises as a matter of routine, as illustrated by this article, “Senate Panel Approves Limited ISIS Fight, Reviving War Powers Debate.” President Obama’s erstwhile promise not to send ground troops has now become a debate over the tentative limits to be placed on the use of ground troops. Apparently, the debate over whether to send them ended before it began.

So this is what Machiavellian politics looks like in real life:

“We really don’t want to use ground troops,” said Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona. But, he added, to have that restriction written into law, “I think is not the right way to go.”

That is a view the administration shares. Secretary of State John Kerry testified before the committee on Tuesday that the president would fight any effort to preclude the use of ground forces because, he argued, there are simply too many unknowns.

We don’t want to use ground troops. That’s why restrictions on the use of ground troops are a bad idea. In other words, when you don’t want to do something, you insist on leaving all options on the table for doing it.

The President promised not to use ground troops. That’s why he’s fighting any effort to preclude using them. In other words, when you promise something, you make sure to facilitate breaking the promise.

The President has no idea what’s going on out there in Syria and Iraq. That’s why it’s crucial to send troops: you send troops when you have no idea what effect sending them will have, for what purpose, or with what scope. Amazingly, the article discusses the Senators’ refusal even to restrict the sending of ground troops to Iraq and Syria. Just in case you thought that Rumsfeldian epistemology was  a thing of the past or restricted to members of the G.W. Bush Administration.

In other words, what we get from Machiavelli in modern politics are two essentially insane ideas that people nowadays would like to regard as the essence of “modern” wisdom: moral  principles don’t apply to politics; consequently, there are no limits whatsoever on the use of force by the state.

In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant famously condemns the act of making a lying promise. According to Kant, once the lying promissor universalizes his maxim, he

sees at once that such a maxim could never hold as a universal law of nature and be consistent with itself, but necessarily be self-contradictory. For the universality of a law which says that anyone believing himself to be in difficulty could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it would make promising itself and the end to be attained thereby quite impossible, inasmuch as no one would believe what was promised him but would merely laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretenses. (Ak. 422).

The problem is, I don’t hear laughter.

Analyze This: Thomas Friedman psychoanalyzes the Middle East

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I don’t think I can be accused of sympathies for Islamism (or Islam) any more than I can be accused of sympathy for communism (or Marxism). But there comes a point when “Western” criticism of Islamism becomes its own pathology, in the same way and for the same reasons that in the 1950s, McCarthyite anti-communism became its own pathology. Here’s a relatively mild but instructive example from a column by Thomas Friedman called “Freud and the Middle East.”

He starts reasonably enough:

When trying to make sense of the Middle East, one of the most important rules to keep in mind is this: What politicians here tell you in private is usually irrelevant. What matters most, and what explains their behavior more times than not, is what they say in public in their own language to their own people. As President Obama dispatches more U.S. advisers to help Iraqis defeat the Islamic State, or ISIS, it is vital that we listen carefully to what the key players are saying in public in their own language about each other and their own aspirations.

Of course, if this were true, it would help to be able to understand what they “say in public in their own language to their own people.” Friedman somehow claims to understand what they’re saying but shows no evidence of understanding the languages they speak. (He apparently has a passable knowledge of Arabic, but I don’t think he knows Turkish, and Turkish is the language at issue in much of this column.) Instead, he quotes throughout from a translation service. The service, MEMRI, has its own political agenda, and translates selectively from a relatively narrow range of items. That limitation doesn’t stop Friedman from giving his readers the idea that he has his thumb on the pulse of the region. His claim, rather sparsely supported, is that Sunni Muslims all–or, well, almost all–covertly desire to re-establish the ancient caliphate, and thus (almost) all harbor covert admiration for ISIS.

Here is what Friedman regards as evidence for his claim:

Well, at least Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in the modern world. No, wait, what is the name that Erdogan insists be put on the newest bridge he’s building across the Bosporus? Answer: the Yavuz Sultan Selim bridge. Selim I was the Sunni Turkish sultan who, in 1514, beat back the Persian Shiite empire of his day, called the Safavids. Turkey’s Alevi minority, a Shiite offshoot sect whose ancestors faced Selim’s wrath, have protested the name of the bridge.

They know it didn’t come out of a hat. According to Britannica, Selim I was the Ottoman sultan (1512-20) who extended the empire to Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, “and raised the Ottomans to leadership of the Muslim world.” He then turned eastward and took on the Safavid Shiite dynasty in Iran, which posed a “political and ideological threat” to the hegemony of Ottoman Sunni Islam. Selim was the first Turkish leader to claim to be both sultan of the Ottoman Empire and caliph of all Muslims.

Here in the States, we just finished celebrating Columbus Day. Christopher Columbus was surely a competitor with Selim I for imperial ambition and militaristic indifference to the Rights of Man. Now recall that Columbus made it to North American shores in 1492–a “crazy long time ago,” as one of my students put it to me. Does that mean that we aren’t part of the modern world, and that we still want to enslave indigenous peoples? After all, we haven’t just dedicated a mere bridge to Columbus, but a whole day to him. If not–and I assume not–why think that the Turks’ naming a bridge after an Ottoman sultan proves that they want to restore the caliphate?

Another cringe-making paragraph:

Vice President Joe Biden did not misspeak when he accused Turkey of facilitating the entry of ISIS fighters into Syria. Just as there is a little bit of West Bank “Jewish settler” in almost every Israeli, there is a little bit of the caliphate dream in almost every Sunni. Some Turkish analysts suspect Erdogan does not dream of building pluralistic democracy in Iraq and Syria, but rather a modern Sunni caliphate — not led by ISIS but by himself. Until then, he clearly prefers ISIS on his border than an independent Kurdistan.

I think I’d want better evidence of Turkey’s facilitating the entry of ISIS fighters into Syria than this. Biden, who has one major instance of intellectual dishonesty in his past, is also known for putting his foot in his mouth on occasion (or two, or…ten). On this particular occasion, he happens explicitly to have withdrawn the accusation against Turkey, so it’s mystifying how Friedman manages to exhume the comment from the dead and use it as Exhibit A of his thesis. One explanation for Biden’s withdrawal of the claim is that he really believes what he said, and was entirely justified in saying it, but simply fears the wrath of the Turkish president. Another explanation is that he spoke too hastily, lacked proper evidence, and realized that he’d embarrassed himself. I leave it to readers to decide between these two hypotheses. I only point out that Friedman neither provides the evidence to decide between them, nor bothers to inform his readers of the need to make a decision. Responsible journalism? No; in fact, it’s positively Oriental in its shadiness.

As for the next sentence in the passage, it’s a double-insult to those it accuses and a complete non-sequitur to boot. What on earth does Biden’s (withdrawn) accusation have to do with Friedman’s claims about non-Turkish Sunnis? And what conceivable evidence could support such a claim, whether about Sunnis, or about Israelis? How many Sunnis are there in the world, and what sample of them has Friedman met? How many of their languages does he speak? For that matter, how many Israelis has he met to justify the claim that they’re all settlers at heart? I’ve been covering inductive generalization with my critical thinking classes here at Felician, but these generalizations are too wild and preposterous even for use in a classroom exercise on fallacious reasoning. They’re the sort of thing I’d expect from an unhinged combox crusader at Jihad Watch, not from a veteran columnist at The New York Times. Under normal circumstances, we’d call generalizations of this kind “bigotry.” Under the present circumstances, one simply furrows one’s brow and wonders what the hell is going through Friedman’s mind.

What, finally, does the column have to do with Freud?

In sum, there are so many conflicting dreams and nightmares playing out among our Middle East allies in the war on ISIS that Freud would not have been able to keep them straight.

That’s it. Bring up “dreams” in one stray sentence in the course of a (very) half-assed column, and suddenly, you’re doing the psychodynamics of “the Middle East.” By this definition, I guess Osama bin Laden was a Freudian.

If you want to grasp the full meaning of the concept of “double standard,” turn from Friedman’s article to a report (first link just below) by the group AMCHA, purporting to document instances of anti-Semitism on American university campuses. The claim they make is that anyone sympathetic to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel is ipso facto an anti-Semite, ought to be branded as one by name, and ought to be treated accordingly. In fact, such academics, according to AMCHA, are to be blacklisted in full-dress McCarthyite fashion. Here is AMCHA’s idea of an operational definition of “anti-Semitism.”  The AMCHA blacklist has recently been protested by a group of 40 professors of Jewish Studies, but it’s also gotten the support of  Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and others. It’s an unbelievable phenomenon, but really just the predictable result of about a decade-and-a-half of very aggressive lobbying by a certain right-wing brand of pro-Israel activist who would rather engage in libels and defamation than argument.

The lesson here seems to be that you can make unrestrained generalizations about the covert imperial ambitions of Arabs and Muslims based on absolutely nothing–and that you can engage in character-assassination of critics of Israel based on about as much. Further, you can do it in the serene and untroubled conviction that there’s nothing wrong with either thing. You just start here: Arabs and Muslims are irredentist fanatics, and accusations of anti-Semitism can be made of them (or those who support their causes) off the cuff; when it comes to character-assassination, precision is a very low priority. It’s easier to make an accusation than to defend oneself against one, after all. Make the accusation, and you’re half-way home: in a climate of opinion in which the presumption of innocence no longer applies, the damage has already been done.

What we’re witnessing, I think, is the derangement that arises from prolonged immersion in the rhetoric and psychodynamics of warfare. We’ve been at war for so long, and the activity has corrupted our minds so completely, that discourse on topics related to the Middle East now seems to have devolved into something genuinely psychopathological–into schizoid fantasy and hysteria. In other words, welcome to the place where civilization and its discontents merge into the psychopathology of everyday life. It’s going to take more than a few sessions on the couch to work this one out.

Postscript, November 13, 2014: Here’s more grist for the mill, so to speak: The New York Times reports this morning that “[m]embers of a Turkish nationalist youth group assaulted three visiting American sailors in Istanbul yesterday, hurling balloons filled with red paint at them, putting white sacks over their heads and calling them murderers.” Twelve of them were later arrested. Here is the Pentagon’s characteristically tone-deaf response to the event: “A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, was more blunt [than the American Embassy], saying that the assailants ‘appeared to be thugs on the street’ and were ‘a great discredit upon the Turks and the Turkish reputation for hospitality’.”

Honestly, where do they get these “spokesmen” from? That the attack was thuggish and wrong I don’t dispute. But is a single attack by a dozen thugs a “great discredit” upon the reputation of the people of a whole country? I wonder whether Col. Warren has any idea how many visiting foreigners are attacked and robbed when they visit the United States–to say nothing of how they’re treated by border control guards at our ports of entry and exit. Do individual crimes against foreign visitors reflect on my reputation, yours, Col. Warren’s, or that of the American people? How would they? The claim is patently ridiculous, and yet we pay “spokesmen” like Warren handsome sums to make claims like that. Is it any wonder that the stereotype of the “ugly American” persists?

Anything Goes: Further Studies in American Foreign Policy (Veterans Day Edition)

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Pausing to observe American foreign policy in the making is like pausing to observe a car wreck on the highway: there’s no point in doing it, but there are times when it really can’t be helped. It’s always just the same gruesome scene, but today is Veteran’s Day, so there’s no averting one’s eyes from the mechanism that creates the veterans we’re supposed to be “celebrating.” In honor of that day, today’s blog post will be an exercise in decoding the euphemisms of war-talk, and translating them into our wholesome native tongue.

The lead story in yesterday’s New York Times was, “Obstacles Limit Targets and Pace of Strikes on ISIS.” Three passages in it are particularly instructive. Here’s the first:

President Obama’s decision last week to double the number of American trainers and advisers in Iraq, to about 3,000, and request more than $5 billion from Congress for military operations against the Islamic State was viewed as clear acknowledgment of the challenges in fighting a limited war. They are especially acute when Washington’s allies on the ground in Iraq and Syria need far more training to battle a formidable adversary that offers little in the way of clear targeting.

In an interview broadcast Sunday, Mr. Obama said he had made his decision, announced Friday, in order to accelerate the mission by taking a set of fresh, if incremental, steps toward greater involvement.

“What it signals is a new phase,” the president said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“What we knew was that phase one was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible, and we now have done that,” he said. “And so now what we’ve done is rather than just try to halt ISIL’s momentum, we’re now in a position to start going on some offense. The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL’s capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making. Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing them back.”

Here’s the second:

“The airstrikes are buying us time. They aren’t going to solve the problem by themselves,” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff and a former top commander in Iraq. “It’s going to take people on the ground, ground forces.”

General Odierno said the priority was developing “indigenous forces” to retake territory from ISIS. “Over time, if that’s not working, then we’re going to have to reassess, and we’ll have to decide whether we think it’s worth putting other forces in there, to include U.S. forces,” he said.

And here’s the third:

Senior American commanders are preaching patience and warning against trying to replay previous air campaigns on the shifting battlefield of Iraq.

“Every air campaign is different and can’t be a reflection of a past one,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey G. Lofgren of the Air Force, the deputy commander of coalition air forces in the Middle East. “A lot of people would like us to drop hundreds of bombs and make the problem go away, but it’s not that kind of war.”

The first passage tells us that we have entered a war that can only be won by the use of ground troops. The two possibilities for the use of grounds troops are either Iraqi troops or American troops. Iraqi troops cannot win the war, but the passage tells us that while we are doubling the military advisers we send to Iraq, we will not be sending American troops there. If this sounds like a classic case of willing the end but not willing the means, maybe it does because that’s what it is.

The second passage, asserted by a subordinate of the president, tells us that in fact, we will have to send American troops, whether the president likes it or not. This claim has the merit of willing the end and willing the necessary and available means to it. It has the demerit of contradicting what the president just supposedly said. It remains unclear whether Odierno is defying the president, in collusion with the president, or simply hasn’t gotten his story straight. The bottom line, however, is that what he says about the insertion of U.S. troops contradicts the president’s assurances that they won’t be sent.

As we all know, anything follows from a contradiction. So what the conjunction of Obama’s and Odierno’s claims amount to is: anything goes.

The third passage, asserted by a subordinate of the president’s subordinate, tells us simultaneously that the war’s course is unpredictable, inscrutable, and discontinuous with past experience–and that it is a war of a knowable and determinate kind, a fact known by past experience of wars of that kind.

That’s a contradiction, too. So the third passage, like the conjunction of the first two, underscores the same message: anything goes.

When it comes to the conduct of our foreign policy, what I think we’re being told is that anything goes. Given that, this video strikes me as the only fitting response to the absurdities of our military leaders.

 

I’d like to think that we’re bound to answer when they propose.

On a more serious note, in honor of Veterans Day (or more precisely, of the veterans themselves) please consider making a donation to the Walter Reed Society, or some comparable organization. Huge numbers of veterans still need our help–and at this rate, indefinitely will.

The Audacity of Hope: Studies in American Foreign Policy

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From this morning’s New York Times, “Obama to Send 1,500 More Troops to Assist Iraq“:

Since the departure of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the former Iraqi prime minister, American officials have been far more vocal about blaming him for what is widely viewed as a dismal initial performance by the Iraqi military against the Islamic State. On Friday, Admiral Kirby said that the new Iraqi government under Mr. Abadi has shown a new willingness to work to engage Sunni groups, including in Anbar, and to train its soldiers to stand and fight.

“We did spend a lot of money and effort training the Iraqi Army,” Admiral Kirby said. “When we left them in 2011, we left them capable.” He said the Maliki government “squandered” the American military’s training of Iraqi troops, but expressed optimism that things will be different now. “This is a completely different game,” he said, pointing to a recent visit by Mr. Abadi to Anbar Province to engage Sunni leaders in the fight against the Islamic State.

Administration officials said they expect international allies will help in the training effort and announced a commitment Friday of 120 military personnel from Denmark to the cause.

As usual, American foreign policy mostly defies comment: the best case against it is simply to quote its champions, and leave it at that. I’d call Kirby’s comments a reductio, but  there’s no room for a “reduction” to absurdity if you begin there. Read the rest of the article for lots more absurdity.

Perhaps our policy-makers would do better to stop thinking of warfare on the analogy of a game? When I was an undergraduate IR student back in the day, I used to wonder whether anyone honestly believed that warfare could be “modeled” on game theory. I mean, was trench warfare during World War I really just a series of iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas, as Robert Axelrod had supposedly “taught us”? (I’d be rich if I had a nickel for the number of times the Axelrodian mantra was recited to us.) We weren’t supposed to ask “naive” questions like that, so I mostly kept quiet. The older I get, I suppose, the more naive I get, and the more inclined to ask “dumb questions” about the verities I was once taught with such confidence (I’m happy to note that occasionally, one gets answers by this method). Of course, sometimes the naivete of youth is indistinguishable from the despair of middle age:

Belaboring the Obvious: We’re the Ones Arming ISIS

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Here’s a depressing belaboring of the obvious from this morning’s New York Times:

In its campaign across northern Syria and Iraq, the jihadist group Islamic State has been using ammunition from the United States and other countries that have been supporting the regional security forces fighting the group, according to new field data gathered by a private arms-tracking organization.

The data, part of a larger sample of captured arms and cartridges in Syria and Iraq, carries an implicit warning for policy makers and advocates of intervention.

It suggests that ammunition transferred into Syria and Iraq to help stabilize governments has instead passed from the governments to the jihadists, helping to fuel the Islamic State’s rise and persistent combat power. Rifle cartridges from the United States, the sample shows, have played a significant role.

“The lesson learned here is that the defense and security forces that have been supplied ammunition by external nations really don’t have the capacity to maintain custody of that ammunition,” said James Bevan, director of Conflict Armament Research, the organization that is gathering and analyzing weapons used by the Islamic State.

Providing weapons to the regional proxies, Mr. Bevan added, is “a massive risk that is heightened by poorly motivated security forces that are facing great challenges.”

I would only dispute Mr. Bevan’s use of the passive voice. It’s not a “lesson learned” by those who most urgently need to learn it.

Rand Paul on Syria

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This comment (reported here) by Rand Paul offers a nice counterpoint to yesterday’s featured quotation from Samantha Power:

Amid the interventionists’ disjointed and frankly incoherent rhetoric, the only consistent theme is war. These barnacled enablers have never met a war they didn’t like.

I’m not sure that Samantha Power has barnacles, but I still think it works.

Bomb First, Testily Allow Questions Later

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This high-level rationalization for “expanded airstrikes” on Syria really defies commentary, from a News Analysis in this morning’s New York Times:

The American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, on Tuesday struck a testy note when asked whether there was a legal basis for airstrikes on Syria.

“We believe we have a basis for action,” she said, declining to describe what they were, because, as she said, it would depend on the action taken and under what circumstances. “In the event that action is taken, believe me, we will have plenty of time to engage on it.”

We believe you! Sorry for asking!

Debating Syrian Intervention

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Check out the conversation on Syrian intervention at Notes on Liberty, “A Few Remarks on Interventions in Syria and Iraq.” And feel free to check out last year’s conversation on the same subject here, from the now-defunct Institute for Objectivist Studies blog (11 posts). If I can change one mind on the subject, I’d count my efforts as a success.

P.S.: In an earlier post, I described Bruce Ackerman as a strange bedfellow in the debate over Syrian intervention. But I think I’d have to kick Howard Friel, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Herman out of bed, despite agreeing with them on the narrow question of the need for a Congressional vote on Syria, and on the potential applicability to the case of Syria of the War Powers Resolution. In a letter published in today’s New York Times, Friel, Chomsky, and Herman casually (but dogmatically) assert the following:

While the president must request and receive congressional approval within the strictures of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, as both Mr. Ackerman and your editorial rightly demand, neither Congress nor the president is free to violate the United Nations Charter’s prohibition “against the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Individual nations are bound by their international obligations regardless of their constitutional law. Thus, the reach of law here goes beyond the War Powers Resolution to the United Nations Charter.

It’s a claim to confirm the most paranoid fears of the most paranoid right-winger: the United Nations Charter supersedes the U.S. Constitution. On the face of it, I don’t see how the United States (or any other country) can be “bound,” whether legally or morally, to adhere to the terms of a document when doing so would violate its own constitution. The perplexity is increased when you consider that it’s obvious how and why the U.S. Constitution is the law of the land, but not obvious that international “law” is law at all.  Though it’s a bit of a distraction from the issue directly at hand, I’d be curious to see an argument for their claim.