The Buzz

It’s time for the United States to act in Syria, says Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Washington Post, but the Obama administration is doing all it can to avoid recognizing that. She suggests it is succumbing to “the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction” as it carefully hedges intelligence suggesting that Syria used chemical weapons.

Slaughter mentions a secret December 2012 cable from the U.S. consul in Istanbul, which she says “conclud[es] that it was likely that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons” and reports victims “responded well to atropine, a drug used to treat people exposed to the nerve gas sarin.” However, charges Slaughter, the administration said the chemical used was a riot control agent, and “similar evidence has been squelched again and again.”

But the cable, obtained by Foreign Policy reporter Josh Rogin, doesn’t say any of that with such certainty. In fact, it states that it “is not able to definitely say whether chemical weapons were in fact used in the December 23 attack.”

Rogin notes that there are multiple discrepancies in reports of what happened: Was it delivered by a vehicle, as initial reports said, or by several short-range missiles, as later reports said? Did atropine make the patients better—as two Syrian doctors told Rogin—or make it worse, as one contact told the State Department? Did most victims have dilated pupils, as the contact said, or pinpoint pupils, as the two doctors say? Was the gas colorless, as the State Department-supported media project BASMA reported, or were there “clouds of white smoke,” as State’s contact said? Was the gas odorless, as in BASMA’s account, or was there a “pungent odor,” as the doctors say? These discrepancies don’t just invite questions about what happened. They also make it harder to determine what gas was used, since different chemical weapons (and “riot control agents”) have different properties.

Yet Slaughter’s account removes all this subtlety and contradiction. And this seemingly willful blindness to shades of gray in the interpretation of intelligence should awaken memories of the rush to war in Iraq, the same rush that Slaughter cautions Obama not to “hide behind.” It’s hard to make a categorical distinction between Slaughter’s interpretation of the Istanbul cable and, say, the 2002 analysis work of Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans.

Reports now swirl of a new Syrian chemical attack, this time in Aleppo in March. The latest set of evidence appears much more reliable than that in the Istanbul cable (although Arms Control Wonk’s Jeffrey Lewis notes it’s also not the best). It may be true that Syria has used chemical weapons on its own people. If so, this is further proof of the utter wickedness of the Assad regime. Yet Slaughter’s Cheneyesque reading of the Istanbul cable is a fresh reminder of the eagerness for war in some circles—right and left.

Tevi Troy has a very good, very long piece about presidential transitions in the current issue of National Affairs. He recounts his experience as the director of domestic policy for the “Romney Readiness Project,” which, beginning in July 2012, was “assigned to help Mitt Romney prepare for the early personnel and policy decisions he would face if he won in November.” The piece is valuable because this project was the first of its type to be funded by the federal government, born out of a 2010 law that “provides government support . . . to help presidential challengers begin transition efforts upon receiving their parties' nominations.”

Troy argues convincingly that starting to prepare early for a transition does not represent hubris—rather, it is essential given the size and complexity of modern government. He contends that the $8.9 million spent by the Romney transition project was a worthwhile investment even though the candidate lost. The argument is straightforward: if there’s a significant chance that a challenger might win the election, and the responsibilities of the president are as immense as they are, a modest investment to make sure his team is as prepared as it can be is prudent.

One issue that Troy discusses in detail is the challenge of staffing a new administration. Noting that the presidential confirmation process has become “lengthy, burdensome and overly partisan,” the transition team “wanted to have short lists ready so that the president-elect could choose candidates for the most important positions almost immediately after the election.” This required that each of the team’s three major subgroups—for economics, domestic policy and national security—“provide approximately 400 names that could potentially take top-level positions at the eight or so agencies under its purview.”

Unfortunately, this problem is not limited to new, incoming administrations. Recently, Foreign Policy has reported on the larger-than-normal number of senior positions that are either vacant or staffed by acting personnel at both the State Department and the Pentagon as President Obama begins his second term.

At Outside the Beltway, James Joyner observes that while congressional obstruction is a factor in this, the administration also bears responsibility for not putting names forward in a number of cases. Joyner’s proposed remedy is a sound one, although it is probably a political nonstarter given how much any White House will naturally want to maximize its control over personnel:

This is another data point in support of a position I’ve held for some time: there are far, far too many appointed positions in our government. Yes, the president ought to be able to put his stamp on policy, and bringing in outsiders of his selection at the top leadership levels helps facilitate that. It makes sense to have appointed cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, and even undersecretaries. But do we really need to appoint assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries? Why not fill those from the ranks of the professionals of the Senior Executive Service?

Sigal Samuel of The Daily Beast’s Open Zion blog asks, “Should Americans Identify With Israel After Boston?” She notes that both Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and one of his close aides, Ron Dermer, have expressed optimism about the impact of the Boston bombings on U.S.-Israeli relations. Both suggested that Americans would feel a sense of shared struggle with Israelis on terror. Samuel notes that this “turns on a hidden assumption: . . . that we’ll all agree to more or less equate the sort of terrorism inflicted on Boston with the sort of terrorism inflicted on Israel.” However, she charges, the two are actually quite different:

Palestinian terrorism—as condemnable as it certainly is—exists within the context of Israeli occupation; living under Israeli control, lacking many basic rights, the Palestinians are clearly in need of a political solution. The same cannot be said of the Tsarnaevs, who lived in America and enjoyed the same rights enjoyed by every immigrant to the U.S. Exactly what political solution does an immigrant already granted full U.S. citizenship require? The answer’s not at all clear.

Samuel is right that it’s not clear what, precisely, the Tsarnaevs were aiming for. But we can make some educated guesses. NBC News reports that under interrogation, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators that he and his brother learned how to make the bombs from Inspire, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s periodic digest of jihadi thought, terror methods and bad poetry. He also told them that he and his brother “were motivated by religious fervor.” Accounts of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s transformation suggest he was sympathetic to the hardline Salafi-Wahhabi currents that have grown like a malignancy in the Muslim world in recent decades. Among other telltales, he had favorited a YouTube video of a Salafi cleric, he had a disdain for celebrating holidays (even Islamic ones) and he publicly accused an imam of unbelief.

And Salafi-jihadi thought absolutely aims for a political solution. That solution—the dominion of its peculiar strand of Islamic thought over all Muslim society, and the removal of all other influences from the Muslim world—just happens to be far less comfortable than political solutions to the Palestine problem.

Yet at bottom many Palestinian terror groups have equally untenable goals. Rejectionist Palestinian groups do not aim for a two-state solution, and have acted repeatedly to undermine it. Even Hamas, which has negotiated (indirectly) with Israel and entered an apparent truce after the last war, has only flirted with the idea.

And that’s what Israel and the United States have in common: they have enemies with which there can be no honorable peace. There always will be Palestinian rejectionists, because even under the most favorable two-state resolution, Palestine will still be a terrible place to live. And there always will be extremists willing to engage in violence as long as America is a major influence in the Middle East (likely for at least the next few decades) and as long as the Islamic world’s intense internal struggle over modernity persists (likely for at least the next few centuries).

Moreover, many of these incorrigible enemies have had deeper connections. Palestinian terror was once funded by America’s geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union; nowadays some of it is funded by America’s (lesser) geopolitical rival, Iran. Hezbollah killed lots of Israelis and lots of Americans in Lebanon’s civil war. Many of the jihadists that attack the United States would include U.S. relations with Israel among their motivations. The connections are rarely strong enough that Jerusalem and Washington face an identical foe—Hezbollah, nowadays, is more concerned with Israel, while Al Qaeda and its hangers-on are more concerned with America. The PLO evacuated Beirut with American guarantees—and an Israeli sniper’s crosshairs on Yasser Arafat’s head. But the connections have long been deep enough to merit substantive coordination.

This all doesn’t mean that the United States should automatically back Israel—which, Samuel notes, seems to be the goal of those who draw parallels between attacks on Boston and attacks on Israel. But the experience of terror is a common thread that should not be dismissed.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest National Review column blasts President Obama for pursuing what he calls a “neo-isolationist foreign policy.” The charges he levels are familiar ones in hawkish critiques of the president: Obama is “leading from behind” and “outsourcing formerly American responsibilities.” His actions “send signals that there is no privilege to be derived from being a supporter of America or its values.”

What is most odd about the piece, however, is how poorly the “neo-isolationist” label appears to fit Obama’s foreign policy—even as Hanson describes it. Consider a few of the events that Hanson covers in his overview of Obama’s first term:

●  The surge in Afghanistan, in which Obama sent an additional thirty thousand troops to that country, temporarily escalating the war with the goal of reversing the Taliban’s momentum.

●  The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, in which “the Obama administration helped to remove the monster in rehabilitation Muammar Qaddafi.”

●  The dramatic escalation of drone strikes across Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, in which “Obama, in one term, may have expanded targeted assassinations by drones tenfold over the tally of the eight-year Bush presidency.”

To state the obvious, this is hardly a record of “neo-isolationism.” That label doesn’t apply even if one grants Hanson all of his other criticisms of Obama—on Syria, Iran, defense spending and so on. It only begins to make sense if your default assumption is that the United States can and should be intervening everywhere, all the time.

The fact is that almost no significant political figure within America’s two major parties holds any views that can fairly be described as “isolationist” or “neo-isolationist.” Democrats and Republicans alike want the United States to have the world’s most powerful military, maintain its alliances and trade with other nations. As I wrote last December, “Hawks and neoconservatives have reduced the term ‘isolationist’ to meaninglessness by applying it to anyone who doesn’t reflexively support using military force to solve every problem around the world.” It may be a convenient rhetorical club for some to beat their opponents with. But as an analytical category, it has become practically useless.