Syrial Killing

The poster above was hung in a local store window, along with a lot of other public announcements, most of them promoting music and other entertainment events rather than politics.  Young Americans For Liberty is a relatively new right-wing youth organization, founded in 2008 at the end of Ron Paul's presidential campaign.  They seem to be a bit better at imagery than most right-wing groups, but they're still unimpressive, and they're evidently unaware of people who opposed Bush's and Obama's wars without being Paulite Libertarians.  If I meet any of these people, I should ask them what they think about Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald.  Or Michael Moore, ambivalent about Obama as he is.  ("Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!" could be Moore's slogan.)  And I admit I'm out of touch with The Kids these days, but I can't help suspecting that people who look like the people in that poster are more likely to oppose Obama's war plans than to support them.

The controversy over whether the US should lob some missiles into Syria goes on.  So far my Right-Wing Acquaintance opposes it, but only because Obama's a Democrat.  RWA1 has also been indignant about NSA data collection, which I don't believe he ever criticized as long as a Republican was in the White House.  (RWA1 called the agency "the No Such Agency", hur hur hur.)  He linked to a rather vacuous post at The Skeptical Libertarian Blog and commented "Imperial assertions should be treated skeptically."  I take that with a grain of salt, because I've heard RWA1 declare his distaste for the word "imperialism" when it was directed at the foreign-policy endeavors of Republican administrations; like "civility" and other desiderata, everything is a matter of party loyalty.  I wouldn't be surprised if RWA1 might have expressed some misgivings about Bush's surveillance programs and even Bush's wars in private -- but party discipline kept it private.  It's the same with Democrats criticizing Obama: oh, you know, he's not perfect, in fact I might go so far as to say that he's a bit of a disappointment, but he's not Bush and it's very important that we support him or the Republicans will take over.  This kind of talk is also a way of assuring oneself that one hasn't completely abandoned principle for the Party.

The other day someone commented on a post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the "idiot public discourse" on Syria.  Well, of course, there are a lot of people out there discoursing, and the media are vast, so it's not surprising that there is some idiotic discourse going on about Syria, as there is on any topic.  But what strikes me is how much thoughtful, sensible discourse is available, in relatively mainstream media as well as in the more rarefied blogosphere.  (One excellent place to start after Coates and his colleague James Fallows would be Daniel Larison's series of short blog posts on Syria at The American Conservative.)  The truly idiotic discourse is coming, not from the caricatured Cheetos-gobbling, Jolt-guzzling chairborne brigades embunkered in their parents' basements, but from the Obama administration and its corporate media shills -- that is, the supposedly sober, credentialed, responsible voices of our society.  Obama and his new Secretary of State have made utter fools of themselves with transparent lies, which only seem to deceive their peers and whatever remains of the die-hard Obama loyalists.  (The NSA revelations probably paved the way for this newfound skepticism among Obama's fans.)

I've noticed, though, that some of the die-hard fans are clinging to the faith by trying to convince themselves that Obama doesn't really want to attack Syria, and that he decided to let Congress deliberate on the attack in order to give him a face-saving way to back down.  Considering that Obama's aides, including Kerry, made it clear that the President doesn't consider himself bound by Congressional opinion, this is obvious and rather sad wishful thinking, on a par with the oft-expressed conviction that Obama didn't want the Sequester or to cut Social Security, it was all the Rethugs' fault.  Maybe when they aren't struck by lightning for opposing Obama, they'll gather more courage as they go along.

It's frustrating, I admit, to see so many on the Right gleefully recycling their standard anti-Obama propaganda for use against Obama's warmongering; but Obama brought it on himself.  So, for example, one friend of mine passed along a meme with a familiar slogan of late: that Obama is pushing the world into World War III: I pointed out that World War III really began with the Bush junta's response to the September 11 attacks, and that Obama is just continuing that.  This friend is old enough to remember the Bush years, but I think she was too stoned to pay much attention then -- as well as too stoned now.  Obama is responsible for his continuation of Bush policies, but I have no illusions that a Republican president would be any better.

Which reminds me -- also under a Ta-Nehisi Coates post, some commenters discussed impeachment, specifically whether Obama could be impeached if he didn't consult Congress on his war plans.  I have mixed feelings about impeachment: I have no doubt that Obama, like Bush, has committed impeachable offenses.  I have no illusion that if Obama were impeached, it would be for irrelevant offenses (as Bill Clinton was); and the Republicans who'd lead the process would see the removal of Obama from office as a partisan victory, just as the Democrats would see it as a partisan defeat.  One commenter concluded, "The only solution to that sort of crisis is voting in new leadership. And we can't recall the President."  Ah, the old "vote the rascals out" canard!  The question, it seems to me, is whether Presidents can be held accountable for their crimes; one reason why the ones we have are so reliably lawless, regardless of party, is that the worst consequence they face is being voted out of office -- and a second-term president like Obama doesn't even have to worry about that.  That's why the Constitution provides for impeachment.  But would the impeachment of Obama, anymore than the impeachment of Bush before him, really have been a deterrent to Presidential criminality?  I doubt it: Richard Nixon would have been impeached and removed if he hadn't resigned, and his chosen successor Gerald Ford pardoned him so he faced no consequences for his crimes.  He managed to rebrand himself as a senior statesman -- again, because of the amoral complicity of the corporate media and the political establishment -- and his successors of both parties went on merrily trampling on the Constitution right down to the present.

The discussion of what to do about about a boy like Assad tends to get bogged down in side issues, though.  For example, there's debate about whether Assad's regime really is responsible for the gas attack that Obama is using as his excuse to kill Syrians.  There is, evidently, room for doubt on that point, but it's not really important, since even if Assad personally deployed the sarin, the US does not have any authority to punish him for it.  Nor does Obama's "red line" ultimatum give him sanction for an attack: saving the American President's face is not a legal ground for military action, under international law or under the Constitution.  As a correspondent of James Fallows wrote to him, "This is a self-created crisis of Obama's presidency that he has turned into a general foreign policy crisis, not the other way around."  These matters deserve some discussion, I suppose, since Obama and the US government have made claims, and it's valid to question whether our leaders are telling the truth.  (Given their record, there's a strong presumption that they aren't.)  But these are still side issues.  I've been impressed by those writers who've stuck to the core questions.

James Fallows is one of them: he has been much more critical of Obama's plans than I expected from a senior establishment journalist of his stature.  He doesn't enable comments on his blog posts, but he does print select e-mail from his readers, and he asked them to suggest what Obama should do about Syria.  He printed several suggestions, none of which I found very inspiring.  This set was interesting, though, in a disturbing way.

1) Attack Syrian air defenses. Accomplishing this should not create the risk of collateral damage, as they are not hidden in schools and hospitals.  If the Syrian government does not stop their war on their citizens, then:

2) Attack the Syrian air force.  Destroy every piece of aircraft they own.  Get the Russians to not complain too much by telling them they will be able to sell them new equipment.  With no aircraft (especially no attack helicopters), their ability to kill their own civilians is hampered.  The possibility of this happening should be obvious to them once their air defenses are taken out.  If they can't see that, then they deserve to lose their jets and helicopters.  Again, there should be little risk of collateral damage, but I am guessing the civilians would be more worried about being killed by their own government than by Syrian jets falling out of the sky.

3) If they still insist on using chemical weapons or slaughtering their own citizens, flatten their government buildings. Make them run their government from caves or underground bunkers or wherever they flee.  So maybe the country will be plunged into chaos, how is that worse than what they have now?

We should not only intervene in mass slaughter when oil is involved.

I take that last sentence as a reference to Libya.  But these suggestions are as untenable as anything Obama wants to do.  I don't know who wrote this stuff, but many of Fallows's contacts are government and even military people.  I really doubt that attacking Syria's air defenses would be as easy as he thinks, or that "collateral damage" would be as minimal as he thinks.  The worst is the idea of bombing government buildings, which is considered terrorism when anyone but the US does it, a fun opportunity when we do.  These are probably the worst suggestions Fallows chose to print, but I didn't see anything I thought was actually positive and realistic among the rest.  There may be nothing the US can actively do about the Assad regime and its crimes, but we can at least refrain from committing more mass slaughter ourselves.

ITMFA

Ten days since my last post. I can't believe it; I can't remember when I last let so much time lapse between posts around here. I don't even really have an excuse. I haven't been sick, haven't been working extra. I've just been looking idly at all kinds of stuff on the Web, and felt a strange sick dread at the thought of starting a new post. I have been reading offline quite a bit, which has eaten up lots of time and energy, and I don't feel bad about that. And I've been getting plenty of ideas, maybe too many for me to choose from.

Anyway. "ITMFA," of course, means Impeach the Motherfucker Already. The abbreviation derives from the edgy advice columnist Dan Savage, who of course had George W. Bush in mind. That would have been a good idea, but of course the Democratic leadership made sure it never got off the ground, and Savage abandoned the call after a few months. Now we have a new Criminal-in-Chief violating the U.S. Constitution and just begging for removal from office, though we all know that accountability is for ordinary schlubs like you and me, not for the rich and powerful. But -- judging by the reactions of Obama apologists online -- it seems that increasing numbers of people are discussing the possibility anyway.

I first became aware of this when my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter e-mailed me a link to Michelle Bachmann's latest antics, adding:

This is the only reason I wouldn't want to see President Obama impeached. She or someone like her (or worse) might become our next President. Considering her record of homophobia and xenophobia, it could be a MUCH worse disaster than what we have now...

I wrote back:

I agree, but only to a point because it means impunity for his crimes. I know Bachmann is a pig, but the point is that Obama is a criminal. Yes, it could be worse. We could have Bachmann. We could have Stalin. We could have Hitler But that doesn't make Obama any less deserving of impeachment.

My friend replied:

If I had any faith in the people running the system, I'd happily lead the charge for him to be impeached. I have no faith in them at all. :(

Then one of my Facebook friends complained about Glenn Greenwald's detailing of the grounds for impeaching Obama: "Why does Greenwald want to impeach Obama? I didn't know he wanted to have a Republican president instead." I took the easy way out and retorted in comments that Obama is a Republican president, continuing and extending many of Bush/Cheney's worse policies. The trouble with Rob's complaint, though, as I found when I read Greenwald's comments, is that Greenwald didn't call for Obama's impeachment. What he said was this (emphasis added):

AMY GOODMAN: By your analysis, do you consider this an impeachable offense, Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, anytime the president violates the law in a significant way, impeachment is supposed to be one of the leading remedies. So I think the President is clearly violating not only the War Powers Resolution, but also the Constitution. Article I, Section 8, assigns the war-making power to Congress, not to the executive. And even executive-power-revering jurists like Antonin Scalia have said that Article II, the Article II power that makes the commander — the president the commander-in-chief, really means nothing more than, when there’s a war that starts, the president is the top general. He directs how the war is prosecuted. But the idea that presidents can start wars on their own, without any congressional authorization, violates not just the law but the Constitution. So, sure, in theory, when the president violates the law and the Constitution, that’s an impeachable offense. At the same time, we’ve set a very low standard for our tolerance of rampant presidential law breaking. If George Bush and Dick Cheney weren’t impeached for their rampant crimes, it’s hard to see Obama being impeached for this.

That's not exactly a clarion call for putting Obama in the dock; it's more of a weary acknowledgement that, given American contempt for the rule of law where the powerful are concerned, it's not going to happen, even though Obama has committed impeachable offenses.

So it would appear that my friend Rob, like so many Democrats, owes the Republicans an apology. They don't really object to Bush's crimes -- indeed, they don't really consider them crimes, or they'd consider them crimes when a Democratic President commits them -- but they wish they could have had an excuse for removing him from office. (Shades of the Republican coup against Bill Clinton.) Since they don't appear to believe that Bush really did anything wrong, their only reason must be that he is a Republican. I'd like to believe that I have better reasons for hating Bush, or Obama, than mere party loyalty, especially since I don't belong to either party.

At times like this I realize all over again that despite what many people consider my gross cynicism about the government of the United States, I'm really a naive little boy who believes what he learned in Social Studies class: that people who commit crimes should be punished for them, no matter if they are rich or powerful, because everyone is supposed to be equal under the law. I now see that people in government, and many outside of it, think that the law is a tool for settling personal or partisan scores. The Republicans who went after Clinton wanted payback for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, aside from hating Clinton for all kinds of convoluted reasons. (I should mention that I think Clinton had committed some serious crimes, possibly impeachable ones, but having an affair with an intern wasn't one of them.) The only reason anyone who mattered could have seen for trying to impeach George W. Bush was something similar; it couldn't be because he'd actually done something wrong.

Now that President Obama has made his own contempt for the Constitution blazingly clear, his acolytes choose almost consciously not to see it. Why, Rob cried, would Glenn Greenwald want to impeach Obama? Considering that Greenwald had carefully explained how Obama is flouting the law and the Constitution, I have to say that's a willfully stupid question. The answer would be, because he's committing impeachable offenses even as we speak. What better reason could Rob ask for?

Which takes me back to my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter. I've written a few posts in the past in which I've addressed the problem that a president's success is commonly measured in terms of passing legislation -- any legislation, even bad legislation. If he fails often enough, he's weakened politically, though come to think of it that's only a problem if he then tries to pass some good legislation, which Obama hasn't shown much interest in doing. But once again I am rubbing my own nose in the fact that the political classes don't care about the quality of the legislation: it's not how you play the game, it's whether you win or lose.

At which point the cry goes up: But then you're siding with the Republicans! What will happen if the Republicans take over? O waily waily waily ... One other problem with Rob's position is that impeaching Obama will not give the US a Republican president -- Joe Biden is still a Democrat as far as I know, and as Vice President, it would be he who would become President if Obama were removed. So Rob's objection is mere alarmism; two strikes against him. Even granting that there are marginal differences between the Republicans and the Democrats, the net effect of this approach to politics is to let the Republicans win. As Avedon put it at The Sideshow the other day, quoting Chris Floyd:

"Again, I say what I have said here over and over (and will keep on saying): This is what you are supporting, enabling and continuing when you support the Obama Administration. Whether that support is wholehearted -- if you, like Kevin Drum, proudly shut down you own brain and defer supinely to Obama's superior wisdom -- or whether it is reluctant, defensive, 'to keep the other guys out' because you desperately hope the Democrats might possibly be marginally better, the results are still the same: murder, brutality, violence, corruption, chaos and suffering." Like I said last week on Virtually Speaking Susie, I have been voting against Republicans all my life, and it hasn't worked. This all has to change.

I'll go on voting against Republicans, as I presume Avedon will, but I know that if any real change is going to come, it won't come from voting. It'll come from some form of direct action, because that's where change has always come from.

Meanwhile, though, the Obama apologists are confusing the issue, perhaps deliberately, though they do seem to have surrendered to irrationality too thoroughly to realize what they are doing and saying. I basically agree with the Ambivalent Obama Supporter that impeachment would let the Republicans look like they have principles, so it's probably a bad idea. But that doesn't for a minute require me to pretend that Obama isn't a criminal, just like Bush, or hasn't committed impeachable offenses, just like Bush. Anyone who pretends otherwise, given the overwhelming evidence, is a cheap party hack who deserves and will get my eternal contempt. That might be a place to start: attacking Obama and his groupies with principled arguments. "You're either for us, or you're against us" was another Bush line that the Obama groupies have embraced, but they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. I can call Obama a criminal without thinking that the Republican aren't criminals too.