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Obama’s Open-Ended, Reckless, ISIS Gamble

President Obama Delivers Statement On Situation In Iraq

Ahead of the president’s major address tonight, word has leaked that Obama is considering airstrikes in Syria as part of the military operation against ISIS:

President Obama is prepared to use U.S. military airstrikes in Syria as part of an expanded campaign to defeat the Islamic State and does not believe he needs formal congressional approval to take that action, according to people who have spoken with the president in recent days.  Obama discussed his plans at a dinner with a bipartisan group of foreign policy experts this week at the White House and made clear his belief that he has the authority to attack the militant Islamist group on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border to protect U.S national security, multiple people who participated in the discussion said. The move to attack in Syria would represent a remarkable escalation in strategy for Obama, who has sought during his presidency to reduce the U.S. military engagement in the Middle East.

I guess entering one failed state’s civil war wasn’t challenging enough! Let’s enter two while we’re at it. Exit strategy? Pshaw. That’ll be up to Obama’s successor. In a more granular must-read analysis of this clusterfuck, Marc Lynch stresses that while a strategy of airstrikes and supporting local ground forces may be able to help restore stability and sovereignty to Iraq, in Syria these options “offer no plausible path to political or strategic success”:

A strategy predicated on the existence of an effective moderate Syrian rebel force is doomed to fail. Instead, the focus should be on shaping the environment in ways which will encourage the emergence of a politically legitimate and more effectively unified opposition. The destructive and radicalizing effects of uncoordinated flows of aid to competing rebel groups from outside states and private actors have long been obvious. The emerging regional strategy offers perhaps the first opportunity to unify these efforts to build rather than divide the Syrian opposition. The new coalition should expand on efforts to shut off funding and support not only for ISIS but also for the other powerful Islamist trends within the Syrian rebellion.

This will take time. The immediate goal in Syria should be the securing of a strategic pause between the rebel forces and the regime in order to focus military efforts on ISIS.  Crucially, this strategic pause does not mean cooperation or alignment with Asad, or a retreat from the Geneva Accord principles of a political transition. It should be understood instead as buying the time to shape an environment in which such a transition could become plausible. … The longer-term goal should be to translate this anti-ISIS tacit accord into an effective agreement by the external backers of both Asad and the rebels on a de-escalation of the conflict.  Rather than a military drive on Damascus, the international community should support the delivery of serious humanitarian relief, security and governance to rebel controlled areas and refugees.

I simply do not believe we are capable of pulling anything like this off. Robert Hunter also complicates the question of whether getting rid of Assad should be among our objectives there:

We continue to talk about “arming moderates,” but no US leader has ever articulated what would come after Assad. There is a basic assumption that, when Assad is gone, all will be rosy. The opposite is more likely true. Added to the ongoing carnage would be the slaughter of the minority Alawites. The risks of a spreading Sunni-Shia civil war would increase dramatically, even more than now. The irony is that many who now worry about ISIS argue that it would not have progressed this far if we had only “armed the moderates” in Syria. But given what would have likely happened if they had succeeded, this argument is nonsense. Yet even now the administration, along with academic and congressional critics, fails to address the consequences of its own rhetoric about getting rid of Assad; that statement has become a mantra, disconnected from any serious process of thought or analysis.

Juan Cole lays out some of the inherent risks in a US military campaign against ISIS:

Obama appears to envisage arming and training the “moderates” of the Free Syrian Army, who have consistently been pushed to the margins by al-Qaeda offshoots and affiliates. Private billionaires in the Gulf will continue to support ISIL or its rival, Jabhat al-Nusra (the Succor Front, which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda). Strengthening yet another guerrilla group will, again, likely prolong the fighting. Moreover, in the past two years, Free Syrian Army moderate groups have gone radical and joined Nusrah or ISIL at an alarming rate. Defectors or defeated groups from the FSA will take their skills and arms with them into the al-Qaeda offshoots.

In Iraq, while giving the Kurds and the Iraqi army close air support against ISIL has already borne fruit when the local forces were defending their ethnic enclaves, it hasn’t helped either largely Kurdish forces or the (largely Shiite) Iraqi army take Sunni Arab territory. Several campaigns against Tikrit have failed. The only thing worse than this failure might be success. Success would mean smart phone video making its way to YouTube showing US bombing urban residential buildings full of Sunni Arab families in support for a motley crew of Kurdish (non-Arab) fighters and Shiite troops and militiamen. Helping such forces take Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, would make for a very bad image in the Sunni world.

But we never learn, do we? Robin Wright’s comparison of the best- and worst-case scenarios illustrates how tremendous those risks are:

For the United States, the best possible outcome would be for the militants to withdraw from their illusory state in Iraq to bases in Syria, where they might wither in the face of strengthened Syrian rebels; ideally, the rebels would also bring an end to the Assad regime in Damascus. Iraq and Syria, with their multicultural societies, would then have breathing room to incubate inclusive governments. That’s the goal, anyway. The worst outcome would be another open-ended, treasury-sapping, coffin-producing, and increasingly unpopular war that fails to erase ISIS or resurrect Iraq. It might even, in time, become a symbolic graveyard of American greatness—as it was for the French and the British. The Middle East has a proven record of sucking us in and spitting us out.

Maybe it will take another humiliating, devastating defeat in an unwinnable war to finally get Americans to understand the limits of their military power – and the increasing toxicity of the American brand.

Jack Goldstone pens an explainer on ISIS, including some suggestions for how it might be defeated. He argues that while US or NATO military reprisals may be necessary to “blunt its success and undermine the feeling of invincibility it has given to its converts”, there are much more daunting challenges beyond that:

Second, the civil institutions that provide a power-base for moderate political organizations and their leaders must be rebuilt and given credibility. In Syria, this cannot happen until the Assad regime falls; in Iraq this cannot happen until a post-Maliki government establishes its credibility and effectiveness. … Third, the ongoing Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East is fueling every sort of violent group: Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, and others. At some point, the global community will have to lean on Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to cease their proxy wars and come to an agreement similar to that of 1648 in Europe, which ended the Thirty Years War that capped over a century of religious conflicts: every country can control its religious policy within its own borders, but agrees to stop meddling in religious conflicts in other countries and to respect other countries’ full sovereignty. This may be a distant goal (it took nearly a century in Europe) but is vital if the region is ever to know stable peace.

Shane Harris wants Obama to get straight whether he plans to “degrade”, “defeat”, or “destroy” ISIS, the last of which Harris considers an impossible goal:

Even if a combined military-political campaign were successful against the Islamic State, history shows that destroying fundamentalist organizations and terrorist networks is exceptionally difficult. Although Obama claims that the United States has “systematically dismantled” al Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan, counterterrorism experts debate whether that’s true, pointing to the fact that Zawahiri is still alive and giving direction to fighters, as well as forming new al Qaeda affiliates, most recently in India. And nearly 13 years after the 9/11 attacks, a sustained military campaign against the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan has failed to destroy the organization. Israel, for its part, has been unable to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah despite the country’s physical proximity to the decades-old militant groups and its ability to deploy one of the most formidable military and intelligence forces on the planet to the fight. The lesson is clear: Terrorist networks are persistent, and they return to their favored targets again and again.

Remarking on the internal illogic of the case for war, Justin Logan doesn’t see how even a successful military operation will solve any of the underlying problems:

The very same political forces that led to a Sunni insurgency during the aughts have contributed to the rise of ISIS. If those politics don’t change—and I see little reason to believe we can make that happen—then you may make gains against ISIS, but the underlying political disease that’s causing the problem remains untreated, and possibly untreatable. In other words, even if the Islamic State is destroyed, there will be an array of other spoilers endangering a thriving Kurdish minority and a stable, successful Iraqi government that integrates the country’s Sunni minority. In fact, these other problems preexisted and helped lead to the successes of the Islamic State. Are we just supposed to cross that bridge when we get to it?

Michael Brendan Dougherty serves up some sharp criticism, lamenting America’s inability to say “no” to lengthy, expensive experiments at fixing other countries’ security problems:

A three-year commitment is merely a hope that drones and bombs plus time equals a stability that is peaceful enough and liberal enough to make our quarter-century of involvement not look like a total waste. But it dumps all the responsibility for solving Iraq on the United States, and makes us yet again a convenient scapegoat for the whole region’s failure. …

This is all part of a broader pattern of the U.S. making too many promises. We’ve promised Japan and the entirety of Southeast Asia to manage China’s rise peacefully. Even as our NATO allies halved their share of military spending since the end of the Cold War, we’ve extended a security guarantee that a Russian advance on Estonia will be treated no differently from a land invasion of the United States. It’s a promise so risible it practically dares a Russian challenge. In fighting ISIS and propping up Iraq, the president is promising to finally make good on America’s constant failure to manage a millennia of hatreds and radical schools of thought, the politics of about six regional powers, and centuries of imperial hubris.

Lastly, George Packer compares Obama’s current situation to that of Gerald Ford after the fall of Saigon:

[Tonight] is a speech that Obama, even more than Ford, never wanted to give. He ran for reëlection, in part, on having fulfilled a promise to end the war in Iraq—always the previous Administration’s war. His eagerness to be rid of the albatross of Iraq played no small part in clearing the way for ISIS to take a third of the country, including Mosul, and to threaten Baghdad and Erbil.

All the more reason to give the President credit (though his political enemies never will) for his willingness, however reluctant, to turn around and face the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq and Syria. Wednesday’s speech will no doubt nod toward staying out (no boots on the ground, no new “American war”), even as it makes the case for going back in (air strikes, international coalitions, the moral and strategic imperative to defeat ISIS). This is the sort of balancing act that Obama speeches specialize in. But he also needs to tell the country bluntly that there will almost certainly be more American casualties, and that the struggle against ISIS—against radical Islam generally, but especially in this case—will be difficult, with no quick military solution and no end in sight. Otherwise, he’ll have brought the public and Congress on board without levelling with them, a pattern set in Vietnam and repeated in Iraq, with unhappy consequences.

The only way to air this debate properly is a full and robust vote in the Senate, preceding a formal declaration of war. That’s what the Constitution demands. And given the emotional rush to war in the country and Washington, you begin to see the wisdom of the Founders’ judgment.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about Iraq in the Brady Briefing room of the White House on June 19, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama spoke about the deteriorating situation as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants move toward Baghdad after taking control over northern Iraqi cities. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Jubilation Of The Hegemonists

They’re back in charge in Washington, they will always despise Obama, and they will demand, in the end, ground troops. Wieseltier takes a victory lap:

New varieties of half-heartedness would be disastrous. Shall we not do stupid stuff? Fine, then. Not bombing ISIS in Syria would be stupid stuff. (Where is the border between Syria and Iraq?) Not transforming the Free Syrian Army into a powerful fighting force would be stupid stuff. Not arming—and in every other way standing behind—the Kurds would be stupid stuff. And—here comes the apostasy!—not considering the sagacious use of American troops would be stupid stuff.

The obsolescence of the American army is not a conclusion warranted by the war in Iraq. In our determination not to fight the last war, we must not pretend that it was the last war. If the president’s ends in his campaign against ISIS are justified, then he must not deny himself the means. The new government in Baghdad may work out or it may not. Our allies may agree to share the toughest burdens of the campaign or they may not. The outcome of this multilateral effort will depend on the United States. It still comes down to us. Why are we so uneasy with our own moral and historical prominence?

No more half-heartedness! Just go to war in the Middle East again – actually attempt to reconstruct two now-imaginary countries, Iraq and Syria – but with one proviso: we’re all in. No ground troops should be ruled out – which means their involvement becomes inevitable. The multi-sectarian, complex forces and counter-forces in the civil wars of what was once Iraq and what was once Syria can all be mastered by American military power – just like the last Iraq war, remember?

Note this line:

In our determination not to fight the last war, we must not pretend that it was the last war.

But we are going to war in the same place we just left! And we are doing so for the very same reason we were the last time around – because a Sunni insurgency does not trust the Shiite-dominated government that we installed and still support. We have no new capabilities that make all our previous mistakes avoidable again. We are once again trying to control the uncontrollable and manage the unknowable in places we know far less about than our enemies, just as we once did – and without any clear, tangible threat to the US. This “last war” began in 1991, it was extended in 2003, it is now being extended again, after the briefest of lulls, for the indefinite future. America is becoming nothing but a war machine, forever fixing the conflicts we create, supported by a Beltway elite with no accountability for anything they have ever said or written in the past.

For some, a forever war against evil everywhere on earth is what gets them up in the morning. I understand how this is genuine, even admirable in its compassion and care. But it is not prudent; it has been proven a failure already; it has cost us a trillion dollars and countless lives and limbs. To believe it will be different this time is the definition of insanity.

Update from a reader:

You wrote:

For some, a forever war against evil everywhere on earth is what gets them up in the morning. I understand how this is genuine, even admirable in its compassion and care. But it is not prudent; it has been proven a failure already; it has cost us a trillion dollars and countless lives and limbs. To believe it will be different this time is the definition of insanity.

I understand trying to ascribe non-malevolent motive here, but I want to make a point that I am somewhat loathe to make, given how the term is often abused: this is chicken-hawking at its most extreme.  The group of neocons and establishment Washington pols (with the media right behind them) that perpetually agitate for war and “boots on the ground” give up NOTHING by their clockwork bellicosity.  They won’t spend years of their lives living in a tent in the desert, their families won’t feel the stress of multiple deployments, their children won’t be blown up by an IED.  Someone else’s will, and they’ll go on agitating for endless military engagement all around the world, forever.

It is inappropriate to cry “chicken-hawk!” every time America decides it needs to use force.  That would be illegitimate – a country can’t function that way.  But at what point do we need to look perpetual-war agitators in the eye and say, “If you really think evil is taking over the world, if you want America to fight constantly, then it is your turn.  Go enlist.  Bring your son and your daughter with you.  Then come back and tell me if you think we need to fight over there.”

I won’t hold my breath.

The Nightmare Scenario

US President Barack Obama holds press conference in Newport

As the president launches a new war against an elusive, asymmetrical opponent, with as yet no solid regional allies, fueled by pure emotion, I have to wonder who it was we elected. I’m going to listen carefully tonight – but so far, this strikes me quite simply an an almost text-book case of what someone once called “a dumb war”.

First off, the public support for war is almost entirely a function of the powerful imagery of two beheadings. It is not a sober reflection on how best to defend ourselves from Salafist terror and theocracy. It is based on little but fear and panic and hysteria:

47% of Americans believe the country is less safe now than before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That’s a significant increase from even a year after the twin towers fell when in September 2002 just 20% of the country said the nation was less safe. The level of fear across America also is up substantially from last year when 28% felt the same way.

This is not a rational conclusion. The change came almost entirely from last month:

A whopping 94 percent of Americans say they have heard about the news of the beheaded journalists – higher than any other news event the NBC/WSJ poll has measured over the past five years. That includes the 2011 debt-ceiling debate (77 percent), the 2012 health-care decision by the U.S. Supreme Court (78 percent), Syria’s reported use of chemical weapons in 2013 (79 percent) and this year’s botched execution in Oklahoma (68 percent).

That is the biggest media coup for the Salafists since the Towers fell. Americans have shown themselves to be terrified beyond measure by a group of religious fanatics controlling an area about the size of Maryland – so terrified, in fact, that they want to make Syria’s and Iraq’s civil wars our war, to own them and their outcome. George Friedman makes the sane and obvious point:

The Islamic State – engaged in war with everyone around it – is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack. In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.

The key thing is to have a sensible grip on what the actual threat really is, rather than reacting like scared school-children in a horror movie. And the threat is primarily to ISIS’s neighbors. How scared are they – and how determined are they to fight? Well, the Iraqis themselves still haven’t filled out a cabinet that can reconcile both Sunnis and Shi’a and Kurds in a unified push against the latest insurgency. Turkey is more concerned, it appears, with the fate of 49 hostages now held by ISIS. Saudi Arabia? Twiddling its thumbs when it isn’t fueling Salafist fanaticism. Iran? Sure, they can and will help – but only in a way likely to inflame Sunni paranoia and fuel sectarian divisions. Assad? Well, this is the scenario he long predicted, isn’t it?

The obvious response of the US should be to coax and goad and guide a regional coalition against ISIS without direct intervention. And the core of that coalition must be Sunni, or this will devolve into one more ripple in the Shiite-Sunni ocean of mutual hatred and conflict. Friedman again:

The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.

But that does not seem to be Obama’s idea right now. We are declaring our commitment to destroying ISIS before the regional actors have fully declared theirs. Now the Turks and the Iraqis and the Saudis can sit back and have the US do their work for them, turning the Salafist terror away from themselves and toward the West. Having the hegemon solve their problems is win-win for them, even as we will get no thanks, and no friends, and many more enemies … if we succeed.

One reason why I oppose this new Iraq War, in other words, is that I fear that it could well increase the threat to the US, rather than reduce it. Our panicked response to two executions in a distant desert could actually lead to a far greater wave of Jihadist terror than would otherwise be the case. They’ll now be aiming for New York as much as Baghdad. We’ve all but dared them.

Then there is the domestic part – and the most depressing. Obama – despite what he did with Syria, and despite his campaign pledges – wants to launch a new war in Iraq and Syria on his own presidential authority. At a time when we desperately need a careful consideration of a war’s potential unintended consequences, a deliberative debate in the Senate on the pros and cons of this new adventure in Arabia, Obama only wants a rubber stamp for a war already underway. The Republicans, moreover, in ever more cynical fashion, will be quite happy to let Obama take all the responsibility and all of the blame for the next Middle East nightmare, while taking no responsibility for the war themselves. That way, they can blame Obama for failure, and claim credit for success, while never playing the essential constitutional role they are supposed to play.

To recap: we are going to war with no clear exit plan; we are doing so before the regional allies have been forced to take a stand; Obama is shouldering all of the responsibility himself, based on a hysterical public mood that could evaporate in a month’s time. To argue that this is a reneging of everything Obama ran on is an understatement. Even Bush went to Congress for a vote before the Iraq War. And the legitimization of panic and fear and hysteria undoes so much of what Obama had previously achieved in amending US foreign policy.

I will listen carefully tonight. I will give him a chance to persuade me. But this is such a bitter pill to swallow.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama speaks during a press conference on day two of the 2014 NATO Summit at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, Wales, on September 5, 2014. By Yunus Kaymaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

#WhyIStayed, Ctd

The powerful response to video footage of Ray Rice’s attack continues. An anonymous Daily Beast contributor tells her story:

Later, I took a photo of my eye with my cellphone, the skin around it still swollen, the whites streaked with popped red veins. “Never forget,” I said to myself as I snapped the shot. And I didn’t. I knew at that point I’d leave him someday, and that I’d know when the time was right. But it wasn’t then.

For months, I did my best to carry on while no therapy appointments were made, no grand apologetic gestures were offered. The memory of that night surfaced in our almost daily arguments. They escalated to yelling and name-calling, but never over the edge he’d crossed that one night. “It was a weird side effect of the cold medicine,” he told me once. “If you hadn’t pushed me…” he said another time. “Abusive husband?!” he’d laugh.

With the distance of time, I slowly lost my power, the gravity of the event getting lighter and lighter until it didn’t seem like a big deal even to me. But I felt like a phony; on the outside, a strong woman raising strong daughters, and yet secretly married to a man who I’d castrate with my own bare hands if my girls ended up with anyone like him.

Ex-NFL player Kyle Turley wants commissioner Roger Goodell gone:

Football players deserve a league that will do better than aiding and abetting violence against women. Nobody in the NFL likes to see domestic violence. Nobody wants it around. Everybody — I think even guys like Ray Rice — if they saw it happening, would stand up for women.

Unfortunately, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and his brass chose not to stand up. Instead, they decided to deal with this situation behind closed doors. They hoped they wouldn’t be exposed. Without this video, even though we knew exactly what Ray Rice had done, the NFL never would have changed its ruling on his suspension, nor would he have been kicked off his team.

Andrew Sharp agrees:

If owners don’t really care about the NFL setting some grand standard for the rest of society, that’s totally fine. But Monday should scare them. If the NFL ever really loses supremacy in sports and culture, Monday is a good preview of what that looks like. The league will become such a mess that nobody can bring themselves to care about the actual games.

It may not be Goodell’s job to solve domestic violence, but it’s definitely his job to make sure that scenario doesn’t happen. At some point, shouldn’t it matter that he’s failing miserably?

Stacia L. Brown argues that “making an example of Ray Rice isn’t enough”:

The league should take this opportunity to implement accountability programs that work in concert with counseling professionals, team owners, coaches, fellow players, and the fans. Since viral video has changed the stakes and made it impossible to keep the community out of off-field scandals, why not find ways to involve us more? Less is known about domestic abuse prevention programs, aimed to treat and educate abusers, than about intimate partner violence protection centers for victims. The CDC’s Domestic Violence Prevention Enhancement and Leadership Alliances (DELTA) describes its treatment model as one that addresses “the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors, and allows [facilitators] to address risk and protective factors from multiple domains.”

DELTA programs emphasize that engagement with communities — rather than isolation from them — play a critical role in reducing instances of physical aggression … It may be too late for Ray Rice to serve as study participant in an NFL-facilitated program patterned at DELTA’s, but the league would do well to consider making its future approaches to “example-making” more symbiotic and less singular.

“Declaring A War On The War On Drugs”

Jon Walker heralds an important new report:

On Tuesday a broad coalition of international statesmen including former UN secretary general Kofi Annan and former Presidents from Mexico, Switzerland, Brazil, Portugal, Chile and Poland called for the world to move towards a new approach on drug policy. Their vision would end the criminalization of drug use and instead focus on health, harm reduction, and the legal regulation of drugs. The plan is laid out in a new report Taking Control: Pathways to Drug Policies that Work from the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

Friedersdorf gives the document a close read:

I can’t help but conclude that what they’re doing–in the accepted parlance of our political discourse–is declaring a war on the war on drugs. The attacks on drug warriors start right in the summary.

“Powerful and established drug control bureaucracies, both national and international, staunchly defend status quo policies,” the report states. “They seldom question whether their involvement and tactics in enforcing drug policy are doing more harm than good.” The zingers keep coming: “Meanwhile, there is often a tendency to sensationalize each new ‘drug scare’ in the media,” the report continues. “And politicians regularly subscribe to the appealing rhetoric of ‘zero tolerance’ and creating ‘drug free’ societies rather than pursuing an informed approach based on evidence of what works. Popular associations of illicit drugs with ethnic and racial minorities stir fear and inspire harsh legislation. And enlightened reform advocates are routinely attacked as ‘soft on crime’ or even ‘pro-drug.'”

Sullum is less enthusiastic:

The report says governments should seek the sweet spot between the “unregulated criminal market” and the “unregulated legal market”: the point where “social and health harms” are minimized.

That aspiration, which does not seem to take into account the pleasure that people get from drugs, is apt to encourage much heavier regulation than libertarians would like. The commissioners take for granted “the need to better regulate alcohol and tobacco,” and they call for “maintaining prohibitions on the most potent and risky drugs or drug preparations” (which will mean different things to different legislators), forgetting their own point that drugs should be legal “precisely because they can be dangerous and pose serious risks.” Still, Annan et al.’s “responsible legal regulation” beats the violent crusade for an unattainable (and undesirable) “drug-free society” by a mile.

New Additions To The Apple Ecosystem

Apple Unveils iPhone 6

Mat Honan puts Apple’s latest offerings in context:

The biggest thing Apple showed off Tuesday wasn’t a product, or even a product line. It was the way all of Apple’s products—and thousands more from other developers, manufacturers and services—now mesh together. It is like a huge ubiquitous computer now, all around us, all the time. The interface is the very world we live in.

Leonid Bershidsky argues that Apple has “established itself as the world’s biggest fashion company by releasing a smartwatch that is more about beauty and variety than about technology”:

The Apple Watch isn’t a tech miracle. It requires a phone to work, creating an Occam’s-razor moment for the consumer: Do I need another device if I still have to carry my phone around with me everywhere? Samsung has overcome this by offering a smartwatch that doesn’t need a phone.

The Apple Watch’s functionality isn’t market-beating. It’s a basic fitness tracker that can count steps, measure the heart rate and prompt the wearer to be more active. The device can handle messaging the way its competitors do. The Siri voice assistant makes an expected appearance. Though Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook seemed enthusiastic about the watch’s useful features, they are too boring to discuss – particularly in comparison to the Apple Watch’s beauty as an object.

Vauhini Vara is skeptical about smartwatch demand:

That people are turned off by the high price of smartwatches shouldn’t be particularly worrisome for the companies that make them; production costs and prices are bound to fall over time. What’s notable is the percentage of people who don’t see what makes a smartwatch particularly useful. While MP3 players could be marketed as a replacement for CD players, and smartphones could be sold as better cell phones, smartwatches have nothing to displace. Companies have to persuade people to add a device to their lives. And given that, people aren’t going to buy smartwatches unless they do something that existing devices, like smartphones or fitness trackers, don’t do—or, in any case, unless they do it better.

So far, no smartwatch has accomplished this.

Even if the watches sell well, Yglesias highly doubts they will be the kind of success the iPhone has been:

Apple announced a new smartwatch on Tuesday afternoon, which is naturally big news both to the world of gadget fans and the business press. But the sad reality for Apple’s public relations department is that no matter how well the company does on the product front, it is essentially doomed to disappoint the somewhat-crazed world of the stock market.

That’s not because of any shortcomings in the Apple Watch — it looks pretty cool — but because the iPhone is simply an insanely great business, the likes of which no company may ever see again. It manages to generate over half the revenue of the most valuable company in the world, completely dwarfing the Mac, the iPad, or the iPod. This is a special kind of business success. It’s not just that iPhones are good phones (though they are), but that they sit at the intersection of a complicated web of factors that makes their success essentially impossible to replicate in any other product.

Andrew Cunningham raises questions about the watch’s capabilities:

The things we really need to know about the Apple Watch are things we can’t know until it’s actually out: what does it do, and how does it work? The Apple Watch looks like a more credible fitness gadget than any Android Wear (or Samsung Gear) smartwatch we’ve seen yet. Tim Cook hinted at some additional capabilities—controlling his Apple TV, using the watches as walkie-talkies—beyond the simple notifications-on-your-wrist thing that the presentation focused much of its attention on. The addition of the crown makes navigation a little more interesting, though a lot of the interactions seem to require the same swiping and tapping that Android Wear devices require. But until we see it in real life, we don’t know how any of that stuff will actually play out.

Alexis Madrigal wonders about battery life:

Apple left one big, huge thing out of its Apple Watch announcement today: how long its battery will last. What we do know is that it’s designed to be worn “all day,” and to be easy to charge at night. How will that hope that translate into real performance? No one is quite sure. But the fact that Apple completely declined to talk about the battery may be a bad sign. Even having to charge a wearable device every night seems like a hassle. While batteries have improved a lot in the last 20 years, they are not on the kind of trajectory that processing speed or storage space have been.

Nicholas Carr has other concerns:

[S]trapping a technological companion and monitor onto your wrist can alter, in ways that are hard to foresee, life’s textures and rhythms. And never before have we had a tool that promises to be so intimate a companion and so diligent a monitor as the Apple Watch.

(Photo: The new Apple Watch is displayed during an Apple special event at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts on September 9, 2014 in Cupertino, California. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Wars, Dumb Wars, And Permanent War

IRAQ-UNREST-VOLUNTEERS

The great and wonderful thing about being a neoconservative is not just that you never have to come to terms with your mistakes – because you are never, ever wrong – but you can also write the same column again and again across decades and Washington will still find you a deep and meaningful thinker. You know the two-step by now: plug in any foreign crisis, call it the 1930s, campaign for war, and pick up your welfare check from a think tank.

Here’s Bob Kagan, as noted by Peter Beinart, on the rise of ISIS among the Sunnis in Iraq after the war Kagan championed and has never apologized for:

The Obama Administration’s current policy invites Islamist adventurism abroad and repression at home. At the beginning of this bloody century, we all should have learned that appeasement, even when disguised as engagement, doesn’t work.

Actually, those sentences were slightly adapted from a column Kagan wrote in 1998, when he and Bill Kristol were itching for a fight with China (which was as good as they could get at the time, before al Qaeda came along). They didn’t get their Cold War then, but after 9/11, they sure hit the jackpot. Their conclusion from those futile, costly catastrophes? Let’s have another one – to deal with the fateful consequences of the first.

But really: Chamberlain again? 1931? Are they that lazy? Yes they are! But how does someone in 2014 actually write the following?

Until recent events, at least, a majority of Americans (and of the American political and intellectual classes) seem to have come close to concluding not only that war is horrible but also that it is ineffective in our modern, globalized world.

Gee, Bob, why on earth would any American conclude that war is ineffective these days? Maybe it’s because we tried it for a decade in Iraq and made things far worse than they were in the first place. Maybe it’s because the longest ever American war in Afghanistan seems destined for the exact same conclusion. Maybe because we’ve seen its horrors in the memories of so many whom we have lost and the faces of so many more trying to overcome the trauma – physical and emotional – of the horror in Iraq he and I urged upon the country so eagerly.

Beinart sketches the extraordinary number of wars, air-strikes, drone-strikes and the like that have already gone on under this administration:

Near the end of his first year in office, President Obama sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. That same year, he began an expansion of America’s drone program that would lead him to authorize eight times as many strikes (so far) as George W. Bush did. In 2011, the Obama administration helped militarily depose Muammar al-Qaddafi. Over the last month, it has launched 130 airstrikes in Iraq, with more almost certainly to come, perhaps in Syria as well.

If this is appeasement, what would the alternative look like? A full-scale military confrontation with Russia? Another occupation of Iraq? A war with Iran? Kagan doesn’t say, of course, his silence on this as damning as his silence on Iraq and Afghanistan. To take his absurd analogy at face value, it would require re-invading Germany once again in 1920 – just two years after the First World War.

This is not an argument; it’s a feeling. And the feeling is fear directed outward with violence and aggression. It comes perilously close to seeing perpetual war almost as an end in itself, an instrument to maintain and expand global hegemony, even after it has bitten us again and again in the ass. It sees only good motives – not unintended consequences. And you see in it a constant rhetorical drumbeat that anything other than permanent war is somehow weakness, rather than strength.

We can do better. We can learn from our mistakes – rather than simply ignoring them. We can defend ourselves without invading other countries with land armies, without occupying places we do not understand and cannot control, and without creating new enemies every time we launch a drone strike or threaten another war. This is not appeasement. It is prudent self-defense, moral self-defense, American self-defense – and a foreign policy insulated from fear and panic and hysteria and self-doubt. The fight for this is not over. In some ways, especially as we face the prospect of a future president Clinton or another Republican schooled in neocon cant, it may just be beginning.

(Photo: Iraqi Shiite tribesmen brandish their weapons as they gather to show their willingness to join Iraqi security forces in the fight against Jihadist militants who have taken over several northern Iraqi cities, on June 17 2014, in the southern Shiite Muslim shrine city of Najaf. By Haidar Hamdani/AFP/Getty Images)

Was The Ebola Epidemic Preventable?

Laurie Garrett argues as much, blaming the international community for not acting on the crisis early enough:

Shortly after the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared an outbreak of the same strain of Ebola that first appeared in Zaire in 1976, outside humanitarian responders appeared on the scene to assist Guinea; they were the organizations that dominated the treatment and prevention efforts throughout the spring and into the summer, as Ebola spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. During that time the outbreaks were largely rural, confined to easily isolated communities, and could have been stopped with inexpensive, low-technology approaches.

But the world largely ignored the unfolding epidemic, even as the sole major international responder, Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym, MSF), pleaded for help and warned repeatedly that the virus was spreading out of control. The WHO was all but AWOL, its miniscule epidemic-response department slashed to smithereens by three years of budget cuts, monitoring the epidemic’s relentless growth but taking little real action. Even as the leading physicians in charge of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s Ebola responses succumbed to the virus, global action remained elusive.

Julia Belluz flags a new study that assesses the virus’s chances of making its way to America:

In a Sept. 2 article in the journal PLoS Currents: Oubtreaks, they published their findings. “Results indicate that the short-term (3 and 6 weeks) probability of international spread outside the African region is small, but not negligible,” they wrote. Ghana, the United Kingdom, Gambia, the Ivory Coast, and Belgium were the countries most at-risk of importing at least one case by Sept. 22, the date they chose as the projected cut-off for their model. Out of the 16 countries analyzed, the US ranked 13th (toward the last) for risk of importing Ebola by that time. The risk for the US was as high as 18 percent and as low as one percent.

And as Ronald Bailey notes, the same study calculates that any US outbreak would only infect about 10 people. Meanwhile, Joshua Hunt takes a look at another promising Ebola treatment, made by the pharmaceutical company Toyama Chemical:

The Fujifilm subsidiary’s small yellow tablets are marked アビガン, which is a Japanese rendering of the brand name Avigan. They inhibit the replication of viral genes within an infected cell, while also mitigating their ability to spread from one cell to another—a two-pronged approach to fighting influenza that Fujfilm says is unique. The drug was approved in March by Japan’s health ministry as a treatment for both novel and reëmerging forms of influenza, but researchers have theorized that it could be an effective emergency treatment for Ebola. …

Avigan offers new hope because, since it received regulatory approval for sale in Japan in the spring, it has been manufactured on a much larger scale than the experimental drugs being developed specifically for Ebola. Supplies of ZMapp, which was created by the San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, have already been exhausted, and its results have been mixed. Two American doctors treated with ZMapp recovered, but a Liberian doctor who also received it died. Fujifilm’s Avigan stockpile would be sufficient to treat twenty thousand people—the exact number of infections that the World Health Organization has estimated might occur before the current outbreak is brought under control.

“Not Mission Creep; Mission Gallop”

Greenwald is shocked but not surprised at how the notions that ISIS is a grave national security threat and “of course we’re going to war with them” have both become conventional wisdom:

If the goal of terrorist groups is to sow irrational terror, has anything since the 9/11 attack been more successful than those two journalist beheading videos? It’s almost certainly the case that as recently as six months ago, only a minute percentage of the American public (and probably the U.S. media) had even heard of ISIS. Now, two brutal beheadings later, they are convinced that they are lurking in their neighborhoods, that they are a Grave and Unprecedented Threat (worse than al Qaeda!), and that military action against them is needed. It’s as though ISIS and the U.S. media and political class worked in perfect unison to achieve the same goal here when it comes to American public opinion: fully terrorize them.

Larison fumes over the war’s rapidly expanding objectives:

It hasn’t taken very long for last month’s “limited” intervention in Iraq to expand far beyond anything that the administration originally described to the public.

Administration officials were denying that they planned for a “sustained” campaign just a few weeks ago, and now they’re saying the opposite. Obama said that he wouldn’t “allow” the U.S. to be dragged into a new war, and he is now setting out to take the U.S. into that war. What we’re seeing now is not so much mission creep as mission gallop, and it all seems to be happening without any serious consideration of the costs or the potential dangers of such an expansive campaign.

Even if the U.S. does not eventually commit large numbers of ground troops to this campaign, the U.S. will be at war in two countries where it does not need to be fighting. This is every bit as much a war of choice as the earlier wars in Iraq and Libya, and it hasn’t been thought through any better than those were.

Christopher Dickey thinks the ISIS threat is being overhyped, though he worries about lone ISIS-inspired nut-jobs like Mehdi Nemmouche, who killed four people in an attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels in May:

Veteran terrorism expert Brian Jenkins notes the alarmism in Washington has reached such proportions, there’s a kind of “shock and awe in reverse.” Thus, as Jenkins writes, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proclaims ISIS is an “imminent threat to every interest we have.”  A congressional staffer argues that it is “highly probable ISIS will…obtain nuclear, chemical, biological or other weapons of mass death…to use in attacks against New York [or] Washington.” Texas Governor Rick Perry claims there is a “very real possibility” that ISIS forces may have crossed the U.S.-Mexican border. Senator James Inhofe asserted, “We are in the most dangerous position we’ve ever been in as a nation,” and retired Marine four-star Gen. John Allen goes so far as to say, “World War III is at hand.”

All this plays to the advantage of the self-proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim, formerly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whose ragtag army conquered a huge swathe of Iraq mainly by filling the vacuum left by incompetent Iraqi government military commanders. The conquest—and the reaction to it—have given him an aura of invincibility that holy-warrior wannabes find quite thrilling.

I actually hadn’t absorbed the sheer hysteria in Washington after the beheadings-bait. It’s truly shocking – and utterly insane. My earlier thoughts here.

#WhyIStayed

A trending hashtag is providing insight into why abuse victims stay with their abusers. Alex Abad-Santos spotlights the powerful tweets, which are a response to the Ray Rice video:

Looming over this violent act is the fact that Janay went on to marry the man who beat her — leading some people, most notably the anchors on Fox News’s Fox and Friends,  to wonder why she, and other abused women, wouldn’t just immediately flee an abusive relationship. They don’t, because it’s not that simple.

Hence the hashtag #whyistayed.

It was started by writer Beverly Gooden, who wrote, “I believe in storytelling. I believe in the power of shared experience. I believe that we find strength in community. That is why I created this hashtag.” It began trending on Twitter on Monday night, as women used the hashtag to explain the psychology and the reality of their domestic abuse situations — some thought it would get better, others didn’t have a place to turn, many felt shame, several wanted to keep the family together. The testimonies are powerful to read, and they shred the idea that it’s easy for victims to leave their abusers.

Olga Khazan rounds up #whyistayed tweets and research on domestic abuse:

In 1999, law professor and domestic violence survivor Sarah Buel offered up 50 obstacles to leaving, most of which remain unchanged. She points out that the end of the relationship can be just the start of the most serious threats. A battered woman is 75 percent more likely to be murdered when she tries to flee than if she stays.

Welfare is the major safety net for single moms, but its monthly benefit levels are far below living expenses for a family of three. In a study of Texas abuse victims who returned home, the number-one reason cited for returning was financial, Buel writes.

Sarah Kaplan adds another important detail:

The National Coalition for Prevention of Domestic Violence estimates that 25 percent of women experience intimate partner violence, and according to the National Domestic Abuse hotline, it takes an average of seven tries for a victim to leave an abusive relationship.

The types of tweets you will find over at #whyistayed: