Author: Patrick Appel

Will Iran Protect Its Ally?

by Patrick Appel

Eli Lake reports on Iran’s response to America attacking Syria:

Recent U.S. intelligence assessments are not entirely comforting, but one silver lining is that for now the government’s analysts do not expect Iran to attempt terrorist attacks outside the Middle East or Afghanistan in the event of limited U.S. air strikes on Syria, according to U.S. officials who spoke with The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity. Although Iran as recently as 2011 plotted a terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., a statement Wednesday from the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hinted that Iran would focus retaliation inside the Middle East.

Larison thinks bombing Syria will make war with Iran more likely:

A direct attack on Syria would make it virtually impossible for Rouhani to pursue a more conciliatory course, which in turn makes conflict with Iran more likely in the coming years. Iran might not respond militarily to an attack on its ally, but if hard-liners in Tehran are as blinkered as our own “credibility”-obsessed politicians they very well might feel that they have to respond or risk being perceived as weak. Whether Iran retaliates or not, Rouhani will be in no position to offer concessions, and Iran hawks here will use this to justify their own demands for even more sanctions and more aggressive measures against Iran’s nuclear program.

Karim Sadjadpour has a useful primer on Iran’s alliance with Syria. A section on Iran’s strategic interests:

Syria has been Tehran’s only consistent ally since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Whereas the rest of the Arab world supported, and in some cases bankrolled, Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, Hafiz al-Assad’s Syria sided with Tehran. While Iranian and Syrian tactical interests have occasionally diverged during the last three decades, on macro-strategic issues the two regimes have more often worked in unison.

Beyond its political support, Syria is also critical to Iran in that it provides it a geographic thoroughfare to Lebanese Shi`a militia Hizb Allah, which is one of the crown jewels of the Iranian revolution. Both Syria and Hizb Allah are crucial elements of Iran’s resistance alliance, and much of Hizb Allah’s armaments are thought to emanate from Iran via the Damascus airport.

Iranian motivations in keeping the al-Assad regime in power are also driven by deep concerns about the composition of a post-Assad government. Given Syria’s overwhelming Sunni Arab demographic majority, Iran fears the prospect of Syria being rendered a Sunni sectarian regime aligned with Saudi Arabia or the United States and hostile to Shi`a Iran. While visiting Damascus in August 2012, former Iranian Supreme National Security Adviser Saeed Jalili stated that “Iran will absolutely not allow the axis of resistance, of which it considers Syria to be a main pillar, to be broken in any way.” In other words, if the ends are opposing the United States and Israel, almost any means are justified.

Why Not Go To Congress?

by Patrick Appel

Amy Davidson asks:

What is the disadvantage of going to Congress? That they are loud and annoying and someone will try to introduce a resolution tying action in Syria to Obamacare? If the Administration can’t stand up to Ted Cruz, it can hardly hope to frighten Bashar al-Assad. And if going to Congress now feels time-consuming, how does it compare to the hours, days, weeks, and sanity expended on the Benghazi hearings? Those might have happened anyway, but they got a fair share of their formless force from the Administration’s initial decision to not really bother with Congress and the War Powers Act when it came to Libya. If you haven’t been asked in the first place, there is no cost to turning a tragedy into a piece of political theatre.

Alex Altman expects Syrian intervention to become a political bludgeon:

The only sure thing is Obama’s opponents will use Syria against him, no matter how it turns out.

House Speaker John Boehner‘s new letter to the president, released late Wednesday afternoon, is a sign of how they may try. Boehner’s letter requests “a clear explanation of our policy” and interests that require intervention, as well as “a clear, unambiguous explanation of how military action — which is a means, not a policy — will secure U.S. objectives.” It notes points of agreements. It includes a list of 14 important questions. But it’s mostly notable for what it doesn’t include: a request for Obama to seek congressional approval.

Instead Boehner wants “substantive consultation,” a phrase that is vague enough to verge on meaningless. The subtext is clear. Republicans will be happy to hammer the president for acting unilaterally, which Obama himself once disavowed. But many want no part of a vote. Backbenchers could wind up on the wrong side of history. And Boehner would have to wrangle a majority out of a restive party that, on this issue, is perhaps even more divided than usual.

Ramesh Ponnuru doubts that Congress would vote for war:

This is not a military action that we are undertaking to defend ourselves from attack or to protect a core interest. The congressional power to declare war, if it is not to be a dead letter, has to apply here. And it seems to me exceedingly unlikely that Congress would vote to commit us in Syria, because the public manifestly opposes it. This is a war with no clear objective, thus no strategy to attain it, no legal basis, and no public support.

Ed Morrissey, on the other hand, suspects that Congress would authorize force:

Why not go to Congress? There is at least as large a bipartisan group urging action, probably more than enough in both chambers to get easy passage of a limited pass.  The authorization would give Obama more political cover on what is undeniably an unpopular action, and spread the blame to both parties.  Chuck Todd suggested yesterday that the White House is afraid that “isolationists” will block the authorization, and that the delay in getting approval would be too great … Delay? Well, it’s been months since the first time Syria used chemical weapons, which makes a rush to action here moot. Furthermore, the UN wants more time to determine what exactly happened anyway.

Cassidy wonders whether the delay in Britain will spur congressional debate:

After yesterday’s dramatic developments in London, which culminated in Prime Minister David Cameron delaying a parliamentary vote to authorize British participation in an American-led attack, President Obama faces the choice of putting off the bombing or going ahead without the support of America’s closest European ally. Should he choose to hold off for a few days, which seems likely, it will give Congress time to consider the matter, and to schedule a vote approving military action. Until now, the White House has resisted such a vote, and the Republican leadership has stopped short of demanding one. But now that Britain has allowed the people’s representatives to have a say, and also given the U.N. inspectors in Syria some time to complete their investigation of last week’s awful gas attack, the political dynamic in Washington may change.

Drum hopes so:

There are legitimate issues surrounding the powers of the president and the extent to which Congress can micromanage military attacks. But this is something that Congress should actually spend some time debating, instead of just folding up and letting the president do whatever he wants with nothing more than a bit of muttering about separation of powers. The president may be commander-in-chief, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. military is his personal plaything. It’s past time to make that clear.

Earlier Dish on congressional approval and Syria here.

How Do We Save The Whales? Ctd

by Patrick Appel

Whale Eye

A reader writes:

Evan Soltas’ article make a decent argument for “catch share” in whaling, though I find it curious he neither quotes nor links to any opponents of the idea (instead choosing to summarize their ideas, which strikes me as lazy and uncharitable). I generally support catch share and other conservation solutions that take human activity into account. But had Soltas done more research, he might have realized another problem–whalers break the rules now, and they will break the rules under any catch share system so long as their home countries don’t care to enforce the rules. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has no enforcement powers. If you hauled a dead humpback whale (actually not that endangered any more) into San Diego harbor, Federal and State authorities would swiftly descend. The same is not true in Japan. Though they’re allowed to take Minke and other smaller whales for “research” purposes, other explicitly protected whales have always been illegally killed by Japanese whaling fleets without consequence.

Years back, my father (Dr. Stephen R. Palumbi) and his colleague Dr. Scott Baker purchased whale meat from Japanese fish markets and used genetic testing to prove that illegal whales were being taken. Blue, fin, sei and other severely endangered great whales were clearly present in the meat supply. A minor furor erupted, with Japan and various useful idiots denying the incontrovertible evidence in front of their faces. Our family home got a number of threatening calls from Japanese-accented men over the next few years (organized crime is involved in the trade). Baker has since repeated the experiment; the illegal species can still be bought without much trouble in Japanese fish markets.

So, catch share is generally a fine conservation strategy. Given proper enforcement mechanisms, which Soltas simply assumes with a wave of his hand at the end of his piece, it might work for whales. But the problem remains: the rules that exist are not being followed. Do whatever you like with the Minke market, but nobody is seriously proposing that blue whales should be hunted. And yet, they are. Until all parties to the IWC are operating in good faith, the rules shouldn’t budge.

And Evan Soltas could have figured all this out if he’d done his homework.

Another reader adds:

Let’s set aside the argument about whales’ intelligence being a reason not to kill or eat them. Instead, I want to address the notion of establishing a “properly regulated market” in whaling as a way to allow their populations to increase.

The history of attempts to manage fisheries makes it clear that “sustainable” management is extremely difficult to pull off. It takes well-crafted regulations, requires strict enforcement and compliance, and relies on fisheries science which is notoriously difficult to get right. The majority of attempts to regulate fisheries for the sake of increasing fish populations have failed or have been so eroded over time by the interests of those who want fish to maximize yield (which typically leads to overexploitation) that the regulations and systems themselves become meaningless.

The assumption that such a system could be put in place for whales is foolhardly. It runs in the face of fisheries management history and fails to take into account the fact that whales are, like many shark species, slow to regenerate. Their feed sources and habitats have been radically reduced. In some kind of ideal scenario, perhaps one could determine some “sustainable worldwide quota” that, as long as it was adhered to, whale populations would increase. But, this sort of paper plan rarely works out in the real world. The idea lacks credibility when factors like human nature, degraded habitats, food sources and more are taken into account.

(Photo by Charlie Stinchcomb)

A Good Poker Face

by Patrick Appel

Can make reading others’ emotions more difficult:

Someone with a poker face will not miss an opponent with a big smile on her face when she look at her cards – participants suppressing their expressions were not significantly worse at correctly stating the expression they saw on the final slide. But when it comes to identifying slight signs of emotion – the hints revealed by a careful player – someone trying to hold a poker face is more likely to miss them.

Poker players cloaking their emotions is probably still wise. But other stone-faced professionals should take note:

As the authors point out, these findings may be most important for professions like law enforcement or medicine. Police officers interviewing a victim try to maintain a professional demeanor, devoid of expression, while seeking out information about others’ emotions. Yet this research shows the inherent difficulty of doing so. This is particularly true of a therapist’s work.

“A Liberal Is A Conservative Who Has Been Mugged By An Illness”

by Patrick Appel

Daniel Gross finds evidence that Republicans are warming to many of Obamacare’s individual components:

In the old days, they used to say that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. When it comes to health insurance, it seems a liberal is a conservative who has been mugged by an illness. After having a devastating stroke in 2012, Sen. Mark Kirk had an epiphany about the inadequacy of rehabilitation services for poor people. “My concern is what happens if you have a stroke and you’re not in the U.S. Senate, and you have no insurance and no income,” he told National Journal. “That’s the question I have been asking, and the reality is that if you’re on Illinois Medicaid and are a stroke survivor, you will get just five visits to the rehab specialist.”

The same holds for the pre-existing condition ban.

Clint Murphy, a former political operative, McCain campaign staffer, and cancer survivor turned Georgia real estate agent, recently wrote of his conversion on Obamacare. Although he had long since been cancer free, Murphy still wasn’t able to get insurance as a self-employed person. “I have sleep apnea. They treated sleep apnea as a pre-existing condition. I’m going right now with no insurance,” he said. Murphy said he can’t wait for the exchanges to bet set up in Georgia, so that he’ll be able to purchase insurance without being denied for a pre-existing condition. And even as they cavil about ripping up Obamacare, and hence the ban on pre-existing conditions, it is common to hear some Republicans speak kindly of the ban.

This is a dynamic we’ve seen over and over again in the past 80 years. Republicans shriek, cry socialism, and offer full resistance to any effort to expand social insurance. Then, after a certain amount of time passes and social insurance measures become popular and effective, they stand foursquare behind them and demand they be protected. Every single stinking component of FDR’s New Deal was a disaster, but don’t you dare touch Social Security! Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was a debacle, but keep the government out of Medicare! Obamacare must be torn up root and branch, just don’t kick junior off my insurance plan!

Would A Syrian War Violate International Law?

by Patrick Appel

Kevin Baron reports that the US won’t seek UN or NATO permission to bomb Syria. Larison comments:

In practice, the governments involved in this attack will be more or less the same ones that intervened in Libya, but there will be no illusion of international approval or alliance backing that the Libyan war received. If NATO had endorsed the action, it wouldn’t make it any more legal, but it would have created the superficial impression of a Western consensus in favor of it. As it is, the attack will most likely be backed by the U.S., Britain, and France, plus the activist Gulf monarchies that have been doing their part to worsen Syria’s conflict.

Millman argues that, if “we launch an attack on Syria, it will not be under any legal warrant whatsoever”:

[T]he entire public justification for an attack is the to punish Syria for a crime of war – that is to say, the justification is the need to uphold international law. In other words, an attack would be an open declaration that the United States arrogates to itself the right to determine what the law is, who has violated it, what punishment they deserve, and to take whatever action is necessary to see it carried out.

Larison adds:

[W]hat strikes the U.S. and its allies launch against Syrian forces in the next few days will be contrary to international law. Now most Americans and even some American liberal internationalists probably don’t care about this, but it is a fairly significant flaw in the claim that the forthcoming missile strikes have something to do with enforcing international norms and creating a “rules-based order.” Indeed, it sinks the only argument for this particular attack.

Russia Won’t Save Assad

by Patrick Appel

Should America bomb Syria, Julia Ioffe bets that Russia won’t stand in our way:

Russia sells weapons to Assad and supports him financially, but it won’t tell him what to do, nor does it want to. It’s also probably none too happy that Assad has pushed the envelope so obviously and so gruesomely because now Russia has to strut around doing its usual, increasingly ridiculous song and dance to give him cover, insisting on absolute unknowability and absolute precision as to whether and when chemical weapons were used. But it won’t retaliate if the U.S. strikes, mostly because there’s not all that much it can do, and because Syria is still far smaller in the Kremlin’s imagination than it is in the White House’s. Moreover, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s übertan foreign minister, said as much today. “But, of course,” he said, “we’re not going to war with anyone” over Syria.

So Russia may veto any U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria and make a rhetorical fuss about suddenly caring about international law, but it won’t get in America’s way once the Tomohawks are streaking towards Damascus. More likely, it will just grumble on the sidelines.

Do Interventions Shorten Civil Wars?

by Patrick Appel

Roger Cohen believes so:

My sense is that Assad’s end would be hastened even by a limited U.S. attack. It should be framed as retribution for a heinous crime. It will not in itself solve anything—but then nothing will. It may, however, bring us closer to the end game.

But that’s not what research on the subject finds:

The data incorporate 150 conflicts during the period from 1945 to 1999, 101 of which had outside interventions. Using a hazard analysis, the results suggest that third-party interventions tend to extend expected durations rather than shorten them.

What If Syria’s Rebels Gain The Upper Hand?

by Patrick Appel

One reason Syria Comment is against American intervention in Syria:

The opposition is incapable of providing government services: Millions of Syrians still depend on the government for their livelihoods, basic services, and infrastructure. The government continues to supply hundreds of thousands of Syrians with salaries & retirement benefits. Destroying these state services with no capacity to replace them would plunge ever larger numbers of Syrians into even darker circumstances and increase the outflow of refugees beyond its already high level. Syria can get worse.

Most militias are drawn from the poorer, rural districts of Syria. Most wealth is concentrated in the city centers that remain integral (such as Damascus, Lattakia, Tartus, Baniyas, Hama, etc.), which have survived largely unscathed in this conflict, and have not opted to continue the struggle. If the militias take these cities, there will be widespread looting and lawlessness which will threaten many more civilians who have managed to escape the worst until now.

Many in these urban centers have managed to continue leading fairly stable lives up to the present; despite the tremendous level of destruction seen so far, many areas are still a long way from the bottom. It would be preferable to avoid a Somalia-like scenario in the remaining cities and provinces.

It’s not at all clear that U.S. intervention can improve the economic or security situation for Syrians.

Peter Galbraith argues that, if “our military intervention is not going to be effective we shouldn’t do it, and if it’s not clearly going to lead to a better situation, then we shouldn’t do it”:

[W]hat’s so striking about the Syrian situation is the minorities have not joined the revolution. It’s almost entirely a Sunni revolution. And that should be more concerning to people in Washington than it is. It’s understandable why the Alawites would stay with Assad. Understandably, they fear they may face genocide if he is overthrown. But the Kurds, who were the first to rise up against Assad in 2004, simply don’t trust the opposition. They think they’re interested in a Sunni Islamic regime that will exclude them and maybe be dangerous to them. The Christians, the same thing, and the Jews, the same thing. I consider that lack of support like a canary in the mine, and we ought to pay more attention to it.

Your Wednesday Cry

by Patrick Appel

Fisher flags a video that “purports to show a father reuniting with his young son, who he thought had been killed, as thousands of Syrian children have been, in a recent attack by regime forces.” The father appears about a minute into the video:

Even if you don’t speak a word of Arabic, the family’s body language says everything. There is a lot of crying and hugging and grateful recitations of the Takbir (“Allahu akbar!” or “God is great!”). If you can hold it together through all seven minutes, you’re stronger than I am. But this video provides a welcome, if all too rare, moment of solace and joy in a war that has had precious little of either.