What if they held a vote for war, and no one came, so there wasn’t a war?

As of yesterday, Rep. Alan Grayson was adamant that the House would vote no, and by an overwhelming margin. By Tuesday, or whenever the vote comes, what are the odds that the usual forces will fail to whip the disgruntled members into line as usual? If it turns out that Rep. Grayson is right, and they do fail, I suppose we could very well be on the brink of something like Churchill’s end of the beginning.

As things now stand, though, I think it’s still the better bet that it’ll take a million people with pitchforks and torches in the streets of New York, Washington, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc., to change anything significant about the U.S. government’s stubbornly bloodthirsty foreign policy, or the accompanying disfigurement of our political discourse. In any event, we won’t have to wait much longer to find out whether this is a real turning point, or just another egregious bit of kabuki from the VSPs.

No downside for Obama. If he respects the will of Congress, he’ll be the first President to uphold the Constitution in several decades. If the UN inspectors report chem weapons use and the Security Council resolves that Syria is in violation of international law on the issue, then they should put it to the General Assembly.

JH: a go-it-alone Obama does nothing to shore up international norms

Exactly. Unilateral military intervention is a violation of the most fundamental international norm, the one barring the use or threat of force against another state except to repel an armed attack or pursuant to a request by the Security Council. The Nuremberg Tribunal called aggression “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

John: good post.

Frank: sure, but John never said we’re in an 11D universe. Maybe we’re in a 13D universe playing 11D chess.

Bruce: we still have a couple allies left. Isn’t Hollande advocating bombing, or did that change? Plus we’ve still got our good buddies Israel and Saudi Arabia. :/

I mean the whole administration behavior is inexplicable. The explanation in the post would be great if true, but it doesn’t fit the fact that the administration keeps floating the idea of bombing even if Congress says no.

“Are they going to argue that Obama is a dirty hippy for listening to them, when they squealed like a stuck peacenik?”

Contra Bruce Wilder, this is one of very few Holbo posts that I’d have wanted to go on longer. It also reminded me of this gem, from dsquared:

“It is certainly true that one of the benefits of doing something stupid is that it saves you from having to spend money on maintaining your reputation as an idiot. However, is the reputation of an idiot really worth having?”

https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/29/reputations-are-made-of/

This is a brilliant post, but I wonder if the premise works if you and a few readers of Crooked Timber are the only people in the world who look at it that way?
As to how the Republicans turn the situation to their advantage: they will continue to do what they are already doing, hang the episode around Obama’s neck as being weak and ineffectual. I’ll never forget GW Bush at the first presidential debate when he listed all interventions by Republican Presidents as good, and all by Democratic Presidents as bad. Republicans are strong and patriots, Democrats piss away our strength abroad while pissing on our liberties at home. That they aren’t actually in agreement among themselves what they would do instead won’t bother them much and is even useful as a distraction.
I suppose the Democrats could all start sounding like John Kerry and try to recapture JFK’s sexy militarism, but that only works if they do in fact bomb and it can be made to look like it accomplished something. Like the “surge”.
It does seem like there is a market for a non-interventionist US foreign policy with the electorate, and it is remarkable that Kerry and Obama so thoroughly eschew it. Maybe I just can’t follow the 11-dimensional chess, but I think I’m just confused.

If he respects the will of Congress, he’ll be the first President to uphold the Constitution in several decades.

True, but, most Americans having been born within the last several decades, how many of them are conscious of this?

Maybe Obama is being told that he risks a defeat, but more likely he is being told that the consequences of “victory” will be no more acceptable to the American public and to Congress than the status quo ante. At least I hope he’s being told that.

Well in a limited sense the fact that being thought of as dumb enough to “just do it”, means people should be afraid of you -since they can’t be sure they can deter you has a certain type of value….

Mead(e) isn’t there a tariling “e”? has a point. The problem is that the game of politics is played at this rather juvenile facesaving level. So at that game, Obama is trying to play 11-D chess on a 2-D board, and he’s found himself in quite a pickle. The only way to win, at this point, is not to play that game. Aren’t we all taught to not allow, winning your case to become totally tied up with your personal worth? It looks like Obama and Kerry, are doing this all-in -as far as their public reputations are involved. Shouldn’t this be presented to congress, and the people, as “here are the facts, and arguments, as best as we can ascertain. Now we have to come to some sort of agreement, as to what we are going to do…” That way they can be winners no matter which way the decision goes. But. I think that requires an “adult” audience. I’ve not see evidence the audience is adult enough for that to work.

Mead thinks that this is some kind of credibility-defining moment because he’s an idiot. Most Americans aren’t looking terribly closely at the specific details of the alleged red lines or whatever; they just know (rightly) that they’ve had enough of Middle Eastern wars and (rightly again) don’t see any compelling national interest in a Syrian intervention. If Lee’s “10-to-1 against” figure is right, then who cares what some doofus writing for The American Interest (oh the irony of that name!) thinks? This is just another round of concern trolling.

Jerry, I don’t have quite as much faith in the ability of every state and non-state actor to read a given situation as well as you do. I’ve argued at length elsewhere that this issue will NOT affect US credibility w/r/t Iran. I note here that in most cases, US credibility will not be affected.

But it’d be foolish to say that there is zero risk of misperception, especially by anyone already inclined to read either the US or the President in a certain way.

And as I also say here, the risk isn’t best managed by following through on Syria, but by carefully delineating other issues from this one. Get a hold of your horses.

There’s another possibility which I haven’t seen discussed: the President has used his power to strike in Syria as leverage in another issue elsewhere.

Snowden?

If there is no attack, and that has little to do with Congressional authorization according to the Pres’s own words, I would watch for a development there, after a interval hiding any connection between Syria and World’s Worst Leaker.

Could be something else, of course.

Iran is a sovereign nation and mid-sized regional power with a 3000 year cultural history and a population of approximately 79 million.

I think a lot of America(ns) tend to forget that countries like Iran or Syria are more than just The Bad Guys in the Hollywood production that is America!

Jerry, I’m hardly warmongering as I’ve said repeatedly that “credibility” is not a good reason to strike in Syria. But you’re simply wrong about the importance of perception, and the danger of it being incorrect.

You write: No one in the world doubts that the US is able and willing to use force when it deems it necessary.

Yes – it’s the “when it deems necessary” part that can be difficult that can be to discern. After the bombing of the US barracks in Beirut, what did Reagan’s pledges to remain in Lebanon really turn out to mean? How committed was the US really to keeping nuclear missiles out of Cuba? Or to take a different nation, how serious is the UK really about holding on to the Falkland Islands? Would the PRC really send an army into North Korea if the US pursued north of the 38th parallel?

Some signals of commitment are unmistakably strong. Placing a brigade of the 82nd Airborne in Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a strong signal of US commitment to any incursion by Iraqi forces into Saudi Arabia.

But other signals are murkier, and can be misread. Instead of Melville, you might read through Jervis’s Perception and Misperception in International Politics as a start.

Well, I just looked at Pamela Geller’s web site, because occasionally I like to make my brain hurt and my eyes burn. To my surprise, she is against the Syria adventure.

She is solid in the ‘if Obama wants it, I will hate it’ camp, but she is a also a serious bomb the Arabs for any old reason sort of girl. And a major Israel supporter. And as I understand it the the Israelis are very much in favor of bombing Syria.

This bomb Syria thing is not getting any love at all from anyone.

This is wishful thinking, but is it possible Obama has been intentionally giving the impression he’ll ignore a no vote from Congress in the hope that it will increase the chances of a no vote? Maybe he thinks that if he says he’ll obey Congress, they’ll more likely vote yes.

I’d think the Republicans might find the prospect of criticizing Obama for defying Congress more tempting than criticizing him for a war they approved. (From the standpoint of pandering to their whatever-Obama’s-for-I’m-against-it constituency.)

I read Jerry’s post, and there’s a beautiful phrase:

“But in reality, this has never been true; from the lowliest aspirant to Al Qaeda membership to the highest leadership of any other nation, everyone knows that the countries that end up suffering the wrath of the hegemon are those countries which are politically convenient to punish”

Not shooting the elephant

At this point, more than two generations into our post-WWII jag into conducting our foreign policy as if we were engaged in the Final Battle of Good versus Evil, we are trapped in modes of thinking that bear little relation to reality.

Obama sounds basically rational on the subject. Syria crossed a line, violated a formal standard in the conduct of his civil war, and there is therefore a reasonable case to be made that the US can and should do things that will encourage him to get back across the line. No unrealistic goals, no unrealistic promise of accomplishing Ultimate Good by defeating Evil. The US is just going to do things that hopefully will get Assad to quit using nerve agent. No slippery slopes in sight. If the policy succeeds at getting Assad to stop using chems, but he still wins his war, no problem. If it doesn’t even get him to quit, we can do other things to provide more encouragement, but since the aim is to keep the civil war form being more brutal than it inherently has to be, those other things would never be pushed beyond

But to sell a reasonable, limited, foreign policy position, his Secy of State falls naturally, almost inevitably, into the 60+ year old habit of scaring the hell out of the American people. So, sure, if this inherently reasonable policy ends up only carried in Congress because it has been successfully sold as the only thing we can do to keep chems from falling on Tel Aviv later this year, and NYC the year after, we actually create, or more correctly, perpetuate, the impetus to escalate both ends and means to the defeat of the Evil Assad by whatever means prove eventually necessary.

The credibility thing achieves its paramount importance, dominating any rational oversight over means and ends, because the unstated assumption is that anything the US should be doing with acts of war can only be in service of Absolute Good. We can’t be proposing any measure against Assad without having decided that Assad is Evil. If he’s Evil , any limited means we use against him are only a sort of economy of force. If they work, fine, but if they don’t, we have to escalate, because the real problem isn’t Assad’s use of chems, it’s that using chems reveals him to be a servant of Evil who will have to be removed at some point. That makes the key factor the credibility that we are bloody-minded enough to pursue this to the end, by whatever means necessary to achieve that end. We only, possibly, avoid having to actually escalate to extreme means insofar as we have the credibility that we will indeed do the worst if that’s what it takes.

Of course this whole approach is self-defeating. Using chems is only marginally useful to Assad. If this were a straightforward deal, if he believed we had the truly limited end of stopping him from using chems, he would stop using them in response to a threat to even somewhat more useful capabilities he enjoys. But after Kerry and the US media get through selling this thing by destroying our credibility that we could possibly have only limited ends here, why would he back down on using chems if he knows we have him pegged as a servant of Darkness, and we’re going to take him down in the end no matter what he does? Would we even be able to offer him a plane to the South of France after we have staked our credibility on him being a genocide right up there with Hitler? His only play then would be to hang tough.

We’ve created a situation in which we either shoot the elephant, because we’ve spent 60 years creating the myth of the Rogue Elephant. or we start backing off the whole myth. But that’s an entirely different question than what to do about an elephant that, while not rogue, has got a taste for vegetables in the market that has to be curbed.

Our politics in the US is sure screwed up, no doubt about it, and not the least on the subject of bombing things. But if bombing a few of Assad’s warplanes will do Syria even a bit of good, our screw-uppedness should not be an excuse to do nothing. Fare forward, if only into yet another political and foreign policy crack-up, because we have to believe that at some point we will learn from our mistakes. Do we learn any other way?

The screwed up nature of our foreign policy thinking has to be confronted at some point anyway. Unlike Eric Blair and the elephant in the market, just walking away is not an option. Part of the dynamic we’re in leaves us with a hugely outsized military. Where, when and how to use it will be a question that will keep coming up until and unless we break that dynamic. The situation in Syria is actually towards the better end of the spectrum of issues whose confrontation is likely to help us get unscrewed. Unlike Iraq, there’s a real problem here, not just the cynical manipulation of the screwed-up myths we’ve grown up with to serve some pathetic little scheme of the Neo-cons, all while helping Rove win the 2002 midterms.

Whether the US president decides himself or the US Congress decides does to alter the fact that the US is asserting its right to act unilaterally. Many Americans who believe their president is the “leader of the world” now seem to think their congress is the legitimate representative of humanity. Ah, the hubris.

“If you add just a negation sign to this Walter Russell Mead post,…”

A serious question: I saw him cited by Daniel Larison, and skimmed his blog. As far as I can tell, he’s a standard non-thinking blah-blah-blah neocon. A rewrite of the Thomas Friedman column generator could do his job (and probably be smarter).

Why do people cite him?

Correctly predicting every Senate seat but one in the last election is prescient, in my book.

There would still be Jews if there was no Israel as there were Jews for centuries before there was an Israel. Religion is defined by people, not place.

Jerusalem would remain the center of the Jewish world as a physical anchor point even if a Jewish government didn’t preside over it – as was the case for centuries – just as it remains a holy place for Christains and Muslims though they don’t govern it.

What I’ve taken or inferred from the many useful comments is that religion lives in its people, and though those people may have strong ties to place – it is the religion which defines them not the place. Israeli leadership errs in not appreciating this although perhaps centuries of being “homeless” creates an understandable over emhasis on maintaining a home.

Jerry #44 “populist Democrats who think that the central bank is a big issue and are willing to go Republican over this matter.”

“Young” populist Dems, I wrote, though perhaps too quickly. They came out for Obama, but they are fluid, some may self-identify as independent, and the Dems cannot count on them. And the few I have spoken with, are completely ignorant of economics — about as ignorant as Ron and Rand. They are boggled by the mysticism surrounding the aery heights of banking and money. Thus, young people, (not to mention businesspeople and most of the newspaper op-edders in the country), are easily confused by the argument that the central bank, government spending, and “inflationary money”are our True National Problem with the Economy.

Meanwhile young “libertarians” (self-identified) already nod their heads sagely about the issue.

That probably means that Presidential candidate Rand Paul may have trouble in trying to obtain Wall Street campaign money, without a lo0t of backroom deals. But: this could also work in his favor, with a strong, youthful internet campaign, and a campaign line that “Hillary [if it is she] and the Dems are up to their necks in banksters,” –which of course they are. The question would be: where would a Paul presidency put Republican Wall Street? Maybe trying to buy a residence in Singapore.

The young won’t matter so much in the midterm elections; the older voters have always dominated. But just look at Rand Paul positioning himself now! He may be an idiot on economics, but (as my prescient buddies keep pointing out, to my consternation) he is not a dumb guy. Ophthmologist; high MSAT scores. We have recently seen trumpeted the publicity that he doesn’t discriminate against blacks and it’s okay to be gay. How very magnanimous, how youthful… Haven’t seen a statement yet on Social Security or Medicare, though of course his ideology is dead against them.

Lee, I love your visuals! What are you using to make that? I like the concept as a whole too, quite punchy.

As for the prospective Rand Paul ticket: I just don’t know that there is any significant population that voted Obama but would somehow be persuaded to vote Republican on grounds of opposing central banking. People who tend to be swayed by that logic don’t really tend to be Democratic voters in the first place, and in any case their numbers must be quite small; it’s such an obscure (to most people) issue that I can’t see it making large inroads among the population as a whole. It’s been known for a while that most people don’t really have complex political theories that drive their voting patterns. I’m not saying those people don’t exist at all (I’ve met a few, actually) but there’s nothing out there suggesting to me that they’re a significant chunk of the populace and that one can base a platform on catering to them.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I’d have to see some compelling empirical evidence for the existence of this group of people as a voting bloc in order to believe this thesis. I also don’t know that anyone can make any sort of firm prediction about what the consequences are for the election two years out; these things tend to damp out over time, and in 2016 I doubt that launching or not launching a strike against Assad is going to sway anyone one way or the other. If we’ve learned a lesson from Sam Wang, Nate Silver, and others, it’s that elections seem to be affected by large-scale trends much more than by transient events. Of course, if Syria becomes some kind of a large-scale trend, then I could see it mattering, but at this point we just don’t know.

I was really really hoping for the 11th dimensional chess play. And I have to say overall I’m fairly happy with the way things are going.

Russia is proposing a solution that Syria seems on board with, the American public seems to actually be outraged by the idea of war unlike Iraq, and everyone agrees going to war is dumb and is mocking the Administration for it.

If the war measure is voted down I would consider this move a “success” by Obama, whether or not that’s what he meant to accomplish. However, there are two possible outcomes from the outside that I really don’t like. Obama unilaterally goes ahead with his plan without congressional backing, or Congress actually approves it.

I have a difficult time counting out the lunatics of the Republican party voting for this thing, and I don’t see a ton of Democrats opposing it either currently. Certainly a vocal group on both sides are though, so there’s that.

Martin #52 — I agree, except that in my opinion, the only hero in this whole economic crisis has been Bernanke. We might have let most of the banking structure collapse (i.e. Ron-Paulist austerianism), but I think it might have put about a hundred million people into bankruptcy court, and tens of millions onto the street. All, to absolutely no instructive purpose for the improvement of morale and morals, etc.

But I would go one step beyond you. I think we may be heading into an era when we will be forced to directly print money for things like healthcare, higher education and retirement security, in addition to the private creation of money for regular business investment. In other words, bring in the government as a money-printing safety-net monopsonist, very carefully watched. This is because it has never been clear to me that an acceleration of technological unemployment would be solved, before social instability threatens the whole game. Economists are just guessing or hoping that it will be solved. But if it becomes obvious that we are heading further into a two-tier income structure with a huge gulf in-between, (the direction revealed to more people in this depression), then I think the nature of money will have to be re-examined. Of course this is about 180 degrees in the opposite direction of, not only the Pauls, but the entire Wall St.-Washington axis.

Lee, the monetary ideas sound interesting, but probably too off-topic to go into on this thread. Bernanke for me has been a mixed bag.