Self-Painted into a Corner, POTUS Ponders Cosmetic Attack Against Syria

            

It is often remarked, mainly by frustrated parents and disrespected teachers, that two wrong do not make a right. But then what do they make? The scolds never tell us that. Well, judging from the skein of events, now more than two years old, that appear to be leading to a U.S.-led attack on Syria, one would have to conclude that two wrongs make a mistake.

            The first wrong was the President’s declaration that Bashir al-Assad “must go”, and then doing less than nothing to redeem his own words. “Less than nothing” because the Administration actually discouraged other parties who were inclined to act early in the Syrian civil conflict to keep it from worsening and spreading—if only they could secure U.S. pledges to “lead from behind” with diplomatic cover and logistical support. They could not secure such pledges.

            The second wrong was the Presidential declaration of a “red line” concerning the use of chemical weapons, and then, once again, doing nothing when the Syrian regime crossed that red line. Not that the line made any sense, since it implied that killing 1,000 innocent people with chemical weapons was somehow worse than killing 100,000 in more old-fashioned ways; but the equivocations that the U.S. government displayed at the time made Bill Clinton’s peregrinations over the meaning of “is” look quaint by comparison.

            As a result of these two wrongs, the credibility of both the President and the United States more broadly has suffered grievously, and now the Syrian regime—apparently—has forced the issue (whether deliberately or not we will take up below). The sense now is that if the United States does not draw blood, the presumption of U.S. fecklessness will worsen, rendering the real target of American strategic concern in the region, Iran, less fearful than ever that America will redeem its pledge to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons capability. That, in turn, would hasten the day when Israeli fears may drive it to act alone. No one wants that, particularly the Israelis.

So whatever the Administration has said about the purpose of an attack being to “degrade and deter” Syrian capabilities, but not to change the regime, everyone expects the attacks to be modest and brief, thus not to much affect the battlefield balance, and once ceased to stay ceased. That is because the Administration’s reticence at being drawn into the bowels of Syrian madness is both well established and well justified. The attacks, then, will likely not degrade or deter anything really; they will be offered up only as a safety net to catch the falling reputation of the President as it drops toward the nether regions of strategic oblivion.

If that is the case—if the military activity in prospect is of only wrist-slap symbolic magnitude—then better to forgo it altogether. It would be a mistake.

An attack designed manifestly for reputational purposes—and we have once again foolishly told the world, Hamlet-like, everything we’re thinking if not everything we’re planning—will be counterproductive precisely in that reputational vein. It will enable al-Assad to say he faced down the United States and survived. It will bolster the morale of his side and crush that of rebel forces. It may encourage the Syrian regime to accelerate and deepen the use of chemical weapons (which we cannot effectively neutralize with air power alone) against his enemies, just as the Kosovo air campaign worsened dramatically the humanitarian horrors we said we were trying to stop. It will cheer the Russian thugs who have supported Assad and benefitted from it politically at zero cost to themselves.

Above all, it will illustrate for the whole world to see that a great military power— indeed, the greatest in the world—either does not know how to use force to achieve political ends, or that it cannot stomach the sacrifices it might entail. The use of force to no deliberate political end is worse than no use of force at all. It expresses strategic illiteracy. It predestines failure even if it hits every target on its short list.

Moreover, if undertaken only with European and Turkish support—and no public Arab endorsement (who gives a duck shadow flying backwards about the UN?)—an attack will come across to most Arabs as yet another example of heartless and arrogant imperial hubris visited on their poor, helpless heads. Indeed, with the Turks associated with the effort (prospective U.S. Air Force participation might base itself from Turkish soil), we risk compounding the humiliation with not one, not two, but three consecutive eras of imperial assault—Ottoman, French and American—all rolled into one. (Yesterday’s British parliamentary vote gets the UK surprisingly off the hook.) That this represents a warped and distorted caricature of present political realities is certainly true. It also certainly doesn’t make a whit of difference; we cannot disabuse the Arabs of their victimization syndrome or their broader grievance culture, however much we may wish to do so.

The potential downsides of a sharply limited attack do not stop there. Iran has threatened to respond to attacks on its ally, and it may have means to do so within the United States. The reason no al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” have been uncovered in the United States in the past dozen years is because there weren’t any. One cannot be so confident about Hizballah cells, or about the FBI’s ability to do anything in this regard beyond entrapping clueless amateurs. Sleeper cells aside, there may be lone wolves like Nidal Malik Hasan or the Tsarnaev brothers who will feel compelled to respond to a U.S. attack on a Muslim country in the terrorist tense.  Please do not misunderstand me: The United States of America should never be deterred from using force in the national interest by such piddling third-order threats. But what is the point of running even such modest risks when the use of force is expressly designed to achieve no strategic or political objective?

A feckless use of American force could also have negative reputational effects both within and far from the greater Middle East. The recently indicted Ahmed abu-Khatallah in Libya will have himself a time dancing a Cyrenaican jig to the tune of an old Dave Clark Five song called “Catch Us If You Can.” Egyptian generals will take the full measure of our sagely advice to them, and of our punchless posturing over sequestering their aid money. Such a squandering of reputational capital might pivot all the way to the Pacific. The nutbags in Pyongyang will dance for joy, gangnam-style presumably (boy, what a picture that conjures). Our friends in Tokyo, however, will hard-swallow much sake.

Of course, it is possible that the Administration knows all this and that, despite its past reticence, it is preparing an open-ended military campaign that would truly degrade and deter, and, if it does, that would necessarily change the state of battlefield play within Syria. To do that, however, the Administration would in effect be taking the country to war in a region it has been trying with all its might for five years to exit. Going large might also touch off an explosion of regional war engulfing the Gulf as well as Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, various and sundry Kurds, Turkey and Israel. It could also touch off a series of more isolated but violent reactions from Morocco to Baluchistan and back again.

To finish an effort just to end the fighting in Syria would take months, cost billions and put U.S. airmen and marines very much in harm’s way. Once the fighting ends, if we can make it end without putting troops on the ground (a dubious proposition), we would still be on the hook (unless we are completely irresponsible…..) for managing if not manning a “Phase IV” stabilization and reconstruction effort.  That effort, however composed, would take at least 50,000 troops as long as a decade—and at a cost of at least $25 billion—to do adequately, since the Syrian state has been utterly destroyed. I doubt the Administration can work up any enthusiasm for such efforts. The uniformed services are not exactly thrilled by the prospect either.

Well, isn’t there something in between all-out engagement and mere symbolic military fecklessness? Can’t we devise a middle way—this President loves split-the-difference middle ways, after all—that can turn the trick in Syria but not expose ourselves to the dangers and costs of a major, open-ended campaign?  Perhaps. If there is such a middle way, it would be worth pondering. Months ago I aired the option of using just a few very big sub-nuclear bombs (MOABs we call then now; we used to call a roughly similar ordnance a “daisy cutter”) to level (pun completely intended) at least Assad’s end of the playing field. And while cruise missiles launched from ships in the Mediterranean cannot readily crater airfields in Syria, the USAF can do so by other means. If I were in charge of such an effort, I would also not hesitate to attack some of the Salafi strongholds on the Sunni side of the street, lest they get the extremely pernicious notion in their fanatical little heads that we will dispatch their enemies for them free of cost.

Still, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can guarantee control over either the specific military outcome or the full array of other consequences of a middle-weight attack on Syria. Even assuming we could define such an attack (not so easy so not so obvious), it would be damned risky to execute it.

I mooted above two wrongs the Obama Administration committed in Syria. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that these two exhaust the list.

For example, the Administration seems to have adopted the view that diplomacy could do no harm, and might do some good, in trying to deal with the Syria crisis. So in Macawberist fashion it encouraged the Kofi Annan UN peace mission and it accepted the Russian notion of a conference to negotiate a political settlement to the war, hoping vainly that “something would turn up” to change the trajectory of events. But both of these efforts merely bought time for the Assad regime to change the terms of the war to its benefit. Diplomacy can indeed be harmful if one’s opposite number is not interested in quids pro quo unless and until faced with annihilation.

Very much related, the Administration seems to have adopted the time-honored but foolish view that the use of force or its threat should always be a last resort. The Neville Chamberlain School of foreign policy, as I call it, is blind to the fact that early resolve can sometimes head off nasty greater evils, which are precisely the kind of evils the Obama Administration faces today. So American errors in the Syria crucible have not been limited to unfortunate Presidential statements, not by a long shot.

But the United States need not be the only party to the conflict capable of making mistakes. Some see the recent use of Syrian chemical weapons as a mistake on Assad’s part. It may be, but to come to that conclusion one has to make a series of assumptions: that Assad ordered the attack rather than some other agent of the Syrian regime; that the scale of the attack was deliberate; and of course that the rebels did not somehow, very improbably, figure a way to do this in hopes of eliciting a Western intervention to their advantage. But let’s assume for the sake of discussion that Assad did order the chemical attack: Was it a mistake?

I heard a Washington Post reporter speaking on the radio a few evenings ago (I cannot remember the name, and even if I could I think it’s better left unmentioned) asking aloud, to wit: Why would Assad order such an attack just in advance of a UN inspection team coming to Syria? Why would he risk getting his murderous hand caught in the cookie jar? Well, this reporter, whoever he was, is in need of immediate remedial lessons in Hama Rules competitions.

Consider that when Kofi Annan engaged in his futile mission, lo these many months ago, the Syrian leadership with whom he engaged spared no effort to smile at him, lie through their teeth, and humiliate him at every turn. This is what Levantine Arab males, especially long-oppressed minority types like Alawis, enjoy doing most, particularly in the face of supposedly superior, preening do-gooders from the outside world. They derive exquisite pleasure from such games, and from the impact such engagements have on their endocrine systems, which they describe in ways similar to what our own sailors say about the smell of cordite. (If you cannot supply the punch-line here, it’s probably for the best.) So maybe Assad made a mistake with that chemical attack, and maybe he did not—time will tell, perhaps. But it’s not the least bit puzzling to see how he might have done it in full and conscious deliberation.

Why belabor this point? Because really understanding the enemy is critical to the impact of anything we may try to do militarily in Syria—whether middle-weight, heavy-weight or light-weight. Degrading enemy capabilities is to some extent an objective category, but deterring future Syrian regime behavior depends on more subtler psychological and cultural factors. People at war, with their backs to an existential wall, are not as easy to influence as they are these days to kill. Just as no one can make you feel inferior without your consent (wisely said Eleanor Roosevelt), no one can either terrorize or deter you without your consent either. If the Obama Administration really sees a need to degrade and deter the Syrian regime, if it’s not just mumbling speechwriter-quality bullshit for press consumption, it’s got to order up some really serious violence if it wants to bend the will of those who are consummate connoisseurs of it. If it’s not prepared to do that, and to risk the consequences it entails, it should shut up and stand down.

            

Al-Sis's Hammer, Obama's Nine-Iron

Aug. 15:

What happened in Egypt yesterday and is continuing to happen today is sad, disheartening and about as completely unsurprising as any such event can be. In Tuesday’s short post I referred in passing to “the impending street clashes in Cairo.” In my August 2 post I specified the epicenter of the violence to come, the Rabaa al-Adaweya mosque compound, and explained why it was coming:

The Egyptian military knows what it’s doing, or at least it thinks it does. It thinks that by showing strength at this early stage in what is bound to be a protracted conflict within Egyptian society, it reduces the likelihood of a civil war and massive domestic violence. Al-Sisi and company believe that if they seem weak now in the face of protests, it will encourage the Brotherhood and the Al-Nour Party salafis to take the next steps and organize for an insurgency.

In others words, al-Sisi and associates believe in the “strong horse” theory of political legitimacy, and they are now in the process of applying that theory to Egyptian realities. Might doesn’t necessarily make right—that’s not at all how Islamic jurisprudence on such matters reads—but it’s good enough for government work failing other, gentler institutional alternatives. The Middle East lacks the warm, fuzzy affection for the underdog that many Americans take to be second nature. The dominant view of what is still a patriarchal, hierarchical and still clingingly pre-modern set of Muslim Middle Eastern societies is that the weak deserve whatever depredations they suffer. It’s a kind of ur-Social Darwinism that has been at work for many centuries before Darwin himself ever saw light of day.

As I also said before, I think Egypt’s military leaders are right about this. And I suspect they recognized that the longer they waited to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood encampments the better prepared the MB would be to resist. And they have resisted, and are still doing so. Several score policemen are dead among the many hundreds of MB protestors in Cairo and around the country. So are hundreds of mostly innocent Copts, who have no recourse but to be on the wrong side of the Brotherhood’s murderous intolerance. Indeed, spending energy and resources to kill Coptic civilians and burn down their churches while Muslim police are bearing down on you with shotguns furnishes about the best example there can be of how MB fanaticism completely swamps its capacity for rational planning of any kind.

But I also said (in my July 4 post, just after the coup) that:

. . . if the Army tries to completely exclude the MB from the nation’s future political configuration, it is bound to sire a new generation of Islamist terrorists. Nothing about General al-Sisi suggests he is that foolish, however. So in a sense the limits of action within the ambit of Army-MB relations remain intact, at least in some form. But who knows? Making big mistakes is the one hallmark that, whatever their other differences, unifies recent Egyptian leaders.

Thus the question of the moment: Is al-Sisi now proving that he is “that foolish”?

Not necessarily. I still think that what we are seeing in Egypt is a kind of deck-clearing phase. I still think a new political modus vivendi between the military and Egypt’s variety of Islamists is possible and likely, once certain red lines are re-established. And I even still think the Egyptian military can and ultimately will play the role of Praetorian guard over the emergence of a more vital civil society, political pluralism and maybe, one day still far off, even something we in the West recognize as democracy—and I think that because of the significant liberalizing social changes in Egypt over the past generation or two that are deep, real and irreversible. But first the generals have to make the MB and the salafis to their “right” (these European terms limp badly applied to Egypt, admittedly) say “uncle.” That may take a few weeks, or months, it now seems—and of course all this is happening in the broader context of a near completely collapsed economy. But the odds are that the military will have its way; the MB will say “uncle.”

That said, if General al-Sisi and company insist on making huge, generative mistakes, if they overdo it so much as to pull down the tent on themselves as well as their enemies, all bets are off. Things are not yet out of hand, but they could be.

Consider that the development of liberal democracy in the West and elsewhere has been a complex, long-running and varied phenomenon. As my TAI colleague Frank Fukuyama has explained, it involves creating a competent post-patrimonial state (which Egypt lacks), genuine rule of law (which Egypt also lacks) and either procedural or substantive accountability (both of which Egypt now lacks…..so much, then, for those who were so quick to pronounce Egypt not only ready for democracy but actually a democracy just a few short years ago).

We can see in past developments leading to liberal democracy the dialectical relationships among technological changes, social mobilization, economic specialization and the sometimes derivative, sometimes independent power of political ideas. But what we also see in more cases than not is the outsized and unpredictable role of both happenstance and exotic personalities. Some places become democratic that shouldn’t, according to the lights of social science, and some don’t that should. At times like these analysts can therefore know oodles of history and social science and have ample reservoirs of area- and country expertise and still end up totally wrong because some jerk simply screws up. We’ll know pretty soon if al-Sisi deserves the description. The technical term for this is the “monkey-in-the-machine-room corollary” of political development.

* * *

Speaking of screwing up (or not), the New York Times continues its fall out of love with Barack Obama’s foreign and national security policies. The powers-that-be at the Gray Lady are evidently not thrilled with the President’s recent full-throated and quite artful defense of several NSA programs, and the way they describe the President today suggests an animus that has by now sunk down well below the waist. Get a load of this from Mark Landler and the usually even-tempered Michael Gordon:

Secretary of State John Kerry said the violence in Cairo was “deplorable” and “ran counter to Egyptian aspirations for peace, inclusion and genuine democracy”. . . . But Mr. Kerry announced no punitive measures, while President Obama, vacationing here on Martha’s Vineyard, had no public reaction. . . . On Wednesday morning, Mr. Obama was briefed on the situation by his national security adviser, Susan E. Rice. But he appeared determined not to allow events in Egypt to interrupt a day that, besides golf, included cocktails at the home of a major political donor, Brian Roberts.

Wow. Maybe Barack Obama really is Dwight David Eisenhower after all!

But I beg to differ with the Times’ insinuations—or at least one of them. The President is right not to allow himself and U.S. foreign policy to be, in effect, taken hostage by events over which we have little to no hope of control. Running one’s diplomatic mouth from the Oval Office (or Martha’s Vineyard…..whatever) while otherwise frozen in place is generally not a good idea. While Secretary Kerry is wringing his hands in Washington, al-Sisi is wringing necks in Egypt, and no amount of the former is going to stop the latter when existential issues are deemed to be at stake. So we are told, too, that Chuck Hagel, also on vacation, has spoken to al-Sisi more than a dozen times in private telephone conversations since July 3. That’s nice. (Besides, as Kerry and Hagel have to know, the Saudis, Qataris and other Gulf regimes are paying the Egyptian generals a lot more money to do what they are doing than the United States is sort of half-credibly threatening to withhold if they don’t.)

There is, however, one speck of plain truth in the Times’ account. The day some weeks ago when the AP and IRS scandals were front-page news, the President made brief comments to the White House press corps about them before helicoptering off to—where?—a major fundraiser on Wall Street. And here we go again: Egypt bleeds and POTUS cares more about straightening out his nine-iron shots and having cocktails with Brian Roberts, the very wealthy CEO of Comcast. Hey, I never said the President was doing the right thing for the right reasons.

But unlike the Times, I don’t trivialize the President’s priorities. His legacy, in his own words, is to win the House for the Democrats in the coming mid-term election. That’s what he cares about. He’s told us as much, and by now we had best be believing it. You may like it or not, but at least the man can do something about achieving that goal. There is very little he can do about the present state of political play in Egypt—very little indeed.

[An Egyptian woman identifies the body of a family member, a supporter of deposed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi killed during a violent crackdown by Egyptian Security Forces on pro-Morsi sit-in demonstrations the day before, at the al-Iman Mosque in Nasr City on August 15, 2013 in Cairo. Photo courtesy Getty Images.]

An Illustration from Heaven

Back on July 1, just a few days before the military ousting of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, I wrote a politically incorrect post about the pre-modern character of much of the Muslim Brotherhood cadre. I did so because it was directly relevant to the fact that a very large number of Egyptians were in the street protesting the Morsi administration’s arrogance and incompetence. And indeed, a few people wrote in politically unhappy with what I borrowed from another writer, called the IBM syndrome.  Here is in part what I wrote:

Years ago a clever and truth-telling fellow named David Lamb devised what he called the IBM syndrome to describe political culture in Egypt and the Arab world. The “I” stands for “inshallah“, may God will it: in other words, fatalism.  The “B” stands for “bokr“—tomorrow morning, or just tomorrow: suggestive of an extremely elastic, pre-modern perception of time, vaguely akin to some uses of the Spanish word mañana. The “M” stands for “malesh“, which is untranslatable, but which kind of means “whatever”, “never mind” or “fagetaboutit”. . . . Now, it is very politically incorrect to say this, but I will say it anyway: A typical Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood rank-and-file type now saddled up on the gyrating entrails of the Egyptian state bureaucracy not only is afflicted with the IBM syndrome, but he does not accept or understand causality as we use the word. . . . He also does not accept the existence of an objective fact separate from how he feels about it, and if he should feel negatively disposed toward the fact, whatever it is, the fact can be made simply to disappear. . . . In short, we are talking about mostly culturally pre-modern people who . . . cannot run a centralized modern state. Obviously, this does not apply to all MB types, and certainly it does not apply to all Egyptians; but it applies to enough of them currently in the state administrative sector to matter.

Now, every once in a while an example of some point I have tried to make comes along that is simply too good to pass over. The following excerpt from yesterday’s Washington Post coverage of the impending street clashes in Cairo is one of those examples. In its own wondrous way, it exemplifies all three parts of the IBM syndrome and the subtle nature of how MB cadre understand causality. I have italicized the line that illustrates the fatalism-predestination connection.

Um Roqiya said she will remain camped out with her five children, despite concerns for their safety.

“We are here to defend legitimacy. If I die defending that, we are martyrs,” she said while patting her 7-year-old son on the head. “My son tells me, ‘I won’t return until uncle Morsi comes back.’”

Her husband, longtime Brotherhood member Abdel-Latif Omran, said he can do nothing to protect his children from death because their fate has already been decided by God.

Organizations like UNICEF have condemned what it calls the deliberate use of children in Egypt who are “put at risk as potential witnesses to or victims of violence.” The Brotherhood says it cannot control families that choose to camp out.

Actually, MB leadership figures can control this if they wished to, but, you know…..inshallah, bokr, malesh.

Too Late, Too Soon: An Eventual Comment on Ahmed Abu Khatalla, the Housing Market, the Terrorism Blip in Yemen and the McCain-Graham Trip to Cairo

Aug. 7:

I’ve been going on a lot lately about time. My editor’s note for the forthcoming Autumn 2013 issue of The American Interest focuses down on that, and since not everyone who reads this blog also reads the magazine (shame on those of you to whom this applies….we need your money), I offer it here in mildly adjusted form (that is in no way meant to suggest or imply that you need not subscribe to the magazine, because we still need your money):

A good deal has been written over the years about the subjective perception of time. That’s the essence, I’ve always thought, of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The masterpiece of historical sociology on the subject is David Landes’s A Revolution in Time, where he shows how different ways of measuring time shape entire civilizations. Physicists and other mystics have their take, too. Thus Einstein: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Indeed, we’ve been told by everyone from Richard Alpert (Be Here Now) to Buckaroo Bonzai (“Wherever you go, there you are”) that nothing ever happens except in the present.

Yes, well, the problem with this is that the present is not a constant. It is disturbingly unstable. In some times and places it is a mere wraith; in others an anvil. In still others it is a highly fractured and diminished social possession, with some living life in mimesis of a remembered past while others in the same society live it as a projection of an imagined future. Dean Acheson once wrote that the “best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time”—doubtlessly a witty way to express a busy man’s thanksgiving for the mercifully regular cadence of time. But Acheson’s assumption that the rolling of the calendar through our lives is more or less symmetrical does not pass muster. During moments of crisis that disorient and surprise the future comes at us many days at a time. It is as David Mitchell wrote on page 363 of Cloud Atlas (which line went missing from the unfortunate movie made from the book): “Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.”

Those episodes of rapid incredulity may be increasing. According to Douglas Rushkoff’s engaging but occasionally sophomoric new book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, the tyranny of our raging cybernetic addictions has created an omnivorous presentism that is devouring our sense of balance and scale, polluting our reservoirs of social grace and our very sense of past and future. It is as though time itself has been shoved into a fisheye lens that magnifies the present, entering our brains in funhouse mirror spectacle. Yes, Ram Dass, we’re all here now, but now has turned out to be nowhere and no time in particular; and we are less content than agog because when time gets bent out of shape, we risk losing access to history’s capacity to anchor us and guide us forward. We also lose our collective narrator in culture, and so the culture loses its capacity to generate a sense of coherence. Fighting against that loss is the duty of every man and women who has had a proper education and still remembers some of it.

That’s not all. Some may recall that I began my July 4 post on “Egypt Continued, or Interrupted (Depending on Your Point of View)” this way:

Political upheavals are reckoned by the currency of accelerated experience. Human beings perceive time in many ways (more on time in a future post), but three fill out the spectrum. There is geological time, measured in hundreds of thousands and millions of years. There is personal time, measured by the sentient moments afforded by our circadian rhythms. And then there is political time, which is pretty much everything in between. Political time, in turn, breaks down into the ordinary, those long skeins of years and decades in which nothing much seems to be changing even when it is, and the revolutionary, those impossibly concentrated hours and days in which everything seems to be changing even when it isn’t.

You will note that I promised here more about time in a future post: Well, the future is here now, you’ll be unsurprised to learn—this is the post.

My burden today is actually much lighter than a promise to write once more about time might suggest. I simply want to mention in passing four items from today’s news, two of which should have happened a long time ago, and two of which have happened very quickly but probably shouldn’t have happened at all. Sorry to make you wait to get to the guts of the post…..well, no—take that back: I’m not sorry to make you wait. Waiting is good for you; it helps you appreciate the variability, value and volatility of time.

Let me start with the indictment, which is said to be imminent, of Ahmed Abu Khatallah. I have written about this guy before: Many months ago I told you that he was among those responsible—and probably primer inter pares among them—for the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi in September of last year.  Specifically, in my “Benghazigate” post on May 3, I explained as follows:

Consider: It has been nearly eight months since Ambassador Stevens’s murder, and the U.S. government has not done a damned visible thing about it. We have a pretty good, if not necessarily court-actionable, idea who was behind this—a guy named Ahmed Abu Khattala. Not long after the murders, Abu Khatalla held a kind of informal press conference at an outdoor restaurant in which he strutted, lied a lot, and seemed to take pleasure, if not explicit credit, for the attack on the Benghazi consulate. Yes, it took us nearly a decade to find bin-Laden (and in this light, and considering that Ayman al-Zawahiri is still breathing, why anyone would think that this was some sort of glorious success I swear I cannot understand), so eight months is not a long time in comparison. Yes, but still…

Now why is this? Well, I don’t doubt that Mike Vickers over at Joint Special Operations Command is trying to figure a way to whack this guy (and possibly some of his associates), but with the rules of engagement being what they are, and with the divisions of lawyers sprawled all over the Defense Department as they are, it’s not easy to get a clean shot. More important, no doubt, is that the State Department probably opposes doing anything without the cooperation and assent of the Libyan government. But the Libyan government is hopelessly feckless. We have not even been able to “interview” Abu Khatalla; Libyan authorities won’t pick him up or question him for fear of literal retaliation. And it seems clear that achieving swift justice in this matter is not high on the list of White House priorities.

So nothing seems to be happening, and nothing probably will happen—which is predictable since it, too, is part of a very unfortunate pattern. Consider that five U.S. Ambassadors have been murdered in office since 1965, three of them in the greater Middle East. In 1973, the PLO murdered Cleo Noel Jr. in Khartoum, Sudan. No retribution was ever exacted for his murder. In 1976, Ambassador Francis E. Meloy Jr. was murdered in Beirut.  No retribution was ever exacted for his murder. In 1979, Ambassador Adolph Dubs was murdered in Kabul. No retribution was ever exacted for his murder. And most recently Ambassador Stevens in Libya.

Yesterday, finally, Attorney General Eric Holder let the indictment cat out of the bag and boasted that, “I’m satisfied with the progress we have made in the investigation. Regardless of what happened previously, we have made very, very, very substantial progress in that investigation.” He sounds to me like a man bending over backwards juggling verbal incantations—using three “verys” in a single sentence is very, very, very rare in Washington, or anywhere outside of a sixth-grade classroom—to persuade himself, if not others, that what he’s saying is actually true.

But this is horse twaddle. The main reason everything has been going so painfully slow is that the State Department insists still (and the White House unfortunately concurs) on going through the Libyan government to pursue justice. But the Libyan government, such as it is, can’t do anything about Abu Khatallah without starting at least a small war. If Holder thinks that indicting Abu Khatallah is going to change the Libyans’ attitude or capability here, then he truly believes in magic.

This outrageous delay also reflects a reversion, as if going back from Bush 43 to Clinton II, of a highly legalized approach to the problem. This approach, which is characteristic of the FBI and its Justice Department masters for perfectly understandable historical reasons, is not suitable for such contingencies, which, while they are not very well described with the broad-bush term terrorism, are serious enough all the same. It is dangerous to leave Ahmed Abu Khatallah on the loose. To hell with indicting him; he is neither a U.S. national nor is he resident on U.S. soil, so he is therefore not entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution. I again wish Mike Vickers a clean shot.

So much for Eric and Ahmed; now for Fannie and Freddie. President Obama spoke yesterday in Phoenix about fixing the housing market, and about getting Fannie and Freddie into the retirement homes they so richly deserve. The President’s basic approach to the problem is inarguable. Not even normal Republicans, if there are any left not of the anarcho-libertarian wing of the party, could object to his basic thrust: get the government and its distortions out of the housing market except for a minor role in helping the very poor. The question is, why has this taken so damned long when everything the President said yesterday was obvious at least three years ago?

The answer involves too long a story to tell here, but suffice it to say that the reason is about more than the recent revival of the housing market making reform more politically plausible. That’s true, it has, and with no help from the White House a bill on the matter has been percolating on the Hill. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere….. Just as with immigration policy reform, the Obama White House has shown no interest in putting together governing coalitions unless doing that also strengthens the President’s prior concern withpolitical coalition-building. This most avariciously and narrowly political President in my lifetime only gets involved in actual policy questions when not doing so might cede political credit to someone other than himself. That’s mainly why this has taken so long.

Finally on this point, two short notes. First, if you really want to understand how Fannie and Freddie helped bring on the housing meltdown and Great Recession, read Mary Martell’s complex but enlightening November/December 2011 TAI essay “Fannie, Freddie and the House of Cards.”  They were responsible up to their bureaucratic and plutocratic eyeballs. Second and much related, note that Dodd-Frank did not even mention Fannie and Freddie, and one of the reasons is that both Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were the recipients of major campaign donations from these semi-government agencies—a phenomenon that should have been illegal in the first place. Those two were very much not alone among Democrats. So could it be, do you think, that the Obama folks found it politically untidy, let’s put it, to go after Fannie and Freddie before the November 2012 election? Do you think, huh?

OK, Eric and Ahmed, Fannie and Freddie…..now let’s move on to Ayman and Nasir. If it took way too long to get serious about the real national security issues concerning Benghazi, and way too long to get serious about the mortgage market mess, it took too little time to decide to shut down a few dozen U.S. Embassies in the Near East this past weekend. This is a delicate matter to discuss in public, but I’m great at delicacy—so here goes.

Apparently, we intercepted a communication from Ayman al-Zawahiri to the head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasir al-Wuhaishi, urging the latter, “Let’s do something.” Whether this something had to do with the end of Ramadan, which is tomorrow, or, more likely, the anniversary of 9/11 soon coming up, is hard to say. But if this is all the sigint we have (and I don’t know that), I doubt it’s adequate justification for all the public discombobulation we have gone through in the past few days. We don’t want to tell al-Zawahiri, whose actual power hold up somewhere in Pakistan is less than extensive these days, that he can cause us heartburn and laundry problems just by making a cell phone call he knows will be intercepted. After all, the message itself has got nothing on what hundreds of thousands of teenagers around the world say to each other every Friday night. As scary as teen behavior can be, it’s not necessarily a harbinger of great danger.

The interpretation that al-Zawahiri’s action makes him look weak is, I think, correct. It’s also potentially dangerous for him and those on the receiving end of such communications. To put it very generally and hence safely, if we intercept that call, we might be able to get a better idea where the communicants are physically located. And if we get a better idea where they are, well—hey Vickers, lock and load, dude. Indeed, that may explain the drone strikes in Yemen yesterday, just possibly. How should I know?

I’m not saying we were too quick to the pull the trigger on that, but I remain to be convinced that the evac order for Amciv dependents in Yemen and the public shut-down of so many embassies over the weekend were justified by the intelligence as against the signal of weakness it sends around the region broadly. Of course we justifiably err on the side of the safety in cases like this, all else equal. But all else is not equal in this case, and pretty much never is.  So OK, somebody come convince me, please.

Eric and Ahmed, Fannie and Freddie, Ayman and Nasir…..now for the fourth and last shidduch of the day: John and Lindsey.

The way the news reads, President Obama asked Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to go to Cairo to warn the General al-Sisi and associates that they better erect a more inclusive political tent, one that includes the Muslim Brotherhood, or their $1.5 billon aid money might be in jeopardy. They delivered this message in public in Cairo (and possibly in private too, but that’s not important, since the President himself has all sorts of ways to do that, not to exclude the recent travels of Undersecretary of State Bill Burns).

And so there are McCain and Graham, speaking in Cairo before a live and large audience, demanding concessions on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood that all Egyptians can see and hear, and that plenty of incredulous Americans can see and hear, too, back home on TV-repeated videotape over and over again. Can you imagine ‘ol Jake and Erma, sitting down to the TV news in Billings or Tulsa, just wondering the heck out of themselves why the deuce the two most prominent Republican hawks in the U.S. Senate are shilling for the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo?

Is Barack Obama so clever that he could so skillfully dangle the virtues of bipartisanship in foreign policy in front of McCain and Graham as to get them to fly all the way to Egypt to make fools of themselves? Or is Barack Obama so stupid that, having established an intelligent policy of “no c-word” and “no aid suspension”, he’s now reverting to his extremely bad habit of wanting to split the difference in all things (except partisan advantage) great and small, suggesting that he might suspend the aid money if the generals don’t do what he wants them to do? Good grief: Could both of these possibilities be true simultaneously?

Unless there’s something critical I don’t know about the message McCain and Graham have been carrying privately to al-Sisi that Bill Burns couldn’t or didn’t, I’d say that for tactical reasons the President was mistaken to ask them to go, and that for even simpler reasons McCain and Graham were mistaken to agree. Call me cynical, but I just can’t escape my suspicion that someone is trying to diddle somebody here, and has pretty much gotten away with it for all the wrong reasons. So, have we just beheld another adventure that happened too fast that probably should not have happened at all?

Well, time will tell, eventually. Or not.

The Sticks and Stones Theorem

August 2:

Sometimes it’s not what a statesman says in public that matters most, but both how he says it and the context in which he says it.  Case in point: Secretary Kerry’s remarks yesterday in Islamabad.

Having written speeches for two Secretaries of State, I am particularly sensitive to such nuances. I am also sensitive to the difference between Secretarial remarks that have been scripted and thought though, and extemporaneous remarks of the sort liable to pop out during encounters with the press. Mistakes happen with both sorts of language, but they tend to happen more often with the latter. And believe me when I tell you that the old sticks and stones theorem—that words can’t really hurt—is utterly false.

So am I saying that what Kerry said yesterday in Pakistan is a mistake? No, and yes.  Let me walk you through that answer, please, starting with the “what”, moving to the “how”, and concluding with the “context.”

What he said was perfectly fine, to my way of thinking—which I explained at some length in my July 11 post, “Missionary Creep in Egypt.” He said the Egyptian military intervened to protect democracy, that millions and millions of citizens urged it on to do so. That was a smart thing to say, even if the first part turns out not to be true, lest the majority of Egyptians think that the U.S. Government is pro-Muslim Brotherhood—an impression rather a lot of them developed over the past year for reasons that need not detain us now.

Kerry also said that there’s a civilian government in Egypt now, and that “so far”—he said it twice—the military has not taken over the government. That is fine to say, even though of course it’s not really true, because it serves several purposes. It pleases the majority in Egypt. It protects us from several possible troubling futures that might come to pass but that we cannot decisively influence. It also increases perhaps slightly what modest influence we do have on the Egyptian military. It also signals those who disagree with the Administration’s posture concerning the “c” word and the $1.5 billion in aid implicated by it that there will be no backing down and no deals over this. That’s all to the good.

The Secretary also noted that U.S. drone attacks on Pakistani soil now had a timetable to end, as of, apparently, the moment the words came out of his mouth. This came across as a concession to Pakistani sensibilities, but Kerry immediately and carefully aligned that remark with a key condition: We’ll stop when we’ve taken out the targets we have identified. This says, in so many words, that we’ve been successful pretty much so far, and that’s why we can foresee an end; but if we stop being so successful, maybe because the Pakistani military does not do its share in cleaning up the mess in its tribal areas, that endpoint will drift further into the future. This is a very delicate matter in Pakistan, not least for the once again new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and Kerry made the right noises. He bowed toward Pakistani opinion without forfeiting so much as a rupee’s worth of flexibility or leverage on our part.

Again, all this is separate from issues of truth or wisdom, in this case whether the drone-attack campaign that’s been so robustly augmented during the past four years-plus has been a good idea. As I have said before, and as have others, for the most part is has not. It’s one thing to blow genuine al-Qaeda types—transnational and trans-tribal terrorists of the chiliastic mass-murdering sort—into little clouds of pink meat in places like Yemen. I’m all for that, and I’m not even particularly squeamish about occasional collateral damage screw-ups. But targeting Pashtun tribesman in Waziristan involves a completely different strategic calculation—or at least it should. Once again U.S. decision-makers have displayed a very, very old trait: a near-complete incapacity to understand or take seriously critical differences within and among Middle Eastern and Muslims societies.

So much for the “what”, how about the “how”?

I have no gripe with Secretary Kerry’s use of language in discussing what he and his Administration associates wisely refuse to call the coup in Egypt. The statement about the Egyptian military not yet, “so far”, “so far”, having taken control of the government sounded to me a bit too studiously phrased. As such, it drew too much attention to itself and, since the statement is manifestly false, that’s not such a good thing to do. If you’re going to lie, if you need to do that for a good purpose, don’t wrap a red bandana around it and light off a cherry bomb. As for his locution about the future of U.S. drone strikes into Pakistan, that was fairly masterfully done.

Thus “what” and “how”; what about “context”?  This I want to approach in reverse order.

Secretary Kerry is in Pakistan on an official visit, and in his first “public” encounter with the press it made all the sense in the world to offer what could be taken as a mild concession, something that felt like a heartfelt two fingers on the top of the hand in friendship.  I’d like to think this had been worked out in advance with Prime Minister Sharif, because that’s the right way to do such things. The context was fine for those words uttered.

The context for what Secretary Kerry said about Egypt while in Pakistan, however, was about as unfortunate as can be. Let me count the two main ways.

Everyone paying attention knows that there are two large pro-Morsi sit-ins going on in Cairo right now, and everyone knows that General al-Sisi has ordered them shut down and dispersed. Everyone knows, too, that this looming confrontation comes on the heels of two especially vicious bloody attacks by the regime on the MB protestors, about which the U.S. government made several remonstrations in private, but said not a whole helluva lot about in public. And everyone knows why: The more inclusive the generals allow Egypt’s political framework to become as it is rebuilt from the ordeals of the past two years, the less likely Islamists will be driven to extremism, violence and terror tactics. But we don’t want to call the generals out in public on this at a time when we’re trying to win their confidence and cultivate their trust in our judgment.

Now, Kerry also said—and if you read the transcript of his remarks you can get the exact wording—that we don’t want to see mass violence again. “That can’t happen”, is how he unfortunately phrased it—because yes, it certainly can. So like his statement about the drone campaign in Pakistan, he tried to balance his remark, in essence trying to have it both ways. Be nice to the Egyptian military, so they’ll trust us better and take our views more seriously, but warn them against doing foolish things out of anger or spite in the meantime.

This splitting of the difference may or may not work with the Pakistanis, but it definitely won’t work with the Egyptians. The Egyptian military knows what it’s doing, or at least it thinks it does. It thinks that by showing strength at this early stage in what is bound to be a protracted conflict within Egyptian society, it reduces the likelihood of a civil war and massive domestic violence. Al-Sisi and company believe that if they seem weak now in the face of protests, it will encourage the Brotherhood and the Al-Nour Party salafis to take the next steps and organize for an insurgency.

They’re right. I therefore do not think they intend to overdo it, to try to extirpate the Brotherhood altogether from the future Egyptian political equation, as some have claimed to be their intent. At some point they will again tolerate the Brotherhood, within certain old and well-practiced red lines, if not tolerate Morsi, Badie and al-Shatar themselves. For the Egyptian military elite, this is a critical and existential decision-point; for the Obama Administration is clearly isn’t, and the Egyptian generals know that. This is a case, among a very great many, where the balance of interests is far more significant in determining outcomes than the balance of power.

The result of Kerry’s remarks, then, under the circumstances, will be to flash a green light to the Egyptian military’s use of force against the demonstrators. They will hear his first sentence or two, and they will ignore the rest. Many people will be killed, most likely, and it will then seem to some that the American Secretary of State is complicit in those deaths. That may not be entirely fair, but as with truth, fairness in such matters is a highly elastic concept.

The second aspect of context the Secretary should have been mindful of but apparently was not is that Pakistan is not a great place right now from which to praise the democratic credentials of a military ouster of an elected government. Pakistan is unusual in many ways, one of which is the fact that it has experienced both military and civilian government over the years with almost equal degrees of consensual remorse. The Pakistani roulette wheel points to “civilian” right now, and so my guess is that Prime Minister Sharif was not too thrilled to hear Kerry’s kind words about the actions of the Egyptian military. These days I suspect that General Kayani wasn’t either. Pakistan is like Egypt in that both countries suffer today from the Hot Potato Syndrome (HPS): No one really wants to rule what have become seriously ungovernable countries, lest they get burned for the long term from trying and failing.

Kerry would have been better off had he dodged the question about Egypt, and saved his remarks for the travelling press aboard Air Force II after wheels-up out of Pakistan. That way too, if the blood should dry thick outside of Rabaa al-Adaweya mosque in Cairo, Kerry will not stand to be blamed for helping to have spilled it.

Words can kill, just as sticks and stones can sometimes be employed as lesser evils. Beware nursery rhyme simplicities.

Still Broken, Again

August 1:

For my money (no serious pun intended, as you’ll see), today’s big news is yesterday’s District Court decision by Richard J. Leon to slap down the Federal Reserve’s violation of Congress’ intent in implementing the order in Dodd-Frank to reduce the fees banks can charge for the use of debit cards. This sounds arcane, I know, and it is; but that doesn’t mean it’s trivial.

For some details and oh-so-little useful background, as usual, go take a look at today’s New York Times and Washington Post coverage. I’ll wait…….

Now, if you’re not on drugs or preternaturally stupid, you will have already asked yourself why the Fed is in charge of this aspect of bank regulation as opposed to, say, the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department. Well you should ask, but that’s truly too arcane a history to tell here. So leave that aside for now, or else go read my TAI e-book Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It for some basic background on the actual relationship between the Fed and the banks.

Focus instead on the key facts. The Fed initially wanted to set the fee at somewhere between 7 and 12 cents, but the banking lobby weighed in and, before you could say “swindle me timbers” the bank-friendly Fed allowed the rate to be set at 21 cents. This was lower than the average fee before the crisis and the passage of Dodd-Frank, but the reasons advanced for moving the fee to roughly double the originally proposed number were transparently preposterous. So a coalition of retailing associations then sued the Fed, and yesterday it finally won its case.

The banks have urged the Fed to appeal; so this is not over. In any case, the 21-cent fee will remain until new rules can be written, which, given the banking lobbyists’ clout and the Fed’s natural interests, could take years. Note recent press accounts of how Dodd-Frank’s CEO salary disclosure rule remains unwritten after nearly three years (Jerry Markon and Dina ElBoghdady, “Pay Rule Unwritten Amid Corporate Push”, Washington Post, July 7, 2013).

What this episode clearly shows is that only outsized actors in the economy, like the National Retail Federation and its well-heeled allies, can stand up to the banks and their friends in the Fed in Federal court. Gigantism rules (another theme whose implications are analyzed in passing in Broken). Ordinary citizens are completely at the mercy of such forces; not even Congress itself can play at an equal level in this contest. And some political scientists wonder why so many Americans are alienated from their own supposed democracy….

Not that the ordinary citizen is entirely deprived of entertainment value in all this. After the Court ruled, the New York Times wrote as follows:

The banks say the retailers have pushed for the lower fees not to benefit customers, but to pad their own bottom lines. “It was—and still is—all about trying to help retailers increase profit margins while providing no real benefit to consumers,” said Frank Keating, president of the American Bankers Association.

I suppose it really does take one to know one, but for a bankers’ shill to accuse retailers of wanting to pad their bottom line at consumer expense has got to rank as world-class mega-chutzpah. We have reached a point where a remark can be both outrageous and hilarious at the same time. Yet the average American citizen is neither outraged nor humored because the entire subject is much too arcane to bother trying to understand it; that’s rational ignorance, and the logic of collective action, too, hard at work.

Boy, what a job they do, huh?