Author: Andrew Sullivan

No Airstrikes, For Now

This is a relief:

Obama has opted not to conduct airstrikes in the immediate future partly because ISIS targets are difficult to identify, and it’s unclear if they would significantly alter the situation on the ground. U.S. military action has not been ruled out entirely, and in addition to the roughly 275 U.S. troops sent to Iraq to secure the American embassy, special forces soldiers may be deployed to assist the Iraqi army.

The New York Times reports that one option still under consideration is a “targeted, highly selective campaign of airstrikes” against ISIS, probably using drones. The campaign probably wouldn’t be launched for days or longer, and would depend on whether the U.S. can find a suitable target.

Zack updates us on possible US plans:

What the American response to the crisis in Iraq will look like still isn’t clear. The leading option appears to involve three planks. First, the deployment of US special forces to gather intelligence, provide battlefield guidance to Iraqi combat units, and possibly train Iraqi soldiers. Second, securing commitment to political reform from the Iraqi government, whose favoring of the Shia majority over the Sunni minority has exacerbated the conflict. Third, look for some avenue to cooperate with other countries in the region to support the anti-ISIS campaign (how that would be accomplished isn’t specified).

That said, airstrikes aren’t permanently ruled out. “U.S. strikes are still actively under discussion,” the Journal reports, “but [senior administration] officials cautioned Tuesday that they don’t expect Mr. Obama to put military action back on the table quickly.”

Robert Farley is against an aerial campaign:

Thinking of air power as a tool to simplify war and avoid its difficult complications is, tragically, a characteristic of the American strategic set, but there’s no reason we should continue to indulge it.

Wolfowitz’s Noble Lies

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I tend not to hold the somewhat conspiratorial view that followers of Leo Strauss, the guru of the neocon intelligentsia, actively believe in deceiving the American people in the pursuit of statecraft. Strauss argued that many critical texts in Western civilization were written with an esoteric teaching for the intelligent few, while presenting a less radical and palatable public doctrine for the masses. Hence the Straussian penchant for a noble lie – one that is good for the people to believe but which the elite knows is bullshit. Perhaps the classic example of this is the Straussian support for public religion, while the bulk of them are atheists. For them, religious faith is entirely instrumental – a way to lie your way to social order and cohesion.

In the case of the Iraq war, several untruths were told. Among them: there is no sectarianism in Iraq; it will cost next to nothing; it will be over in months; there are WMDs everywhere; Saddam and al Qaeda are joined at the hip. It’s hard to tell which of these untruths were sincerely believed by men like Wolfowitz and Kristol, longtime Straussians both, and which were a function of them not knowing anything about the country that was to be their text-book case of “creating reality”. But when a disgraced architect of that war goes on television to argue that the public needs to be told now that ISIS is al Qaeda, even though he knows that they are separate organizations with separate ambitions, I tend to withdraw whatever benefit of the doubt I give these men with the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands.

Here’s the money quote from Wolfowitz:

We should say al Qaeda. ISIS sounds like some obscure thing; it’s even more obscure when you say Shia and Sunni … It means nothing to Americans whereas al Qaeda means everything to Americans … My point is that these are the same people, they are affiliated with the same people, who attacked the United States on 9/11 and still have an intention of attacking the United States and attacking Europe …

This is a rare moment in which a Straussian actually comes out and says: yes, we’re deliberately lying by conflating all sorts of different things in the Middle East – the Sunni-Shia divide; the hostility between ISIS and al Qaeda – in order to concoct a simple and terrifying message to the American people that will enable us to get into another war in order to advance our goals in the Middle East.

Yes, we know this is a lie – just as our insinuation that Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots before 2003 was also a lie. But it’s a noble one, and that’s all that counts. That Wolfowitz was revealed as grotesquely incompetent in getting his war to achieve anything for the United States or Iraq but catastrophe is not something this smug propagandist has to worry about. We should not go into recriminations about the past, see. All of that is wiped from the ledger, and anything that went awry was always someone else’s responsibility.

It’s not just that these people refuse to be held accountable for their incompetence, war crimes and catastrophic foreign policy. It is that they are still prepared to go on television and brazenly lie to the American people and to use fear to whip up another war in the Middle East. They are trying to do this again. It’s not just that they are shameless; they are actively dangerous in their ability to manipulate and lie this country into another disastrous war.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“In spite of the things I felt at the time when we went into war, liberals said: We shouldn’t get involved. We shouldn’t nation-build. And there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free. I thought that was insulting at the time. Everybody wants to be free. They said we couldn’t force freedom on people. Let me lead with my mistakes. You are right. Liberals, you were right. We shouldn’t have,” – Glenn Beck.

Obama Caught Another Terrorist And The Right Can’t Handle It

The reaction of the Fox News right to the capture of the ringleader of the attack on the Benghazi consulate/CIA base tells you a huge amount. If their concern at the attack on the compound were genuine, they would have taken a moment to celebrate. Here, after all, is the fanatic they’ve wanted to get for two years now. He could help answer more questions than dozens of Congressional hearings. The truth of what occurred could be fleshed out much more definitively, as long as we use civilized methods of interrogation; and justice can be better served by trying him in a civilian courts rather than military commissions, since the courts have an exponentially better record at prosecuting terrorists.

But no. The FNC right is not interested in the actual facts of the case or the pursuit of justice. It is merely a weapon with which to bludgeon their partisan opponents. So good news like yesterday’s will have to be instantly dismissed in order to maintain the crusade against the president. And when I say instantly, I mean instantly. Here’s  Paul Waldman:

I just turned on Fox News and heard one commentator say “We all have questions about the timing” of the arrest, and another chimed in to say, “You have the former Secretary of State who is in the middle of a high-profile book tour, and I think this is convenient for her to shift the talking points from some of the things she’s been discussing.” If you aren’t a regular Fox viewer, you’d react to that by saying, “Are these people insane?” But if you are a Fox viewer, it makes perfect sense. Because you’ve been hearing for almost two years that Benghazi isn’t a story about an attack on an American consulate, it’s a story about the Obama administration’s cover-ups and lies and betrayal.

Morrissey scrambles for something disparaging to say:

So yes, this is a win for the US, but it’s still going to raise questions about how much effort the US put into capturing Khattala until now. At the time of Calderone’s piece, the White House insisted that they couldn’t act without destabilizing the government in Tripoli. What’s changed since then? Last week, incoming PM Ahmad Maiteeq offered his resignation after a court ruled his election was unconstitutional and current PM Abdullah Al Thani refused to recognize his legitimacy.  This hardly seems like a propitious time for a Special Forces raid if the previous delays were taken to promote stability.

The big fish still remains to be found. Abu Safian bin Qumu has long been suspected of commanding the attack, despite an inexplicable New York Times claim to the contrary. The US had bin Qumu in custody, too — until the Bush administration released him from Gitmo in 2007. This good news will serve as a reminder of the dangers of releasing terrorists back into the war, a reminder that the White House probably would prefer to avoid at the moment.

Eli Lake and Kimberly Dozier explain why the Khatallah operation was a year in the making:

The Obama administration has come under withering criticism because the whereabouts of abu Khatallah have been generally known. Journalists in Libya were able to interview him, critics asked, so why couldn’t American special operators track him down, too?

But other U.S. officials, who spoke to The Daily Beast anonymously because they were not authorized to talk to the press, said the mission to grab abu Khatallah had been planned for more than a year. Indeed, the Benghazi ringleader had been in the sights of Delta Force operators at the end of August, according to these sources, but no order was given at the time. A senior administration official told The Daily Beast that the delay in apprehending the suspect was due in part to requests from the Justice Department to gather appropriate evidence to prosecute him in criminal court.

Erika Eichelberger and David Corn look back at all the nasty things Republican leaders had to say about the president as he calmly and quietly went about planning to capture the Benghazi terrorists:

[F]or a long stretch, maybe a year or more, the Obama administration had been trying to figure out how best to grab Abu Khattala, who was identified as a possible Benghazi ringleader soon after the September 11, 2012, assault. Yet for much of that time, Republican critics of the president have repeatedly criticized Obama for not capturing the Benghazi perps. Even though it took a decade to nab Osama bin Laden, GOPers have depicted Obama as feckless on the Benghazi front, with some even saying that he was not truly interested in bringing the Benghazi killers to justice.

… It can take a while—even years—to capture a suspected terrorist overseas. (Ruqai, the embassy bombings suspect, was apprehended 15 years after the attacks.) Yet that didn’t stop these Republicans and other conservatives from slamming the president and suggesting publicly—in a real underhanded dig—that Obama was not seeking the murderers of Benghazi. Now what will they say? That his heart wasn’t really in it?

And the last resort of the partisans is to insist that the captive be sent to the torture and detention camp at Gitmo, where no one is successfully convicted of any crime and where they can become instant martyrs in the eyes of their followers – if they don’t go on hunger strike. Sargent asks a good question: will Rand Paul stand up to the pro-Gitmo crowd?

We are frequently told there are genuine tensions within the GOP over foreign policy and national security, with libertarian and isolationist Republicans like Rand Paul sparring with mainstream conservatives or neocons on a range of issues. Benghazi has kind of papered over such divisions by giving Republicans a common target (Obama) and a ripe scandal narrative to focus on. But the question of where to detain the first apprehended Benghazi suspect will provide a good test of just how deep these civil liberties differences among Republicans really run.

My bet is that partisanship will defeat principle every time in this GOP. But let’s see if Paul can come through. It’s an interesting test.

All Hail The Halophytes

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With climate changing leading to a rise in sea levels and an increase in droughts and floods, Mark Anderson worries that “the acreage available for conventional, freshwater agriculture is shrinking rapidly.” Which leads him to this thought:

More than 97 per cent of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400,000 flowering plant species around the world, 2,600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?

Among the halophytes he believes holds promise is a perennial species called “seashore mallow,” a plant that “can grow in salty soil, using saltwater irrigation” and has been championed by the University of Delaware researchers John Gallagher and Denise Seliskar:

Last year they published a paper in the journal Renewable Energy, co-written with a group from the US Department of Agriculture, that analysed the plant’s potential as a biodiesel and ethanol source. By their calculations, it comes out roughly on par with soybeans, one of the commonest sources of biofuel now in use. A second paper, in Biomass and Bioenergy, examined the perennial’s stems’ absorbency, revealing commercial potential as mulch, erosion control and even kitty litter and animal bedding.

That variety of applications is important. ‘The thing that became apparent to us is it wasn’t going to run economically just on the oil you squeezed out of it,’ Gallagher says. ‘It’s taken 8,000 years to evolve corn from the teosinte [wild grass] found in the Mexican highlands to the Iowa cornfields. I just don’t have that long. So we thought we’d try to come up with an array of things we can get from the plant.’ Gallagher and Seliskar estimate that the entire crop can be harvested for products that could compete with existing markets of conventionally farmed commodities. The absorbency of its inner stem makes it attractive for animal bedding, while the outer bark has been developed into a thread for cloth. The seed, as noted, is a promising stock for ethanol and biodiesel. And the seedmeal offers a spread of amino acids that make it attractive as animal feed. Roots, spent flowers and the biopolymers in the plant are also being investigated for everything from gums to industrial chemicals.

(Photo of Salicornia, a genus of halophyte plants, by Rusty Clark)

You’re Working Too Much

And it’s contributing to the wage gap:

The proportion of Americans who work long hours has increased substantially over the past 30 years. In the early 1980s, fewer than 9 percent of workers (13 percent of men, 3 percent of women) worked 50 hours per week or more. By 2000, over 14 percent of workers (19 percent of men and 7 percent of women) worked 50 hours per week or more. Overwork began to decline in the mid-2000s, but it remains widespread today. The slowdown in women’s wage gains was especially notable in professional and managerial careers, just the ones where women’s educational advantages should have paid off, but where the stall in pay equality was most evident. …

Expansion in “overwork” – net of other changes since 1979 – could have affected the gender gap in two ways: Men could be overworking increasingly more often than women, or the financial payoff to overworking could have increased, or both. In their statistical analysis, [researchers Youngjoo] Cha and [Kim] Weeden identify the second factor as critical. In 1979, workers who put in long hours tended to make less per each hour than those who worked full-time; by 2009, that had reversed. Putting in the extra hours now pays off more. Or phrased another way, working “only” full-time now pays off relatively less.

Previous Dish on the wage gap here, here, here, here, and here.

The Brazilian Soul

David Goldblatt explores the larger-than-life role that soccer plays in Brazil’s culture and history:

Whereas the response of the visual arts in 20th-century Britain to football can be boiled down to a single Lowry canvas, football has appeared in the oeuvre of dozens of Brazil’s large_1_sleading artists—from the nationalist surrealism of Cândido Portinari to the abstract geometries of Ivan Serpa to the pop art of Claudio Tozzi. Its writers and novelists have, again and again, found space for the game in their literary landscapes: from Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, to José Lins do Rego’s epic saga of life on Rio’s periphery, Água-mãe, from the urbane and witty crônicas of Clarice Lispector to the sharp short stories of Edilberto Coutinho’s Maracanã, Adeus.

The game has also been a thread and connector across the many spheres of Brazilian life. João Cabral Melo Neto was a diplomat who wrote poetry and his poetry featured Pelé. Pelé, a footballer, has gone on to be a businessman, the minister of culture, and a singer and composer. The composer Ary Barroso crossed over into football commentary and then to municipal politics. Politicians regularly seek the presidency of clubs, while club presidents try to make the transition to formal politics. The crowd can become musicians, while musicians have endlessly written and composed songs for players and clubs. Poets and dramatists commentate on football. Football commentators like Washington Rodrigues and João Saldanha have become coaches.

Ilan Stavans asks why the sport doesn’t feature more prominently in Latin America’s canon of great literature:

I can’t quite explain why there aren’t more fine literary artifacts on fútbol in Latin America. In contrast, the number of classic baseball novels in the United States is astounding, from Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952), to Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968), to Michael Chabon’s Summerland (2002). This is because the game is seen as a kaleidoscope of the American Dream, the platform through which not only immigrants but various ethnicities make their way into the melting pot. Latin America isn’t known for its social mobility. Perhaps the reason for this scarcity is that until recently, soccer in Latin America was a poor people’s sport. TV, of course, has changed that. The sport might make players like Uruguay’s Luis Suárez and Mexico’s Chicharito rich, but it still isn’t seen by young athletes as a ticket to a college education. Nor is it perceived as an environment where people from different ethnicities find a common ground.

Leave The Laptops At Home, Ctd

A reader thinks Dan Rockmore’s argument against laptops in the classroom misses a larger point:

I’m a medical student, and the absolute volume of information I have to absorb is astounding. It would be impossible for me to keep up with everything if I were forced to write it all down by hand. I do, however, have an app that allows me to not only type, but to write and draw images using a stylus, allowing me to take beautiful notes (if I do say so myself). I can also download PowerPoints and type notes, write, and draw directly on them.

Maybe the reason laptops appear to harm classroom comprehension is that we haven’t focused on teaching students how to take effective notes on computers. If we focused on that instead of simply reacting against technology, we could not only boost students’ immediate comprehension but also improve the quality of the notes that they use to study for their exams.

Another recalls an encounter with a literature professor who wouldn’t allow note-taking of any sort:

His rationale?

He wanted us to use our memories and so we had to become good listeners, instead of note-takers. He had a point. This same professor required us to memorize five poems of varying length. Again, we asked why, and he said that these poems, memorized in our youth, would stay with us for our life, so we should choose wisely what we would memorize.

The result? Forty years later, I still can recite the first 16 lines of The Canterbury Tales, a sonnet by Milton, and a love poem by Robert Herrick. You cannot imagine how many people I’ve impressed with these recitations!

A PhD candidate in medieval history notes how that tension between memorization and note-taking goes back quite a bit:

In 1355, the committee of masters of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris (later known as the Sorbonne) issued a decree that all lectures given were only to be delivered by speaking rapidly, “so that the mind of the hearer can take them in but the hand cannot keep up with them.” They gave no direct explanation of their reasons for favoring this approach, but the implication is that speaking quickly would force students to actually listen and memorize what was being said rather than permitting them to rely on the notes that they (or someone else) had taken.

In the medieval university, the memorization of great quantities of material was a fundamental part of the curriculum and it seems likely that the masters realized that the ability to memorize things after hearing them only one time was a valuable skill for their students to develop. Therefore, any lecturer caught speaking too slowly was forbidden to teach for one year. Amusingly, though, it also appears that the masters expected that their decision was going to be none too popular with their students. At the end of the decree they declare that any student who protested the implementation of the statute in the classroom, “by clamor, hissing, noise, throwing stones … or in any other way,” would be suspended for one year.

Water? Who Needs Water?

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Eric Holthaus observes that “dry farming” is coming back into fashion in California:

The dry-farming method has long been practiced successfully in Mediterranean climates with a long dry season like California’s – basically, dry farmers forgo the extra fertilizer, water, and other inputs that maximize yields. Advocates say its water starvation diet produces sweeter and more flavorful tomatoes, apples, and other fruit. Some of the best wines ever produced in Napa Valley were dry farmed.

But there’s a significant downside. Though his heirloom apples make a cider that “brings to mind Lambic beer,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle, [dry farmer Stan] Devoto says “people have to be willing to pay a little bit more for them.” Dry farmers like Devoto are trading quantity for quality.

Devoto concedes that’s one of many reasons dry farming won’t have the potential to overthrow conventional agriculture. The lower water usage means there’s a significant yield tradeoff: His dry-farmed apples average 12 to 14 tons per acre, less than half the 20 to 40 tons per acre irrigated apple crops typically get.

(Photo: Dry-farmed tomatoes at California’s Dirty Girl Farm. By Flickr users CUESA)

Read Your Age! Ctd

A reader objects to Ruth Graham’s argument that adult readers of YA must “abandon the mature insights … that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults”:

I don’t think of this as a fair criticism. This makes me think of a book I read, Beautiful Creatures, which I enjoyed because I thought it had an interesting story set in a culture distinct from my own. However, the teenage characters were, as she described, portrayed in a fairly uncritical way. This led to portions of the story that frustrated me, but it did not require me to abandon my adult perspective. In fact, it allowed me to apply it as I saw fit. I don’t need the author to provide me with an “adult” perspective.

This applies to children’s novels too. A story can be written in a way that is suitable for children, but possess elements that can be appreciated better by an adult. Think of the political dynamics in Harry Potter or the religious insights in The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m an adult who has read and reread many of these books and likely will again. I see no shame in this.

Another reader emphasizes the pleasures of reading with children:

My daughter is turning 10 this summer, and I love sharing books with her. We just started The Witch of Blackbird Pond; a personal favorite made all the more special because she goes to school in Old Saybrook.

I don’t think reading YA or even children’s chapter books is reading down; rather it is doing exactly the thing I am looking for in reading fiction which is to be transported to another place and another time for a bit. Through my children I have discovered so many wonderful books that I have enjoyed re-reading with them (I dare anyone not to be cheered by any book written or illustrated by Oliver Jeffers or to claim that they didn’t read ahead in any Harry Potter book) and I have shared my favorites with them.

When so many adults are not reading anything at all, should we be attaching age limits to books?

On a similar note, another reader contends that adult fans of YA do the valuable work of building a shared literary culture:

While culture as a whole seems pretty fragmented these days, young adult novels are books that teens and adults can both read and enjoy. Many of them can be read aloud to younger children. If a whole family has read a book, then they have something to help bind them together. If a book is popular, then more members of society can get together and talk about this shared story, and there is value in that.

That’s why it’s so great that children’s movies have become more an more enjoyable to adults. It’s why it’s a good thing that the cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic appeals to boys and young men: we can share these wonderful things with each other as a society.