dagblog - Comments for "Middle-East Woes"

Somehow I think Iran's the

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:28:26 +0000

In reply to Peter, there were 50 comments

Somehow I think Iran's the "Paper Tiger in the Room", or just a strutting Peacock, not quite an Elephant. Have they invaded anyone since Darius & Xerxes and the battle at Thermopyle?

With the Taliban running Afghanistan and the Wahabbi's running Saudi Arabia, and Hussein doing his best to rile up the region, Iran was almost the adult in the room - the US didn't exactly raise the average age over the last decade.

Iran had a lot of reforms through the 90's, and was seeking rapprochement with Europe. Bush pushed this success back - whether it was hatred for everything Clinton (just like he ignored the improvements in Serbia/Yugoslavia) or just an entrenched new agenda to reshape things, he undoubtedly made it worse. And Iran still doesn't have the enriched uranium to make anything dangerous, even though it's been 10 years since Lieberman was freaking out about it as our "serious" hawkish Democrat.

Give Iran observer status with the EU, pull the troops out of Afghanistan, give Assad some clear lines we care about or we carpet bomb, and let's spend that $100 billion a year some way useful.

Peter, there were 50 comments

Lurker — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 11:49:23 +0000

In reply to I'd say part of the break

Peter, there were 50 comments to the submission, many of them, like yours, raising several points. As I said in reply to the first responder, Verified Atheist (who raised 11 questions): " I don't have the time (or the knowledge) to answer your questions." Nothing personal, and I'll try to deal with your point about deterrence at the end.

You question my motives, whether I'm "after a discussion or just some folks to agree with you on XYZ". As an atheist in the Dagblog Church of Obama-Is-God, I suppose I'm partly driven by evangelism: how could so many seemingly intelligent people be so deluded? Maybe I can shift some true believers into, at least, agnosticism. The Snowden leaks have shown that Obama is, indeed, omniscient and omnipresent, but perhaps his foreign policy failures will show that he's not omnipotent.

But if I lower myself into a pit of hissing leftists, there is a risk I may get bitten on the ankle, ie, that you will convert me to your worldview. That's a possibility. I think it's unlikely because I don't read the NYT, don't listen to NPR, don't watch CNN, and so miss out on daily reinforcement of the Received Wisdom.

I doubt I'll find folks to agree with me, but I do hope to enter a discussion. It's boring to read your own side's arguments all the time. I'm giving you and you're giving me a change of viewpoint.

About deterrence: I think in the 1980s we didn't recognize the danger from Iran, we considered it a bloody nuisance, nothing more. Hizbulla had not yet taken over Lebanon or fought Israel to a standstill. The Iranian nuclear programme was small and primitive, and didn't yet alarm anyone (other than Israel, but they kept things quiet). So we didn't feel the need for deterrence.

I've heard it suggested that Bush should have ignored Iraq and gone straight for the elephant in the room - Iran. But it's hard to focus on the elephant in the room when there's a rabid dog at the door. As of this writing, Iran has still not sent missiles from its territory into Israel or Saudi Arabia. Saddam did.

"If 'we don't share a

acanuck — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 05:57:03 +0000

In reply to If you can't read an opposing

"If 'we don't share a vocabulary,' what hope is there for dialogue?" We're in agreement: none. Fortunately, none of us is in a position of power, so our lack of consensus has no impact on the prospect of world peace.

But my time is precious, and I have none to waste trying to change other people's worldviews. When it comes to the Middle East, delusional thinking appears to be the norm, and recent events are already sending the crazy talk into overdrive.

Just today, I read two articles -- in the JPost, Bibi hints to a cabinet committee he's thinking about unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. In the NYT, Shmuel Rosen muses about the growing allure of unilateral annexation.

Seeming opposites, yet one common thread: the Palestinians are to have no say in their fate. Neither scenario requires their buy-in. Simple enough, but guaranteed to fail.

I'd say part of the break

Peter Schwartz — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 15:33:01 +0000

In reply to If you can't read an opposing

I'd say part of the break down in foreign policy consensus is due to the "end" of the Cold War. Back in the day, we had (really) only one enemy which we fought through proxy wars and various kinds of diplomacy. Everyone in the US agreed, more or less, that the USSR had a bad system, which we called, rightly or wrongly, communism.

There were a variety of ways to be against the USSR and its proxies, and we argued greatly over what to do about it, especially around Vietnam and South America, but the general layout of the geopolitical map was clear. Moreover, we had an overarching deterrent in place on both sides. MAD created a stalemate and a sort of consensus about the way the world worked and who was who.

Once that went away...once asymmetrical warfare became a reality...once highly destructive weapons with no return address were broadly distributed...once lots of "new" players asserted themselves and had the means to reach large audiences in fare away lands...and once lots of norms and set ways of thinking were splintered and replaced with highly charged 24-hour news and millions of different Internet voices (often anonymous voices), it became harder, maybe impossible, to maintain a consensus.

Maybe, even, not because there was so much genuine disagreement...and maybe, even, not because it's impossible to get to some semblance of the truth about what's going on in, say, Syria or Iran, though that's very hard to do...but because everyone's been liberated to enter into the discussion...a certain democracy among opiners, regardless of merit, has become a fact. "Oh yeah? Who sez? And who are you? And how do you know? You were wrong five times before--why believe you now?"

Millions of people now have instant access to LOTS of information about everything, but very little ability to verify whether any bit of information is true. You can say, "I won't accept any fact as a fact unless I see five independent sources for it," but then the Internet makes it incredibly easy for one person to simply pass along what he reads somewhere else, which then gets passed on again.

So one way around this is to vet one's sources. Some sources are reliable; others are not. Some have an ax to grind; others don't. Some are okay because they're grinding my ax. And so on. But still, vetting sources takes a lot of time, and even reliable sources can make big mistakes, and it's not entirely clear what a reliable way to vet a source would look like. You have to rely on what that person has said before and judge it by...what? How accurate the person was before? How important previous inaccuracies are and what weight they should carry when looking at new claims?

So when you read a few grafs and it becomes clear that the author has an ax to grind and isn't making genuine arguments which can be discussed, then there are no "receptors" (to use a biological metaphor) where an opposing view can attach and engage. For example, you started this off by saying, "Dagbloggers no longer discuss foreign policy." Later, you asked me, "Don't you believe in deterrence?" I asked, "If we believe in deterrence, and feel that Iran needs to be deterred, what sense does it make to take out Saddam? After all, he was 'our guy' throughout the 1980s?"

But I got nothing back from you on this point--and you claim at least to want a discussion. Don't get me wrong: I'm not miffed, and this happens all the time. I'm just pointing out that, in this example, I did take your starting point seriously--the need for deterrence--it was, for the instant, a point of commonality between you and me. So I have to wonder a bit whether you're after a discussion or just some folks to agree with you on XYZ. If so, then that stance, IMO, precludes commonality and consensus. To reach consensus, we need at least a few shared understandings.

If you can't read an opposing

Lurker — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 08:34:25 +0000

In reply to Given the Commentary article

If you can't read an opposing piece to the end because "it’s clear we don’t share a vocabulary", what hope is there for dialogue? If you can't talk to your opponent, then you can't persuade him/her, so you end up ramming your legislation through when you have a majority, and your opponent does likewise, leading to "an incoherent hodgepodge of self-righteous posturing and arbitrary actions/reactions". US foreign policy used to be bipartisan. Not any more, and this is not the fault of only one party.

It's easy to sneer at Netanyahu, but he's the pig in AnonymousPP's metaphor (above), while you're the chicken. If US intelligence makes a mistake about Iran, the mushroom cloud will rise over Tel Aviv, not New York. At least, the first. Could US intelligence miscalculate? See Anonymous PS (above).

I'm looking forward to you explaining cosmic inflation to a non-creationist.

What would be the point of

Lurker — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 08:14:26 +0000

In reply to What would be the point of

What would be the point of "moving our troops around"?

Ask Obama and NATO. Here are some links:

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-06-03/news/50301614_1_...

http://news.yahoo.com/nato-agrees-readiness-action-plan-counter-russia-2...

You would never know from the

moat — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 01:04:02 +0000

In reply to Middle-East Woes

You would never know from the A.G. article that Saudi Arabia exists and that the U.S. is deeply entangled in the deals made with them in terms of arms and money.

This isn't to say that focusing upon that sort of thing explains everything that is happening or points to a simple policy directive.

But to completely exclude the element from a discussion of the "Mideast" is nuts.

FWIW, here's a graf from a

Peter Schwartz — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 23:19:02 +0000

In reply to Thinking it over, I guess

FWIW, here's a graf from a newsletter whose recent Russian investments are all way up...

"The big news is that Putin is backing off and stocks are running hard. The Micex, Russia's exchange, is up 28.64% from its March 2014 low. Inflows are once again on the rise, which suggests people are beginning to come to terms with what we knew in the first place... Russian equities were tremendously undervalued."

I don't know how you feel about the geopolitical prognosticatory prowess of Mr. Market, but he appears to be sanguine about Mr. Putin's plans for world domination. Of course, he could be wrong.

Edit to add: And now it does appear that Obama wants to bolster Europe militarily.

We'd have to do the addition

Peter Schwartz — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 23:17:36 +0000

In reply to If dead bodies, rather than

We'd have to do the addition to know for sure.

And we'd have to stipulate a way of deciding which dead count. Or how to count the dead.

However, you specified "dictators" above, so I was following your lead.

As to Putin, he didn't simply wake up one morning and decide he was going to persuade Assad to give up his chemical weapons. Something preceded it.

Well, didn't FDR proclaim,

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 21:12:35 +0000

In reply to I changed the author to

Well, didn't FDR proclaim, "he may be a sock puppet, but he's our sock puppet"?