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Obama's Foreign Policy Critics Are Wrong |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 September 2014 14:40 |
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Rich writes: "I have my share of quarrels with President Obama. And, like most other Americans, I find the beheadings of Foley and Sotloff so savage on so many different levels that I fully concede there is an ugly part of me that would like to bomb any country that harbors ISIS terrorists back into the Stone Age."
President Obama and Susan Rice listen to Secretary of State John Kerry. (photo: Pete Souza)
Obama's Foreign Policy Critics Are Wrong
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
06 September 14
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Obama's restrained response to ISIS and Putin, the White House contemplates an immigration executive order, and the revolving door continues to spin.
 he end of the summer has been a remarkably bleak time in international affairs. ISIS has beheaded two American journalists — James Foley and Steven Sotloff — and Russia has grown more brazen in its backing of separatists in Ukraine. President Obama has been criticized for his cautious reaction to the two crises, especially after he said last week that "we don't have a strategy yet" to deal with ISIS. Has Obama over-learned the lessons of the "shoot first, ask questions later" Bush years?
I have my share of quarrels with President Obama. And, like most other Americans, I find the beheadings of Foley and Sotloff so savage on so many different levels that I fully concede there is an ugly part of me that would like to bomb any country that harbors ISIS terrorists back into the Stone Age, as the American general Curtis LeMay, the prototype for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, once proposed for North Vietnam. But Obama’s deliberateness in the face of ISIS’s provocations as well as Putin’s — his refusal to follow the trigger-happy foreign policy of the Bush-Cheney era — is to be applauded.
You will notice that the crowd of pundits and (mostly Republican) politicians insisting that Obama “do something” about these horrors never actually say what that “something” is. They offer no strategy of their own beyond an inchoate bellicosity expressed in constructions along the lines of “we must more forcefully do whatever it is that Obama is doing.” That’s because Obama is already doing the things that can be done (and that some of his critics redundantly suggest): bombing ISIS positions wherever it is feasible; searching for allies to join action that might defeat them on the ground; trying to rally Europe to tighten the economic noose on Putin and Russia. There will surely be more actions to come when America’s ducks are in a row, and if the president were to delineate them, you can be certain he’d be condemned for tipping off our enemies in advance.
Contrast his deliberateness with his critics, most of whom have in common that they were completely wrong in endorsing the disastrous Iraq War that precipitated the current crisis. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has gone on record of late saying that she, unlike Obama, would have armed moderate forces in Syria to bring down Assad. But as Thomas Friedman, these days a much-chastened Iraq War enabler, has pointed out, there’s a reason why even Israel didn’t take up that tactic: Those “moderate” forces, to the extent they could be identified, were doomed to fail, and chances are that whatever arms we got to them would have fallen into ISIS’s hands. (As indeed has been the case with armaments we bestowed upon Maliki’s Iraq government.) As John McCain chastised Obama for not doing enough to fight ISIS last month, he had the gall to brag on CNN that he had “predicted what was going to happen in Iraq.” He had indeed predicted that Iraq might be destabilized by the withdrawal of American troops, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and, besides, McCain is always in favor of more American troops as a one-size-fits-all panacea for international conflicts. His earlier predictions were that we would win the Iraq War “easily,” and that the Sunnis and Shia would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them. Why in God’s name should Obama listen to him or Clinton now? Why, for that matter, do Sunday talk shows repeatedly book McCain and repeatedly fail to challenge his long record of wrong calls on the Middle East?
As a corrective, I highly recommend an essay by Michael Cohen of the Century Foundation, published last weekend in the Daily News, that lays out in detail why Obama has a strategy for ISIS, Russia, and other foreign-policy crucibles, and why most of his critics do not. It’s a much-needed blast of reality. As an aside, Cohen also raises another intriguing question: Why are politicians and pundits giving the relatively slender threat of an ISIS attack on America more weight than the “gun violence that takes the lives of an estimated 30,000 Americans every year”?
In late June, President Obama vowed to overhaul America's immigration system through executive action this summer. Now the White House is strongly hinting that the president will delay any action until after the midterm elections. Republicans and red-state Democrats have criticized the president's potential executive action as a massive overreach of his authority, while immigration activists have contended that the potential delay of an executive action would alienate Hispanic voters and continue a regime of mass deportations. Should Obama issue an executive order on immigration at all? And should the electoral chances of Democratic senators in Arkansas and North Carolina affect his timing?
As my colleague Jonathan Chait has argued, Democrats would not be so thrilled if a Republican president were to try to achieve policy goals by such extra-democratic, if legal, means as Obama has proposed on immigration. Chait is right, but in the current context — a grave humanitarian crisis that begs for alleviation, a GOP-run House that has vowed complete inaction on immigration reform — I feel Obama has a case. But I don’t think he should delay action now to salvage (possibly) some Senatorial candidates who are likely to lose anyway. If his motives are pure — to bring relief to those who are suffering — the timetable should not be determined by the electoral calendar. And I think he’s likely over-thinking the political fallout in any case. A move on immigration would actually aid one Senatorial candidate in a tight race — in increasingly Hispanic Colorado. It would also provoke a round of Republican Hispanic-bashing that will backfire on the GOP’s electoral prospects — perhaps marginally in 2014, but seriously in 2016. Last weekend Ted Cruz likened the border between Manhattan and the Bronx to that between Texas and Mexico — a provocative and preposterous analogy that may end up looking relatively genteel next to what the Iowa hothead Steve King and other GOP Congressional xenophobes will have to say if Obama acts on immigration. King and Marco Rubio have also implied they might try to shut the government down if the president acts — just the gift the Democrats are praying for in this election season. Obama should pull the trigger on his immigration strategy and make their day.
Earlier this week, the boutique investment bank Moelis & Co. announced that it had hired recently deposed Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as vice chairman and managing director. At the same time, word broke that the Russian bank Gazprombank, a target of U.S. sanctions, had hired former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Democratic Senator John Breaux to lobby on its behalf. Meanwhile, the Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout is challenging New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination on an anti-corruption platform and is considered a hopeless long shot. Why don't Americans in 2014 seem to care at all about corruption and the revolving door?
Americans care, but they have given up. Members of both parties have become inured to the reality that the deck is stacked in favor of corporate interests and the one percent — a cynicism that was heightened not just by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, opening the floodgates for money as “free speech,” but by the failure of government to punish the culprits who greased the skids for the Great Recession and walked away with their loot while their victims suffered. Most voters (and lapsed voters) assume that every politician is on the take from the highest bidder, and they are often right. There are few politicians in office who can resist the entreaties of big donors. There are few out-of-office politicians who can resist the siren call of lobbying, even to the point of signing on with fat cats in Putin’s Russia as the bipartisan team of Lott and Breaux did. And so we shrug about them and Cantor — and about onetime liberal heroes turned influence peddlers like the former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. It’s impossible to know what will change this equation. Still, an unexpectedly strong protest vote for Teachout over Cuomo in next week’s primary could rattle the status quo — at least within the confines of blue New York.
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The Real Reason the GOP Is Obsessed With Voter Fraud |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=14516"><span class="small">David Sirota, Salon</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 September 2014 14:30 |
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Sirota writes: "It is rare for a politician to publicly deride efforts to boost voter turnout. It is seen as a taboo in a country that prides itself on its democratic ideals. Yet, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie last week slammed efforts to simplify voter registration."
(illustration: FreeSpeechTV)
The Real Reason the GOP Is Obsessed With Voter Fraud
By David Sirota, Salon
06 September 14
The real reason Republicans object to same-day voter registration? Greater turnout will cost them elections
 t is rare for a politician to publicly deride efforts to boost voter turnout. It is seen as a taboo in a country that prides itself on its democratic ideals. Yet, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie last week slammed efforts to simplify voter registration.
Referring to Illinois joining other states — including many Republican-led ones — in passing a same-day voter registration law, Christie said: “Same-day registration all of a sudden this year comes to Illinois. Shocking. It’s shocking. I’m sure it was all based on public policy, good public policy to get same-day registration here in Illinois just this year, when the governor is in the toilet and needs as much help as he can get.”
Christie was campaigning for Illinois GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, who is challenging Democratic incumbent Gov. Pat Quinn, who signed the same-day registration bill into law in July.
Christie, who chairs the Republican Governors Association, denounced the effort to boost voter turnout as an underhanded Democratic tactic, despite the Illinois State Board of Elections being composed equally of Democrats and Republicans. Referring to the same-day voter initiative, Christie said Quinn “will try every trick in the book,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Christie said the program is designed to be a major “obstacle” for the GOP’s gubernatorial candidates.
The trouble with such rhetoric – beyond its anti-democratic themes — is its absurd assertions about partisan motives. After all, many of the 11 states with same-day registration laws currently have Republican governors.
In reality, same-day registration is all about turnout, not partisanship. According to data compiled by the think tank Demos, average voter turnout is more than 10 percent higher in states that allow citizens to register on the same day that they vote. Demos also notes that “four of the top five states for voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election all offered same-day registration.” There was some evidence in Wisconsin that same-day registration boosted Democratic turnout, but the Wisconsin State Journal of Madison reports that “Republican areas also saw heavy use of the state’s last-minute registration law.” The registration system been also been adopted by such deeply Republican states as Wyoming, Idaho and Utah.
Unlike Christie, most Republicans who have fought voter turnout efforts like same-day registration have argued that same-day registration would increase voter fraud. This has allowed the GOP to position itself as battling crime — not as trying to block legal voters. But the GOP has been unable to substantiate that voter-fraud claim, and there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Demos, for example, surveyed data from six states with same-day registration and found that “there has been very little voter fraud in [same-day registration] states over the past several election cycles.” In GOP-dominated North Dakota — which requires no voter registration at all — Secretary of State Alvin Jaeger, a Republican, reported that “voter fraud has not been widespread in North Dakota” and that there have been “very few known incidents of voter fraud” in the state.
Those findings confirm a recent analysis of primary, general, special and municipal elections by Loyola University professor Justin Levitt. He found that since 2000, more than a billion ballots have been cast in the United States and there have been just 31 credible incidents of voter fraud.
In light of that data, Republican efforts to prevent same-day registration and preclude voting betray a fear that has nothing to do with voter fraud and everything to do with political power. Essentially, the GOP fears that when more Americans exercise their basic democratic rights, Republicans may have less chance of winning elections.
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Nuclear Power's Insanities - Taxpayer-Guaranteed |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23303"><span class="small">Ralph Nader, The Nader Page</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 September 2014 14:29 |
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Nader writes: "The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) - the corporate lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for the disintegrating atomic power industry - doesn't have to worry about repercussions from the negative impacts of nuclear power."
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader. (photo: Meet the Press)
Nuclear Power's Insanities - Taxpayer-Guaranteed
By Ralph Nader, The Nader Page
06 September 14
he Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) – the corporate lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for the disintegrating atomic power industry – doesn’t have to worry about repercussions from the negative impacts of nuclear power. For nuclear power is a government/taxpayer-guaranteed boondoggle whose staggering costs, incurred and deferred, are absorbed by American taxpayers via a supine government regulatory and subsidy apparatus.
So if you go to work at the NEI and you read about the absence of any permanent radioactive waste storage site, no problem, the government/taxpayers are responsible for transporting and safeguarding that lethal garbage for centuries.
If your reactors experience ever larger cost over-runs and delays, as is now happening with two new reactors in South Carolina, no problem, the supine state regulatory commissions will just pass the bill on to consumers, despite the fact that consumers receive no electricity from these unfinished plants.
If these plants, and two others in Georgia under construction, experience financial squeezes from Wall Street, no problem, a supine Congress has already passed ample taxpayer loan guarantees that make Uncle Sam (you the taxpayer) bear the cost of the risk.
If there were to be an accident such as the one that happened in Fukushima, Japan, no problem, under the Price-Anderson Act, the government/taxpayers bear the cost of the vast amount of damage from any nuclear power plant meltdown. To put this cost into perspective, a report by the Atomic Energy Commission about fifty years ago estimated that a class nine meltdown could make an area “the size of Pennsylvania” uninhabitable.
Why do we stand for such a doomsday technology all over America that is uneconomic, uninsurable, unsafe, unnecessary (it can’t compete with energy conservation and renewable energies), unevacuable (try evacuating the greater New York City area from a disaster at the two Indian Point plants 30 miles from Manhattan) and unprotectable (either from sabotage or earthquake)?
David Freeman, the famous energy engineer and lawyer, who has run four giant utilities (the Tennessee Valley Authority, the SMUD complex – where he closed the Rancho Seco Nuclear Plant – the New York Power Authority and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) sums up the history of nuclear power this way: “Nuclear power, promoted as too cheap to meter, turned out to be too expensive to use, the road to nuclear proliferation, and the creator of radioactive trash that has no place to go.” Right wing conservative/libertarians call it extreme “crony capitalism.”
Nuclear power plants are shutting down. In 2013, four reactors shut down: Crystal River 3, Kewaunee, San Onofre 2 and San Onofre 3. Now, Michael Peck, a senior federal nuclear expert, is urging that the last nuke plant left in California, Diablo Canyon, be shut down until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regulators can demonstrate that the two reactors at this site can withstand shaking from three nearby earthquake faults.
Meanwhile, the human, environmental and economic disasters at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plants keep metastasizing. Scientists are producing studies that show serious biological effects (genetic damage and mutation rates) of radiation on plant, insect and bird life in and around the large, cordoned off, uninhabitable area surrounding these closed down reactors. The giant politically-influential electric utility company underestimated the likelihood of a powerful earthquake and tsunami.
In the early nineteen-seventies, the industry and its governmental patrons were expecting 1,000 nuclear plants – 100 of them along the California coast – to be operating by the year 2000. Instead, a little more than a hundred were built nationwide. In reality, as of 2014, there are only 100 operable reactors, many of which are aging.
The pitfalls are real and numerous. In addition to growing public opposition, and lower-priced natural gas attracting electric utilities, there are the ever-present, sky-rocketing costs and delays of construction, repair and the question of where to store nuclear waste. These costs are what make Wall Street financiers turn their backs on nuclear power unless the industry can ram more tens of billions of dollars in government/taxpayer loan guarantees through Congress.
And what is all this nuclear technology, from the uranium mines to the nuclear plants to the still absent waste storage dumps for? To boil water!
These are the tragic follies when the corporate masters and their political minions, who are ready and willing to guarantee taxpayer funding, have no “skin in the game.” This kind of staggering power without responsibility is indeed radioactive.
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Media Should Be Challenging Arguments for War, Not Baying for Blood |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29754"><span class="small">Dan Froomkin, The Intercept</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 September 2014 14:27 |
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Froomkin writes: "Washington's elite media, as usual, is doing its job exactly wrong. They are baying for war."
(image: Shutterstock)
Media Should Be Challenging Arguments for War, Not Baying for Blood
By Dan Froomkin, The Intercept
06 September 13
 ashington’s elite media, as usual, is doing its job exactly wrong.
They are baying for war.
Pundits and reporters are seemingly competing for who can be more scornful of President Obama for his insufficiently militaristic response to the brutal Sunni militants who call themselves the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
They are gleefully parsing Obama’s language for weakness, and essentially demanding a major military assault — while failing to ask the tough questions about what if any good it could actually accomplish.
It’s not just that the lessons of the abject failure of the press corps in the run-up to war in Iraq seem to have been forgotten. Watching post-invasion reality in the region should have made it clear to anyone paying any attention at all that America is not omnipotent, and that military action kills not just enemies but innocent civilians, creates refugee crises, can spawn more enemies than it destroys, further destabilizes entire regions, and alters the future in unanticipated and sometimes disastrous ways.
(Indeed, as noted author Robert W. Merry wrote in the National Interest recently, the “ominous turn of events in the Middle East flows directly from the regional destabilization wrought by President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.”)
In a nation that considers itself peaceful and civilized, the case for military action should be overwhelmingly stronger than the case against. It must face, and survive, aggressive questioning.
There is no reason to expect that kind of pushback from within Congress — leading figures from far right to far left are falling into line with the hawkish consensus for some sort of action, virtually begging Obama to ask for their authorization so they can give it to him. And Vice President Joe Biden, the one guy inside the White House who’s been a consistent voice of military restraint, said Wednesday that the U.S. will follow ISIS “to the gates of hell“.
In the absence of a coherent opposition party or movement, it’s the Fourth Estate’s duty to ask those questions, and demand not just answers, but evidence to back up those answers.
The press corps shouldn’t be asking: Why isn’t Obama sounding tougher? It should be asking: What is he considering, and why the hell does he think it has any chance of working?
I asked a few experts who I respect and trust to propose some of the specific questions that the Obama administration should have to answer. (As I wrote in my inaugural blog post, one of my goals here it to serve as a megaphone for people who a) know what they’re talking about and b) have gotten things right in the past.)
Here are three responses. As more come in, I’ll add them to the bottom. And I’ll hoist good ones up from comments, too. Or maybe I’ll make it all into a second post.
Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, now a military scholar and author, summed up his questions in three words: “Purpose? Method? Endstate?”
He argues that ISIS isn’t the threat some make it out to be, and that it’s only one part of a proxy war against Iran that will continue as long as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar continue to fund it:
ISIS is a contemporary version of Mohammed’s 7th Century force with pickup trucks instead of horses, but with the same brutality. Its successful conquest of largely Sunni Arab areas in irrelevant desert is evidence for the weakness in those areas and their surroundings rather than strength on the part of ISIS.
Frankly, I think lots of Westerners with either no personal experience on the ground fighting and killing Arabs or with agendas (ideological or self-enrichment) are making a mountain range out of very small hills at best. Also, keep in mind if ISIS in Syria presented any real threat would the Israelis stand by and do nothing about it? Of course not.
Finally, we created the conditions for ISIS through our intervention and installation of Iranian power in Baghdad, but Riyadh, Ankara and Doha are now the recruiting and financial centers for ISIS. As long as they and their surrogates want to wage this proxy war against Iran and its satellites/allies the conflict will continue.
After the 1991 failure to remove S[addam] H[ussein] from power, we wasted two decades, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on Iraq and the region. It’s time to stop.
Iconoclastic retired diplomat and Middle East expert Chas W. Freeman Jr., whose appointment to chair Obama’s National Intelligence Council was quashed in early 2009 by the pro-Israel lobby, notes the inherent conflict between Obama’s casual admission last week that “We don’t have a strategy yet” and the fact that we are already actively bombing ISIS.
There have been 124 air strikes across Iraq as of September 2, according to the Guardian; the White House has described the mission thus far as “to protect U.S. personnel and facilities and to address the humanitarian situation on the ground.”
Freeman asks:
What are the missing elements of a strategy for dealing with ISIS and whose cooperation do we need to produce one? What is being done to secure that cooperation?
Our military tell us that the use of force cannot effectively counter ISIS, yet we’re bombing ISIS as if it can. What can counter ISIS? What sort of diplomacy is needed to keep ISIS from carrying out its threats to extend its operations to our homeland?
How can we fight ISIS in Iraq while allowing it safe haven in Syria? Would opposing ISIS in Syria require us to cooperate with the Assad government? With Hezbollah? With Iran? If we cannot cooperate with these enemies of ISIS, can we coordinate policy with them? If so, how?
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf Arab states have been major sources of international financial support for radical Islamists in Syria. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has adopted a sectarian religions approach to its foreign policy, countering Iran theologically as well as geopolitically. Does Saudi Arabia have a role in turning Salafi Muslim rebels in Syria against their more extreme co-religionists in ISIS? If so, what?
Should we be working with Iran against ISIS? How would doing so be reconciled with our deference to Israeli and Saudi paranoia about Iran?
Compared to al Qa’ida, how do you rate ISIS as a threat to Americans abroad? Israelis? Americans at home?
How is a base area defended by hundreds of U.S. troops an embassy under the Vienna Convention? How does our embassy at Baghdad differ from the norm?
How afraid of ISIS are the Saudis? How much should they be concerned about it?
Who are the foreign fighters in ISIS? Where and how are they recruited? Is there any non-coercive program to counter the ideological appeal of ISIS?
Why is ISIS not an appropriate means of expressing the defiant resentment of Arab youth against the United States and American policies in the Middle East? If the U.S. and Israel can kill large numbers of civilians with impunity, why can’t citizen militias do the same to Americans and the United States?
How do you see the role of Russia in the contemporary Middle East, given the rise of ISIS and the siege of Syria?
Paul R. Pillar, formerly the CIA’s top Middle East analysis, wrote an influential op-ed in the Washington Post during a particularly intense period of saber-rattling toward Iran in 2007 called “What to Ask Before the Next War”.
Last week, he wrote a brilliant article in the National Interest, attempting to put “ISIS in Perspective”.
In the piece, he wrote that “Americans, following a long tradition of finding monsters overseas to destroy, are now focusing their attention and their energy on a relatively new one.”
He also noted that “We also are reacting quite understandably to the group’s methods, which are despicably inhumane, and to its objectives, which are disgustingly medieval.” But, he wrote, “we also should bear in mind that an emotional reaction to such an incident produces the wrong frame of mind for debate, and cool-headed deliberation, about public policy.”
He warned about the danger of absolutism in assertions that ISIS “must be destroyed”:
We have heard similar absolutism before, and we have seen the results. We heard it with the post-9/11 false syllogism that if terrorism is considered a serious problem then we must recognize that we are at “war,” and if we are at war then that means we must rely principally on military force. We heard it also in the dictum that if there is even a one percent chance of something awful happening to us, then we must treat that as a certainty.
The absolutist approach leads to inappropriate derision and dismissal of policy steps as “half measures” when they may in fact be—considering the costs, benefits, and other U.S. interests at stake—the most prudent steps that could be taken. Some actions that would set back ISIS may be, given the circumstances, sensible and cost-effective. Other possible measures may seem aimed more directly at the goal of destroying ISIS but, given the circumstances, would not be sensible.
In an interview, Pillar marveled at the “kind of mass emotional phenomenon” based in part on the recent barbaric beheadings of captured free-lance journalists and the scary maps that make it seem like ISIS is about to take Baghdad. But, he said, the press is “getting excited in a way that I think has been blown well out of proportion.”
Here are the questions he thinks the press should be raising instead:
What do you expect the response of ISIS to be, given especially that these killings that have gotten so much attention have been couched by the group as revenge for military action we’ve already taken? Why shouldn’t we expect more of the same if we do more of the same?
Have we considered whether part of the group’s purpose is to provoke more U.S. intervention, and therefore show themselves as the group standing up to the U.S.? Would we not indeed be playing into their hands by doing so?
Given that Matthew Olsen, the outgoing director of the NCTC [National Counterterrorism Center] made a statement the other day that we do not face the prospect of attacks by this group against the homeland, why are we focusing as much attention as we are against this one group? They’ve done certain dramatic things that have gotten our attention, and the press’s attention, but what exactly are the U.S.’s interests at stake?
Given that this group’s advances in Syria and Iraq have had a great deal to do with the larger sectarian conflict in those countries… how do we intervene without effectively taking sides in a sectarian conflict in which the United States has no interest? Why should we favor Shiites or Sunnis? Because that’s exactly how it will be seen. Have you considered the downside of being seen as taking sides in a sectarian conflict, in terms of the enemies that you make?
With particular regard to the question of intervening in Syria: What exactly would be our broader political objective? Do we still believe that [Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad] must go? And if we do, how do we square this with an intervention against ISIS, given that the regime and ISIS are the two most powerful interests in the Syrian civil war?
How effective would air strikes be against a group most of whose strength is closely intermingled with civilian populations? It does not consist of large military formations out in the desert. How do you do something effective militarily without causing casualties among innocent civilians?
Pillar said the air strikes thus far have largely involved “the few targets of opportunity there have been,” including advancing troops. “But the larger the operation, and the more extensive it becomes, the more the question of collateral damage becomes pertinent.”
Here are a few other notes of skepticism I’ve run across. (Send me more!)
New York Times reporter James Risen notes:
And in a story about the lack of fulsome debate on the issue, Huffington Post’s Sam Stein finds a critic asking questions:
“It seems unlikely that U.S. military action, even if assisted by surrogates on the ground, can ‘kill’ ISIS. At best, we will be able to significantly reduce its capabilities. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but then what?” said. “If the basic problem is instability — a problem extending far beyond Iraq/Syria, of course — then the big question is what if anything the U.S. and its allies can do to restore stability to the region. That’s where the debate ought to focus. I don’t get much sense of people taking on that issue, perhaps because it is truly a daunting one.”
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