Drones and Gitmo: If Bush had…

Posted by Tom on Thursday, May 23, 2013 | Comment

All the blogospheric insta-reaction to the President’s speech at NDU today doesn’t amount to much, because there’s not much to judge until actual policy changes are issued and the appropriate bills are submitted in Congress. But I couldn’t help but think, listening to it, about the double-standard that’s emerged in American debates over national security since 2008.

Hard to disagree with this pair of tweets from Kirsten Powers of The Daily Beast:


 


We’ll see what happens next. I think it’s ironic that Code Pink heckled the President while he was trying to allay their concerns, but that’s the nature of groups like Code Pink: they can’t take “yes” for an answer, and there’s no administration, conservative or liberal, they won’t complain about, because that’s what they do.

More about that another day.

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Iran and the dangers of nuclear ambiguity

Posted by Tom on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 | 4 Comments

So, this is a quick story about a non-story, but a real policy. And that policy is a real problem.

The non-story is the exchange today between Congressman Mo Brooks, the Republican member representing Alabama’s Fifth Congressional District, and Ambassador Wendy Sherman, currently the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. The congressman pressed the ambassador about the Obama administration’s commitment to stopping Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, at which point Ambassador Sherman reiterated administration policy:

[T]he President has been very clear that all options are under consideration.  I think that everyone in the world would prefer there be a peaceful resolution to this situation.  But, no one should have any doubt about where the President of the United States stands on this.  He will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, he has stood side-by-side with many of our partners and allies around the world, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and said as much.  So there is no pulling back from that stance.  At all.

That’s not really a controversial answer. In fact, it’s not much of an answer at all. Congressman Brooks pushed harder:

…is it fair to say that President Obama is prepared to use, if necessary, America’s nuclear arsenal to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

Understandably, Ambassador Sherman chose not to speculate on that. So Mr. Brooks asked a follow-on:

[Is] President Obama is prepared to launch if necessary an Iraq or Afghanistan style ground invasion in Iran to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

Again, the ambassador prudently refused to speculate on which actions the United States might, or might not, take if Iran closes in completing an actual nuclear weapon, and instead noted only that America has “many ways to fight Iran’s efforts to gain a nuclear weapon,” and that we’d always stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Israel.

Now, to foreign policy watchers, this is just another day at the office. It’s pretty much the standard answer to those questions — and that’s the problem, but I’ll get back to that in a moment.

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Benghazi: The politics of the passive voice

Posted by Tom on Monday, May 13, 2013 | Comment

Ed-Rogers1Republican strategist Ed Rogers, like a lot of critics of the Benghazi hearings, is tired of the whole subject. He thinks the GOP is burning capital and wasting time with it. Maybe so. That doesn’t (or shouldn’t) mean that investigating the first death of a U.S. ambassador in over 30 years is not important.

At this point, the argument that reasonable people could have real questions about what the American people were told about Benghazi…well, it’s just too damn tiring to make to people who just don’t want to hear it.

Exhibit A: Glenn Greenwald explaining it last Friday night to Bill Maher, patiently and clearly — twice — only to have Maher say: “I’m bored with it.” Greenwald makes his case at about 1:29 into the first clip.

So instead let’s talk for a moment about writing. Students who have taken the writing-intensive course I offer at Harvard Extension know that most of the time, I practically threaten them with eternal damnation in Writer Hell for relying on the passive voice. (The passive is an inversion that often makes the subject disappear: “The ball was thrown,” rather than “he threw the ball,” etc.)

Anyone who writes has wrestled with the temptation to use the passive voice. We all do it, and I’m as guilty as the rest of us. Sometimes, it’s a useful tool and is even necessary. Most of the time, however, resorting to the passive voice is a crutch, or a kind of spackle applied to half-finished thoughts or half-baked assertions.

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The Syria Excuses: It’s none of our business…right?

Posted by Tom on Tuesday, May 7, 2013 | 11 Comments

Good luck, fellas. We’re still thinking it over.

So now it’s come to this.

Despite a high probability that chemical weapons have been used in Syria — by somebody – a death toll approaching 100,000 people, Israeli air strikes against weapons almost certainly sent from Iran, and the increasingly hysterical and violent panic of the Assad regime, apologists for the Obama administration are now digging around the bottom of the barrel for excuses not to intervene in a situation that was already a clear case for intervention 50,000 deaths ago (as I said in posts on this blog in May, June, and July a year ago).

What’s it going to take? Does this have to turn into another Rwanda, where the corpses of men, women and children choked African rivers and had to be stacked like firewood for disposal? (Yes, yes, I know: ten times as many people died in Rwanda. But Syria’s not over yet. Give Assad some time. He might yet want to shoot for a silver or bronze in the Mass Killing Olympics.)

So far, the excuses for not intervening in Syria — and I’ll say more in a moment about what “intervening” means — fall into three general categories, some of them well-meaning, some of them disingenuous, and some morally repugnant.

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