Pompey the Great

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnius, by Tom Rutjens/Deviant Art.

Noah Rothman of Commentary yesterday morning, explaining to NPR why Mike Pompeo is qualified to be secretary of state, makes some very peculiar arguments:

ROTHMAN: Well, among them being that he was just in North Korea conducting a very high-level diplomatic mission. To the extent that he has been acting as a diplomatic ambassador now - and this was apparently leaked to convey to the press and to Democrats that he is essentially functioning as a diplomat...

GREENE: You're saying leaked to the - you're saying the White House wanted this out there so - to try and convince Democrats about his credentials.

ROTHMAN: Oh, we've learned yesterday that that was apparently the case. And it was a very smart move. It established his...

GREENE: But isn't that just one trip? Isn't that just one trip?

ROTHMAN: Well, yeah, but it's one very effective trip, apparently.

It is just one trip and we have no way of judging how effective it was, other than what the White House says, which is what this White House always says, that everything they do is totally great and making America great again only they can't tell you in just what respect.

West of Eden: Dissent in the State Department

12th-century Ayyubid Syrian baluster pottery jars in the Raqqa style, via Christies.

I more or less support President Obama's Syria policy as it is (with a reservation I'll get to below), but there's something I want to say about its critics, including the 50-odd US diplomats who have been circulating the internal cable that was leaked to the WSJ and the Times for today's papers,

urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

I want to say that I may disagree with them, they're not bad people. I mean, some of the critics are bad people (hi, Senator McCain, hi, Ron Fournier), whose aims are not to help the suffering people of Syria, about whom they understand nothing, but to further their own misbegotten careers by picking at the president's perceived weakness in any way they can, to make themselves look larger, but some of them, possibly most, are good people responding to a terrible situation in a totally understandable way. (Including candidate Hillary Clinton, who I think is at least somewhat on the State rebels' side.)

Parry and thrust

Update 3/2023: A little discouraged to see how much Russian propaganda I could take seriously at this point almost nine years ago... I still think Obama would have been right to try negotiating if that's what he was doing.

FDR found it helpful to negotiate with the lunatic Great Helmsman too. Image by Reuters via LatitudeNews.

I've been reading and rereading a remarkable piece by Robert Parry, who I think of as a kind of Seymour Hersh [update: LOL] of the blogosphere, and I mean that in a good way, for his extraordinary stories of October surprises in the 1968 and 1980 elections suggesting that your worst fantasies of Nixon's and Reagan's dirty tricks are probably true—this post, though, is about Ukraine, and President Obama's behind-the-scenes struggles with his most implacable enemies, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Well, maybe not exactly, but close: it really is about power issues inside the US foreign policy establishment and limits on presidential power, especially as applied in the [jump]