Author: Andrew Sullivan

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I write this from the perspective of one who didn’t participate in politics before Barack Obama, but I voted for him twice.  I’m part of that “Obama coalition” that political writers like to talk about – a “creative class” member, family man, early 40s, white, with deep skepticism toward American politics and outright disdain for the two major political parties.

Watching the president last night made me think two things.  First, my gut reaction was that this wasn’t the guy I voted for – what happened to that guy?  Second, it made me think more deeply about why I had supported him in the first place.  Sure, the idea of a black president was interesting to me, but that really had very little to do with my vote.  I also didn’t vote for Obama out of fear of Sarah Palin’s lunacy or John McCain’s warmongering (though both were certainly compelling reasons).  No, he was different. We didn’t vote for Obama because we hated or feared the other side, and that is actually something that makes him different from most of the milquetoast candidates the two parties typically put forward (and are already planning to put forward in 2016).

I think the disappointment in Obama stems in part from the fact that most of us who voted for him did so affirmatively.

We actually voted for Obama, not against McCain or Palin or Romney or Ryan.  We voted for the guy he ran as – a profoundly intelligent, intellectually independent, thoughtful man who insisted on treating the public like adults and who, on issue after issue, self-consciously refused to be responsive to whatever the Beltway shouting about. In short, he decided he wanted to be president on his own terms.

Obama knew he couldn’t control events, obviously, but he certainly could control himself – and his composed, sober, longer view of the churn of day-to-day issues conferred an inherent dignity upon himself.  The political class and some in the media didn’t always “get it”, still breathlessly chasing after the latest big story, trying to “win the hour”, etc.  But Obama’s poised refusal to go along (remember how he used to deride what he called “cable chatter”?  I sure do…) was a major dog whistle for people like me. I saw the president acting the way I wanted him to act. That was the guy I elected.  The guy who wouldn’t play along with all the bullshit, who would insist that we actually deal with both policy and politics based on facts, reasoning, and long-term strategy.

This can seem mundane, but for people like me who have watched Obama closely over the years, that’s what we liked and what we voted for.  I work in a corporate job with mostly conventional Fox-news Republican types, and time and again over the years, every argument they make bounces off me like Teflon.  It was always so easy to see how they had to mischaracterize Obama in order to effectively criticize him.

Not anymore.

Last night’s speech looked transparently political. OK, so Obama goofed and said we didn’t have a strategy, a rhetorical blunder that handed the Republicans a short-term tactical advantage in the midterm elections … so, after enough Democrats bitched about it, he goes on TV to announce a strategy.  The actual content was secondary to the fact of the speech itself.  That’s just not the guy I voted for.  It also lacked any actual strategic thinking – what are we going to do, who’s going to help us do it, how long, costs, risks and mitigants.  It was a political errand dressed as a speech, which frankly was one of the things I despised most about George W Bush.

It is sad to see Obama fall this far.  Furthermore, beyond even the inadequate content of the speech or the stench of midterm politics behind it, didn’t anyone bother to think of how the speech elevates ISIS around the world?  I admit they’re extremely violent and completely incapable of being deterred.  But they’re what – 30,000 guys?  A primetime presidential address gives them stature, legitimacy … which can only help them strengthen their hold on those they already have, and recruit even more.  How does that serve a real strategy to defeat them?

This is not the guy I voted for.  I remembered thinking this during the first debate with Romney, and now I’m thinking it again.  Is he checked out?  What happened?  Last night was a failure not only for Obama himself, but his political and policy teams.  Every president is surrounded by people for whom part of their responsibility is to not let the president look ridiculous.  Where are THOSE people?

The president looks like a solitary, adrift figure to me, a guy who may have already written off these next couple of years.

The Problem With Partners

Obama Meets With Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki At White House

In contrast to the right’s caricature of Obama as a president too feckless to stand up to our enemies, Benjamin Wallace-Wells posits that his real quandary is “whom the United States might trust — the problem of friends”:

The futile hunt for friends characterized the long Obama withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. In Syria, the long, pained, ultimately failed search for a tolerable proxy in the opposition precluded any American involvement, a hesitation that now looks like the biggest foreign-policy error of Obama’s presidency. During the Gaza conflict, Obama was far cooler towards Israel than his predecessors have been. If you want to hang back from the front lines, to hover overhead and urge your friends to the front lines, then the question of exactly who those friends are becomes crucial. ISIS, in its radicalism and its cartoonish barbarism, solved the enemy problem for Obama. It hasn’t completely solved the matter of the friends. Obama spoke confidently about the new, “inclusive” government that Iraqis had formed “in recent days.” Given the long history of sectarian animosity and slaughter in Iraq, it seems worth wondering whether this new coalition of a few days duration will hold under the pressures of a war.

Afzal Ashraf calls the decision to rely on regional partners “the most immature and risky part of the US strategy”:

Middle Eastern countries have spent billions on their defence capability but have shown a remarkable reluctance to deploy it beyond quelling mostly unarmed civilian rebellions. A history of petty squabbling and so little experience of political cooperation or joint military operations further reduces their potential impact. If the anti-Iranian attitude of the Saudis and other Gulf states is not checked before any troops from those countries arrive in Iraq then there is a danger of sparks flying if they come into contact with the Iranian military “advisers”, who appear to be advising very close to the frontline. Increasing efforts to remove President Assad from power in Syria is probably the greatest strategic flaw. Identification and maintenance of a single clear aim is a maxim of strategic success. If defeating Isis is the main aim of this strategy then why complicate an already difficult task by simultaneously engineering regime change in Syria?

Bobby Ghosh makes the easily overlooked point that Arab leaders who join this war will have to sell their publics on it as well:

The template for the coalition against IS should be the international effort in 1991, marshaled by another US secretary of state, James A. Baker III, to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. The presence of many Arab nations was not only vital for the military strategy, it also prevented Saddam from portraying the conflict as a battle between Islam and the West. Kerry will no doubt invoke the Baker coalition in his conversations with Arab officials in Riyadh.

But as effective as the 1991 military campaign was, many Arab people felt no sense of ownership over the victory. Their leaders had not sought their approval, and had failed to explain why it was necessary to join non-Arab armies to eject Saddam from Kuwait. This explains why Saddam remained popular among Arabs long after his defeat in Kuwait. It also allowed Osama bin Laden to portray the 1991 campaign as an unholy alliance between Arab elites (mainly the Saudi royal family) and the Western “crusaders.”

Turkey, for its part, is already signaling that it wants no part in combat operations, while the UK and Germany also appear to be bowing out of the air campaign. That doesn’t comfort Daniel Larison:

The lack of Turkish cooperation will presumably make the air campaign more difficult and therefore make it last even longer. The more striking thing about this is that the U.S. is going back to war in the region and still cannot count on support from its sole NATO ally in the region. That draws attention to one of this war’s basic flaws: the U.S. is taking the regional threat from ISIS more seriously and doing more to oppose it than many of the regional states that have far more to lose. The U.S. has allowed itself to be pulled into a new, open-ended war for the sake of “partners” that are contributing little or nothing to the war.

Ed Morrissey also finds it troubling:

[W]hat does this say about Obama’s strategic preparation? Did he bother to check in with the Brits and the Germans before pledging his “broad coalition of partners” last night? It would appear not, and that Obama just assumed that they would follow whatever plan he laid out last night. Obama could have framed the Syrian phase separately as a uniquely American security concern and set expectations properly. Instead, it looks as though Obama and his political team wrote a speech without building the necessary commitment from allies to allow them to be part of a united front on global security.

There’s also that niggling matter of finding an acceptable partner in the chaos of the Syrian civil war. Keating complicates that question, reminding us that the task of dividing the belligerents into “good guys” and “bad guys” is not nearly as clear-cut as we’d like it to be:

While the Syrian civil war may once have been viewed as a fight between Assad’s regime and “the rebels,” it’s now much more complicated than that. The major groups now fighting for territory and political influence within Syria include (but are not necessarily limited to): the government; ISIS; the Western-supported Free Syrian Army; the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra; the Kurdish PYD, which has gained control of significant territory in areas near the Turkish border; and the Islamic Front, an umbrella group of Islamist groups distinct from both the “moderate” rebels of the FSA and the hardline jihadists in ISIS and Nusra. The last group on that list has gotten relatively little attention, but recent events show it could be critical. A bombing in northern Syria decimated the leadership of Ahrar al-Sham, a long-established and well-organized rebel group that was one of the primary organizers of the Islamic Front alliance.

And Thomas Pierret and Emile Hokayem make a fresh case against allying with Assad:

Given its lack of homegrown manpower, the regime has owed its survival to auxiliaries in the Alawite-dominated National Defense Forces—an evolved, more sophisticated version of the shabbiha militias—and foreign Shia fighters from Iraq and Lebanon. As in Iraq, this has further alienated the Sunnis, with the difference that in Iraq, at least, these militias are entirely homegrown. This is the point of the argument where those who favor working with Assad point out that defeating the Islamic State will require deploying ground troops in large number—and in the very regions that Assad’s forces have intensively pummeled since 2011. Here’s the rub: Local populations in these areas, crucial to the success of any counterterrorism effort, are unlikely to cooperate with their recent oppressor. Sending pro-Assad sectarian forces back into the Islamic State’s safe haven in northern and eastern Syria would only lead to more communal violence—but almost certainly not victory.

(Photo: Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki (L) shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama in the Oval Office at the White House November 1, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

From The Annals Of Chutzpah

Russia suddenly discovers international law:

“The U.S. president has spoken directly about the possibility of strikes by the U.S. armed forces against ISIL positions in Syria without the consent of the legitimate government,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said. “This step, in the absence of a U.N. Security Council decision, would be an act of aggression, a gross violation of international law.”

Morrissey retorts:

Gee, I must have missed the UN Security Council resolution that granted Russia sovereignty over Crimea, and the invitation to send armor and infantry into eastern Ukraine. For that matter, perhaps the Kremlin could be kind enough to point us toward the UNSC resolution that authorized the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the seizure of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well. After all, Vladimir Putin’s regime appears to be an expert on international law, so …

An Unhealthy Work Environment

Frakt and Carroll make the case against employer wellness programs:

More rigorous studies tend to find that wellness programs don’t save money and, with few exceptions, do not appreciably improve health. This is often because additional health screenings built into the programs encourage overuse of unnecessary care, pushing spending higher without improving health.

However, this doesn’t mean that employers aren’t right, in a way. Wellness programs can achieve cost savings — for employers — by shifting higher costs of care onto workers. In particular, workers who don’t meet the demands and goals of wellness programs (whether by not participating at all, or by failing to meet benchmarks like a reduction in body mass index) end up paying more. Financial incentives to get healthier sometimes simply become financial penalties on workers who resist participation or who aren’t as fit. Some believe this can be a form of discrimination.

Drum suspected as much:

For the most part, wellness programs are a means to reduce pay for employees who don’t participate, and there are always going to be a fair number of curmudgeons who refuse to participate. Voila! Lower payroll expenses! And the best part is that employers can engage in this cynical behavior while retaining a smug public conviction that they’re just acting for the common good. Bah.

How Apple Plugs Itself Into Our Lives

Nick Carr is uncomfortable with QuickType – a “predictive type” feature being rolled out with iOS 8:

It seems more than a little weird that Apple’s developers would get excited about an algorithm that will converse with your spouse on your behalf, channeling the “laid back” tone you deploy for conjugal chitchat. The programmers seem to assume that romantic partners are desperate to trade intimacy for efficiency. I suppose the next step is to get Frederick Winslow Taylor to stand beside the marriage bed with a stopwatch and a clipboard. “Three caresses would have been sufficient, ma’am.”

In The Glass Cage, I argue that we’ve embraced a wrong-headed and ultimately destructive approach to automating human activities, and in Apple’s let-the-software-do-the-talking feature we see a particularly disquieting manifestation of the reigning design ethic. Technical qualities are given precedence over human qualities, and human qualities come to be seen as dispensable.

Looking on the bright side of Apple’s announcements, Jonathan Cohn imagines that the Apple Watch could “make medical care more efficient and let us all stay a lot healthier”:

One of the biggest problems with health care today is the lack of ongoing, continuous care, particularly for people with chronic conditions. It means that doctors, nurses, and the rest of health care system spend a lot of time treating people with serious, sometimes urgent problems, rather than keeping them healthy in the first place.

Mobile devices that monitor and then transmit vital signs can help fix that, so that patients and their medical professionals would know when problems were starting.

Julia Belluz is skeptical of such claims:

This gadget and the new software will certainly make analyzing data easier, and it may even be more precise than other wearable technologies. But the claims to an Apple-shaped health revolution deserve some scrutiny: the evidence on existing wearables suggests that — like all other silver-bullet solutions for health — they haven’t yet figured out how to make habit change stick.

Neil Irwin, meanwhile, casts doubt on Apple’s new mobile payments service:

The core challenge Apple faces is that buying things with a credit card isn’t nearly as onerous a process as they make it out to be.

Drum is on the same page:

There really are issues with credit cards as payment devices. They’re fairly easily stolen and they’re pretty insecure. Still, these things are relative. As long as you use a credit card instead of a debit card, you’re not responsible for most losses, and various forms of modern technology have made credit cards much more secure than in the past. And as Irwin points out, they’re pretty easy to use. It’s just possible that the Steve Jobs reality distortion field could have convinced everyone otherwise, but I’m not sure Tim Cook is up to the task.

Leonid Bershidsky also deflates Apple Pay a bit:

The company’s partners, banks and credit-card companies, played along with Apple’s hype, because they support every player that puts effort into popularizing a technology whose use they are struggling to expand. Essentially, however, Apple is just a middleman and will have a role only so long as existing payments industry players need help spurring consumers to adopt contactless payment.

And Cass Sunstein raises a potential drawback to Apple’s mobile payments:

When payment becomes easier, and when people don’t see the money they’re handing over, they tend to spend a lot more. And as payment becomes more automatic, people become less sensitive to what they’re losing. Apple Pay users might find that their thinner phones are making their bank accounts thinner as well.

A little social science: People who use credit cards tend to give bigger tips at restaurants and spend more at department stores. They are also more likely to forget, or to underestimate, the amounts of their recent purchases.

Earlier Dish on this week’s Apple news here.

Dick Cheney Was Right About Iraq All Along

Really, he was! That is, if we point to 1991, when he said this:

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi’i government or a Kurdish government or Ba’athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

But the new narrative emerging as Cheney pursues his “told you so” comeback tour is that he was right all along about how he had won the Iraq war and then Obama lost it. Weigel plumbs the depths of the derpitude:

Boy, the phrase “all along” is asked to do some heavy from-the-knees lifting there. All along? The timer starts four years after the start of the Iraq war, and two years after Cheney insisted, pre-surge, that Iraqi insurgent groups were in their “last throes”? Yes, that’s the new rule.

We are to analyze the situation of 2014 by crediting the Bush administration not for the Iraq war, but for post-surge Iraq. This has been the argument since 2011, when the Obama administration failed to extend the three-year status of forces agreement that (to the satisfaction of hawks) Bush had handed to him. The theme at the time, as Charles Krauthammer put it, was that Obama was“handed a war that was won,” and he blew it.

Dreher has no time for such nonsense:

Three out of four Americans in 2011 wanted the president to withdraw all US troops from Iraq. Read the Gallup poll; how soon, and how conveniently, we forget. You cannot keep US soldiers in a hopeless war with 75 percent of the country against that policy. Gallup’s poll numbers show that even though the percentage of Americans in 2014 who believe total withdrawal was the right thing is down to 61 percent, that’s still a strong majority. President Obama did what the Iraqis would allow him to do — it’s their country, after all — and what the American people wanted him to do.

This Bush prophecy business is b.s. through and through. It’s important to say that now, because Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of one of the worst disasters in US foreign policy and military history, is now making an “I Told You So” tour, back in Washington (a standing ovation at AEI!) spreading his wisdom to appreciative conservative audiences. It’s like they let Bernie Madoff work on Wall Street again, or returned the FEMA portfolio to Brownie.

Beard Of The Week

Gibraltar Celebrates National Day

A Gibraltarian with the beard with the colors of the Gibraltar flag is seen during during Gibraltar National Day celebrations on September 10, 2014. The day commemorates Gibraltar’s first sovereignty referendum of 1967, in which Gibraltarian voters were asked whether they wished to either pass under Spanish sovereignty, or remain under British sovereignty, with institutions of self-government. By Sergio Camacho/Getty Images.