Dreher On Blow

After reading Charles Blow’s intense and fascinating account of his own childhood abuse and his particular experience of bisexuality, Rod Dreher actually comes out with this:

The thing that stands out to me about it is Blow’s (very modern) belief that his passions constitute an essential part of his identity as a person. That is, he seems to believe that his freedom consists in accepting his desires, and that he is “subject to the tide.”

But is this really true? Somehow, reason tamed his homicidal passion in the case of avenging his rape. Why is that passion restrainable, but sexual passion is not? He would say that the passion to kill someone is not the same thing as the passion to have sex with someone, and he would, of course, be right.

But he would be wrong in another sense. According to Dante (speaking from a position informed by both classical and medieval Catholic thought), all sin comes from disordered passion. To be truly free is to master our passions by making them subject to our reason. We cannot prevent our desires, but if we make ourselves “subject to the tide” of passion, we cannot be said to be free.

This is a very strange response to the essay. Rod insists that his point is not about bisexuality, but about “passions” in general and our modern sense that we should accommodate them, rather than “master” them with reason. But I didn’t find any evidence in the piece that Blow had somehow “surrendered” to his “passions”. What he did was simply come to terms with who he really was – to probe what his sexual orientation really was and is. This is an integral part to mastering any passion. If you are not fully aware of who you are, you can act out in all sorts of ways, or enter relationships you really shouldn’t, or make horrible mistakes, or suppress feelings without ever really confronting them. What Blow describes is very much an exercise of reason, of inquiry, of remarkable poise in the face of a troubled past (including sexual abuse). Surrendering to passion meant in this case a seven-year marriage to a woman, including kids. And Blow rather movingly explains how an actual homosexual relationship was not something he could pull off.

If Blow were heterosexual, I doubt Rod would have said anything about “disordered passion”. We all have unique and complex sexualities – and all Blow did was examine his own past and his own nature and channel both toward a constructive present. It has to be the element of homosexual attraction that provokes Rod’s splutter – as if anyone can simply master by reason who they actually are. We do not have control over that. But those who come to terms with their sexual identity, who face it squarely, are likely to have a much better chance of channeling such passions toward good ends.

One other note about Blow’s piece: it’s a very convincing and eye-opening explanation of a certain kind of bisexuality:

I had to accept a counterintuitive fact: my female attraction was fully formed—I could make love and fall in love—but my male attraction had no such terminus. To the degree that I felt male attraction, it was frustrated. In that arena, I possessed no desire to submit and little to conquer. For years I worried that the barrier was some version of self-loathing, a denial. But eventually I concluded that the continual questioning and my attempts to circumvent the barrier were their own form of loathing and self-flagellation. I would hold myself open to evolution on this point, but I would stop trying to force it. I would settle, over time, into the acceptance that my attractions, though fluid, were simply lopsided. Only with that acceptance would I truly feel free.

Dan Savage adds:

As Blow’s piece makes clear, writing “lopsided bisexuality” out of the bi experience, the constant and often smug framing of bisexuality as the capacity to be sexually and romantically attracted to both men and women equally, excludes men like Blow and makes it harder for men like him to accept themselves as bisexual. Men like Blow walk around believing that they’re either not really bi (like this guy who wrote me at “Savage Love”), or that they’re bi but defective or broken.

But bisexual guys like Blow aren’t broken.

They sure aren’t. Which is more than one can say, sadly, for many men who refuse to confront their identity, and construct lives based on fantasies about what they’d like to be rather than what they are.

For much more on the nuances of bisexuality, check out this Dish thread.

Abuse In The Public Eye, Ctd

Ta-Nehisi Coates comments on comparisons between two controversial athletes:

Soccer star Hope Solo is alleged to have assaulted her sister and 17-year old nephew in June of this year. Unlike Ray Rice, Solo is still plying her trade as a goalkeeper for the national team. This led several people to claim that Solo is the beneficiary of a double standard. …

In the history of humanity, spouse-beating is a particularly odious tradition—one often employed by men looking to exert power over women. Just as lynching in America is not a phenomenon wholly confined to black people, spouse-beatings are not wholly confined to women. But in our actual history, women have largely been on the receiving end of spouse-beating. We have generally recognized this in our saner moments. There is a reason why we call it the “Violence Against Women Act” and not the “Brawling With Families Act.” That is because we recognize that violence against women is an insidious, and sometimes lethal, tradition that deserves a special place in our customs and laws.

This is the tradition with which Ray Rice will be permanently affiliated. Hope Solo is affiliated with a different tradition—misdemeanor assault. If she is guilty she should be punished.

Amanda Hess explains another “startling false equivalence” between the men’s football and women’s soccer scandals:

Rice was cut from his team and suspended from the NFL in response to overwhelming criticism from fans, domestic violence advocates, and sponsors who were finally fed up with the fact that the NFL has, for decades, taken domestic violence less seriously than it does, for example, drug offenses. Rice’s indefinite ban (which he plans to appeal) is the NFL’s attempt to demonstrate that it takes his crime seriously, sure. But it is also a bid to deflect criticism directed at the Ravens and league officials, who stand accused of purposefully misleading the public about the details of Rice’s crime and their investigation of it. All of the players who have been benched in the past couple of weeks are taking the heat for their league’s long-standing ignorance of domestic violence.

It’s not clear that this approach—which penalizes highly visible players while letting the league off the hook—is ideal. What we do know for certain is that it’s not applicable to U.S. women’s soccer, which has no such systematic, decades-long history of ignoring the fact that certain players abuse their partners.

She also notes an eerie coincidence:

If we’re interested in elevating Solo as the symbolic face of women perpetuating domestic violence, let’s really investigate what exactly she represents. [NYT’s Juliet Macur] oddly omits the fact that former NFL player Jerramy Stevens—who is no longer in the league after amassing a truly impressive list of sexual assault, battery, and DUI accusations—was arrested for attacking Solo the night before their wedding. The case was dropped for lack of evidence, largely stemming from Solo’s nonparticipation. The couple was married shortly thereafter, kinda sorta exactly like what happened with Ray and Janay Rice.

Previous Dish on male victims and female perpetrators here. The far greater problem of violence against women covered here and here.

Ted Cruz Thinks Ross Douthat’s An Anti-Semite [Updated]

And Mollie Hemingway and Matt Lewis and K-Lo and Rod Dreher and Michael Brendan Dougherty … and so many others who, however politely, expressed their misgivings over Cruz’s inflammatory speech to Middle East Christian groups, in which he “trolled the victims of genocide”, as Dougherty memorably tweeted. Ross’s piece is the best I read on the subject, and if you can find a scintilla of anti-Semitism in it, well, you’re probably Leon Wieseltier. But this is what Cruz just said to The World magazine in response to his critics:

Among one particular community, which is sort of the elite, intellectual Washington, D.C., crowd, there has been considerable criticism. … A number of the critics, a number of the folks in the media have suggested, for example, that my saying what I did distracted from the plight of persecuted Christians. What I find interesting is almost to a person, the people writing those columns have never or virtually never spoken of persecuted Christians in any other context. I have spoken literally hundreds of times all over the country. This is a passion. I’ve been on the Senate floor, and I intend to keep highlighting this persecution. I will say it does seem interesting that the only time at least some of these writers seem to care about persecuted Christians is when it furthers an anti-Israel narrative for them. That starts to suggest that maybe their motivation is not exactly what they’re saying.”

“Almost to a person”?

Cruz should name names if he believes that his critics have never written about Christian persecution in the Middle East before now. It is not my impression. But the imputation of anti-Semitism is yet another instance in which the neocon right simply refuses to engage the arguments about policy in the Middle East without resorting to this kind of rhetorical blackmail. It’s a reminder not just of Cruz’s deep McCarthyite tendencies, but of a dangerously crude view of the world in which bright and permanent abstractions – Israel always right! America just needs to bomb its enemies! – have replaced any actual engagement with reality.

Cruz is a domestic creature. He cares about marshaling and exploiting the fanaticism of the Zionist Christianist right and winning the mountains of cash available to any GOP candidate who backs Likudnik policies and the permanent annexation of the West Bank. What he isn’t is a thinker on foreign policy, someone who has any sort of clue how to engage a messy and dangerous world. And yet what he represents is clearly a rising force on the right – a kind of Jacksonian myopia that we thought had suffered a mortal blow in the sands of Mesopotamia but is now back, pristine, and ready to go to war against Islam all over again.

Update: Perhaps sensing that he had falsely accused so many writers of being anti-Semites and not caring about Middle East Christians, Cruz has just walked back his words in an email to Matt Lewis:

It was a mistake to suggest that critics of my remarks at IDC had not spoken out previously concerning the persecution of Christians; many of them have done so, often quite eloquently.  It was not my intent to impugn anyone’s integrity, and I apologize to any columnists who took offense.  The systematic murder of Christians in the Middle East is a horrible atrocity, and all of us should be united against it.  Likewise we should speak with one voice against the persecution of Jews, usually being carried out by the very same jihadist radicals.

Insurers Want In On Obamacare

Obamacare Insurers

Jonathan Cohn heralds a new HHS report (pdf):

Obamacare critics hadn’t predicted the markets would evolve this way. On the contrary, they expected that that young and healthy people would stay far away from the new marketplaces, because the new coverage would be pricier than what they were paying before. Without enough business, the argument went, insurers would get skittish and withdraw. At best, the marketplaces would all become oligopolies and monopolies, with just a handful of insurers continuing to sell policies. At worst, the whole scheme would fall apart. That quite obviously isn’t happening.

Waldman wishes Republicans would face facts:

As the insurers’ behavior makes clear, it isn’t just that the exchanges have not become ground zero for a death spiral. It’s also that the exchanges are a place where there’s money to be made, even as premium increases have slowed. The market is working, and those most noble actors pursuing that most noble goal — private corporations seeking profit — are responding.

In a rational world, conservatives would say, “Well, I don’t like all that increased regulation and expansion of Medicaid, but this does demonstrate one good thing about the law. I guess it’s a complicated story.” But of course that’s not what they’ll say.

Ezra catches conservatives ignoring this another other good Obamacare news:

[C]osts are lower than expected, enrollment is higher than expected, the number of insurers participating in the exchanges is increasing, and more states are joining the Medicaid expansion. Millions of people have insurance who didn’t have it before. The law is working. But a lot of the people who are convinced Obamacare is a disaster will never know that, because the voices they trust will never tell them.

Can The Church Survive In America? Ctd

Another day, another firing of a faithful Catholic parish music director … because he married his longtime boyfriend. The structure of the story is deeply familiar and depressing:

After marrying his long-time partner over the weekend, parishioners got an email from Father Bob White. It told them that Archbishop John Nienstedt had asked for Moore’s resignation, and Moore intended to resign. In a statement, Nienstedt said he was contacted by St. Victoria about the situation with Moore, and he told parish leaders that the church’s teachings must be upheld. Nienstedt never mentioned the Catholic Church’s stance against gay marriage, but added: “The … conduct of church employees can inspire and motivate people, but it can also scandalize and undermine their faith. Church employees must … recognize and accept the responsibilities that accompany their ministry.”

Disheads will know something about Nienstedt – and it encapsulates so much that’s so profoundly wrong with the Church. The archbishop accusing a popular music director of scandalizing and undermining the faith of others has a back-story:

Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis is being investigated for “multiple allegations” of inappropriate sexual conduct with seminarians, priests, and other men, according to the archbishop’s former top canon lawyer, Jennifer Haselberger. The investigation is being conducted by a law firm hired by the archdiocese. Nienstedt denies the allegations…

“Based on my interview with Greene Espel—as well as conversations with other interviewees—I believe that the investigators have received about ten sworn statements alleging sexual impropriety on the part of the archbishop dating from his time as a priest in the Archdiocese of Detroit, as Bishop of New Ulm, and while coadjutor and archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis,” Jennifer Haselberger, [the archbishop’s top canon lawyer who resigned in protest in 2013] told me. What’s more, “he also stands accused of retaliating against those who refused his advances or otherwise questioned his conduct.”

Haselberger also brought to light the issue of Nienstedt’s handling of child abuse cases – as recently as last year:

She contacted MPR News in July 2013 and disclosed how Nienstedt and other top officials gave special payments to abusive priests, failed to report alleged sex crimes to police and kept some abusers in ministry. Her account was especially stunning because it involved decisions made by church leaders as recently as April 2013.

Nienstedt has been cleared of an accusation of grabbing a boy’s buttocks, and the rest is still under investigation. Nienstedt, moreover, has admitted errors in handling accusations of child abuse, been forced to act against several priests he allowed to stay in their jobs, but refuses to resign:

A bishop’s role is more like that of a father of a family than that of a CEO. I am bound to continue in my office as long as the Holy Father has appointed me here.

So contemplate this: a man credibly accused of protecting child abusers, of violating his vow of celibacy by having relationships with other men, and of, by his own admission, creating dissension and distraction in his own archdiocese cannot ever quit. A faithful Catholic in a local parish is nonetheless forced to resign – during his honeymoon, for Pete’s sake – because he decided to commit himself in love and responsibility to another man in perpetuity. No thinking, moral person can find that dissonance anything less than disgusting.

A question for Pope Francis: why on earth is this staggering hypocrite and divider still an archbishop? And why would anyone be a part of a church as morally bankrupt as this?

Jim Webb Flirts With A Run

Senate Holds Cloture Vote On Immigration Bill

And comes out against Obama’s foreign policy recklessness:

“Our country has been adrift,” Webb said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington that rattled through a list of his disagreements with the Obama administration’s foreign policy.  “We continue to be trapped in the never-ending, never-changing entanglements of the Middle East.”

Allahpundit doubts Webb poses a real threat to Clinton. And Doug Mataconis has a hard time imagining Webb on the campaign trail:

As Larry Sabato noted when Webb declined to run for re-election in 2012, while he may have been a good Senator, Webb isn’t a particularly good politician and he clearly doesn’t enjoy the kind of campaigning that someone running for President would need to do on a daily basis if their candidacy is going to go anywhere at all. This was something that was, quite honestly, evident even when Webb first ran for Senator in 2006, especially given the fact that it reportedly took a significant amount of cajoling from state and national leaders for him to agree to run in the first place. Many saw the fact that he didn’t run for re-election as a [reflection] of this disdain for the “meat and potatoes” of politics as well. If you’re going to run for President, you’d better like campaigning because that’s all you’re going to be doing for the better part of a year.

Aaron Blake throws another bucket of cold water:

He has negative charisma. The Fix believes that presidential races have a charisma threshold, by which we mean that candidates need to be at least somewhat compelling to a national audience to achieve viability. Tim Pawlenty (R), for instance, struggled with this. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) has a similar problem. Webb would probably make Pawlenty look like Herman Cain. He’s just very dour. We wonder who would get excited about him, in the absence of some galvanizing force that suddenly makes him the perfect candidate for that political moment in time.

Jonathan Bernstein enumerates the growing list of “anti-Clintons”:

Finally, a Democratic presidential field beyond Hillary Clinton may be emerging. Well, it’s a quasi-field, but it got one body larger today, with former Senator Jim Webb of Virginia talking about running on an anti-war platform. We now have five of these possible anti-Clintons: Webb, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Joe Biden. That’s a lot!

Well, sort of. O’Malley is the most active. He is hiring in Iowa and doing pretty much everything an obscure but viable candidate can do at this stage. Sanders, and now Webb, aren’t doing much beyond talking. Warren denies she is running even as she does candidate-like things, and is pointedly refusing to pledge that she won’t run. And Biden is in a holding pattern: He’s not organizing a real campaign, but has declared himself a potential candidate. We can’t know how many of these Democrats will actually be running in 2016, or even in spring 2015.

(Photo by Jamie Rose/Getty Images)

Go To Congress, Mr. President

Clay Hanna, a veteran, pleads with Obama to get congressional authorization for his new war:

If Congress declares war, and the full force and might of the U.S. military and her allies is deployed, I have no doubt that we will fatally strike the Islamic State.

But without this clarity, without “boots on the ground” and above all an acknowledgement of what these really are, the president’s strategy amounts to nothing more than amorphous rhetoric and disingenuous platitudes. It is at the core a cynical plan to incite war and fund violence, backed by a vague hope that not only will we remain unaffected but somehow we will achieve peace. Don’t deceive yourself or us any longer, Mr. President: There is no good war and no participant gets to walk away with clean hands. Not even you.

Beutler believes Congress wants war but doesn’t want to authorize a war, because “voting on the issue would violate the Optimal Preening Principle, which tends to govern these debates”:

Killing terrorists, or alleged terrorists, might be popular. But it’s also something the military (and thus, the president) does. Meanwhile, on a good day, Congress votes on legislation. The president might use a new AUMF to do things the public overwhelmingly supports, but that won’t help the embattled congressperson who would have to defend granting the president unlimited warmaking power or defend voting against bombing terrorists because the AUMF wasn’t expansive enough. Instead, by not being forced to take a stance, Obama’s opponents will be able to frame the issue however they want to.

Likewise, when something goes wrong—as it inevitably will—members of Congress won’t want to be linked to it with their votes, and won’t want their votes constraining them from harrumphing about it on camera. Constituents won’t credit them if things go swimmingly anyhow, so they see no upside in sticking their necks out.

Bruce Ackerman chews out Congress for neglecting its duties:

Neither the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel nor the White House Counsel has issued a serious legal opinion presenting its side of the argument. This represents a profound breach of the rule of law. Worse yet, Congress’ failure to address the constitutional issues during its regular session threatens to create a legal vacuum which only the courts will be in a position to resolve. Unless extraordinary steps are taken, the result will be the worst of all possible worlds, in which a problematic Supreme Court decision only exacerbates the ongoing crisis of constitutional legitimacy.

Eric Posner disagrees with Ackerman’s legal analysis:

Ackerman is right that the Obama administration’s reliance on the 2001 AUMF is phony, but he’s wrong to say that Obama has broken with American constitutional traditions. That tradition dictates that the president must give a nod to Congress if he can, but otherwise he is legally free to go to war, subject to vague limits that have never been worked out. That’s not to say that Congress is helpless. It can refuse to fund a war if it objects to it. But the real constraint on the president’s war-making powers is not law, but politics.

Regardless, Jennifer Daskal, Ashley Deeks and Ryan Goodman urge Congress to get involved:

[T]he administration again appears to be invoking the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs – a position that two of us have been critical of in the past.  We thus join President Obama in his call to Congress to put the actions on sounder domestic law footing, and pass a new authorization specifically focused on ISIL, and, depending on the facts, the Khorasan Group as well.

A Climate Summit With Some Hot Air

Philip Bump argues that yesterday’s UN summit amounts to something new under the sun:

For decades, the United Nations has tried to put together a binding commitment from its members aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions – particularly carbon dioxide. … What’s happening right now in New York, in the wake of the largest climate rally in history, is something different. Instead of parties coming together to develop a binding agreement, it’s an attempt to self-regulate, to encourage countries and companies to establish individual goals for reduction that, in the aggregate, will hopefully have a global effect. Mashable is tracking those commitments: a European Union pledge to reduce emissions up to 95 percent by 2050, financial commitments from France and Switzerland, Costa Rica’s switch to clean energy. All of these things could have an effect, and particularly that E.U. pledge. But none will have a huge impact in the absence of other efforts.

Indeed, Ben Adler suggests the conference confirmed all the worst stereotypes about the UN:

A procession of heads of state spoke – so many that they had to be split into three simultaneous sessions — but even the largest session, in the General Assembly Hall, was largely empty during most of the speeches. The few delegates there seemed distracted, mostly talking to each other. The speeches from heads of state and other representatives were billed grandly as “national action and ambition announcements.” Mostly, though, they consisted of familiar talking points, platitudes, and boasts about preexisting national energy policies. …  Speakers were eager to talk about the need for action and the general principles of energy conservation and renewable energy, but they avoided mention of specific emissions targets or even precise amounts of funding they want from rich countries for climate-mitigation efforts.

The focus was largely on the United States and China. Ronald Bailey was not impressed by their actions:

The world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States, both held off on making any specific additional pledges regarding their future emissions. In 2012, humanity emitted 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, of which 10 billion came from China and 5.2 billion from the United States. Convened by General-Secretary Ban Ki Moon, the Summit is supposed to “catalyze action” in advance of the big U.N. climate change conference at Paris in 2015. At the Paris conference, the nations of the world are supposed to make pledges to cut their emissions sufficient to keep future warming below the internationally agreed upon threshold of 2 degrees Celsius. It is not at all clear that today’s Summit catalyzed much more than pious clichés.

Matt McGrath describes Obama’s speech to the General Assembly as “notable for the absence of big pledges and for its realistic tone”:

Every time the president used the word “carbon”, he tagged the word “pollution” on the end. His goal was to underline that carbon dioxide is damaging to humans in the same way as air pollution, and in the US it should be regulated by executive power rather than by through legislation in a very divided Congress. The president also acknowledged the scale of opposition to his attempts to cut carbon. The most substantial pledge he made was an announcement that early next year he would publish a post-2020 plan to cut emissions.

He appealed to China, saying that together with the US the two countries had a special responsibility to lead. But everyone had to contribute. “No one gets a pass,” he said. The president wants to bind in the Chinese with an ambitious, inclusive – and most critically – a flexible deal that he can sign without recourse to the Senate.

Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli said the country expects emissions to peak “as soon as possible.” Andrew Freedman analyzes the announcement:

On the one hand, as far as environmentalists and the Obama administration are concerned, the mere mention of a peak in China’s carbon dioxide emissions was new and ambitious, considering how quickly the Chinese economy has grown in recent years and how fast emissions have risen as well. During the past decade, for example, China saw about 10% per year increases in carbon dioxide emissions, although that slowed in 2013, according to a report from the European Commission. China has a goal to reduce its carbon intensity, which is a way of measuring the carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product, by up to 45% by 2020. Zhang said that China will reveal its goals for reducing emissions post-2020 during the first quarter of 2015, as the United States also intends to do. …

On the other hand, China signaled its continued support for a long-running source of tension between industrialized countries and developing nations regarding the U.N. climate treaty process. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was negotiated in 1992, well before China’s emissions overtook U.S. emissions, mandates that developing countries and industrialized nations have “common but differentiated responsibilities” in addressing the problem. In 2009, for the first time, China and other developing countries committed to taking action to reduce their emissions along with industrialized countries, but it remains to be seen how far they are willing to go when the next treaty is negotiated in 2015. That treaty is due to go into effect by 2020.

Rebecca Leber argues that addressing climate change “will require steps Obama couldn’t promise on Tuesday – perhaps because, though he would happily support them, his political opposition would not”:

Consider what the President did announce – an executive order directing federal agencies to plan for climate change impacts in all of their investments and decisions on international development. The idea is to help make sure these investments are durable and effective in a world where it’s becoming impossible to consider funding parts of the world without considering impacts like extreme weather. The executive order is less about the climate negotiations process than a broader signal to the world that the U.S. takes climate change seriously (even if congressional Republicans don’t).

Obama also declined to pledge any money to the Green Climate Fund, which supports developing countries coping with the effects of climate change: France committed $1 billion, which Suzanne Goldenberg describes as “the first significant contribution since Germany threw in $1 billion last July.” She adds:

The Green Climate Fund was founded in 2010 to help poor countries cope with climate change. UN officials and developing country diplomats have said repeatedly it will not be possible to reach a climate deal in Paris without a significant fund for those countries which did the least to cause climate change but will bear the brunt.

South Korea and Switzerland went on to pledge $100 million each, Denmark pledged $70 million, Norway pledged $33 million and Mexico said it would give $10 million. But the total of $2.3 billion pledged for the Green Climate Fund so far fell short of the $10 billion to $15 billion that UN officials and developing country said was needed to show rich countries were committed to acting on climate change. It also was unclear whether Tuesday’s pledges represented new money.

Meanwhile, Justin Gillis notes that at the summit, “companies are playing a larger role than at any such gathering in the past.” Forty companies signed a pledge to stop tropical deforestation by 2030, and a further 400 voiced their support for putting a price on carbon. Gillis explains:

Several environmental groups said they were optimistic that at least some of these [promises] would be kept, but they warned that corporate action was not enough, and that climate change could not be solved without stronger steps by governments. The corporate promises are the culmination of a trend that has been building for years, with virtually every major company now feeling obliged to make commitments about environmental sustainability, and to report regularly on progress. The companies have found that pursuing such goals can often help them cut costs, particularly for energy.

Who The Hell Is The Khorasan Group?

They were among our targets yesterday:

Tuesday’s attacks hit key Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) facilities as well as the little-known Khorasan Group, which is based in northwest Syria. But it is not yet clear to what extent the Khorasan leadership and operatives had been taken out in the attacks. The joint staff director of operations Lieut. General William Mayville said the U.S. was still “assessing the effects of the strikes.”

Aron Lund’s provides background on the group:

What is being discussed is not a “new terrorist group,” but rather a specialized cell that has gradually been established within, or on, the fringes of an already existing al-Qaeda franchise, the so-called Nusra Front. What this seems to be about is a jihadi cell consisting of veteran al-Qaeda members who have arrived to the Nusra Front in Syria from abroad, mainly via Iran, and who are in direct contact with al-Qaeda’s international leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, himself believed to be based in Pakistan.

Foreign Policy asks how big a threat the group poses:

“In terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a conference in Washington last week. But according to the top U.S. counterterrorism official, as well as Obama himself, there is “no credible information” that the militants of the Islamic State were planning to attack inside the United States. Although the group could pose a domestic terrorism threat if left unchecked, any plot it tried launching today would be “limited in scope” and “nothing like a 9/11-scale attack,” Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in remarks at the Brookings Institution earlier this month. That would suggest that Khorasan doesn’t have the capability either, even if it’s working to develop it.

“Khorasan has the desire to attack, though we’re not sure their capabilities match their desire,” a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told Foreign Policy.

What Eli Lake is hearing:

The Khorasan Group has been experimenting with different types of non-metallic explosives for attacks on Western targets, according to U.S. intelligence officials. Most of the members of the group come from Yemen, Afghanistan, or Pakistan and have for months been coordinating with bomb-makers drawn from al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula, the most persistent and creative of al Qaeda groups in efforts to bomb U.S.-bound passenger jets.

ISIS and al Qaeda bitterly split earlier this year, and have since attacked one another on occasions. But some analysts now fear that striking at ISIS and al Qaeda could persuade the two groups to put aside their sharp differences and come together. Indeed, jihadist ideologues loyal to both warring factions have had similar messages for their followers in the wake of the airstrikes.

Our Arab Coalition Against ISIS

US And Arab Allies Launch Airstrikes Against ISIL In Syria

Drum is unimpressed by it:

Here’s the nickel version: After months of bellyaching about America’s commitment to fighting ISIS, one single Arab country finally agreed to help out. Only then did anyone else also agree to pitch in. But the extent of their involvement can’t be revealed because it’s a “sensitive operational detail.” Can you guess just how extensive that involvement is? Or do you need a hint?

But Fred Kaplan thinks the coalition is a big deal:

It is highly significant that four Arab nations—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain—participated in Monday night’s airstrikes and that a fifth, Qatar, supported them. No one has yet said how many bombs the four dropped, or what Qatar’s support amounted to, but it doesn’t matter. During the 1990–’91 Gulf War, these and several other Arab nations, including Syria and Egypt, sent tank divisions and air wings to help push Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. Few of them did much, but the important thing was that they joined the coalition in active force—and, therefore, Hussein could not claim that this was purely a Western, imperialist war. Sending this message is even more important in the fight against ISIS, which bills itself as the Islamic army and its mission as a religious one—the revival of a caliphate. To have Muslim nations, especially Sunni nations, battling against ISIS helps discredit its rationale for existence.

Goldblog also talks up the coalition:

[Obama] has built a formidable alliance of Arab allies to fight Islamic State. Of course these Arab allies are all profoundly threatened by Islamic State and have an incentive to openly align themselves with the world’s only superpower. But the leaders of these countries have until very recently doubted Obama’s commitment to them, and they would not have joined forces with him if they believed he wasn’t in the fight for the long haul.

After long avoiding deeper engagement in Syria and Iraq – for the simple, understandable reason that these countries are seemingly insoluble messes – Obama has pivoted (to borrow a word from another now-dormant foreign-policy debate) in the direction of responsibility.

“Responsibility” is not the word we’d use. Christopher Dickey asks about the coalition’s mission:

Perhaps most striking of all is the absence, in this rump coalition, of the grand pronouncements we heard from earlier U.S. administrations—or from this one five years ago when President Barack Obama sought to turn a new page in Washington’s relations with the Arab and Muslim world. In the current crisis, Obama has articulated no overarching cause, no doctrine about defending freedom and democracy. This offensive is purely defensive. It is not about the future: it is about a desperate effort to hang on to the present status quo as the region, having shed the enthusiasms of the Arab Spring like a soiled party outfit, is now trying to slip back into the drab, predictable uniforms of dictatorship and monarchy.

Now that the Arab kings and princes have joined in, it’s obvious that this is a war to try to turn back the clock to before the Arab Spring of 2011, before Obama’s 2009 initiatives, before the efforts of President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice to graft democracy onto the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The people of the region are tired of chaos. And at this point, Obama shows every sign he’s tired, too. He appears to be settling for any tactical approach that might ward off the growing threat of new attacks on Americans and the American homeland posed not only by ISIS, but by the point men of al Qaeda in a group known as Khorasan that also came under attack by U.S. warplanes over Syria on Tuesday.

Saletan points out that the US is “hiding or downplaying the involvement of other countries whose complicity, if acknowledged, might do more political harm than good”:

The ally no one wants to acknowledge is Israel. That would play into ISIS propaganda, which frames Obama as the “mule of the Jews” and Saudi rulers as “guard dogs for the Jews.” In the first Persian Gulf War, we used Israeli intelligence but didn’t advertise it, lest we offend our Arab allies. Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of Israel’s contributions to the anti-ISIS coalition, “Some of the things are known; some things are less known.” An anonymous Western diplomat said the United States was using Israeli satellite images, “scrubbed” of their Israeli traces, to show its coalition partners damage from strikes against ISIS in Iraq.

No such role has been acknowledged yet in Syria. But the Obama administration began its surveillance flights over Syria only a month ago. In all likelihood, Israeli satellite coverage was even more thorough and useful in Syria than it was in Iraq.

Adam Taylor wonders about Turkey:

Ankara’s position has clearly been complicated by its fraught relationship with the Turkish Kurds. The People’s Protection Units, known by the acronym YPG, have been one of the strongest forces fighting against Islamic State, yet they are linked to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, the separatist guerrilla group that has waged a Kurdish insurgency against the Turkish state for decades. Both Ankarra and Washington consider the PKK a terrorist organization. Many observers suspect that Ankara finds it easier to tolerate the Islamic State’s rampage in Syria than cooperate with Kurdish groups like the PKK or YPG.

Ed Morrissey looks on as Egypt exploits the situation:

In an interview [yesterday] morning with CBS’ Charlie Rose, the Egyptian president whose coup took down the Muslim Brotherhood government favored by the White House says that his country would be happy to join the anti-ISIS coalition, including militarily, and expects to do so. Just as soon as the US coughs up the fighter jets that the Obama administration held up after the coup, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi says with repeated laughter, Egypt will be delighted to help fight terrorism. … There is no such thing as a free ride in this part of the world. But at least Obama doesn’t have an Islamist regime in Cairo that’s giving ISIS political cover, and for that he can thank Sisi — even if those thanks come through clenched teeth

And Michael Koplow isn’t expecting Iran to openly join the coalition anytime soon:

A large element of the Iranian regime’s ideology is opposition to the U.S.; it is the reason that the regime has harped on this point for decades on end. When you base your legitimacy and appeal in large part on resisting American imperial power, turning on a dime and openly helping the U.S. achieve an active military victory carries far-reaching consequences domestically. It harms your legitimacy and raison d’être, and thus puts your continued rule in peril. Iran wants to see ISIS gone as badly as we do, if not more so, and ISIS presents a more proximate threat to Iran than to us. Despite this, Iran cannot be seen as helping the U.S. in any way on this, and simply lining up interests in this case is an analytical mistake as ideological considerations trump all when you are dealing with highly ideological regimes. The same way that the U.S. would never have cooperated with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War to defeat a common enemy – despite being able to come to agreement on arms control negotiations – because of an ideological commitment to being anti-Communist, Iran will not cooperate with the U.S. against ISIS. Those naively hoping that ISIS is going to create a bond between the U.S. and Iran are mistaken.

(Photo: In this handout image provided by the U.S. Navy, the guided-missile destroyer USS Arleigh Burke (DDG 51) launches Tomahawk cruise missiles on September 23, 2014 in the Red Sea. By Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Carlos M. Vazquez II/U.S. Navy via Getty Images)