Hillary and Libya: Update

That's "Aidez-moi!" on his fingers. Image via Freaking News.

The extremely remarkable news coming out of France this week about ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, under arrest in a grotesque illegal campaign financing case, sheds unexpected light on a question we were working on two years ago, as the presidential campaign and the calumny campaign against Hillary Clinton were intensifying, and one of the angles of the latter was the portrayal of Clinton as a bloodthirsty warmonger against peace-loving Donald J. Trump, as in this example featuring a strange pro-Trump alliance among Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Green candidate Jill Stein, The New York Times, and young Conor:

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.)

Post Hawk Ergo Propter Hoc

I'm guessing this (from the January 2013 Senate Benghazi hearings, photo by Alex Wong/Getty North America) is more "In the second place..." than "Peace out!" but it does show her fingers know how to go there.

If you saw that cross-head in Mark Landler's book-promo excerpt (for Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power, being released from Penguin Random House today) in the Times Magazine—

—you might have started feeling a little panicky, and you wouldn't have been alone.

Though you also might want to just take a deep breath and ask yourself what it means, if Carpet-Bomber Cruz, who was still in the race last I heard, doesn't qualify as a hawk. Or John Kasich, who's called for a major US ground force in Syria. Or Donald J. Trump, who may claim (although he's demonstrably lying) to have opposed the war in Iraq back in 2002 but is eager to "bomb the shit" out of it now, and kill all the families of the ISIS fighters as well and send Exxon in to do the nation-building, and thinks Japan and South Korea and Saudi Arabia should have nuclear arsenals. True that Trump doesn't have a lot of respect for NATO, though neither did Donald Rumsfeld. But what's a "true" hawk?

Or you might want to look at the fine print—the part of the article known in the trade as "the article"—and see what that has to say about, for instance, her stance as opposed to that of President Obama:

Men are earthy, Ross is mercurial

Because I refuse to make the Uranus joke.

Mars by Sandro Botticelli (1483) and Venus by Nicki Minaj (2012), image by Daniel Fernández.

'Missus!' shouted the fat boy.
    'Well, Joe,' said the trembling old lady. 'I'm sure I have been a good mistress to you, Joe. You have invariably been treated very kindly. You have never had too much to do; and you have always had enough to eat.'
    This last was an appeal to the fat boy's most sensitive feelings. He seemed touched, as he replied emphatically —  'I knows I has.'
    'Then what can you want to do now?' said the old lady, gaining courage.
    'I wants to make your flesh creep,' replied the boy. Pickwick Papers, 8)

Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, was doing his Joe number on Sunday, asking us to be afraid—be very afraid—of the consequences of socialism, perhaps only ten or a dozen years away:

West of Eden: Brussels doubts

Syrian family in Istanbul. Photo by Jonny Hogg/Reuters (?) on Flickr.

Trump doubled down on his torture advocacy yesterday, naturally:

The billionaire businessman said authorities "should be able to do whatever they have to do" to gain information in an effort to thwart future attacks.

"Waterboarding would be fine. If they can expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding," Trump said on NBC's "Today" program, adding he believed torture could produce useful leads. "You have to get the information from these people."

That would almost be funny, if it wasn't so horrible, coming at the time it does. On Monday, as Belgian police were talking about the fantastic cooperation they were getting from Salah Abdeslam, without the benefit of torture ("worth his weight in gold," said his lawyer), they happened to mention one of the leads they'd acquired, the false name Soufiane Kayal being used by Najim Laachraoui, a suspect in November's Paris attacks; on Tuesday, the Brussels bombings took place, and today we are learning that that same Laachraoui is a member of the team that did yesterday's slaughter, probably the bomb-maker. The Belgian authorities might well have been able to capture Laachraoui and prevent the attack, thanks to their humane and effective interrogation practice,  if they had been a little luckier.

West of Eden: The Washington Playbook

Recess at an Aleppo elementary school, 19th century. Halep'de Bir Sıbyan Mektebi, Oyun Saati, Ottoman Archives.

Early on in the big Jeffrey Goldberg piece in the Atlantic on the "Obama doctrine" (as I said, it's got a lot more than David Brooks thinks it does):

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.

Mr. President, thanks!

I also loved learning that the phrase "stupid shit caucus", which I thought I invented in October 2014, was actually common currency in the White House around the same time, after the newly departed ex–Secretary of State Clinton gave Goldberg that interview in the August 2014 Atlantic complaining about Obama's failure to build up a "credible fighting force" out of the students and professionals who had led the peaceful protests against Assad in the beginning of the Arab Spring:

Comeback of stupid shit?

Roman temple tombs at Ghirza, Libya. Photo by Esther Kofod.

So, SuperTuesday, huh. Everybody from Corey Robin to Ross Douthat is out with a venture into some of that contrarian horserace panditry as if that's something cool, or adult (gee, Dad, I sure wish I could be like Mark Halperin when I grow up!), the professor working out Bernie's demographic path to unexpected victory (he got 41% of the non-white Democratic vote in Massachusetts!) while the Monsignor games out the chances of a contested convention (credit where credit is due, he uses the correct expression instead of the idiotic "brokered convention", and while his scenario is equally idiotic, or worse, this is a year where that is no bar to becoming reality).

Imma say Hillary over the Donald in November with a record low turnout, and the usual awful performances by the Democratic senatorial and congressional committees leaving Congress more or less as it is. No I'm not. I will leave that to others.

I am feeling kind of distressed, amid the SuperTuesday celebrations and laments, by something else that happened virtually in the middle of it, the huge report by Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the Times that came out Sunday and Monday on the US role in Libyan military operations of 2011-12 and the part played by Secretary of State Clinton; not so much in the intervention itself as in her apparent failure to learn anything from it:

Return of the Stupid Shit Caucus (like they went somewhere?)

Agnes Ayres and Rudolph Valentino in George Melford's The Sheik (1921).

Verbatim David Brooks, "When ISIS rapists win", August 28 2015:

President Obama has said that ISIS stands for nothing but savagery. That’s clearly incorrect.

Aw, Mom, do I have to?

OK, OK, incorrect in what sense? What are you, Politifact? By what metric would you determine the truth or falsity of that statement?

And by the way when did Obama say it? You put a link there as if to lead us to your source, but it just leads to the Times Obama Navigator page, and a search button whose closest result is your column today.

FBI director James Comey has called the Da'esh forces "savages", White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has said that their killings show they "stand for nothing" tout court. Secretary of State John Kerry called the killing of Stephen Sotloff "an act of of medieval savagery by a coward hiding behind a mask."  At the United Nations last September, Obama must have been referencing the Da'esh indirectly as the contrast when he told young Muslims, "You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder." But that's as close as it comes.

He has used "barbaric" in association with a "nothing but" account:

DO GOOD SHIT

Rafael Leonídas Trujillo Molina, "El Jefe", of the Dominican Republica, Image via TuVez.

¡JEB! last March on the president's executive order to protect millions of people brought to the US as children from deportation (adding maybe $230 billion to GDP and something over 30,000 jobs per year over the next ten years), currently under legal suspension while the federal courts decide whether Texas is entitled to sue over the program on the grounds that it will cause the state to "suffer irreparable harm":

“Let’s give them priority to be citizens. But by the law, not by decree, because that’s like a Latin American dictator,” Bush said.

And ¡JEB! this week on how he'd go about getting Congress to do what he wants if he were president:

Brooks on behalf of the Stupid Shit Caucus

Cobbler's shop, Syria, early 20th century, via Pieter van Ostaeyen.

Verbatim David Brooks, "Being Who We Are", New York Times, January 30 2015:

The Middle East is not a chessboard we have the power to manipulate. It is a generational drama in which we can only play our role. It is a drama over ideas, a contest between the forces of jihadism and the forces of pluralism. We can’t know how this drama will play out, and we can’t direct it. We can only promote pluralism — steadily, consistently, simply.

It's possible that our correspondent is not fully conversant with the rules of chess, but it is a game in which players cannot manipulate the board but only play their roles.

Hagel's dialectic

Would you take a Titus Andronicus from this man? Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford, via Wikipedia.

I'm generally very hesitant to take issue with anything Marcy Wheeler says, because I realize she has tens of thousands of pages of legal filings, some incredibly technical, virtually committed to memory, and woven into an apparently nearly coherent narrative, and when I can't follow her arguments I have to assume it's my fault because I'm not smart enough, but the fact is that when I can penetrate the narrative I'm not completely sure I can differentiate it from the kind of narrative that shows how the Earl of Oxford wrote all of Shakespeare's plays and poems (you can make up a story, but it only makes sense if you really want it to), and yesterday, when the folks at Emptywheel were dealing with documents I can understand and vying amongst each other over who can be angriest about how poor pacifist Chuck Hagel was tossed out of the Pentagon because of his interference with the president's plan to plunge the world into perpetual war as Emperor of Mesopotamia, I just got fed up.

In recent days, the press has reported that President Obama signed an order (or on second thought, maybe it’s just an unsigned decision that can’t be FOIAed, so don’t start anything, Jason Leopold) basically halting and partly reversing his plans for withdrawal....
And now that Obama has made it clear he will spend his Lame Duck continuing — escalating, even — both forever wars he got elected to end, he has fired forced the resignation of the Secretary of Defense he hired to make peace.

Aside from noting that there is no reason to suppose that the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan is being in any way halted, let alone reversed, "basically" or otherwise, as opposed to what has been announced, that the boots are going to be in some sense slightly more on the ground than seemed to be the plan, Hagel has been fighting the cuts he was hired to implement in the defense budget from July 2013 until four days ago. His chief firing offense, according to the Times account, was his hysterical public disagreement with the president's hopeful suggestion that the "Islamic state" was less than an existential threat to the entire world:

Stupid Shit continued

Senwosret III, 12th dynasty, ca. 1878-1840 B.C.E. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Pretty much everything about American politics exhausts me might now, which is why I haven't been writing too much. It's not writer's block exactly. It's just fatigue. What are we doing? How are we going to get out of this jam? Where is all the energy we had back in 2005? Even if I had the energy to try it, I can't organize potted plants.

I guess I am digressing. I am in a mood. There's shit to understand about South Dakota but the public is being custom-fitted for a collective hazmat suit for the brain. Ebola! Benghazi! Hamas! (Booman)

And Kobane! It was more than a little unsettling to see Jon Stewart apparently sucked into the Stupid Shit Caucus war party last night, donating a third of his half-hour to demanding to know why US airstrikes have so far failed to save the Kurdish town of Kobane on the Turkish-Syrian border from the Da'esh advance, and another third to supporting the book tour of chuckleheaded ex-CIA chief Leon Panetta, meaning more Kobane, and more "why didn't we bomb Syria last year?"

News from the Stupid Shit Caucus

From the title page of Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, 1549. Via Wikipedia.

It's been a staple of abuse of Obama by conservative intellectuals such as Sarah Palin and John McCain (hope you saw what I did there) for some months now that the president is to blame for the ongoing catastrophe in northern Iraq and eastern Syria because he implemented the agreement negotiated between the Iraq and US governments in the last weeks of the Bush administration in December 2008, which was very feckless of him: