E.J. Dionne at The Washington Post explains How Congress should debate the Islamic State strategy:
Here again, the parallel [today regarding ISIS] with 1991 is instructive.
Without congressional authorization, [George H.W.] Bush had already sent 500,000 U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia to prepare for war. He insisted he did not need Congress’s approval to put them into action. His request for a resolution was essentially a courtesy. It came just a week before the deadline he had set for Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait—and, as it happened, just nine days before the war started.
There is reason to admire Bush for waiting. Politically, he might have profited from making the war an issue in the 1990 midterm campaign. He preferred to wait. The second President Bush demanded a congressional vote on the Iraq war in the fall of 2002, before the midterms. This almost certainly helped Republican candidates and drew additional votes for his policy from Democrats fearful of bucking the president so soon after Sept. 11, 2001. But the result was a politicized debate that did not help build consensus. This came back to haunt the 43rd president.
We need a responsible Congress to begin the search for a sustainable foreign policy. An unconstrained debate after this fall’s campaign is the place to start.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
How to Get It Wrong:
The great majority of policy-oriented economists believe that increasing government spending in a depressed economy creates jobs, and that slashing it destroys jobs—but European leaders and U.S. Republicans decided to believe the handful of economists asserting the opposite. Neither theory nor history justifies panic over current levels of government debt, but politicians decided to panic anyway, citing unvetted (and, it turned out, flawed) research as justification.
I’m not saying either that economics is in good shape or that its flaws don’t matter. It isn’t, they do, and I’m all for rethinking and reforming a field.
The big problem with economic policy is not, however, that conventional economics doesn’t tell us what to do. In fact, the world would be in much better shape than it is if real-world policy had reflected the lessons of Econ 101. If we’ve made a hash of things — and we have — the fault lies not in our textbooks, but in ourselves.
More pundit excerpts can be found below the orange ink stain.
Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times writes Old echoes in America's new Mideast policy:
The Middle East never stops being a problem for the United States, no matter how hard a president tries to pivot away to other regions. The reason isn't merely oil, or Israel or even terrorism, although those factors count, of course. Instead, the underlying problem is that after more than a decade of war and revolution, the old order of the Middle East—corrupt, inefficient but stable governments living within their borders—has broken down.
A decade of wars and uprisings has weakened (or, in some cases, toppled) old regimes, but it hasn't replaced them with effective new ones.
The brief upsurge of democracy movements in the Arab Spring of 2011 didn't solve that problem; instead, it opened new doors for Islamic radicalism, sectarian division and tribalism.
Ramzy Mardini at
The Washington Post writes
The Islamic State threat is overstated:
The United States has a tradition of misinterpreting the Middle East. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 with misplaced certainty, misconstrued assumptions and poor foresight. After the Arab revolts began in 2011, Washington misdiagnosed the problems and opportunities, and overestimated its influence to steer outcomes in its favor. Now, as the United States prepares to escalate military action against the Islamic State, misinterpretation is leading to another tragic foreign policy mistake. [...]
This doesn’t suggest that the Islamic State poses no problem, nor that the United States should ignore it. However, any strategy that involves U.S. airstrikes to contain the group is like searching for a beehive to swat, then assuming that the threat of being stung is somehow mitigated.
While some military action is necessary to defeat the Islamic State, that effort should be driven by regional actors, not a Western power. The United States is far better positioned to assume an active diplomatic role, facilitating consensus and cooperation among local and regional players. If the common threat could compel these actors toward local collaboration, national compromise and regional rapprochement, there may emerge an opportunity to bring them together to finally settle the civil wars plaguing the Middle East.
The New York Times Editorial Board concludes in
A Bigger Midterm Election Turnout a major effort should be exerted to boost voting in the upcoming midterms:
The biggest prize at stake in November is the Senate, where Democrats are in serious danger of losing control to a Republican Party determined to roll back much of the social progress of the last six years, and to block as many of President Obama’s judicial appointments as possible. There is little chance that Democrats will win back the House this year, in part because of Republican redistricting, but many statehouses and governorships that control districting and voting regulations are also in the balance.
All of that makes it imperative that the demographic groups that turned out in relatively large numbers during the last two presidential elections show up at the polls this year. According to Catalist, a data analysis company, the groups with the biggest declines in turnout between 2008 and 2010 were voters younger than 30, down nearly 35 percentage points; black and Hispanic voters, down 27 points each; and single women, down 26 points. Those groups have historically been the most resistant to the right’s message of lower taxes, sharply reduced spending on social programs and job creation, and tighter restrictions on women’s reproductive rights.
Nick Engelfried at
In These Times writes
The People’s Climate March: This Generation’s March on Washington?:
Back in 2009, writing for Orion magazine, Bill McKibben said, “Instead of another march on Washington or London, we’re collecting images from every corner of the world.” He was referring to the recently founded organization 350.org and the preparations for its first international day of action on climate change. In October of that year, people in almost every country staged more than 5,000 actions calling attention to 350 ppm, the maximum safe threshold for atmospheric parts per million of carbon dioxide. They helped focus attention on the importance of getting back to 350 ppm, in the lead-up to the 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen.
The quote from McKibben suggests organizers of the 2009 mobilization envisioned a movement not dependent on big marches in national capitals — and such an approach had the advantage of being new and different. An equally important factor, though seldom or never mentioned by movement organizers, was that the 2009 climate movement, at least in the United States, simply wasn’t ready for a major march on anywhere. The largest U.S. climate gathering up to that point, Energy Action Coalition’s national Power Shift event in early 2009, had consisted of just slightly more than 10,000 people. There wasn’t going to be a climate moment like the March for Jobs and Freedom that year. [...]
Not everyone in the climate movement is convinced the march will work.
“Spending millions of dollars to plan a climate march corresponding with a U.N. summit gives me flashbacks to 2009 in Copenhagen,” said Jasmine Zimmer-Stucky of Portland Rising Tide. “If this march were to occur in Utah instead of on the streets of New York City, it could actually shut down the nation’s first-ever tar sands mine. This march could happen on train tracks almost anywhere in the nation and stop a dangerous oil train from the Bakken [shale field in North Dakota]. Instead, it runs the risk of silencing these frontline struggles and overshadowing real, direct ways for people to engage in the climate movement.”
William Rivers Pitt at :
And so, here we go again/again/again. The president made it abundantly clear that there would be "no boots on the ground" in Iraq, or in Syria, the next theater of this war that has been ongoing to one degree or another for twenty-four years...but here's a pro tip: "smart" bombs are not smart. They require troops on the ground to lase the intended targets, so the guidance systems on the bombs can find them. President Obama himself said on Wednesday night that some 150 airstrikes had been carried out against ISIS, ISIL or IS, whatever you want to call them. One assumes the US Special Forces troops hiding in a bush with the laser guidance apparatus wore boots while they augured the munitions in. [...]
The money we are going to spend bombing the problems we caused by bombing the problems we bombed can be better spent creating jobs, repairing infrastructure, and educating our children to know better when a politician comes calling with platitudes about the excellence of the United States before announcing his intention to blow more stuff up.
We were excellent, I suppose. We certainly can be. It has been twenty-four years of this, with the twenty-five years of Vietnam still receding in the rear-view. Imagine if we had those 50 years back, and then imagine what we could do with 50 years unencumbered by profiteering warfare.
Lee Fang at
The Nation writes
Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?:
If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as ISIS, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region. They will say that our government should deploy, as retired General Anthony Zinni demanded, up to 10,000 American boots on the ground to battle ISIS. Or as in retired General Jack Keane’s case, they will make more vague demands, such as for “offensive” air strikes and the deployment of more military advisers to the region.
But what you won’t learn from media coverage of ISIS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world. Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.
Keane is a great example of this phenomenon. His think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which he oversees along with neoconservative partisans Liz Cheney and William Kristol, has provided the data on ISIS used for multiple stories by The New York Times, the BBC and other leading outlets.
Trevor Timm at
The Guardian writes
Obama's legally dubious Isis campaign is just a way to continue perpetual war:
In a speech that would make Dick Cheney proud, the president told us (and the Pentagon repeated) this week that we are at war with Islamic State (Isis) “in same way we are at war with al-Qaida and its affiliates” – a war that will go on indefinitely, is based on a strategy that’s been failing for over a decade and will never legally be called a war.
What Obama really did, however, was confirm for everyone what the late Hunter S Thompson recognized, shortly after 9/11, when he wrote, “We are At War now—with somebody—and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”
Michael Klare at
Mother Jones writes
How Obama Became the Oil President:
[O]il is back. Big time. Signs of its resurgence abound. Despite what you may think, Americans, on average, are driving more miles every day, not fewer, filling ever more fuel tanks with ever more gasoline, and evidently feeling ever less bad about it. The stigma of buying new gas-guzzling SUVs, for instance, seems to have vanished; according to CNN Money, nearly one out of three vehicles sold today is an SUV. As a result of all this, America's demand for oil grew more than China's in 2013, the first time that's happened since 1999.
Bill Mckibben: How Methane Wrecked Obama's Fracking Gambit Accompanying all this is a little noticed but crucial shift in White House rhetoric. While President Obama once spoke of the necessity of eliminating our reliance on petroleum as a major source of energy, he now brags about rising US oil output and touts his efforts to further boost production.
Just five years ago, few would have foreseen such a dramatic oil rebound.