Perhaps Kathleen Parker's Problem is That She Doesn't Understand Honesty

At least if you're a Republican. Penning yet another childish screed about President Obama, Parker whines,

Moreover, people don’t like being insulted and misled, as many feel they have been by this administration. This is not just a feeling but a demonstrable fact, especially vis-a-vis the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not just the far-right fringe who object to the strategic misrepresentations along the way.

If Parker thought you had even a smidgen of intelligence, her next paragraph might cover some of the most outrageous lies about the PPACA. You know... like death panels. Or even some of the lesser Republican lies, like arguing that Obamacare would cover illegal immigrants, cause massive budget deficits, cause massive increases in insurance premiums, or involved the government taking over the insurance industry. Heck -- she, herself, is lying even as she writes about public sentiments toward the PPACA -- she knows that the key elements of the law, save for the mandate, are in fact supported by clear majorities of Americans, that it's the label that drags the law down. She probably giggles about the voters in Kentucky who praise Kynect and express their gratitude that it's not Obamacare, even though... it's simply the name Kentucky gives the exchange through which its residents can enroll in Obamacare.

What are the horrible lies that Parker attributes to Obama?

These obfuscations include telling the American people that they could keep the insurance they had if they liked it and also writing the law in such a way that the ACA’s mandate to purchase government-approved insurance was not a “tax,” despite the Internal Revenue Service’s role in policing its compliance.

Oh, the horror. An overstatement that was made in good faith, and run-of-the-mill machinations designed to get a better CBO rating. Politifact, the "fact-checking" outfit that made the declaration upon which the "lie" accusation is premised initially rated the statement as "true", making me wonder if they're producing a reliable analysis or if they're channeling an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Dean Baker has capably responded to those who want to hang their hats on the third (yes, in between declaring the statement "true" and "false", Politifact also rated it as half-true) analysis of the statement.

If Obama's pledge was understood as ensuring that every plan that was in existence in 2010 would remain in existence, then it would imply a complete federal takeover of the insurance industry. This would require the government to tell insurers that they must continue to offer plans even if they are losing money on them and even if the plans had lost most of their customers. This would at the least be a strange policy. It would be surprising if many people thought this was the meaning of President Obama's pledge....

On closer inspection, the claim that President Obama lied in saying that people could keep their insurance looks like another Fox News special. In the only way that the pledge could be interpreted as being meaningful, the pledge is true. The ACA does not eliminate plans that were in existence at the time the bill was approved.

Parker, of course, knows all of this, but anticipates that her intended audience does not.

Similarly, anybody who was following the debate over the PPACA knows that there was an absurd insistence that the law be revenue-neutral. They know that many compromises were built into the law, including significant delays in its implementation, to keep the books nominally balanced. Parker knows that the Republicans she serves would have shrieked like banshees had the mandate been explicitly enforced through a tax, as opposed to a penalty. Parker knows that the penalty is based on income and enforced by, you guessed it, the IRS. Within that context, her feigned surprise that the penalty could be characterized as a tax is quite revealing.

But wait -- there's more. Parker knows that her party and its supporters spent two years and spent vast sums of money litigating against the PPACA, and insisting through that litigation that the penalty was not a tax. If it was so obvious to everybody that the penalty was a tax, why spend years litigation the case, causing taxpayers to pour millions of dollars into its defense, only to reach the inevitable conclusion that it is a proper exercise of Congress's power to levy taxes? Why did the political right attack and vilify Chief Justice Roberts for joining the majority on that issue? What are we supposed to make of the refusal of Scalia, Alito, Kennedy and Thomas to join what Parker tells us was, at all times, a known and obvious fact? Parker later lectures,

This ruling, indeed, was the reason the ACA was able to go forward, which is why so many Republicans were apoplectic with Roberts’ siding with the liberals in a 5 to 4 ruling. In other words, Obama’s obfuscation was simultaneously revealed and rewarded by the court. And the American people were smacked with a health-system overhaul many more would have rejected had they known the truth.

If it is so blindingly obvious that the penalty is a tax, and if Parker truly believes that lying by politicians is a bad thing, why does she implicitly applaud the Republicans for lying about the mandate in order to perpetuate costly and divisive litigation? Why does she implicitly defend attacks on Roberts for accepting what she tells is is an obvious truth, rather than embracing a partisan lie in order to take down the law?

What inspired Parker's attack on the President? If you've been following the headlines, you already know. An economist who worked with the Obama Administration in developing the PPACA made an off-the-cuff comment that has been demagogued into the suggestion that the Obama Administration thinks voters are stupid. As a reference, Parker links to an idiotic screed against the PPACA, but fastidiously avoids introducing the facts -- that the statement she wants to attribute to "the White House" was made in an off-the-cuff manner by economist Jonathan Gruber, a non-politician who is long out of the Obama administration, and who most people wouldn't know from Adam.

Parker follows that absurd attribution with a sentence that starts, "Punditry aside...." It would appear that Parker believes that "punditry" and "demagoguery" are synonyms. Incredibly, after having linked to a diatribe that relies upon Gruber to suggest "", Parker then explicitly invokes Gruber,

Those who feel defrauded by their own government got third-party confirmation recently when remarks by one of the ACA’s chief architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber — invoking the stupidity of voters and lauding the political advantage of a lack of transparency in government — went viral.

Parker appears to believe that her readers are too stupid to click the links and find out that there's only one story.

Now, it is no surprise that Parker and her ilk feign deep offense at the most trivial impropriety, real or imagined, by a Democratic President. But really?

We also know that once trust is gone, it’s very hard to restore. Over time, and not just during this administration, we have lost trust in one institution after another. But when we have lost faith in our government, we have lost faith in ourselves.

At their core, the midterms were really about restoring that trust.

To Parker, it seems, having somebody once associated with the Obama Administration suggest that, as many voters aren't always informed on the issues and are inclined to latch onto labels instead of substance (you know, like "death panels"), it can be necessary to construct legislation that avoids certain "trigger words", is on par with Watergate. Parker, it seems, has no problem with such robust honesty as proposing something as a Social Security privatization plan, then objecting to any use of the term "privatization" as an unfair distortion. Or proposing a Medicare voucher plan then objectin to any use of the term "voucher" as an unfair distortion. Because, you know... that's her party. Let's ignore the $millions earned by Frank Luntz, coaching Republicans on how to mislead voters on issues ranging from the "death tax" to "climate change". When it comes to healthcare reform, Luntz kind of takes us full circle:

In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."...

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections.

Yeah, that Kathleen Parker is horrified by dishonest politicians, and does nothing but overestimate the intelligence of her readers.....

Getting Paid to be Contrarian is One Thing....

Part of how you get commentary published, it seems, is coming at issues from an angle that at least some of your audience hasn't seen before. But sometimes, perhaps often, the angle tells us more about the person writing the commentary than about the issue they're addressing. Case in point, Megan McArdle's self-described counter-factual on why she would have preferred for Hillary Clinton to have won the 2008 election. The first counter-factual,

I think that Hillary Clinton would have been more cautious when dealing with Republicans, and therefore ultimately more successful in some ways. At the very least, she would not be facing the same level of vehement opposition in Congress.

Certainly there is no reason to believe that the Republicans would have opposed Hillary Clinton, ginned up fake controversies over her past or present actions, or ridiculed and sabotaged her health care reform. That is, if you ignore pretty much everything in Hillary Clinton's past, as it relates to the Republican Party. The party that is still wailing "Benghazi!" would have been deferential to Hillary Clinton? Really?

I think liberals really do not understand emotionally the extent to which the Tea Party was created by the Affordable Care Act and the feeling that its government was simply steamrolling it.

Except that the Tea Party movement did not grow out of healthcare reform. It grew out of the financial industry collapse and bail-out. It was carefully steered in the direction of healthcare reform through Republican demagoguery and strategic misinformation. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they would not have been led to oppose modest healthcare reform, or that their energies would not have been directed at other significant initiatives -- as has actually occurred with issues such as immigration reform.

(One suspects that McArdle has spent little if any time talking to actual liberals.)

From the Tea Party's perspective, you had an unpopular program that should have died in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Social Security privatization did: because sensible politicians saw that, no matter how ardently they and their base might desire it, this was out of step with what the majority of the country wanted (and no, you cannot rescue the polls by claiming that the only problem with the law was that it wasn’t liberal enough; when you dig down into what people mean when they say that, the idea that there was ever a majority or a plurality that was secretly in favor of Obamacare collapses).

Except... no. Social Security privatization died because the then-President's own party wouldn't get behind it. We're talking there about something that was easily recognized as benefiting a relative few, those privileged with "managing" our money, while creating significant risks for everybody else. While it's reasonable to say that you cannot sustain an argument that a "more liberal" plan would have been more popular, that question is moot for the same reason that the question of Social Security privatization is moot -- a "more liberal" plan would not have been voted into law. If you look at the actual content of the PPACA, other than the mandate (which we all know to be a necessary aspect of keeping private insurance companies on board while requiring them to insure people with pre-existing conditions) you'll find that the individual components of the bill are largely popular. You'll find that the most contentious aspects of the bill, such as "death panels", are Republican fabrications.

The rage was similar to what progressives felt as they watched George W. Bush push the country into a war in Iraq. That defined and animated the anti-war movement (which is why said movement collapsed when Bush left office, and not, say, when Bush agreed to a staged withdrawal of our forces).

For the most part, the anti-war movement collapsed when the war started. Whatever anti-war movement continued after that point was quite modest. Also, no, the rage and demonstrable ignorance of the Tea Party was nothing like what one saw in a typical anti-war protest, nor were Democratic politicians out, en masse, pushing misinformation or refusing to correct misinformation embraced by anti-war protesters.

Yes, those people would still have hated Republicans, even if there had been no Iraq War. But they would not have been as passionate, as organized or as powerful without it.

Who are "those people"? When I look at the Tea Party, I see a movement that has sent ripples through the Republican Party, has toppled incumbent politicians and had its own elected in their place, and has caused some of the most absurdly ignorant people to be elected to Congress since... I'm not sure when. The anti-war movement, by way of comparison, unsuccessfully advocated against the Iraq war and then... nothing? I'm not even sure where McArdle comes up with her canard that the anti-war protesters "hated Republicans", but hers seems to be a classic "hollow man" argument -- putting words into the mouths of "those people" in order to easily swat down an argument that few (if any) made, rather than having to address actual people and actual arguments. Counter-factual, indeed.

Liberals tend to write off this anger as racism, as irrational hatred of Barack Obama, or as perverse joy in denying health care to the poor, but at its root, it’s the simpler feeling that your country is making a mistake and you can’t stop it because the people in charge are ignoring the obvious.

It's not an "either, or". You (and by "you" I apparently mean, "anybody except McArdle") can recognize the actual racist statements and actions of people associated with the Tea Party, and can recognize the racism implicit in birtherism, the suggestion that President Obama is not a "full blooded" American, and the like, while also recognizing that the Tea Party is at its heart a fear-driven organization. It was quite obvious that when the Tea Party was screeching about death panels, or carrying around signs to the effect of, "Keep your government hands off of my Medicare", that they were afraid of change. It was also apparent that they were not approaching the issues in a rational manner, and that the monied interests and Republican politicians affiliated with the movement liked it that way.

Yes, a lot of money and energy was poured into the Tea Party by rich backers, but rich backers cannot create a grassroots campaign unless the underlying passion is there in the voters (paging Karl Rove and Crossroads). The Obama administration created that passion with Obamacare.

That, again, is nonsense. There's an element of truth to the notion that you can't astroturf your way into a massive grassroots movement, but what anybody but McArdle would have noticed is that the monied interests she mentions spotted an early opportunity to co-opt and direct the anger of the Tea Party movement. Those backers weren't interested in stopping the financial industry bailout. They were -- and remain -- interested in harming Obama's agenda. As with Mitch McConnell's stated goal, the priority was to try to make Obama a one-term president. They were not interested in educating Tea Party members about the issues -- to the contrary, they helped maintain a constant feed of misinformation. They would have been every bit as interested in harming Hillary Clinton's agenda.

I think that Hillary Clinton would have pulled back when Rahm Emanuel (or his counterfactual Clinton administration counterpart) told her that this was a political loser and she should drop it.

That may be true, but where McArdle sees that as a good thing I do not. Why not? Because unlike McArdle, who likely enjoys platinum quality employer-provided health benefits and sits on considerable family wealth, I actually needed to purchase insurance for my family. The PPACA permitted me to purchase insurance of a quality comparable to a good employer-sponsored plan at a fair price -- not necessarily at a cost savings over the cost of such a plan but with a more favorable pricing structure than what I had paid for COBRA coverage. Between the expiration of my COBRA coverage and the January 1 start date of the PPACA, I purchased a comparatively overpriced plan on the individual market, riddled with exclusions, and had to deal with the absurd arguments that insurance companies use to jack up premiums over "pre-existing conditions". For people not as lucky as McArdle, that's a big [Biden's Word] deal.

I’ve written before about how my Twitter feed filled up with comparisons to 1932 the night that Obama took the presidency, and it’s quite clear to me that the Obama administration shared what you might call delusions of FDR. It thought that it was in a transformative, historical moment where the normal rules of political caution didn’t apply. The administration was wrong, and the country paid for that.

So McArdle has looked down her nose at Obama from the start? And the country has "paid for" the president's pressing forward with the high-priority Democratic agenda item, healthcare reform, by actually getting healthcare reform? The horror!

That’s not to say that Republicans would have somehow been all kissy-kissy with Clinton -- they weren’t very nice to her husband, after all.

Not very nice.... That's quite a way to describe the constant attacks, inquisitorial approach to his background, and the use of impeachment as a political tool.

But I doubt she would have had the debt ceiling debacle or the deep gridlock of the last four years, because it was Obamacare that elected a fresh new class of deeply ideological Republicans who thought they were having their own transformative political movement, and they were willing to do massive damage to their party, their own political fortunes and, in my opinion, to the country in order to take a stand against “business as usual” -- business that included legislating or paying our bills.

Because using the debt ceiling as political theater, and shutting down the government, was something that the Republicans never dreamed of doing when Bill Clinton was President. That is, if we're again using the term "counter-factual" to mean, "ignoring indisputable fact." Further, if McArdle believes her own argument about the increasing polarization of the electorate, and was paying any attention to the likely outcome of the election, the difference is at most one of (slight) degree -- the odds of the Democrats holding the House were vanishingly small, and one would have expected the Republicans voted into formerly Democratic seats to be part of a new partisan wave. Predictably, McArdle offers no acknowledgement of the fact that the Democrats held the Senate, or the fact that a smaller Democratic loss in the House would not have changed the subsequent power dynamic in which House Republicans refuse not only to compromise, but refuse to legislate.

Besides, I thought McArdle was taking the position that the problem was healthcare reform, not the debt driven by the economic meltdown and financial industry bailout. Why does McArdle believe that the Tea Party would have ignored the issues that underlie their genesis, and become complacent in relation to the bail-out, but for healthcare reform? If they were so obsessed with healthcare reform, how is it that they (mistakenly?) voted into office those who chose to focus on the debt ceiling and force a government shut-down? For that matter, the Republican Party could have easily bypassed its relatively small number of Tea Party members and passed a funding bill, simply by allowing a funding bill to reach the floor -- so how is it that this isn't a problem inside the Republican Party, as opposed to one supposedly driven almost exclusively by the President's being Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton?

Of course, in my counterfactual, Hillary also probably wouldn’t have proposed ambitious health-care reform; she’d have done something more modest, like a Medicaid expansion.

More modest... except had McArdle been paying any attention to the Tea Party, she would have heard them complain about any program that directs money to the undeserving poor. She might have noticed the right-wing demagoguery over SCHIP, a program to insure children. She might have even noticed that Republican governors have gone out of their way -- to the point of litigating the issue to the Supreme Court -- to avoid accepting free money to expand Medicaid.

To my mind, however, that would have been a much better outcome for everyone. So there’s my counterfactual for the summer: If Hillary Clinton had won, Obamacare wouldn’t have happened, and Democrats -- and the country -- would be better off.

I'm sure that when McArdle and her husband offer their wealthy friends cocktails, perhaps with some sort of dipping sauce McArdle whips up herself in her Thermomix, that's the sort of observation that makes them chuckle. To notice how the PPACA helps actual people? That's beneath her notice. I don't personally believe that Hillary Clinton would have embraced McArdle's notion of modesty, or that she would have so easily folded on a more ambitious plan when faced with Republican opposition -- if I were to accept that counter-factual, I think we have to include the probability that Clinton would have been viewed within her own party as a failure, and would likely have faced a primary challenge after her first term. As Clinton would not have found that acceptable, it's reasonable to conclude that she would have found a way to stick to her guns.

Gerson Wants to Intervene in Syria, But Can't Explain How

When I read Michael Gerson complain that the United States hasn't done enough in Syria, I think he's being genuine. My problem with his columns is that they show an astonishing lack of thought about the subject, and a complete lack of understanding or appreciation for why most oppose the type of intervention he desires. If anything makes me question his sincerity, it's his dishonest characterization of the President's position:

When the rebellion was a broad, non-radical uprising — the dead in Caesar’s photos — President Obama did almost nothing to help. When radical groups gained momentum, it became an excuse for further inaction, because America didn’t want to create jihadists. We got the jihadists anyway, who are now causing regional havoc. At every stage, Obama defended his policy with false choices and flanking attacks on straw men: Any critics of his minimalism wanted Marines in Damascus. And when he eventually adopted the policy recommended by many of his critics — aid to the responsible rebels — it was very late.

Were Gerson to educate himself, he would become aware that the White House has attempted to identify, train and arm "responsible rebels" since 2012, and weapons and equipment have been provided for almost a year. Gerson works from the assumption that Syria is overflowing with easily identified U.S.-friendly rebels, with sufficient numbers and dedication to defeat all other factions in Syria, take control of the nation and turn it into a western-friendly state. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests something else, entirely. Perhaps Gerson thought this screening test was serious and workable? We're to believe that significant numbers of fighters can be armed, with little to no chance of serious mistakes?

Gerson wants to pretend that the most powerful factions fighting Assad arose in a vacuum, that groups like ISIS would scarcely exist had the U.S. poured arms into the region with little concern beyond a warlord's promise that he really liked the U.S., but there's never been a showing that Gerson's wish was anything more than a fantasy. You certainly won't find substantiation in anything Gerson has written.

Now Gerson complains that a genocide is occurring in Syria, and that the world must do something. Given that he mocks those who suggest that it would be necessary to dispatch a considerable force of ground troops into Syria to arrest the chaos and stop the bloodshed, it would be nice if he would tell us exactly how he proposes that we stop the civil war and its atrocities. He could explain why he rejects Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, General Martin Dempsey's concern that "intervention would end up costing so much, the U.S. military would be unable to respond to crises in other parts of the world". As is par for the course for a Gerson column, those real-world concerns are simply ignored.

You know, it would be great if all of the world's problems were easy to solve. It would be great if all it took for a nation to become a stable democracy was the toppling of its tyrannical leader. It would be wonderful if it were cheap and easy to transform a nation, used to totalitarian rule, into a modern economy with progressive values and a desire for democracy. It would be great if the type of intervention Gerson wants would end the spilling of innocent blood, with no risk of creating a larger, longer or more violent war. But as much as Gerson isn't able to contemplate that such interventions aren't easy, cheap or bloodless -- a reflection not only of an inability to think things through but also to learn from his own past mistakes -- the real world is far more complex. Gerson simply isn't able to process that his eager desire to arm Syrian rebels could lead to any number of outcomes that would be worse for the region and its people than the dismal status quo. Why is Gerson so certain that leader who emerges from the rubble won't be the moral equivalent of Pol Pot? Why does he believe that U.S.-backed forces will do any better at hanging onto their weapons than the Iraqi army that abandoned its arms to ISIS?

Gerson should continue to advocate for the victims of the world, at least the ones he cares about. He should feel free to act as the nation's conscience. But when he wants the U.S. to contribute weapons, support and training to factions in a civil war, I think he owes it to his readers to explain exactly what intervention he proposes, how it can be safely accomplished and why we should believe that it is likely to result in a better outcome. If he cannot do that himself or after consultation with an expert, why should he expect to be taken seriously?

The Fantasy of Arming Secular Syrian Dissidents

A consistent argument made by critics of the Obama Administration is that the Administration should have somehow identified, trained and armed secular, western-friendly factions in Syria, and that this would have changed the balance of power in that nation's civil war. The concepts for what the outcome might be seem to vary with the person making the argument, and perhaps also with the time of day. The pure fantasists seem to believe that the western-backed factions could have defeated Assad's government, crushed Islamist factions, and instituted a secular, pro-western government in Syria. A more moderate argument is that these secular factions would have fared so well in battle that they would have forced both the Assad government and the radical factions to the negotiating table where they would hash out an agreement for a new, more inclusive Syrian government, also more friendly to the west. There's also the nebulous argument that boils down to, "I have no idea what would have happened, but we should have done it anyway", or perhaps, "Whatever choice the Obama Administration makes, I'm going to argue that it should have done something else."

Do you recall how last year, John McCain went to Syria and met with various groups that he ostensibly would have had the U.S. arm and back in an effort to defeat the Assad regime? How well did that go, again? Yes, McCain had lots of excuses and regrets over meeting terrorists and kidnappers -- but ISIS appears to view McCain's visit as a propaganda coup. I guess his position is that the U.S. would have done a much better job of identifying western-friendly factions than he did, and would have avoided arming the very factions with which he posed for photos, so as to by now have defeated those factions? Could any part of McCain's Syria policy survive outside of the realm of fantasy?

One thing I don't hear much about is who these secular, pro-western Syrian fighters are, how many there are, how we know that they are truly committed to a more balanced view of the west, why we believe that arming and training them will actually shift the balance in the Syrian civil war, and how they will unite a post-war Syria. Which is to say, the argument for arming these factions is made without addressing any of the relevant concerns. One of the huge concerns held by western nations and Israel is that arms given to factions believed to be friendly to the U.S. could end up in the hands of factions that are hostile to U.S. interests -- just as happened when ISIS fighters went into Iraq and confronted that nation's army. Whatever we make of the incompetence of Iraq's Maliki administration, if the best trained army in the region turns tail and runs from a few thousand ISIS fighters, why are we to believe that the unidentified and as-of-yet untrained Syrian dissident factions would have stood, fought, and defeated ISIS?

The essence of the fantasy is that we could have identified so many pro-western factions, and trained and armed them so effectively, that they would have crushed groups like ISIS. That argument defies logic. ISIS was active in Iraq, under its former name, before essentially withdrawing to Syria following the last outbreak of civil war. Why should we believe that they would remain in Syria and fight to the last man, rather than figuring out that they had much more friendly and more fertile ground for their activities back in Iraq? The position that they would have stayed in Syrian until they were wiped out defies not only basic logic, but the experience of what terrorist organizations do when they face too much pressure in one location. It's reasonable to infer that under that particular fantasy scenario, at best ISIS would have withdrawn to a third country, and at worst they would have gone into Iraq albeit possibly on a different schedule.

Other than as a tool to criticize the Obama Administration, where is the evidence that arming dissident groups. beyond those efforts actually made over the past three years, could have made a difference in Syria or Iraq?

Roger Cohen's Fantasy of Air Power and Influence

Come on, Roger -- you know better than this.

There was a moment in the Syrian conflict when decisive military aid to the opposition could have changed Assad’s calculation. President Obama mouthed vague promises of arms and allowed Assad to regroup.

First, you're awfully mealy-mouthed in your claim.... "decisive military aid" (whatever that is) could have (but might not have) changed Assad's "calculation" (presumably not to sue for peace, and broker some sort of imagined, long-term peace deal that made nice with some of the dissident groups, disarmed other factions like ISIS and stabilized his country). The conceit here seems to be that there's a magical point that the U.S. could have caused the warring parties to reach where the opposition factions would not have been quite strong enough to topple Assad, but where he would have been sufficiently weakened to be convinced to give them enough of what they wanted to lay down their arms and unite behind his reformed government. It's an interesting fantasy, but not one I think could have been turned into reality. Assad and his military would not want to relinquish power to their blood enemies, nor would those enemies happily again subject themselves to his rule (or that of his hand-picked successor, if part of the fantasy is that he agrees to step down).

Cohen buys very strongly into the notion that, as a bombing campaign appears to have tipped the balance in the Bosnian conflict, it's a tool that can magically change the balance favorably to U.S. interests in pretty much any conflict. Drop enough bombs from a safe altitude and the facts on the ground inexorably change in your favor. Cohen is apparently unaware of the basic facts of the conflict in Bosnia. That was not a conflict that ended based on air strikes alone, no boots on the ground, but was a conflict that involved a significant deployment of ground forces to cement and maintain the peace. The initial troops were NATO forces, and those troops were eventually replaced by E.U. forces. Where does Cohen believe that the troops will come from to secure a post-bombing peace accord in Syria, even if we assume that the fantasy scenario would be achievable? Is there a single western nation that is interested in committing troops to such a venture?

Further, even during the bombing campaign, it was key that Bosnian and Croatian ground forces were able to go on the offensive. While Cohen seems to believe that various Syrian opposition groups might fill that role, he doesn't identify which ones or how we could be sure that the ones who ended up in the leadership of a theoretical alliance of opposition groups would be the factions we would want to prevail. You don't have to look past what is presently happening in Iraq to recognize that some of the groups operating out of Syria are hostile to U.S. interests, nor what happens when you arm a weak group and a stronger, anti-western faction steamrolls them and takes their U.S.-provided arms. The lesson of Bosnia may be that a western air campaign can help achieve balance between two armed factions fighting on the ground below, but it should be recalled that victory still required the two warring sides on the ground to be roughly equivalent in strength.

More than that, we have a fantasy of finding huge numbers of trustworthy, U.S.-friendly factions that the U.S. can arm, that can be trusted to work together against the government, to hold onto those arms, and to ultimately either so threaten the Assad government as to force it to become more inclusive and progressive (and friendly to the west) or to topple it and impose a more progressive, pro-west government. I'm reminded of G.W. Bush's joke, where he pretended to search for Iraqi WMDs in the Oval Office -- where are we supposed to find these factions, and in those numbers?

And that's not where the silliness ends,

Force in the absence of a sustained political and diplomatic strategy leads nowhere. This has been Obama’s failure in Afghanistan, where the United States never invested much capital in a diplomatic solution involving negotiation with the Taliban; and in Iraq, where the president allowed American forces to withdraw without leveraging the massive U.S. investment there into ensuring that the sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki reached out to the Sunnis and Kurds.

What does Cohen believe would happen if the Obama Administration openly declared that it was in negotiations with the Taliban, and hoped to integrate the Taliban into the Iraqi government? Was Cohen asleep during the Bowe Bergdahl foofaraw, in which Republicans couldn't shove themselves before cameras quickly enough to declare that the Taliban is a terrorist organization with which we should have no dealings at all? Did he miss the dire warnings that five Talibani prisoners, having been released, were going to pose a grave and continuing threat to the safety of the United States? Did he miss that, behind the release of Bergdahl, it is inescapable that negotiations did involve the Taliban? We should be able to infer from those facts that, at least at some level, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban and that the negotiations likely do involve trying to keep it from attempting to destabilize or overthrow the Afghan government, but that it would be ridiculously stupid for the Obama Administration to publicly announce that any such negotiations are occurring.

As for the president "allowing" U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq, Cohen seems to have scrubbed from his memory banks the fact that George W. Bush negotiated the withdrawal date for combat forces, and that the Iraqi government was not willing to enter into a new status of forces agreement with the immunity clauses required by the United States for a continued military presence. What would Cohen have had Obama do? Disregard the concerns of the military, ignore the wishes of the sovereign government of Iraq, and keep the forces in place? I'm also reminded of Tom Ricks' concession that, although he initially wished that the U.S. could have kept forces in Iraq, in hindsight it's a good thing that the U.S. did not as it would presently be in the position of having to massively reinforce that deployment or withdrawing -- neither of which are good outcomes. Cohen seems to disagree -- so he would have us send tens of thousands of combat troops into Iraq to secure the Sunni areas were ISIS operates, even as Iraq's own army chooses to turn and run?

The past months have constituted a low point in American foreign policy: the rampage by the Sunni fanatics of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria through wide swathes of Iraq; President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and successful troublemaking in eastern Ukraine; Syria’s descent into ever further horror; China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea; the failure of U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian talks.

Sure, but it's a bit much to imagine that the president could have done much on any of those fronts. The problems in Iraq are borne of the final status of forces agreement, negotiated by G.W. Bush, and the poor governance of the Shiite leadership of Iraq, the leadership of a government that formed and came to power under G.W. Bush. It was entirely predictable that Maliki's actions would eventually create a crisis -- it was much less a question of "if" than "when". As for Putin's actions in Crimea, what use of forced does Cohen imagine would have deterred him? The same sort of chest-thumping machismo that didn't deter Putin from taking military action in Georgia when G.W. Bush was President? Does Cohen believe that the U.S. can credibly threaten China with military reprisals? Does Cohen believe that the "Israeli-Palestinian talks" had any chance of success under Prime Minister Netanyahu, or that there was some magical reason to believe that this was the one time that doing the same thing over and over again would achieve a different outcome? And if it's a show of military force that makes the difference, how did G.W. Bush's "roadmap" work out, back when he was eagerly starting wars in the Middle East?

Even leaving aside the fact that Cohen's imagined outcome of a bombing campaign is fantastical, the notion that all of these events can be pinned on Obama because he didn't bomb Syria is absurd. One could make a similar list of bad events under G.W. Bush -- North Korea and Pakistan going nuclear, the abject failure of his Israel-Palestine peace initiative, the catastrophic failure of his policies in Libya, China's actions in the South China Sea to assert sovereignty over those waters (no, they're not new), Putin carving territories out of Georgia.... Should we mention the incompetence that led Iraq into civil war, or the failure to stabilize Afghanistan? The list goes on.

Fundamentally, Cohen seems to have lost track both of history and of the limits of what happens when you apply force (particularly when you do so in a half-hearted manner, such as "Let's do airstrikes and see what happens, but make abundantly clear we're never going to have boots on the ground") in parts of the world -- in this case, parts of the world that are not exactly sympathetic to U.S. foreign policy interests. He falls into a long line of armchair commentators who seem to believe that people on the ground don't mind being bombed, as long as those bombs are delivered by the U.S. Air Force or NATO. Were he to pay better attention to his history, it's difficult to believe that he would have written that column.

The Danger of Providing Arms to Civil War Combatants

David Ignatius shares an update about the situation in Iraq,

ISIS forces have swept south along Highway 1 from Mosul, swelling their ranks by liberating 2,000 to 3,000 jihadist fighters from a prison in Nineveh province. The jihadists have captured so much U.S.-made equipment that it’s reportedly hard to distinguish friend from foe along the chaotic highway south.

Those who argue that we should throw powerful weapons to the "least worst" of the Syrian rebel factions had best keep in mind how quickly those arms can end up in the wrong hands.

Ignatius closes with an odd accusation,

Restitching the fabric of Iraq and Syria may be Mission Impossible. But with its focus on counterterrorism and weapons supplies, the Obama administration seems to have decided to treat the region simply as a shooting gallery.

As opposed to... doing what? Perhaps he's alluding to what had seemed to be a rhetorical question,

Can [the United States and its allies] convene a regional peace conference — which would seek to reconcile Sunni and Shiite forces and their key backers, Saudi Arabia and Iran — in some new security architecture?

Can they convene such a conference? I have every reason to believe that they can find a nice conference center, a printer who can engrave some attractive invitations, and a decent caterer. But the real question is, would such a conference accomplish anything? I suspect that, even at his most optimistic, Ignatius would admit that the odds of any material progress are vanishingly small.

Why Can't Applebaum Simply Admit That She Favors A Full-Scale Invasion of Syria

I have heard an argument floated in relation to Syria that I find absurd: that we need to arm rebel factions to the point that they can imminently topple the Assad regime, and once that happens all of the parties can be brought to the bargaining table where they'll hammer out a lasting peace agreement. First, it's difficult to imagine the argument being made in a context in which the speaker hoped to preserve the government that is under threat. History tells us that defenders of the government will take the opposite position - that peace talks won't be possible until the traitors and terrorists lay down their arms. Second, that's not a context in which either side is likely to want to run to the bargaining table. The government in danger of being toppled has too much to lose, and the "rebel factions" that are poised to depose the government have little incentive to lay down their arms and accept a deal that keeps the threatened regime in place. Third, in a case like Syria's, there are many armed factions. You would not only have to convince every significant faction to join and maintain a ceasefire, you would have to broker a peace deal that they all found satisfactory, and that they all trusted to the point that they don't turn their guns on each other or insist upon carving the nation into territories under the control of various warlords.

Nonetheless, I was not surprised to see Ann Applebaum implicate that argument,

Back in June, the Group of Eight called for “urgent” peace talks. But there are no negotiations to speak of, in part because the Syrian rebels continue to hang on for Western military support that always seems to be just around the corner but never quite materializes.

The rebels are too weak, and too much in danger of losing, to engage in peace talks? Then why, dare I ask, does Applebaum suppose that turning the tables on the government will make Assad's regime rush to the negotiating table?

Applebaum's piece is snarky, first at Clinton for not acting quickly enough to intervene in Bosnia, and next at President Obama for not acting more quickly in Syria. Applebaum suggests that Presidents should not engage in rhetoric about foreign leaders needing to change their ways or resign unless they're willing to promptly back up those words with military force.

Two decades ago, five years ago and today, the source of the problem is the same: The president of the United States wishes to represent things — justice, fairness, international norms — that he cannot, or will not, or doesn’t know how to defend in practice. In the future, it would be far more just, and far less cruel, for the president, and the rest of us, simply to say nothing at all.

I am not convinced by Applebaum's suggestion that the world, upon hearing the President call for a foreign leader to step down, understands that to be a threat of invasion if the leader chooses to remain in power. I think her implication that a government should not make a statement on an undesirable foreign situation unless it is either prepared to take military action or immediately qualifies its comments, but we're not going to do anything about it, is just plain wrong. We can't criticize human rights in China unless we're prepared to invade? We can't press for the release of dissidents in Burma and call for free elections unless we're prepared to invade? Come on.

Applebaum argues that the President has threatened force in Syria, then backed away from the threat, then again threatened force.

For example, in August 2011 Obama declared: “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” To Syrians fighting on the ground, that may have sounded like a promise that U.S. military support, or at least substantial military aid, was imminent.

May have? It also may have sounded like the President was saying that it was time for President Assad to step aside, and it may well be that they were smart enough to figure out that there was no actual or implied threat of imminent military action.

This June, the White House authorized the CIA to begin arming some of the Syrian rebels. This sounded even more like a promise, but as of last week that aid also had yet to arrive.

Were Applebaum more honest, she would share the reasons for that delay as stated in her own source, the anything-but Obama Administration-friendly Wall Street Journal,

U.S. officials attribute the delay in providing small arms and munitions from the CIA weapons program to the difficulty of establishing secure delivery "pipelines" to prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands, in particular Jihadi militants also battling the Assad regime.

By virtue of her marriage, Applebaum has very close ties to the international diplomatic community, and certainly has many people in her virtual Rolodex from whom she could easily get a reality check on the Administration's concerns. If she believes that the officials are incorrect, she could present a cogent argument to that effect. The fact that Applebaum instead chooses to misrepresent the reason for the delay suggests that she's not trying to be balanced, or even accurate.

The president famously declared a year ago that the use of chemical weapons constituted a “red line” in Syria. But now that the red line has been crossed, the president has decided that he needs congressional support before he can respond. This is perfectly legitimate — but shouldn’t it have been obtained earlier, at the time the promise was made? Certainly the Syrian regime interpreted the president’s sudden and unexpected desire for congressional support as a “historic American retreat.” Its media gloated accordingly.

Okay... so it's "perfectly legitimate" for the President to go through Congress before launching a military action, but it also is honest for Syria's state-controlled media to characterize that legitimate action as a retreat? Which does Applebaum want - for the President to follow statutory law and the text of the Constitution, or to cast those trivialities aside to prevent a propaganda sheet in Syria from misrepresenting what it means to follow democratic process?

As for the notion that the President could have sought Congressional pre-approval for military action in the event of Syria's use of chemical weapons, that's true of pretty much anything the President says on foreign policy - but you can't take everything to Congress. Why does Applebaum believe Congress would have gone along with such a request, that Boehner and the Tea Party would be ready to give the President the discretion to initiate a military action based upon something that few at the time believed was likely to happen? Does she believe that the Republicans would have been more cooperative a year ago, when the use of chemical weapons was considered unlikely, than they are today when their use has been documented? If so, I would love to hear her explanation.

If you wanted to do so, you could read something sinister into these tactics. Perhaps, some unnamed officials suggested to the Wall Street Journal this week, these delays and sudden changes are intentional: Perhaps the administration’s point is to “tilt” the fighting away from Assad but to prevent an outright rebel victory — in other words, to prolong the war.

Unnamed officials? So we're talking about what... leaks within the White House, suggesting that the President is only following what Applebaum deems to be a legitimate course of action because he hopes to perpetuate the civil war? Let's turn back to the WSJ:

Many rebel commanders say the aim of U.S. policy in Syria appears to be a prolonged stalemate that would buy the U.S. and its allies more time to empower moderates and choose whom to support.

"The game is clear to all," said Qassem Saededdine, a spokesman for the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army's Supreme Military Council. "When it comes to the interests of superpowers…the average Syrian comes last."

Some congressional officials said they were concerned the administration was edging closer to an approach privately advocated by Israel. Israeli officials have told their American counterparts they would be happy to see its enemies Iran, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and al Qaeda militants fight until they are weakened, giving moderate rebel forces a chance to play a bigger role in Syria's future.

So while Syrian rebels are depicted as being frustrated that the White House is not simply arming everybody, but appears to be considering arming only those groups whose goals are not hostile to U.S. interests, something that is consistent with the facts, these unnamed "congressional officials" are imagining a secret conspiracy between the Obama Administration and Israel. One can hardly imagine why they don't want to attach their names to the accusation....

I'm curious, also, as to what it means to be a "congressional official". I know what a Member of Congress is. Their staff members aren't officials. I can see why Applebaum chose to say only "officials", but knowing the context I don't find the omission to be particularly honest.

If so, this administration is even more ruthlessly cynical than its critics have maintained, and Syrian conspiracy theorists are right on the mark.

Except the Syrian statement wasn't a conspiracy theory. The Syrian statement was sensible and consistent with the Obama Administration's statements on the provision of military aid - it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Obama Administration hopes to "empower moderates and choose whom to support". It was the unnamed congressional "officials" who were pushing the conspiracy theory and Applebaum herself who is choosing to treat it as a serious possibility.

But whether that is true hardly matters because the effect is the same:...

No, I think the truth does matter. First, I think it matters that columnists like Applebaum try to present the truth, rather than misrepresenting their sources and giving air to conspiracy theories before concluding that truth is irrelevant. Second, I think it does matter if the President's delay results from his taking care to avoid potentially turning Syria over to a government not far removed from the Taliban. To somebody who favors such an outcome that may constitute putting the interests of the average Syrian last, but for those who want Syria to have a more enlightened future the truth lies in the opposite direction.

As happened in Bosnia, American pontification, prevarication and postponement in Syria have preempted the policies of others and delayed negotiations. The civil war continues; with every month the devastation increases, the refugees multiply and the levels of political extremism rise. Back in June, the Group of Eight called for “urgent” peace talks.

Such alliteration. It's always fun when a columnist gets in touch with her inner Safire. What's missing is any explanation of how the Administration's failure to... I guess, invade Syria or at least indiscriminately arm its rebel factions without concern for their goals or whether weapons end up in the hands of terrorists... has preempted the polices of "others". Who are these "others", what are their "policies", and why are they sitting somewhere, invisible, silent, and unnamed, as Applebaum takes up their cause. I understand why Applebaum's "It's a conspiracy between Obama and Israel" officials don't want to be named, but this isn't the first season of Lost - who are these others?

The Group of Eight... That wold be Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.K., the E.U., and the United States. Of those eight, the U.S. is proposing military action, France has indicated that it won't act unless the U.S. first authorizes military action, the U.K. and Germany have voted against military action, Russia is protesting that Assad is innocent, the Prime Minister of Canada has stated that he has "no plans" for a direct military mission, Italy insists that any military action should be preceded by a U.N. mandate, and Japan is sitting on the fence pending a final U.S. decision. Which of those nations does Applebaum believe to be more hawkish than the U.S., and to have had its plans and hopes crushed by the fact that the U.S. is exercising caution and following constitutonal process?

I was curious, given the circumstances, to see what Poland had to say about the issue. Would Poland be a pillar of Applebaum-endorsed virtue, ready to do the most it could to punish the criminal Assad regime?

Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced last week that Poland will not be taking part in any military action in Syria, though Minister Sikorski said on Monday night that he has told US secretary of state John Kerry that, “Poland does not have the capability [to take part in a military strike] but understands the situation”.

As President Obama tries to win support from Congress for a military strike, Minister Sikorski said in an interview with the TVP public broadcaster: “In my judgement a chemical attack occurred, most likely by the Assad regime. The use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians, their own citizens, is unacceptable”.

“The use of chemical weapons in the twenty-first century sets a very dangerous precedent,” Sikorski said, adding that, "President Obama's decision to give more time to convince the US Congress gives a chance for Russia and China to change their positions.”

So the official position of Poland, as articulated by Applebaum's husband, is that (a) Assad probably used chemical weapons, and that is wholly unacceptable, (b) Poland won't contribute so much as a Zloty toward any military action, and (c) the Obama Administration is correct to go through Congress and the associated delay could help the world achieve a diplomatic solution?

Perhaps the Applebaum household is among those in which the spouses simply don't discuss politics.....

Rand Paul's Grandstanding on Syria

Courtesy of Time Magazine, Rand Paul reminds us that he intends to run for President in a couple of years:

War should occur only when America is attacked, when it is threatened or when American interests are attacked or threatened. I don’t think the situation in Syria passes that test.

He should have stopped there.

Even the State Department argues that “there’s no military solution here that’s good for the Syrian people, and that the best path forward is a political solution.”

Paul knows that he's taking the State Department spokesperson's position out of context. The situation for which the State Department asserts that there is no military solution is the civil war itself, not the possibility of a strike in response to the use of chemical weapons.

Paul puffs,

I will not vote to send our nation’s best and brightest to fight for anything less than victory. If American interests are at stake, then our goal should not be stalemate.

Paul presents a false dichotomy - that the only possible goal of a military action against a foreign nation is to depose the existing government, and that anything short of that constitutes a stalemate. Paul might have tried to make the argument that a strike that does not weaken Assad would not advance U.S. goals, but instead he presents an argument that is

Paul asks a series of fair questions about what might happen if Assad were deposed, but none of them relate directly to the question he is supposedly addressing - a limited strike that is meant to send a strong message to Assad, and ideally to deter his future use of chemical weapons, but not change the balance of power between Assad and the various rebel groups. If Paul wanted to make a valid argument, he should have started by explaining why it is not possible to strike Syria without toppling Assad. If he does not believe that to be true, his argument is dishonest. If he does, he should explain why.

Paul closes by pounding the table about the separation of powers, suggesting that President Obama should adhere to the position he took when he was a Senator, "that no President should unilaterally go to war without congressional authority unless there is an actual or imminent threat to our nation." Perhaps Paul would stick to that principle as President. Perhaps he would insist upon strict interpretation of the Constitution in accord with his references to James Madison. Paul may be looking at the history of U.S. military adventurism and concluding, few of those actions should have occurred, and no more should occur unless there's a bona fide crisis that necessitates military action before it's possible to consult Congress or unless Congress fulfills its constitutional role and declares war.

But if that's Paul's actual position, he would be a rarity among presidents and the only modern president to take that position. I think a Senator has the right to be offended by a President who, by statement or implication, asks for Congress to approve military action while taking the position that he will proceed no matter what Congress decides. I would have a lot less sympathy for the President, though, if Congress didn't have a very long history of shirking its duties - of granting presidents broad authority to engage in full-scale war against other nation states without actually declaring war, of blithe acceptance of unilateral military action initiated by presidents in the absence of urgency, or of grandstanding when things go wrong but avoiding taking action that would cause it to share responsibility.

Leaving aside my skepticism of Paul, I don't think that there is any way to view his editorial as anything but something he hopes to tout in future political ads, particularly if things go wrong. "Look how wise I was. [Just like Obama before he changed his mind]". But while a cogent argument against military intervention in Syria can be made, this isn't it. Paul doesn't question that Assad used chemical weapons. He does not explain why it's not in the best interest of the United States to deter the use of chemical weapons, even when they're not directed at U.S. territory or citizens. He instead relies upon a false dichotomy, misrepresents the position of the State Department relative to a punitive strike, and accuses the President of hypocrisy.

I would expect more from a man of Paul's professed values, but his editorial is entirely consistent with that of a self-promoting opposition party politician who wants to have it both ways - a (supposedly) principled reason for voting against a strike just in case things go well, and an increased opportunity for finger-pointing and demagoguery if they don't.

Mixed Feelings on Edward Snowden

Brad DeLong is justifiably critical of the President's comments on Edward Snowden,

Obama concedes that Snowden's leaks triggered a passionate and welcome debate. But he claims that Snowden is no patriot because "we would have gotten to the same place" eventually.

When?

This does not pass the bullshit test.

For the most part, I did not find Snowden's revelations to be surprising. They're an evolution of the ideas the Bush Administration attempted to implement before the ink was even dry on the USA Patriot Act, and although those ideas evolved to be more consistent with the law it was also inevitable that they would test the limits of the Fourth Amendment and rely heavily on the fact that the federal courts are incredibly receptive to a defense of government actions that, in essence, is "But... National security!" It was also no surprise that Congress knew what was going on (or at least enough key leaders of both parties that neither has any credibility in arguing that the Obama Administration was exceeding the bounds of the law) as Congress habitually eschews its duties when it hears the words "National security". Darrell Issa and his ilk are more than happy to squawk about national security errors and failures, but they are too craven to do anything that might make themselves the subject of such finger-pointing. They are happy to refrain from setting limits or staking out the margins. Better yet, the failure to do their own jobs allows them to do even more finger-pointing.

I have no particular objection to the notion of Edward Snowden as a whistleblower in the vein of Daniel Ellsberg, to the point that he disclosed a government program that exceeded the bounds of what he believed to be reasonable and lawful, grabbed enough supporting documentation to prove his allegations in the event that they were denied, and stood ready to accept whatever consequence fell upon him for his actions. I have a problem with Snowden because it seems like he did a Bradely Manning-style document dump and, while not disclosing those documents in the same manner as Manning, has reportedly distributed encrypted files with a key to be distributed if something happens to him... or, I suppose, if he feels like distributing the key.

I also have a problem with his fleeing to a nation with an abysmal human rights record. If your concern is that the U.S. is becoming too much of a police state, the idea of seeking refuge in Russia should seem appalling.

I would have much more sympathy for Snowden had he purged his document collection of anything that might compromise national security, and anything else not necessary to support his claims about the overreach of his program, then sought temporary refuge in a nation like the U.K. while using the attendant publicity and extradition process to make clear that his intentions were purely honorable - to reveal what he believed to be government misconduct while keeping only those documents absolutely necessary to prove the overreach at no risk to national security and with no intention of sharing those documents except as necessary to support his claims. Then he could say, "I realize that I could go to prison for this, but if it makes my country start doing the right thing it's worth it."

Snowden's own past statements cast something of a shadow over his motives, but part of the problem seems to be that he has fallen in with the wrong crowd. The people who encouraged him to create his "failsafe" and to flee to Russia, I think, were doing so as part of their own agenda - with Snowden becoming a useful tool for them to use in advancing their own public profiles and agenda. His actions have made his personal story and motives the primary subject of public debate, while allowing the government to take the most hardline approach toward his prosecution.

Had Snowden fled to the U.K. and not made a sufficiently convincing pubic case for his actions - and perhaps even if he made a convincing public case - he may well have found himself in prison. But as his primary motivation at this point seems to be to avoid prosecution, his actions continue to subvert the conversation that his supporters content he wants, and that people like DeLong correctly note that we need. As long as he stays in Russia, the less likely it is that the conversation will switch from Snowden's life as a fugitive to the scope of the continuing surveillance programs he revealed.

Speaking of Geithner, About Those ObamaCare Regulations....

Stephen Brill asks, why is it that Geithner's getting a free pass on the postponement of the employer mandate under the PPACA?

The explanation for the postponement was that the rules, instructions, and reporting forms necessary to implement the requirement could not be written in time. The Treasury Department has responsibility for that paperwork and has had three years and three months to get it done. Geithner was in charge of Treasury for all but five of those 39 months....

Can’t someone tell us why Geithner and his team couldn’t get their homework done in 39 months? Is 39 months too fast to be “thoughtful and careful?” What happened? Why wasn’t the White House staff monitoring them from the day the bill passed to make sure the work was getting done? What about the Office of Management and Budget, which was run during most of those 39 months by Peter Orszag and Jacob Lew (who now runs Treasury) and which is supposed to supervise regulation-writing at federal agencies?

Brill echoes some of Joe Klein's anti-administration rhetoric, but it is a fair question to ask: why couldn't Geithner get the job done, and why wasn't he held accountable for his failure?

In fairness to Geithner, the answer may be political - it may be that the regulations are in place, and the forms aren't all that complicated, but that the Administration was responding to political concerns and pressures and used complexity as an excuse. But as Brill points out, nobody seems to be investigating the issue.

The Easiest (But Least Useful) Thing to Do About Syria is to Complain About Obama

These days, it's difficult to escape hearing lectures directed at the Obama Administration about what it should do in Syria. Many of the critiques, even by well-meaning and reasonably well-informed individuals, amount to little more than wishful thinking. And of course, there are the fire-breathing partisans who simply want to attack the Obama Administration. On Real Time last week, Niall Ferguson issued a frothy attack on the Obama Administration's record on conflicts in the Middle East while fastidiously ignoring the repeated question of what the Obama Administration should have done. I heard one critic claiming that a year or so ago it would have been possible to support a democratic revolution in Syria, but now the groups fighting Assad are all Islamist - which raises two obvious responses, the first being that if a democratic movement is that easy to squelch it didn't have much of a chance to begin with, and if we're talking about the same groups simply modifying their stated agenda in order to get support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia it's questionable whether they actually supported what we think of as democracy in the first place.

My eye was drawn for some reason to the latest anti-Obama harangue from Richard Cohen, a man who personifies the low-hanging fruit. It's almost embarrassing to pick apart his nonsense, like debating foreign policy with a kindergarten class, but... how to resist. Cohen sneers,

The president is the master of the muddle. He concocted a doozy in Afghanistan when he announced a surge and a date of withdrawal — a marriage and a divorce at the same time.

The think that Cohen should try to remember is that there's a difference between a policy that is "muddled" and one that he is not capable of understanding. Cohen is among those who don't understand that a "surge" is supposed to be a short-term escalation followed by withdrawal, not a long-term escalation with no end date. If you have no plan to end your "surge" then it's simply an escalation. Beyond that, why shouldn't the Obama Administration project an end-date for the longest war in American history, particularly when it seems clear that Afghan factions won't negotiate in good faith while the occupation continues. It may well be that things fall apart after we depart, but unless there's a reason to believe that prolonging the occupation will have a beneficial effect all we're doing is delaying the inevitable - at considerable cost. I understand that Cohen is not a man who cares about the cost of military action that he supports, whether in dollars or human cost, and that he may not even think about the cost, but those responsible for safeguarding the nation and ensuring that we have an effective military don't share his luxury of treating global conflict like an epic session of World of Warcraft, in which losses are measured in bits and pixels.

There's also something else Cohen doesn't seem to grasp about foreign occupation: people don't like it. Even if you can make the convincing case that your military intervention was a good thing, and liberated the people - and even if the people agree with that initial assessment - they want you gone. If it needs to be said, prolonged occupation is not good for relationships with the locals.

Cohen lectures,

For opponents of U.S. intervention in Syria, the instructive precedent is the Iraq fiasco. But that has so little in common with the Syrian situation they may as well cite the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua of early last century and the ultimate victory of the guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino. The more apt comparison is the 78-day NATO bombing campaign in 1999 that ended the bloodshed in Bosnia — and cost not a single American life. (Another apt comparison is Libya where, once again, no American boots were put on the ground and U.S. combat deaths were zero.)

And do you know why, to Cohen, the latter examples are instructive when the former are not? Because (a) he doesn't know spit about the conflicts he's describing (for starters, he's confusing the Kosovo and Bosnia interventions, and seems unaware of the military activity that occurred on the ground) and (b) he's cherry-picking examples that suggest that the U.S. can enter a civil war and achieve its objectives at a minimal cost - like we're playing a live action video game. Cohen doesn't explain why he believes that Bosnia is a better example, nor why the outcome in that region (century-old ethnic rivalries ignited, and a small nation shattered into several tiny nations) would be desirable in Syria. Or perhaps he imagines that a bombing campaign would somehow cause Syria's ethnic and tribal factions to unify? Cohen won't even hear about ethnic or tribal issues, sneering, "The weary recitation of all these ethnicities suggests a colonial-era mentality: those bloody people and their bloody behavior." As if dropping the word "colonial" somehow erases ethnic and tribal tensions from reality - and never mind that he, himself, made one of those "weary recitations" only a few days ago, "I have always recognized the difficulties of any intervention in Syria and the hideous ethnic complexities of the place".

Cohen huffs,

The operative philosophy is that you do what you can when you can. The United States has the muscle. There are few grander causes than the saving of human life.

Apparently our bombs don't kill people. Cohen has lectured his readers that it's "cold-hearted" not to... I guess it's "do something" in Syria, because there's a humanitarian need. And that would be great, if we knew up front that the cure wouldn't be worse than the disease. We helped the Afghan people liberate themselves from Mohammad Najibullah. They ended up with the Taliban. Cohen seems to think that all bloodshed will end the moment the civil war ends. Not to get all "colonial" about it, but there's good cause to believe that absent a significant outside military presence the civil war will be followed at best by ethnic cleansing and at worst by ugly reprisals of the sort he might recall from Lebanon... if he knew any history. Don't just take my word for it,

Mamoun al-Homsy, a former Syrian MP and one of the country’s opposition leaders, has reportedly recently distributed a recorded message to the Alawite community in Syria, in which he warns its members against supporting Assad.

In the message, al-Homsy called on the Alawites to immediately renounce Assad, warning them that if they do not do so, “Syria will become the graveyard of the Alawites.”

He also stressed that Syria’s Sunni Muslims “will not remain silent” over Assad’s crimes, adding that they intend to abide by the rule of “an eye for an eye” and will “teach you (Alawites) a lesson that you will not forget.”

Moving back to Cohen's opening paragraph,

I have written so many columns about the Syrian civil war they are like rings on a tree stump — a way of gauging Barack Obama’s steadfast inaction and what the cost has been. In one of my first columns about that war, I called on the administration to arm the rebels and impose a no-fly zone, grounding Bashar al-Assad’s attack helicopters and his airplanes. At that point — March 27, 2012 — the war had taken the lives of 10,000 Syrians.

For Cohen to relate the discussion back to his first demonstration of ignorance reveals little more than how wise the Obama Administration is to ignore him, even if it causes him to write an occasional angry missive about how they're not showing him the respect he deserves. Does Cohen understand that Syria built its air defenses using Russian technology to defend against an Israeli military? It's not that the U.S. cannot defeat Syrian air defenses - it's that doing so will involve considerable risk, and will necessarily involve bombing targets throughout the country, including in densely populated areas. Even Cohen must know better than to lecture, "Somebody like Assad would never endanger civilians by building air defenses that cannot be taken out without bombing civilian neighborhoods." But then, he seems to believe that bombs don't kill people, so... who knows what he thinks.

More than that, Cohen is ignorant of the fact that Syria is not dependent on aircraft and, just as in Libya, there's no reason to believe that a cumbersome, expensive no-fly zone would create a significant shift in favor of anti-Assad forces. Were Cohen aware of the history of U.S. actions in Libya, he would be aware that the Obama Administration rejected the simple imposition of a no-fly zone because they did not believe that it would result in Qadaffi's defeat. Cohen has incredible faith in no-fly zones because... he imagines them to have a much more impressive history of affecting the outcome of regional conflicts than history in fact indicates. The no-fly zone in Iraq was in effect for a decade and, while preserving the status quo, did not remove Hussein from power nor weaken his ability to maintain control without a full-scale U.S. invasion.

And this magic wish, "Let's arm the rebels" - if it were easy to find rebels worthy of being armed, it would be a no-brainer. As it's not, the only no-brainer in the discussion is again Richard Cohen. There's a reason Israel is fastidiously refusing to publicly take sides in the conflict, and it's not because they want Assad to win or because they don't care about the outcome. In the early column he references, Cohen purports that a rebel victory "would be a boon to Israel". If he's capable, perhaps Cohen should ponder for a while why Israel doesn't seem to share his opinion. Perhaps as part of that consideration, he can ponder the Pentagon estimate that it would take 75,000 ground troops to ensure that Syria's chemical weapons arsenal - which is highly portable and highly distributed - does not fall into the wrong hands.

Here's a thought that should be obvious, even to Cohen: If there were good, easy choices to be made to end this conflict, we wouldn't be wrestling with how to avoid turning an already big mess into a bigger mess. If the sort of magic solution that ends the conflict, replaces Assad's regime with a more forward-thinking, inclusive government, and prevents humanitarian catastrophe were easy, the world would have already implemented that solution. Instead, the only part of the conflict that's easy is to sit at the sidelines with little knowledge of the region, its history or the facts on the ground and complain, "The Administration's not doing things the way I would."

Michel Singh's Bad Advice on Iran

The New York Times has published an editorial by Michael Singh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and, during G.W. Bush's second term, former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council. Singh apparently hopes to convince the Obama Administration to adopt a posture that Bush rejected, hoping that Obama will demand a degree of capitulation from Iran that the government would see as a humiliation and lock himself into taking military action of Iran does not capitulate.

The reasons for failure in all the approaches share a common thread: Iran shrank from any broad bilateral thaw because it feared engagement with the United States more than it feared confrontation.

“Resistance” to the West — and especially to the United States — was a founding principle of Iran’s Islamic regime. And while Iran has gradually normalized relations with many European and Asian allies of Washington, it has not done so with the United States itself, just as it has not with America’s ally Israel. To lose those two nations as enemies would be to undermine one of the regime’s ideological raisons d’être.

In other words, according to Singh, the U.S. has any number of allies who are able to reach out to Iran, but that Iran is going to reflexively reject engagement with the United States. Singh complains that the present round of sanctions are not likely to accomplish more than we've already seen. He complains that Iran's compliance with Israeli and U.S. "red lines" on its nuclear program allow it to control when those nations might launch a military attack.

He concludes that the U.S. should negotiate a new track of negotiations with Iran, outside of the current multilateral talks, to address all of the issues with Iran that trouble the United States. He also proposes that we arm-twist our allies to toughen their sanctions on Iran, never mind what that might mean for the progress or outcome of current talks, while telling Iran that they'll support any military action the U.S. chooses to take, while supporting Iranian dissident groups. I suspect that Singh hopes that such a move would cause Iran to walk away from the bargaining table. While pretending to be concerned that "whoever is on the Iranian side actually comes ready to bargain" his actual concern appears to be that Iran will reach an agreement - one of the type he describes as "a narrow technical accord rather than a more fundamental reorientation".

In short, Singh appears to be arguing that the U.S. should pressure the states presently negotiating with Iran to increase sanctions in a manner that is likely to poison any progress. Despite expressing that any such move would trigger reflexive Iranian opposition, he proposes that the U.S. submit to Iran a list of grievances that it wants addressed through separate talks, a move that is likely to undermine the multilateral talks (because Singh clearly wants the U.S. to insist upon concessions that he does not believe will result from a negotiated agreement) while demanding concessions far beyond what anybody (including, and perhaps especially, Singh) believes Iran would find acceptable even if not demanded by the United States. He appears to hope that the U.S. demand will be a new "red line" for military action, or that the collapse of negotiations likely to result from new demands, new sanctions, and new threats would leave the U.S. with "no choice" but to attack Iran.

The question of how to handle states such as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan, nations that have significant military power and nuclear technology and are hostile to the United States, is not one that lends itself to easy answers. I may be reading too much of a subtext into Singh's argument. Perhaps he truly believes that a nation he paints as likely to reflexively reject any such effort will suddenly become pliant and cooperative if we thump our chest hard enough and make enough threats. But to me, it seems like Singh hopes to create a context in which the United States paints itself into a corner, either having to look like Iran called its bluff or go to war, and that he's hoping for war. Singh might argue that there's a chance that his approach would work - that unlike every other regime in recent history that has faced a similar set of threats and despite his own characterization of its leadership, Iran will capitulate. But it's a "Wish in one hand, crap in the other" scenario - the odds of Iranian capitulation are vanishingly small, such that Singh's proposal is best regarded as a sure path to war.

As Usual, Michael Gerson Overplays His Hand

It's not that he gets off to a good start - he's eager to jump sharks from the word "go" - but how can the man look himself in the mirror after serving up a whopper like this one:

There is a political problem at the heart of the budget debate. If Democrats get what they want — tax-rate increases on the wealthy — they can crow about it in public. If Republicans get what they want — structural reductions in entitlement spending — they are unable to crow. Their motivation is fiscal and ideological, not political.

Gerson's memory is perhaps too short to recall, but when his former boss, George W. Bush, was elected to office our nation had a budget surplus. A few years later we has massive tax cuts, two unfunded wars, the unfunded Medicare Part D benefit, and a massive budget deficit. And then, for Act 2, we got the collapse of the economy. Their motivation is fiscal? If you believe that the Republican Party cares about balancing the budget, you're a fool.

Remind me again, where was Michael Gerson when the Bush Administration was taking the explicit, public position that deficits don't matter? Oh yeah... he was writing Bush's speeches.

Is Republican opposition to Social Security and Medicare ideological, at least within the party itself? Certainly, but not an ideology born in a vacuum. The ideology that drives the Republican Party to attempt to undermine Social Security and Medicare is very much about politics - it's about pleasing powerful and monied interests that bankroll the party, and is about gaining and holding power over the long term.

If Gerson means to suggest that it's a double-edged sword - that the Republicans accept a certain amount of political risk when they make massive cuts to Medicare and Social Security a central part of their party's ideology, and that they thus misrepresent their motivations and goals so as not to alienate the beneficiaries of those programs - he has a point. But to make that point he has to actually admit that the leaders of his party cannot be trusted to tell the truth. That is to say, opposition may be driven by ideology at the top, but the rank and file Republican voters like Social Security and Medicare. They don't share the ideology of the party's elite, and the Republicans therefore obfuscate lest they find themselves unable to win an election.

The heart of the present conflict is that the Republicans have been lying to the public for years, a lie exemplified by the Romney/Ryan budget proposal. Romney promised that he was going to cut taxes, significantly increase military spending and, although he proposed an idea to transform Medicare into a voucher program starting a decade in the future, that he would maintain Medicare benefits for those 55 and older and would not cut Medicare spending. When he was asked for specifics we got "I'll fire Big Bird".

The truth is, if you want to balance the budget it's going to be painful. If you want to balance the budget without increasing tax revenue, it's going to be extremely painful to the middle class. Gerson had no problem with the Bush-era lie that "deficits don't matter", and he has no problem with the present Republican lie that the budget can be balanced - with trillions freed up for tax cuts and increased military spending - by closing loopholes in a revenue-neutral fashion and eliminating waste. His problem is that the Democrats refuse to take ownership of the Medicare and Social Security cuts his party desires.

In focusing on the specifics of Gerson's mendacity, let's not lose track of the big picture. This Congress cannot bind future sessions of Congress to its spending plan. What Gerson and the Republicans want is not an actual, workable plan to balance the budget over a period of years. They want the President to agree to structural changes to Social Security and Medicare that would be difficult for future sessions of Congress to undo, while offering no assurance that they won't be every bit as profligate and irresponsible as Bush with the "savings" that result.

The President is resisting that "deal", and Gerson's unwilling to articulate the stakes in an honest manner, so instead we get this noisome whinging about how the President is a meany-pants who isn't offering enough concessions to the poor, downtrodden Republicans.

Middle East Blowback and Syria

Jackson Diehl and I have different ideas of what constitutes "blowback". I see "blowback" as the unintended consequence of foreign policy and military actions. He sees it as... I'm not quite sure.

At best, Libya will be a steady, low-grade headache for Obama in his second term. But the worst blowback from his policies will come in Syria. What began as a peaceful mass rebellion against another Arab dictator has turned, in the absence of U.S. leadership, into a brutal maelstrom of sectarian war in which al-Qaeda and allied jihadists are playing a growing role. Obama’s light footprint strategy did much to produce this mess; without a change of U.S. policy, it will become, like Bosnia for Bill Clinton or Iraq for George W. Bush, the second term’s “problem from hell.”

Diehl complains that President Obama's approach to Libya resulted in Gadhafi's fall from power, but showed little concern for what would happen to the nation afterward.

[A] Rand study concludes that stabilizing Libya will require disarming and demobilizing the militias and rebuilding the security forces “from the bottom up.” This, it says, probably can’t happen without help from “those countries that participated in the military intervention” — i.e. the United States, Britain and France. Can the Obama administration duplicate the security-force-building done in Iraq and Afghanistan in Libya while sticking to the light footprint? It’s hard to see how.

Diehl does not appear to be arguing that we should now occupy Libya, disarm its mlitias, and rebuild the nation from the ground up. He presents no argument that U.S. policy in Libya contributed to the civil war in Syria.

The U.S. is faced with four choices in Syria: Cease all current efforts and let the chips fall where they may, keep on the current course of sanctions and selective support for certain resistance, escalate into a Lebanon-type limited military engagement designed to cause Assad's regime to collapse, or invade, occupy and rebuild. Obama's "light footprint" policies in Libya did nothing to produce the mess in Syria. Diehl seems to be choosing loaded language, irrelevant to the situation, to try to make the Obama Administration responsible for Syria's civil war, and then to convince his readers that the only responsible action that can now be taken is an Iraq- or Afghanistan-style occupation and "bottom up" nation building.

Does Diehl actually believe that's plausible given our nation's recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, even under a different President? Even if we weren't still in a painfully slow period of economic recovery? Can Diehl at least explain why "It will be different than what happened the last two times we invaded and attempted to reinvent predominantly Muslim nations as progressive democracies," or "It will be different from our most recent incursions in nations that are dominated by warlords"? Because if not, the blowback isn't what would be leading us into the conflict - it would be what we would experience if we follow Diehl's counsel.

Few outside of Iran, the Putin Administration and Assad's inner circle want his regime to survive, but policy on how to achieve that end and what might follow should be predicated upon more than wishful thinking and an implied blank check payable by the U.S. taxpayer.

The Republican Party Can No Longer Blame Bush

Okay, I'm really turning that line back on the political right, specifically those factions that have tried to turn the War in Afghanistan into "Obama's War" and the slow economic recovery resulting from the Bush-era economic collapse into "Obama's economy". No doubt, memories of Bush did play a role in holding some voters in the Democratic column where they might otherwise have supported a Republican contender.

Nonetheless, when I read something like this, I think it's fair to say that it was the Republican Party that lost this election, not Bush. It is fair to say that Bush caused damage and that the Republican Party has not recovered from that damage, but I don't think that damage rises to the level that it either cost the party this election or, with more responsible leadership, would have remained a significant issue four years out.

But in reality the more pressing problem is that Republicans are still a party badly damaged by the George W. Bush years. The GOP has traditionally held huge advantages on foreign policy and the economy. That advantage is gone now. And Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate to give the party a refresh on those issues, particularly when the gettable voters were downscale whites. It isn’t that Republicans aren’t reaching enough voters; voters simply don’t believe the GOP is competent to govern.

The Republican Party has long held undeserved advantages on... I think it's more fair to call it "the military" as opposed to foreign policy, and on the economy. Past Republican Presidents did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "tax and spend", while running up record deficits. They did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "weak", while committing the U.S. to foreign military escapades that were of questionable value to national security, with sometimes disastrous results. Bush didn't depart from that formula - he simply kicked it up a notch.

But that's still not why the Republican Party lost. The Republican Party lost because it chose to nominate Mitt Romney. I'm certainly not convinced that any of the other declared candidates would have won, at least once the few who displayed any signs of "paleoconservatism" were drummed out of the pool, but let's recall a few things: Bush dreamed of an ethnically inclusive Republican Party. When he ran for office he favored immigration reform, albeit of a somewhat watered down nature. Senator John McCain was a champion of the DREAM Act. John McCain responded to anti-immigrant sentiments in his party by abandoning any support for immigration reform. Mitt Romney predictably tried to come down on multiple sides of the issue, but was not credible. And the Republican Party lost votes as a result - vote losses that cannot be blamed on Bush.

You want a party that is credible on foreign / military policy? Even though he chose to endorse President Obama, Colin Powell is still a Republican. No, I'm not saying run Powell, and I'm well aware of the positions taken by his critics, but I am saying that there are Republicans that continue to have credibility with the public. It was not the Democratic Party that chose to marginalize that faction of the Republican Party.

Obama did not really propose anything new on the economy or foreign policy fronts, but he did make contraception, rape, and Roe v. Wade a large part of this campaign. He constantly portrayed Romney as a man with “the social policies of the 1950s.” Apparently this worked.

I'm sure it played a role in President Obama's advantage among women, but again that's not something you can pin on Bush. G.W. ran as an unapologetically pro-life candidate, and implemented a lot of policies that made the pro-choice crowd angry, but he knew where to draw the line. He didn't come across as the type who wanted to ban contraception or who would make crackpot statements on sexual assault, and I don't think he would have left any ambiguity about where he stood on those issues. Romney tried to dance around the issues, and I doubt that anybody was left satisfied - the social conservatives he was attempting to appease, or the women who questioned whether he would stand up even for their right to access contraception.

The "back to the 1950's" issues, let's recall, arose in no small part from the statements of Tea Party candidates. In many ways the Tea Party is a reinvention of a certain bloc of Republican voters, but it was the Republican establishment and right-wing media that chose to amplify their voice and power. That helped the Republicans gain seats in 2010, but appears to have contributed to their loss in 2012. It definitely contributed to some of the Democratic victories in the Senate.

So let's say this: Right now it is fair to say that the economy is struggling back from collapse, and that the present economic conditions are in significant part an echo of the Bush Administration's mistakes, but that it would have been at least theoretically possible to have a more robust recovery had the President advanced (and if the Republicans would have allowed) certain recovery measures that were not tried, or were not strengthened when they proved inadequate. Right now it is fair to say that the echo of G.W. Bush played a role in why the public is suspicious of the Republican Party on foreign / military policy and economic issues, and probably contributed to the line-up of candidates from which Mitt Romney was deemed "the most electable".

But from this point forward, it's ownership time. It's Obama's job to keep the nation on a path to recovery. It's the Republican Party's job to find a candidate who is credible on foreign policy and economic issues. (As was obvious some months ago, Jeb Bush was already seeing the handwriting on the wall and has long been positioning himself to be that candidate four years from now.) Acknowledge his actual contribution if appropriate, but from this point forward the only politician who is entitled to say "It's G.W.'s fault" is Jeb, if he cannot get his own quest to be President back on track.