Intellectual Clarity & Rocket-Propelled High Explosives

It’s a two-fer! When it rains it pours. No time for frilly introductions. Let’s get this soiree going.

Where’s Obama resolve on the budget battle?
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Wednesday, March 30, 6:39 PM

In his Libya speech,

Either politicians need to start giving their speeches better titles, or opinion columnists need to start referring to them as they are titled.

Obama was clear, forceful and principled.

This reminds me of the episode of Futurama where Richard Nixon buys Bender’s robot body to affix to his severed, chemically-maintained head-in-a-jar. After being skewered in the debate against Jack Johnson and John Jackson his publicist assures him that even though he had been thoroughly embarrassed, his “body stayed on message.” (An obscure reference, I’ll grant you, given that it includes something called a “truth-o-scope,” but it’s one that I’m confident will stand the test of time.)

The point is, Obama was only clear, forceful, and principled on a purely superficial level. Saying “let me be clear” and then following it up with something vague does not serve as an acceptable substitute for actual clarity. The content of the speech was vague, tepid, and uncertain, despite Obama’s insistence that he was being clear, forceful, and principled. Only his body and tone were on-message. This trick is starting to wear thin.

Yes, there were some ambiguities

Some?

but these were dictated by a genuinely uncertain situation on the ground, not by muddled thinking.

The President completely failed to distinguish Libya from Syria in any meaningful way. Simply asserting that this was a unique circumstance doesn’t exactly cut it. He regularly stated that the military action was in our national interests, but he failed to explain why. Some vague sense of moral obligation is not national interest. Neither is Libya’s geographic location between Tunisia and Egypt (arguably the most irrelevant fact brought he dredged up). Indeed, everything he said was predicated on the notion that the Libyan people would democratically elect leadership that it more friendly to the United States than Kadafi. In reality, there is no evidence that this would occur. This is the note of caution conservatives struck when Egypt was facing its own uprising. Now the leading party is a band of Islamist fanatics known as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The president made the case for a foreign policy rooted in morality yet also alive to the difficulties of acting wisely in an imperfect world that does not bend easily to one man’s or one country’s will.

So if I’m reading this right, the official United States foreign policy towards international crises is hyperactive morality coupled with fatalistic nihilism?

On the budget, by contrast, it’s hard to know what the president’s bottom line is, what deals he would regard as reasonable or when he will even join the fray.

He won’t join the fray; Obama wants a government shut-down. He knows that a government shut-down is viewed as much more dire than it actually is. (It’s not like our military stops functioning in the event of a shut-down.) The man is clearly pinning his re-election on his ability to blame Boehner and the Republicans, despite this being the budget for a fiscal year controlled solely by the filibuster-proof Democratic Congress of 2008.

The White House is so determined to keep the president antiseptically distant from the untidy wrangling on the budget that it will not even allow its allies in Congress to cite the administration’s own analyses of how harmful some of the Republican cuts would be. They can use the facts

Facts <> Analysis. Just saying.

but not let on that the administration put them together. What’s up with this?

Obama was not afraid to take risks on Libya,

The President was absolutely mortified to take risks in Libya. That’s why he put the decision off as long as he could and eventually deferred the decision to Hillary. The entire reason for our muddled mission is that the President refuses to fully engage in the fight because he’s not sure we should be in the fight in the first place.

including the hazard of criticism from all sides for his resolute refusal to lay out an all-encompassing policy toward the various uprisings in the Middle East.

That’s a nice way of saying that the administration’s official policy is to “embrace the clusterfuck.”

It’s amusing to watch us journalists

You’re not a journalist. You’re an opinion writer. It’s actually closer to “rodeo clown” or “pot farmer” on the continuum of professional respectability than journalist.

assume the mantle of medieval scholastics as we parse his every word in search of an “Obama Doctrine.”

True. You guys are fucking clueless.

But the last thing the United States needs is a doctrinaire approach to a series of conflicts that affect our interests in different ways and in which we have very different capacities to influence the outcomes.

Let go of your dogmatic structure of policy and reject the outmoded adherence to reason. Embrace the clusterfuck!

When “history is on the move,” as Obama put it nicely, rigid policy frameworks can be dangerous.

It’s much more sensible to trust the awesome power of the United States military to a single man too intellectually lazy to formalize his thought processes regarding the use of that power. Brilliant. Not only are we sacrificing the safety afforded by the balance of powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches, but we’re doing so to amass power for a man-child with less foreign policy acumen than the various strippers that let Charlie Sheen snort cocaine from their breasts.

What Obama did offer was an exceptionally honest and rigorous defense of humanitarian intervention.

Defend the clusterfuck for our God-given right to future clusterfucking!

“It’s true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs,” he said. “And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action. [emphasis added]

This is kind of the crux of the speech here, and it underscores Obama’s tragically muddled understanding of the world. He believes that American interests run in conflict to the need for action. He admitted it. See? Right there. I italicized it

The pressing question, of course, is whose needs supersede those of America?

But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right.

First, measuring and balancing are not arguments. Showing that the costs outweigh the benefits is an argument. It’s one that, if proven, should ALWAYS deter the United States from military action. 

Second, it’s almost as if his reflexive meekness doesn’t permit him to understand the meaning of the words “always” and “never.”

In this particular country — Libya — at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence.”

In other words “Back off! I’m making this shit up as I go along.”

He was right to keep using that word “particular”

Yes, it absolves him of all need to be consistent when intervening in future skirmishes between America’s enemies.

and also right to argue that we should not have acted unilaterally.

If the argument is that we must “always measure our interests” is derailed by the caveat “unless the international community objects,” then it was even more tepid and limp-wristed than I made it out to be.

The United States will better maintain its power and influence by expanding the ways in which it can work in concert with like-minded nations.

We do that with trade partnerships, not by asking American military personnel to serve under a Canadian. Typing that just made me vomit in my mouth a little.

Putting aside the whatever-Obama-does-must-be-wrong wing of the Republican Party, there are two legitimate lines of criticism of his Libya policy.

Here are my top ten:

1)      A failure to take seriously the basic demands of leading the Executive Branch has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s massively under-qualified for the position he has.

2)      The decision to go into Libya was half-hearted and timid.

3)      We shouldn’t have gone into Libya in the first place, but the President got goaded into it by his advisors because he’s weak.

4)      The “Obama Doctrine” is simply an enshrinement of the notion that the Executive Branch can use the full force of the United States military haphazardly, and unilaterally.

5)      The mission is muddled in the mind of the man who conceived it.

6)      The mission is muddled in its implementation.

7)      The President apparently doesn’t know or doesn’t care that we are actively aiding and abetting Islamist extremists within the rebel movement in Libya.

8)      The President clearly doesn’t understand the concept of “American interests.”

9)      The President doesn’t understand the military necessity of a multi-faceted attach to achieve combat objectives worth having (i.e. you can’t win a war from 30,000 ft.)

10)  “Kinetic Military Action” proves that liberals are too much of pansies to admit that they started a war even when they started a war.

One is the realist’s view that the United States should not have intervened because we are already overcommitted and don’t even know who the rebels are. The other is that having declared that Moammar Gaddafi must go, we need to go all the way, arm the rebels and do whatever else is needed to ensure their victory.

Realists (and, for that matter, pacifists) won’t be moved by Obama’s humanitarian case, but I suspect many Americans were convinced that the United States and its allies could not stand by facing “the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.”

Which, of course, is a lie. We did it in Bosnia. We did it in Iraq. We did it in the Sudan, and Rwanda, and Myanmar. The simple and sad facts are these:

a)      Totalitarian leaders are asshats.

b)      Ethnic conflict blows.

c)      Neither is our responsibility.

Here’s my solution: split Libya. Why are we obsessed with the idea that Libya is a fixed and indivisible territory? The rebels get Benghazi; Kaddafi gets Tripoli. Literally split the country down the middle. Give them both international standing, legitimacy, and if they want to keep shooting each other, so be it.

As for giving more help to the rebels, it may come to that.

Somewhere, some talk radio personality is creating a parody song for “mission creep” to the dulcet tones of Radiohead.

But after our experience in Iraq, I’d prefer a president who is wary of the costs of a military mission devoted to regime change

The assertion that George Bush wasn’t aware of the costs of the Iraq War, both in human tragedy and in financial expenditures, is wrong and Dionne knows it.

See, it’s frustrating when someone simply asserts  facts, isn’t it?

and doesn’t lightly brush aside the risks of a quagmire.

Perhaps Obama has the same fear of quagmires when it comes to the budget fight,

Oh right. This column was ostensibly about budgets.

but this is not a battle he can avoid. So far, he has been more of a pundit or a distant judge, rendering verdicts from afar on the behavior of the various parties. “Both sides are going to have to sit down

I want some people do to their legislating standing up. That’s not a metaphor; I just appreciate the benefits of exercise and good circulation.

and compromise on prudent cuts,” he said a few weeks ago. Well, yes, but isn’t he on a side here? He talks periodically about his priorities, but he hasn’t put any muscle behind those who are actually trying to defend them in the brawl that’s raging at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Let’s be honest; Obama’s approval just slipped to the low 40s. He doesn’t have any muscle to spare.

In his speech on Monday, the president spoke of our obligation “to live the values that we hold so dear.” He’s done a decent job of that in Libya. He needs to do the same closer to home.

I actually feel for Obama in many respects. Domestically, he gave liberals everything he could get during his first two years. True, he didn’t get the public option into Obamacare, but then again, he simply didn’t have the votes in either the House or the Senate. He even floated the bat-shit crazy stuff from the fringes like Card Check and Cap and Trade. The budget was an issue that the Democratic-controlled house and the Democrat-controlled Senate should have taken up six months ago. Probably more.  This was Nancy Pelosi’s responsibility.

Now that he’s taken a stand—a wrong-headed stand though it may be—these little pissants start criticizing him for failing on domestic issues. No wonder his approval is heading into the 30s.