The leader of the United States should never leave those willing to sacrifice their lives in the cause of freedom wondering where America stands.
Worth reading in full.
Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The leader of the United States should never leave those willing to sacrifice their lives in the cause of freedom wondering where America stands.
Worth reading in full.
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John Quincy Adams
By pointedly not getting involved, Obama is not being neutral. He is supporting Assad and the Iranian mullahs.
Adams’s monsters are out there. We can fight them now, when doing so requires mainly words, or we can fight them later when it will be harder and bloodier.
Meh.
While I sympathize with your points, Jonathan, I tend to agree with Lex but with caveats that support your points! Dr. Metz (who has posted around here) suggests possibly supporting groups in Iran that are hostile to the ruling regime as a push back against their proxies in Iraq. This seems more reasonable than backing a bunch of people in Syria that we have no idea about and opening up a whole new can of worms.
Our intelligence can’t have kept up. Not even the Israelis intelligence could have kept up. How could it? Events are moving too rapidly and we could get fooled like others did in Egypt. We are not good at this. The past decade has shown it.
Our troops are tired. Really tired. We are out of money.
Al Q has moved into Africa big time and using the seas and Somali pirates for revenue generation. Supposedly. Intelligence is a tricky game, so who really knows?
At any rate, no-one takes us seriously on these issues, Jonathan. No-one. Not a single “our bastard” or “their bastard” – or anyone. Even if we recalled our Syrian ambassador and took a hard line. That’s because of our extreme toleranceof Sunni radicalism while trying, haphazardly, to put the screws on Iran and its horribles.
The US tolerates mostly Pakistani (but a very few Iranian) proxies in Afghanistan against NATO troops and gives tons of aid money to Pakistan while the “get Iran” and “get Russia” crew in DC looks the other way as China-Pakistan proliferate up the wazoo and give missiles or whatnot to Iran. We follow the Saudis no matter what happens to us. 9-11 matters less than helping them with Iranian containment and keeping the oil flowing. Well, I don’t know. What am I supposed to think post Abbottabad? I don’t trust any of our traditional foreign policy strategizing for this era. It’s not good enough.
Oddly enough, the “get Russia” and “get Iran” crews in DC kind of exacerbate this by focusing on one single issue instead of the whole picture for American security interests.
It’s a three dimensional world which requires a certain nimbleness. I’m not sure I know the answers.
Here is one reason people laugh at us and our attempts to “get tough”:
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2010/07/he-aint-heavy-hes-my-genocidal.html
What are American interests in all of this mess? And why do I get the feeling that old Cold Warriors in DC will tolerate anything coming out of “afpak” in order to block the Iranians and Russians and Chinese. And all their maneuvering got us troops killed in NATO and 9-11.
I’m being melodramatic, but barely.
I don’t know.
We need a radical rethink of strategy. The Old Cold warriors (thanks for the past, but it’s new times now) just scare me.
If there is an act of nuclear terrorism, the “hub” will be “afpak” maybe. As good a chance or better as any of the other joints.
– Madhu
There are many sources of danger. We should be responsive to all of them. We can afford to. (We can’t afford our welfare state but that is a different matter. Why is it so frequently used as a rhetorical diversion against arguments for increased defense spending?)
US courts have sometimes treated juvenile criminals too leniently, with the consequence that many of the juveniles learned that crime pays and grew into hardened adult criminals who have caused a great deal of harm. That is how the USA tends to treat hostile countries. Some of those hostile countries eventually become big threats to us and then we start to take them seriously. But until then we often try to ignore them. I think it would be wise for us to change our policies to emphasize making it costly for foreign adversaries, no matter how small they are or how weak they appear to be in the larger scheme of things, to harm Americans or American interests. Tit for tat isn’t a bad strategy. But I fear that our strength makes us complacent.
Pakistan is a difficult case. Gradually cutting off US aid in response to Pakistani uncooperativeness seems like a good idea. But maybe some of those bombs will be used one day, though of course one hopes not. Pakistan is a good argument for our use of force to block Iran’s nuke program.
I don’t necessarily disagree with much of what you say.
However, the devil is in the actual details. And from my vantage point I can’t see that the DOD is different from any other government bureaucracy. Money can be allocated, proirities misplaces, legacy weapon systems protected over better systems, and so on and so forth.
“Tit for tat” can mean lots of different things in reality. Part of our problem in “AfPak” is not that we didn’t spend enough money but that we spent too much and people got taken by a variety of local con men.
Specific study of a region and its history outside of Americna domestic wishful thinking seems not to be a strong suit of ours….
:)
– Madhu