Let’s get stupid. We used to say that back in college. Beer followed. Lots of beer, and no studying followed. Everyone needs a break from trying to be smart all the time, and of course we’d end up saying stupid things to each other, and laughing at jokes we didn’t even understand, if they were jokes, or passionately arguing with each other about something none of us could remember the next morning – but everyone needs a break from the grind, whatever the grind is. It wasn’t a way of life or anything, even if it seemed to be for the frat boys – the rich kids and legacy admissions who had no need to be smart about anything. They had connections. They’d be fine. They “got stupid” all the time, to show everyone else that they could and it wouldn’t matter at all in their lives, ever.
That was a way of sneering at the losers in life and seems to sum up George W. Bush’s years at Yale, if all the stories of his undergraduate days there are true. That might also sum up his foreign policy once he somehow became president, particularly that business with Iraq. Let’s do something stupid and see what happens. What happens might turn out to be catastrophic, but the old man had friends, and his friends have friends, who will figure out a way to say we were being bold and courageous, and their friends at Fox News will say we were heroic, and that whatever it was, even trying to build a secular Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq, by force of arms, really should have worked, and maybe it did work. They’ll say history will one day vindicate what seems like a catastrophe now. Just wait. None of us liked those frat boys much.
We would have liked someone like Barack Obama. Out here at Occidental College and then back east at Columbia, he admits he did his share of getting stupid – smoking weed, mostly – but he was also always trying to be smart all the time. Getting stupid wasn’t a way to approach life for him. It was a break one took now and then, on the way to Harvard Law School and beyond. Doing stupid stuff was, well, stupid. He didn’t have the luxury of legacy. His grandfather wasn’t a famous senator from Connecticut, and his father hadn’t been a vice president and then head of the CIA and then president – his father had been a Kenyan graduate student who disappeared from his life early. Obama had no legacy support system. Getting stupid – as a way of life – wasn’t an option. What was? Be cool. Don’t do stupid stuff. Work hard to know what the stupid stuff really is, and just don’t do it.
That has served him well. He beat Hillary Clinton in 2008 Democratic primary, and then John McCain in the 2008 general election, by being infuriatingly calm and reasonable, and waiting for them to do stupid stuff. McCain did choose Sarah Palin, didn’t he? Four years later Obama did the same to Mitt Romney, even if the gaffe-prone Romney might have imploded all on his own. In each case the privileged legacy crowd took it on the chin. Hillary Clinton wasn’t inevitable and the Clinton machine wasn’t the Democratic Party after all. The war-hero son of the admiral doesn’t automatically get the presidency, nor does the son of a rich auto magnate, who got even richer because he knew how to borrow money to snap up companies and dismantle them and then walk away with all the cash. The cutthroat legacy businessman doesn’t automatically get the presidency either. You get the presidency by not doing stupid stuff, and that’s not a bad approach to life.
The privileged legacy crowd doesn’t get it. A month ago, Hillary Clinton said this to Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic:
At one point, I mentioned the slogan President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit” (an expression often rendered as “Don’t do stupid stuff” in less-than-private encounters).
This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
She softened the blow by noting that Obama was “trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy,” but she repeatedly suggested that the U.S. sometimes appears to be withdrawing from the world stage.
There are obvious implications. She might be saying you have to be a bit crazy, even murderously crazy, if you want to lead the world, or maybe she’s saying that the world only has to start to worry that you’ve gone bat-shit crazy – it keeps them off balance, to your advantage. Don’t worry so much about the American people either. They like a little crazy in their leaders. It’s refreshing. They elected George Bush twice, didn’t they? She doesn’t mention that smirking cowboy, but she seems okay with doing stupid stuff. Leadership is about taking chances. Others may die, many others, but that’s a sacrifice she’s willing to make. That of course led to this – Bill Maher: If Hillary gets the 2016 nomination, I’ll vote for Rand Paul – which is what you’d expect from a man who only gets stupid, smoking lots of excellent marijuana, recreationally, as he freely admits. That’s for fun. Otherwise, Maher avoids doing stupid stuff, and he does wonder about Hillary.
As for Obama, in late August there was this:
President Barack Obama tried to get himself a bit more political space Thursday to make a decision about whether to expand the U.S. military campaign against Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria, but in so doing he may have dealt himself a significant political blow by suggesting that his policy on the issue is adrift.
“We don’t have a strategy yet,” Obama said as he took questions from reporters in the White House briefing room.
This has been discussed endlessly as a terrible gaffe, but it comes down to Obama saying he’s taking his time to make sure he doesn’t do something stupid, and his critics saying he should do something now, even if it is stupid, because something must be done, right now, or last year, or two years ago, or five years ago, if that can be arranged. It’s the sneering frat boys verses the timid nerd. Do something. Thinking isn’t something. Where’s the damned strategy? We cannot wait for it to be something that’s not stupid stuff.
This had to come to a head, and it certainly did:
President Obama on Wednesday authorized a major expansion of the military campaign against rampaging Sunni militants in the Middle East, including American airstrikes in Syria and the deployment of 475 more military advisers to Iraq. But he sought to dispel fears that the United States was embarking on a repeat of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a speech to the nation from the State Floor of the White House, Mr. Obama said the United States was recruiting a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants, known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He warned that “eradicating a cancer” like ISIS was a long-term challenge that would put some American troops at risk.
“We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” Mr. Obama declared in a 14-minute address. “That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq,” he added, using an alternative name for ISIS. “This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”
This is far more militant than anyone expected, but then he told us it really wasn’t:
The president drew a distinction between the military action he was ordering and the two wars begun by his predecessor, George W. Bush. He likened this campaign to the selective airstrikes that the United States has carried out for years against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, few of which have been made public. …
Mr. Obama outlined a plan that will bolster American training and arming of moderate Syrian rebels to fight the militants. Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide a base for the training of those forces.
Mr. Obama called on Congress to authorize the plan to train and equip the rebels – something the Central Intelligence Agency has been doing covertly and on a much smaller scale – but he asserted his authority as commander in chief to expand the overall campaign, which will bring the number of American troops in Iraq to 1,600.
“These American forces will not have a combat mission; we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” Mr. Obama pledged, adding that the mission “will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”
We’ll bring in allies for that. The Saudis and the other Sunni nations may step up to fight those crazy Sunnis of ISIS, and Turkey may help out, and Iraq has a new government now, sort of, and even if it’s still Shiite, they may let Iraq’s Sunnis into the government, somehow, so they don’t want to go north and join the ISIS crowd. The administration is working on all this. That’s the strategy, folks!
Andrew Sullivan is not impressed:
So here we are. The strategy is not to defeat a direct threat to the United States, because there is no such threat at present. The strategy is to contain ISIS through US airpower, the Kurds, the Iraqi “Army”, and by trying to get the Saudis to work the tribes to turn a critical mass of Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis against the Salafists and toward Baghdad. I presume air-strikes in Syria will be designed to cut off ISIS’ supply lines across the now non-existent border. I don’t doubt there will be Special Forces on the ground.
There will also be old-school American service-members on the ground in Iraq to help train the Kurds and the central government forces. Somehow, along (one presumes) with massive bribes as during the first “Awakening”, this will turn the tide.
This, then, may be dumb stuff:
That we have already spent enormous sums training the Iraqi army – and that they fled at the first sign of a black ISIS flag – goes unmentioned. But we should have no illusions about their ability to do anything meaningful to push back the Islamic State. The Kurds have had limited success in regaining territory. But the covert war in support of the non-Salafist Syrian opposition will become much more overt – with the Europeans taking the lead in funneling them arms. Where those arms end up we have no real control over. So in effect we’re pumping a whole bunch of weaponry into Iraq and hoping, once again, that it doesn’t come back at us.
And then there’s the big picture, and what Sullivan sees as tone-deafness:
Who can believe America is a force for good in that part of the world when we have just blown the whole place up – and left a failed state in our wake? And the president still seems to convey an impression that those rescued from ISIS will somehow be grateful to the US for standing up for civilization and its values. They won’t be. They’ll hate us, whatever we do – but especially when we intervene. One obvious factor missing: the Iranians – many of whom apparently believe that ISIS is America’s creation. But the Iranians could scramble the sectarian balance here by seeming to be a Shiite force of exactly the kind that spawned support for ISIS in the first place.
I don’t buy this as in any way guaranteeing the demise of ISIS; to analogize this war to Yemen and Somalia – where the president’s glib declaration of success doesn’t exactly evoke confidence – is to miss the obvious point that the US created the nightmare in Iraq from 2003 onward. This is a continuation of the same war, with the exact same tactics used by Petraeus to bribe, organize and arm Sunnis repelled by ISIS. But this time, we have no troops on the ground. And the Sunnis are even more pissed off now than they were then. And our credibility is in the toilet. And our levers are weaker. And the multi-sectarian government just barely formed has not even come close to proving its inclusive potential.
I wanted to be reassured. Alas, I’m not.
Sullivan does, however, see what is going on here:
If we simply left ISIS alone, there’s a real danger that it could begin to organize in such a way as to threaten the US. That in itself reveals the craven dependency that the regional powers still have with respect to this kind of Salafist fanaticism – but it remains a fact. We can do a few things from the air to make ISIS’s life a lot harder, and hope to God that yet more American bombs in Iraq won’t go astray or provoke an even more intense reaction. Maybe the non-Salafist Syrian opposition can get its act together, but maybe it can’t. At best, the strategy is simply to try to contain ISIS with airpower. And that’s basically it. Another Sunni Awakening? That’s the hope. But at this point it’s surely just a hope.
So this is really a police action which does not end crime, cannot apprehend the criminals but can keep the criminals from getting a firmer footing for a while. As long as we are cognizant of that, we can judge its relative success or failure. But it contains no inkling of what the unintended consequences will be, leaves Obama open to even more pressure to send ground troops in if things go south, and allows the Congress to shirk any responsibility to declare war.
Apart from all that, it’s brilliant.
Sullivan is not alone. Andrew Sprung wasn’t impressed either:
Other than the execution of Foley and Sotloff, ISIS’s direct threat to the U.S. is thus far hypothetical. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be countered. But does that threat justify unlimited executive action without express authorization by Congress? Obama glided right over that basic constitutional question. In short, the speech raised a lot more questions than it addressed – or than Obama has addressed elsewhere. It provided a thin sketch of a strategy and justification. Given broad popular support for action against ISIS, perhaps Obama calculated that less is more. But as a means of educating and preparing the nation, it was a cursory effort – an “I got this” from a president currently enjoying little public confidence.
At Vox, Zack Beauchamp is attuned to the irony of all this:
Bush argued that the United States needed to launch wars against regimes that might sponsor terrorist groups before they were imminent threats to the US. Obama is applying a version of that preventative war logic to ISIS.
Now, the comparison isn’t exact. There’s a compelling case that ISIS, an utterly brutal jihadi group that has already beheaded two Americans, will one day turn its eye towards the American homeland. It’s certainly more compelling than Bush’s case that Saddam might sponsor nuclear terrorism against the United States. What’s more, the military campaign Obama is proposing is extraordinarily more modest than Bush’s full-scale invasion of Iraq. But the irony here is unmistakable. Barack Obama, who won the presidency on the strength of his opposition to Bush’s war in Iraq, is now launching a new campaign in Iraq – on fairly similar reasons.
At Mother Jones, David Corn wonders about what could follow:
Obama’s intentions are clear: he doesn’t want to return to full-scale US military involvement in Iraq. But now that he has committed the United States to renewed military action there, where’s the line? When US military intervention in Libya was debated in the White House, Obama, after careful deliberation, chose a calibrated course of action that included limited US military involvement as part of a multilateral campaign. That plan achieved its end: Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was ousted. (The dust there, however, is far from settling.) Obama’s approach to ISIS is similar, but this problem is more vexing and the risks greater. His speech gave little indication of how he might confront the possible problems and hard choices that will likely come.
There’s an old cliché: no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The same might be true for a case for war. Once a war is started, the narrative of that war, like the events themselves, can be hard to control.
At National Interest, Paul Scharre discusses practical issues:
Countering terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS requires more than simply dropping bombs. The key enabler is intelligence, much of which comes from unmanned aircraft, or “drones.” Contrary to the popular attention paid to “drone strikes,” the most valuable service that drones provide isn’t the ability to drop bombs – many manned aircraft can do that – but rather the ability to loiter overhead for 16-20 hours at a time, watching terrorists and gathering information. Several drones working together can provide 24/7 coverage, an unblinking eye watching a terrorist’s every move, and most importantly, every person he meets with, allowing intelligence analysts to unravel a network and find key leaders.
The Air Force refers to these 24/7 coverage areas as “orbits,” and in its most recent budget, it slashed them. In its Fiscal Year 2015 budget submission, the Department of Defense reduced the number of 24/7 Air Force Predator and Reaper orbits by 15 percent, from 65 to 55. This would make sense if there was too much capacity in the force or if the reduction of troops from Afghanistan meant that fewer surveillance orbits were needed. The reality is that demand for unmanned aircraft for high-priority missions like counterterrorism far exceeds supply.
At Foreign Policy, Chris Woods says these things cannot be done from the air anyway:
There’s scant proof that airpower-only campaigns actually work. Much of Libya is now overrun by militant Islamists, while Yemen is actually less stable today after five years of secret U.S. drone strikes. Ground troops will eventually be needed to hold territory once ISIS is forced out of the areas of Syria and Iraq it now controls. Washington and its Western allies not only have little appetite for another ground war; they don’t have enough credibility to conduct one following the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. Presumably that’s why Obama has promoted the idea of a regional solution to the problem. Yet with the Syrian and Iraqi armies barely capable of stepping up, it’s not clear who would fill that void.
And then there’s the guy who was there the last time, David Frum, who seems a bit appalled:
Those of us associated with the Bush administration bear the burden of having launched a war on false premises that then yielded disappointing results. It’s a heavy responsibility, and one most of us have struggled with in our various ways. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of it. But it’s one thing to fail to achieve your aims. It’s another to start a war with no discernible aims at all. It’s not crass, not narrow, and not unethical for the president of the United States to test any proposed foreign policy – and most especially the use of armed force – against the criterion: “How will this benefit my nation?”
That test is not a narrow one. The protection of allies is an important U.S. interest. The honoring of international commitments is an important U.S. interest. And it could even be argued that humanitarian action can be justified when it will save many lives, at low cost in American blood and treasure, without creating even worse consequences inadvertently. This new campaign against ISIS does not even pretend to meet that test. It’s a reaction: an emotional reaction, without purpose, without strategy, and without any plausible – or even articulated – definition of success.
Don’t do dumb stuff? Who said that? Here we go again, and Freddie deBoer sees why:
I can envision no plausible scenario in which this country stops its endless projection of military force. Not in my lifetime. I suppose I hope only that people in the media will someday be honest and say: we are bent on war, and our media is bent on war, and there is no such thing as an antiwar voice in our politics or media, and we will go to war again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. We might “win” this time. We will certainly destroy ISIS if we set our minds to it. And we will leave behind another failed state, whether after a year or ten, and then that failed state will do what failed states do, and we will go back again. But every time a little weaker, a little more vulnerable, until someday at last, the next war is the one that leads to our own destruction.
In the New Yorker, Robin Wright sees it this way:
For the United States, the best possible outcome would be for the militants to withdraw from their illusory state in Iraq to bases in Syria, where they might wither in the face of strengthened Syrian rebels; ideally, the rebels would also bring an end to the Assad regime in Damascus. Iraq and Syria, with their multicultural societies, would then have breathing room to incubate inclusive governments. That’s the goal, anyway.
The worst outcome would be another open-ended, treasury-sapping, coffin-producing, and increasingly unpopular war that fails to erase ISIS or resurrect Iraq. It might even, in time, become a symbolic graveyard of American greatness – as it was for the French and the British. The Middle East has a proven record of sucking us in and spitting us out.
The best possible outcome is beyond unlikely. The worst outcome is what has happened to others, each time.
Let’s get stupid? Let’s not – but it’s too late now, even if Obama is saying we won’t get entirely stupid this time. But one thing leads to another. That calls for a good stiff drink.
