Category: The Dish

Will The ISIS War Come To A Vote?

by Dish Staff

If Obama wants to secure the public’s backing for the fight against ISIS, Jack Goldsmith recommends that he bring it to Congress for a vote:

The President must eventually educate the nation about why the United States is going to be deploying significant treasure and possibly some blood in Iraq and probably Syria to defeat IS.  As noted above, the case in theory is not hard to make.  But a mere speech from the Oval Office will not do the trick if the President wants the nation to understand the stakes and risks, and wants to get the American People truly behind the effort.  Only an extended and informed and serious national debate can do that, and such a debate can only occur if the President asks for Congress’s support.

Will Inboden also believes it’s time for a new, ISIS-specific Congressional authorization for the use of force:

Even before the Islamic State’s resurgence, some national security legal scholars were arguing that the Obama administration ‘s campaign against al Qaeda and its proliferating franchises was skating on increasingly thin legal ice. … Substantively, a new AUMF, especially focused on IS and its affiliates, could take into account the evolution and adaptation of militant jihadist groups in the 13 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the shifts and drawdowns of American ground force deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic State’s nihilistic wickedness may be generating the headlines now, but over time even more danger may be posed by its magnetism towards other al Qaeda franchises and its potential leadership of militant jihadist groups spanning the broader Middle East and points beyond in Africa and South Asia.

Ashley Deeks, meanwhile, explores the various ways in which the administration might kosherize an intervention in Syria under international law:

A UN Security Council Resolution would provide the clearest basis for action. This option was a dead letter back in July 2012, when Russia and China refused even to approve economic sanctions against Assad, let alone the use of military force. One question would be whether the politics on this have changed: there might be some reason to think that Assad is coming under pressure from his own supporters to take on ISIS. It seems unlikely that Assad would affirmatively embrace a UNSCR authorizing a coalition of the willing to target ISIS in Syria, but if Russia senses that Assad might tolerate such action, the Security Council dynamics could change. Then again, the U.S.-Russia relationship is so toxic right now that this option seems remote. …

Second, Assad could secretly give consent to foreign governments (including the United States) to use force against ISIS in Syria. This, too, seems improbable, given the longstanding animosities between Assad and various Western governments. But having one government give secret and reluctant consent to another to conduct strikes in its territory is not without precedent.

Cutting Hours Cuts Profits

by Dish Staff

Over-reliance on part-time workers isn’t good for anyone:

Since 2006, the retail and wholesale sector has cut more than a million full-time jobs and added half a million part-time positions.

A study of one large retail chain, conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that scheduling the optimal mix of temporary and part-time workers could increase the profitability of the average store by nearly one-third. But cheaper wasn’t always better. Part-time workers often are not as productive as full-timers, because they tend to be less skilled and less experienced. To maximize sales, the researchers found, the typical store should have four or five part-time employees for every ten full-time employees. “It is possible to have too much of a good thing,” they concluded.

We may already have passed that threshold. Last week, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported that a slack job market continues to limit the paychecks of U.S. workers. An important factor, they said, is the number of part-time employees who would rather have full-time work.

Gas Attack?

by Bill McKibben

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A new study in Nature describes a new possible climate threat. We’ve known for some time that there is lots of methane stored in frozen form in the world’s oceans. The best known of these clathrate formations are in the Arctic, but today’s study finds them across the Atlantic, and by implication around the rest of the seafloor. Methane appears to be bubbling up out of these vents–which is bad news, since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, molecule for molecule much stronger than carbon dioxide:

The seeps were discovered in a stretch of ocean waters from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Georges Bank, Mass. The majority are located at a depth of about 1,640 feet, which is at the upper level of stability for gas hydrate.

“Warming of the ocean waters could cause this ice to melt and release gas,”Adam Skarke, a geoscientist at Mississippi State University and the study’s lead author, told NBC News. “So there may be some connection here to intermediate ocean warming, though we need to carry out further investigations to confirm if that is the case,” he added.

The theory is, much of the heat from global warming is currently going into the ocean, not the air.  In fact, there was a study just yesterday–Justin Worland summarizes :

Temperatures have risen more slowly in the past decade than in the previous 50 years and will continue to rise at a somewhat slower rate in the next decade, according to a new study, even as climate change continues to raise temperatures to unprecedented levels worldwide.

The study, published in the journal Science, explained the temporary slowdown in rising temperatures as a potential consequence of the end of a 30-year current cycle in the Atlantic Ocean that pushes heat into the ocean.

The Economist looks at how the study credits the oceans for the pause:

Dr Chen and Dr Tung have shown where exactly in the sea the missing heat is lurking. … [O]ver the past decade and a bit the ocean depths have been warming faster than the surface. This period corresponds perfectly with the pause, and contrasts with the last two decades of the 20th century, when the surface was warming faster than the deep. The authors calculate that, between 1999 and 2012, 69 zettajoules of heat (that is, 69 x 1021 joules—a huge amount of energy) have been sequestered in the oceans between 300 metres and 1,500 metres down. If it had not been so sequestered, they think, there would have been no pause in warming at the surface.

Some of that heat may well be causing these methane formations to melt, in what would be yet another vicious feedback loop. But even if this turns out to (and oh one hopes) a red herring, the basic news that the oceans are heating quickly is quite bad enough. In part because we don’t notice it as much as we do heating of the air, which slows down our response.

As Jane Lee puts it:

It’s important to note that a pause in rising temperatures doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening, writes Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at NCAR, in an email. “Global warming hasn’t stopped, it has temporarily shifted to the subsurface ocean,” says Meehl, who first proposed that the Atlantic Ocean was storing some of the missing heat.

Indeed, it’s just a matter of time before this heat is reflected in atmospheric temperatures, says Tung. If this 30-year cycle holds, we’re starting to climb out of the current pause, he explains.

“The frightening part,” Tung says, is “it’s going to warm just as fast as the last three decades of the 20th century, which was the fastest warming we’ve seen.” Only now, we’ll be starting from a higher average surface temperature than before.

Oh, and by the way, to return to this problem with methane: it’s why scientists increasingly worry that fracking is a bad idea not just for local water supplies, but for the climate. As Naomi Oreskes pointed out recently, if more than a couple of percent of methane leaks, it’s possible that the Obama adminstration’s turn to natural gas hasn’t really cut our greenhouse gas emissions at all:

But how do we know what our emissions actually are? Most people would assume that we measure them, but they would be wrong.  Emissions are instead calculated based on energy data — how much coal, oil, and gas was bought and sold in the U.S. that year — multiplied by assumed rates of greenhouse gas production by those fuels. Here’s the rub: the gas calculation depends on the assumed leakage rate.  If we’ve been underestimating leakage, then we’ve underestimated the emissions.

A Sand Wedge Issue

by Jonah Shepp

Obama has come in for a lot of criticism for remaining on “vacation” in Martha’s Vineyard and proceeding with his regularly scheduled golf outings despite mounting crises in Iraq, Ukraine, and Missouri. Ezra Klein identifies what’s right and wrong about that critique:

This is politics at its dumbest. The country is not well served by a burnt-out president. If there’s a problem with presidential vacations it’s that they’re not restful enough. The way to do this right would be for the vice president to take over for a week or two — and for the president to get a call if something really goes wrong. Instead, the president takes working vacations, and the White House brags about how much work he gets done when he’s supposed to be resting.

But so long as the president is still the president when he’s on vacation, he still carries the symbolic weight of the role. He can’t go directly from leading the nation in grieving to hitting a drive. … Obama, of course, would say that this isn’t his problem. The get-caught-trying thing is Washington’s problem. The idea that politician should go around pretending to get things done even when they’re not getting anything done is exactly why the American people hate Washington, and exactly why they elected to Barack Obama to change it. And he is, in many ways, right about that. But there are days when it’s bad to get caught not trying.

First of all, let’s dispense with the notion that Obama is “on vacation”. President is a job you can do from pretty much anywhere these days, and in August, I suspect I’d rather be doing it from Martha’s Vineyard than from Washington, DC, where it’s typically a breezy 86° in the shade, not counting the hot air emanating from Capitol Hill. And that’s exactly what the president is doing: his job, from somewhere other than his usual office. It’s not like he’s really unplugging and unwinding out there on the links—and as Klein points out, he’d probably be handling this hellscape of world affairs a bit better if he actually got to do so once in a while. This criticism also strikes me as somewhat hypocritical, when the same people who accuse the president of failing to think out his strategic choices clearly and act on them decisively also insist that he operate under conditions of maximum stress.

Should he have postponed those 18 holes he put in after the Foley speech? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s how he clears his head after delivering a grim address. It might not look especially sensitive, but then, those who are making political hay out of that can always be counted on to find their hay somewhere. And after all these years, Paul Waldman figures the president is past caring about “the optics”:

Obama could try to “win the morning” and be consumed with every up and down of the news cycle. But he plainly no longer cares. Playing golf might not make him look good, but he’s probably decided that it’s an important way for him to stay sane (as the Times article says, he has “perhaps the most stressful job on the planet”), and he’s willing to tolerate some bad press.

Back when he first ran for president, Obama and his team prided themselves on their ability to see beyond the fury of that day’s news cycle, avoid the distraction of whatever was in Politico that morning, and keep their focus on their long-term goals. That was a central part of the “No Drama Obama” ethos. What’s happening now is in some ways an extension of that perspective. It may be that Obama has decided that it’s no longer possible to affect how most Americans think about him — after nearly six years in office, there’s no clever press strategy that will revive his approval ratings. The only thing that will make a difference is results.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy’s defense of what he dubs Obama’s “golf addiction” is so snobbishly golf-happy it reads more like a brief for the prosecution. I came away from it much angrier at Obama—and anyone else who makes $250k+ a year—than I was going in. Read it only if you either love golf and want to feel like you have something in common with the president, or hold deep class-based resentments against the sport and enjoy getting angry about it.

Foley’s Impossible Ransom, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Bucking the pundit consensus, Leonid Bershidsky argues that the US should not dismiss out of hand the option of paying terrorist groups ransoms for civilian captives like James Foley and Steven Sotloff:

Not leaving the ransom option open fits the logic of war. Either the U.S. Marines will drop out of the sky and destroy the hostage takers — in the case of photojournalist James Foley that didn’t work out — or the terrorists will kill their infidel victim and distribute the fortifying video to their supporters. Yet this approach may not be smart for detective work. Keeping the ransom option open may create opportunities to track down kidnappers and free hostages — and a growing number of successful hostage liberations would be as powerful a deterrent to terrorists as declarations that no money will be paid out. So a policy of refusing to pay isn’t so obviously superior, after all. One thing is for sure, though: More deaths like Foley’s will just raise the savages’ morale.

Michael J. Totten wonders if there isn’t a middle way:

Washington can’t pay ransoms, but it could and probably should offer a large cash reward for intelligence that leads to a successful rescue. Kidnappers might try to collect the reward money themselves, which would make it a ransom by other means, but there’s an easy way around that—kill all the kidnappers. Do not arrest them and send them to Guantanamo. Kill them.

I have no doubt Washington is looking for Sotloff and the others right now. They’ll send men if they think they know where he is. They’ve already tried at least once. We can only hope they’ll succeed before it’s too late. In the meantime, to all of my colleagues: for God’s sake, stay the hell out of Syria.

And Sandy Levinson brings up the uncomfortable truth that a human life isn’t really as “priceless” as we like to think it is:

We know, when we decide to build skyscrapers or major bridges, etc., that people are going to die.  Ditto, incidentally, with regard to raising speed limits on automobiles or continuing to allow the sale of alcohol in bars, etc., etc.  To be sure, we don’t know exactly who is going to die, and that makes all the difference, just as Barack Obama doesn’t know exactly whom he is sentencing to death when deploying troops or allowing the use of drones that will generate “collateral damage.”  For many, that non-specificity makes all the difference. … There is absolutely no excuse for what was done to Mr. Foley, but perhaps we have to treat war journalilsts the way we treat soldiers:  i.e., they voluntarily enlisted in a very dangerous occupation, for a mixture of reasons, including patriotism and devotion to the public weal, but part of the deal is that their lives will be on the line, to be protected only at “acceptable” cost.

Even if it is true that most of us consider our own lives “priceless,” no society has ever operated on that basis, and none ever will.

Childhood Memories

by Sue Halpern

Last week, Dr. David Sulzer’s lab at Columbia Medical School reported that researchers were able to reverse the symptoms of autism in mice by administering a drug that prunes synapses. Though scientists have known of the connection between synaptic overload and autism, this was the first time that they have been able to show that pruning synapses is palliative. What might seem counterintuitive that the human brain needs to shed neurons to develop normally, that, in fact, is what needs to happen between birth and puberty. Think of it as clearing out the attic so you can make clear pathways to what you’ve got stored up there. (When you read Bill’s post, One Perfect Thing, you will understand why this analogy seems especially apt to me today.) More to the point, many of the 100 billion neurons we are born with are not yet connected. As neurons are shed, there is more and more room for connections to be made. According to one source I read, at birth, each neuron has about 2500 synaptic connections and by three that number has grown to about 15,000, and continues to increase exponentially.  According to another,

At birth the baby has 50 trillion connections or synapses

In the first three months of life, the synapses multiply more than 20 times

At one year the brain has 1,000 trillion synapses.

The takeaway, here, numbers aside, is that as neurons are shed, connections are made.

So I was particularly interested in Ferris Jabr’s explanation for why we forget childhood memories, which in the end may turn out to be a very good thing:

Studies have shown that people can retrieve at least some childhood memories by responding to specific prompts—dredging up the earliest recollection associated with the word “milk,” for example—or by imagining a house, school, or specific location tied to a certain age and allowing the relevant memories to bubble up on their own.

But even if we manage to untangle a few distinct memories that survive the tumultuous cycles of growth and decay in the infant brain, we can never fully trust them; some of them might be partly or entirely fabricated. Through her pioneering research, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine has demonstrated that our earliest memories in particular are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.

In one set of groundbreaking experiments conducted in 1995, Loftus and her colleagues presented volunteers with short stories about their childhood provided by relatives. Unbeknownst to the study participants, one of these stories—about being lost in a mall at age 5—was mostly fiction. Yet a quarter of the volunteers said they had a memory of the experience. And even when they were told that one of the stories they had read was invented, some participants failed to realize it was the lost-in-a-mall story.

Libya Just Keeps Getting Worse

by Dish Staff

Meanwhile, in Libya, the The NYT reports that Egypt and the UAE have secretly launched airstrikes on Islamist militias battling for control of Tripoli:

Since the military ouster of the Islamist president in Egypt one year ago, the new Egyptian government, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have formed a bloc exerting influence in countries around the region to rollback what they see as a competing threat from Islamists. Arrayed against them are the Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by friendly governments in Turkey and Qatar, that sprang forward amid the Arab spring revolts. Libya is the latest, and hottest, battleground.

Several officials said that United States diplomats were fuming about the airstrikes, believing they could further inflame the Libyan conflict at a time when the United Nations and Western powers are seeking a peaceful resolution. “We don’t see this as constructive at all,” said one senior American official. … The strikes have also proved counterproductive so-far: the Islamist militias fighting for control of Tripoli successfully seized its airport the night after they were hit with the second round of strikes.

As the above image shows, the capital’s airport has been almost completely destroyed in fighting between the Misratan and Zintani militias. Ishaan Tharoor flags the recently released footage of a “public execution” by an Islamist militia, which further illustrates how the already tenuous security situation is deteriorating:

In the footage, which is available on YouTube, masked gunmen waving black flags bring a blindfolded Egyptian man identified as Mohammad Ahmad Mohammad onto the field in a pick-up truck. He is eventually shot in the head by a person dressed in civilian clothes, believed to be the brother of a man Mohammad is said to have killed. The murder is one of the starkest instances yet of Islamist groups enacting sharia law in the country. (Since Gaddafi’s fall, Salafists have also set about attacking the shrines of Sufi saints.) “This unlawful killing realizes the greatest fears of ordinary Libyans, who in parts of the country find themselves caught between ruthless armed groups and a failed state,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, the organization’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director, in Amnesty’s press release.

Siddhartha Mahanta warned last week that the country was rapidly falling apart:

[F]ighting has only grown more intense over the summer, raising questions about whether Libya is on the fast track to civil war — or already in one. On Monday, planes of initially unknown origin conducted airstrikes on Islamist targets in Tripoli. Then, in the early hours of Tuesday, unidentified militants shelled an affluent section of Tripoli with Grad rockets, killing three. And, yes, that’s the same kind of artillery Russia has been accused of firing across the Ukrainian border. Who fired the Grad rockets remains a mystery, but eventually Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a onetime Qaddafi loyalist turned revolutionary and now a hardened anti-Islamist fighter, took credit for the airstrikes. Haftar said it’s part of his broader campaign for control of the city and airport, though there’s still some question as to whether Libyan planes could have been in any shape to conduct the strikes.

Not for the first time, Larison attributes this chaos to our “successful” intervention there in 2011:

While it is possible that Libya would still be suffering from internal conflicts in the absence of outside intervention in 2011, it is far more likely that aiding in the destruction of the old regime condemned Libya and its neighbors to the destabilizing and destructive effects of armed conflict for an even longer period of time. It was not an accident that Libya’s immediate neighbors were among the least supportive of the U.S.-led war, since they were always going to be the ones to experience the war’s harmful effects. Unfortunately for the civilian population in Libya, they will be living with the dangerous consequences of that “humanitarian” intervention for years and perhaps even decades to come. Considering that the war was justified entirely in the name of protecting civilians from violence, it has to be judged one of the most conspicuous failures and blunders of U.S. policy in the last decade. The desire to “help” Libyans with military action has directly contributed to the wrecking of their country. The lesson from all this that the U.S. and its allies shouldn’t be forcibly overthrowing foreign governments is an obvious one, and one that I am confident that all relevant policymakers in Washington will be sure to ignore.