The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    A War of Choice.Not

    By Flavius on Wed, 09/24/2014 - 9:57pm |

    The initial response to Obama's announcement of our attack on Isis/Isil was "oh good" . Wars are always popular on their second day of course.

    But we're just beginning to get the criticism from the left  , being consistent with its opposition to all wars-fair enough-and we'll soon be hearing from John McCain, seemingly ,his   opposition to all peace.

    Since ,wisely, no one asked I'll volunteer a Flavian comment.

    No ,this is no more Obama's " war of choice" than the deaths of the two  Americans-so far-executed on camera were their choices.  For whatever their reasons-who cares?- the leaders of Isis wanted Obama to attack them so they achieved their goal. On their first try of course because he understood that until  he responded Isis  would have kept on raising the ante. 

    It's excellent to have a giant's strength, but to use it like a giant is tyrannous.

    A wise poet said. But not to use it when your citizens are being murdered on camera is craven.

     

     

    Comments

    Flav, let's follow this logic though to conclusion. If this is not a war of choice, if the US had to go war, than who's choice was it? Not Obama's, apparently. Not Congress's. Not the American people's.

    According to your logic, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gets to choose when the US the goes to war. In a way, that makes all him more powerful than the Commander a Chief--warmaking powers with no checks, no balances, no elections.

    And not just al-Baghdadi. Any warlord or minor dictator who gets his hands on an American journalist or two can choose to make us go to war. After all, we have no choice.


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 12:32am

    Hmn. Michael I’ve been of course impressed by your contributions here at Dagblog but in this case, not so much. Even Homer nods

    Of course  had  can  have multiple meaning but that’s a false dilemma . In practice everyone knows  which one applies in the context.

    Similarly Obama could have chosen to ignore the ISIS beheadings. Another false choice. Presidents have a duty to protect our citizens. Goes with the territory..So it’s Obama’s position , not  al-Baghdadi which required Obama to act.

    Unlike W in 2003. 

     


    by Flavius on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 9:15am

    If Obama is obligated to go to war whenever Americans are beheaded, it gives every ambitious fanatic tremendous power to manipulate us. American journalists and even tourists are not so hard to capture in certain countries. So a terrorist just has to catch one, videotape a gruesome execution, put it on youtube, and boom, presidential obligation to bomb the Middle East.

    But I made the point mainly to expose the silliness of your "war of necessity." Why necessary? What happens to America if we don't go to war? We lose more war correspondents? That would be a sad tragedy but hardly a mortal threat to our national security.

    Every war's defenders speak of its necessity. Read Barbera Tuchman's Guns of August. The German generals spoke incessantly of "military necessity" as they rationalized their plans to invade France. Many Iraq War supporters called it a war of necessity too.

    But it's bullshit. Unless you're faced with imminent subjugation or annihilation, there is no necessity. You weigh the pros, you weigh the cons, you weigh the risks, you choose. Talk of necessity is just a way of obscuring the calculus.


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 6:43pm

     I did not mention necessity.


    by Flavius on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 9:04pm

    Then what was the opposite of choice you had in mind?


    by moat on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 9:35pm

    I'll attempt to provide a composite answer at your further intervention below.


    by Flavius on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 10:59pm

    The journalists' beheadings were not in any way the cause of our intervention.

    A trigger, perhaps.  A justifying rationalization, to persuade Americans fed up with both war and the Middle East, quite possibly. 

    A cause?  No, that machinery was already in motion, long since.

    Still, I suppose it may serve as comfort for some to reduce it to a Glenn-Greenwaldian abstraction of logic and choice.

    It is not.  Real people are losing and will continue to lose real lives there - and as we've now seen, elsewhere.  In both small and large numbers.

    If the surrounding nations finally realize that it is in their interest to (a) create and preserve some measure of stability in their own neighborhood, and (b) start paying attention to their own restive streets, where those who feel they have no voice turn to more and more extreme movements to gain one, then the catastrophe we helped shape with Bush's plunder-driven 2003 invasion and resulting destruction may be wound down in shorter order than not.

    It is in our interest to aid them in doing so, yet not in our interest to attempt to do it on their behalf.


    by Austin Train on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 3:47pm

    The hostages were beheaded because of the bombing, so to use it as justification for the bombing seems dubious.

    What is your reason for thinking that  ISIS wanted to be bombed? That is hard to believe.


    by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 10:23am

    Actually, the hostages were beheaded because ransom was not paid. And they take hostages with ransom in mind. For grievances, they don't take hostages, they kill immediately if possible (like most soldiers in war do.)


    by artappraiser on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 11:34am

    What is your reason for thinking that  ISIS wanted to be bombed? That is hard to believe.

    The publicity they gave to Foley's beheading..

     


    by Flavius on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 11:49am

    They were already being bombed when they beheaded Foley.


    by Aaron Carine on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 11:57am

    It was not rational for them to think that beheading would not result in intensified bombing. The beheadings were considered a strong stand for the faith by ISIL's base, but the rest of the world viewed the televised action as barbaric.the gave the appearance of a bloodthirsty group unwilling to compromise. To the rest of the world, the argument that you can't negotiate with madmen canaries the day. Bombing becomes easier to justify to the public.


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 12:12pm

    The Islamic State executed a female Iraqi lawyer for criticizing the groups destruction of religious sites. This suggests that they will kill anyone disagreeing with the group's interpretation of Islam. Stopping the bombing would not have prevented the death.


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 12:21pm

     Not bombing probably would have saved the Western hostages, although I guess that can't be proven, at least not yet.


    by Aaron Carine on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 3:02pm

    Not only is that an unproveable negative, it's a highlly dubious assertion at best.

    They beheaded others, and killed many more people in horrific ways.  IS is a group that wants to be seen as lethally absolutist.

    Bombing is irrelevant to that concern.


    by Austin Train on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 3:32pm

    I don't know; had they beheaded Western hostages before? Maybe they did. It seems unlikely that it was coincidence that the beheadings came after the bombing.
     


    by Aaron Carine on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 4:39pm

    I think some countries paid ransom

    Islamic state had no problems slaughtering Christians.

    http://www.catholic.org/news/international/middle_east/story.php?id=56481


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 5:52pm

    Yeah.

    I accept my position is subjective but it goes like this.

    In early August ISIS was defeating the remnants of the Iraq army and the Iraqi Kurds.We intervened in particular to defend the Kurds. We could have expecting some sort of ISIS attack response. That's warfare.

    The particular response they  chose was to execute Foley.That's not warfare, it's barberism 

     


    by Flavius on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 12:22pm

    Did everyone see this article by a veteran Arab news man from Dubai in Politico? The Barbarians within Our Gates, excerpt:

    ......Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. .........these (terror) groups do belong to the same family tree—and all of them stem from the Arabs’ civilizational ills. The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the tumorous creation of an ailing Arab body politic. Its roots run deep in the badlands of a tormented Arab world that seems to be slouching aimlessly through the darkness. It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It will take us a long time to recover—it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime. My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing at the gates. Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.

    Obama seemed to be trying to 'kick start' big regional Muslim nations into action. It may take a while for that to happen. He compared US participation to be 'like Somalia' which has been in chaos for 20 years, but is finally getting its act together with help from African Union boots on the ground troops.

    Muslim Turkey (military man power pool of 30 million, active 1/2 million, 5000 tanks -total pop Syria 16 million) is too corrupt, or too cowering before the terrorists to secure even Syrian cities and towns across its border. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - would any Saudis fight or die to save it..?


    by NCD on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 11:16am

    I think it's good to see that the Arab identity thing is being raised, it's something that  I think hasn't been raised enough since "Islamism" failed so miserably in Egypt.  Makes me wonder if it's possible that a lot of things that have been conflated as Sunni cultural dysfunction are really more along the lines of Arab cultural dysfunction. Especially since Sunni wealth is mostly Arab and funds Sunni imams and mosques around the world of other ethnicities.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 11:33am

    Good points. It often seems like Muslim identity problems, as many of them come from, or were even born in, Minnesota, England, Scotland, Australia.....


    by NCD on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 1:36pm

    Just ran across another piece on the topic of "Arab identity" @ Asia Times:

    Gaza and the end of 'Arab gallantry'
    The lack of reaction on Arab streets and among the region's governments as Israel savaged Gaza civilians raises doubts over notions of gallantry that define Arab identity. There is a similar lack of gallantry within the ruling Palestinian classes, however, with the war's aftermath seeing the Ramallah political class attack the former Hamas government, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas fret over his position.
    - Ramzy Baroud (Sep 26, '14)


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/29/2014 - 1:43am

    The enemy that you say we must fight emerged from the confluence of many different civil wars happening right now simultaneously. Some of these wars get reported on extensively; others are buried in the back pages of obscure journals. Obama acknowledged this general condition when he said local members of the "coalition" needed to stop exporting violence to their neighbors. But militating against that condition probably won't be possible while waving a banner so many of the warring contingents have found brief common cause to march behind. This observation isn't an argument against this or that policy, just a reminder that the "choice" in this case is not an individual act of decision like an example of Augustinian Free Will. It is also a refusal to choose who should be helped or not in this sprawling network of war except those who declare themselves against the bad thing.

    For the sake of discussion, let us call a choice something that not only opposes a bad thing (from the point of view of many people) but helps address why the bad thing keeps happening. 

    What would that choice look like? It probably would require more from us.


    by moat on Thu, 09/25/2014 - 9:31pm

    Oh Lord, I’ve got to discriminate.

    I  try to stay away from words like must and necessity because they don’t reflect my belief that life is full of matters of degree and the trick is to choose among them.

    I actually think that Presidents Bush the younger and Obama got it about right in November 2001 and May 2011. 9/11 was horrible and what was done afterwards to the Taliban and OBL was well deserved. I only regret that we couldn’t  resurrect him daily so we could shoot him over and over again.

    Now comes March 2003 and August 2014 otherwise known as last month.

    The invasion of Iraq and the later execution of Saddam were not proportionate to any harm that Saddam and co had done to us.  I’m well aware that Baghdad was well stocked with people with good reason to hate his guts. We didn’t. We should have stayed home. Had we did so many things would have been different perhaps including the appearance of ISIS and its unspeakable proclivity for beheading completely innocent Americans.

    It wasn’t necessarily the case that Obama was required initiate air attacks on the ISISites but according to me it was necessary that he did something. He’s President and ISIS’s behavior to us put Obama under an obligation to re-teach them that those who “live by the sword etc.”

    As part of that should Obama have tried to start the process of educating the inhabitants of that hot and dusty part of the world? Perhaps .But not if trying to do that interferes with the simple understandable message he/we started to send them three days ago: if you kill Americans you’ll soon wish you hadn’t.

     


    by Flavius on Fri, 09/26/2014 - 12:58am

    I agree with your assessment that "something" had to be done in the face of such bold provocation. It is not an argument against that point to notice that being goaded to act is a common means of manipulation. Your original post spoke of the IS- (whatever the hell anybody wants to call them) going for the most provocative message possible.  In that context, what M Wolraich said about the logic of who controls the initiation of war is an important question; Always has been.

    I am not arguing against the Obama response. I am glad to see that much effort is being made to support the tactical decisions that were decided upon.  In that respect, the present effort is much more focused and professional than the fight George the Younger brought against OBL back in the day. The deals made at the beginning of that combat turned into serious liabilities as the fight dragged on. That could happen again, of course. We will see.

    By suggesting there were more possible responses than the ones being taken, I didn't mean to say that we were morally required to "educate" the people over "there." Our military actions have set off all kinds of wars that were just waiting for the opportunity to get underway.  In terms of strategy, the situation is developing into exactly the black hole some people were hoping for back in nineties on those neocon websites urging regime change by direct force.

    Remember?


    by moat on Fri, 09/26/2014 - 9:39pm

    Politics eliminates some of the possible strategies. In theory Obama could have decided to make no response. Perhaps in order to address Michael's concern that we shouldn't allow our actions to be dictated  by ISIL. After a few more beheadings without response  ISIL might  very well decide to stop.

    But that strategy would be very difficult to implement because of the public's probable disgust that we were being insufficiently macho. Although it  probably be expressed as annoyance with Obama because he was not defending  our citizens at least some of the reaction would be pure chauvinism.'Don't let them kick us around this way".

    Even tho this "passive" response would probably result in fewer American deaths than the approach that is now underway  


    by Flavius on Sat, 09/27/2014 - 2:16am

    A reaction to a provocation is not a strategy. If one has the power to implement a strategy, the response to a particular act becomes part of some larger plan. Realizing this element cannot help one wonder what are the details of that larger plan.

    There probably is a larger plan underway because that is what people do, plan things. 

    But let us say there is no larger plan. The people in charge right now are only responding to what is emerging as a problem that popped up suddenly without relation to the other issues they were dealing with. The language becomes like that used by the George II administration:

    How could we be expected to expect this?

    A sudden- not very thought out reaction- becomes more acceptable then.

    This doesn't mean the response is all theatrical but it is worth noting that it has all the components of manufactured consensus.

    Perhaps the resemblance is pure coincidence.


    by moat on Sun, 09/28/2014 - 7:13pm

    A reaction to a provocation is not a strategy..

    Well put. !

    I'll leave you to have the last word . Unless someone else decides to rattle your cage. 


    by Flavius on Sun, 09/28/2014 - 9:56pm