Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 147

Bill O’Reilly’s Dumb Plan To Defeat ISIS

Oy vey:

[O'Reilly] knows advocating for American troops to take up the fight themselves is extremely unpopular. O’Reilly, problem solver that he is, has a solution: “elite fighters who would be well paid, well trained to defeat terrorists all over the world.” Since that worked so well in Iraq last time around. What we need is more Blackwater. In the O’Reilly fantasy, the 25,000-person force would be English-speaking, “recruited by the USA and trained in America by our special operations troops,” and dubbed “the Anti-Terror Army,” because the Avengers is already taken.

Allahpundit dismantles O’Reilly’s pipe dream:

The flaw is that there’s no obvious next step if the mercenaries succeed in routing ISIS from Raqqa and eastern Syria. Who takes over and rules that half of the country if that happens? Assad? He’ll butcher the Sunni civilians there and the Sunnis know it. A new sectarian rebellion against the regime would spring up overnight. Some sort of multinational Sunni force of Saudi, Turkish, and Jordanian troops? Iran will never let the Saudis have that kind of foothold, and besides, none of those countries want the headache of pacifying radicalized Sunni Syrian civilians. NATO doesn’t want it either, of course; an army of western peacekeepers would be even more culturally estranged from Syrian Arabs than a multinational Sunni force would.

The theoretical virtue of Obama’s “arm the Syrian moderates” plan is that if the moderates were to defeat ISIS, they’d be comparatively well positioned to take over as rulers of eastern Syria. They’re natives and they’re Sunnis; they’re probably acceptable to the locals. But of course, the moderates aren’t going to defeat ISIS, which puts us back at square one.

(Image via Barbara Morrill)

Face Of The Day

Newly elected New Zealand Prime Minister John Key greets Maori Party Co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell at The Beehive in Wellington, New Zealand on September 23, 2014. On Saturday evening, the National Party leader was re-elected after defeating Labour opposition leader David Cunliffe. By Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images.

Choosing “Yes”

Freddie responds to Vanessa Grigoriadis’s piece on campus rape:

I think that it’s a mistake to create different standards of consent for college students. The potential unforeseen consequences scare me, and besides, a central aspect of the fight against sexual assault is to insist that rape is rape. I think it sends a retrograde message to suggest that there is a different standard that is applied only to college students. I would argue that a clear takeaway from the New York piece is that the establishment of this entire separate legal system for campus sexual assaults, while undertaken with good intentions, has added a layer of complexity and lack of accountability that has backfired badly. …

I feel strongly that explicit consent laws actually undercut the absolute ownership by the individual over her or his own sexual practice.

One of the most important parts of the feminist project is insisting that women own their own bodies. This has application to abortion, where the pro-life movement seeks to take physical control of women’s bodies away from them. And it has application to rape. The insistence of those who work against rape is that only the individual has the right to define appropriate and wanted sexual practice. With the informed consent of all adult parties, no sexual practice is illegitimate. Without that consent, no sexual practice is permissible. This is a humane, moral standard that has the benefit of simplicity in application and clarity in responsibility.

But it stems first and foremost from the recognition of individual ownership. To define the exact methods through which individuals can request and give consent takes away that control and turns it over to the state, or even more ludicrously, to a dean or some academic grievance board. We should be expanding the individual’s control over their own sexual practice, not lessening it. And we should maintain the simplest standard that there is: that if a person rejects a sexual advance, or is in such an incapacitated state that they cannot rejected that advance, or is under the power of the other party to the extent that they feel compelled to consent, sexual contact cannot morally or legally take place.

Scaring Up Some Votes

The Republicans are already using ISIS as a wedge issue:

Sargent passes along a new Scott Brown ad that also hypes the ISIS threat:

It’s true that the President’s approval on terrorism has plummeted and the GOP now holds a huge advantage on foreign policy. Republican strategists have been pretty explicit in explaining that they see this as a way to exploit a general public sense that things have gone off the rails, and polls do show high wrong-track numbers and rising worry about terrorism. If things go wrong, which is certainly possible, this could well redound to the benefit of Republican candidates.

But for now, it’s hard to imagine that arguments such as Brown’s above are going to cut it. After all, if GOP candidates are really going to paint the U.S. response to ISIS as insufficiently realistic about the nature of the threat, then that should theoretically open them up to thequestion of whether they support sending in ground troops. You’d think that if the criticism continues now that operations are underway, it would be harder for them to duck that basic follow-up.

Waldman agrees that ISIS fear-mongering is unlikely to work:

Despite the surface similarity between political attacks like those and the ones we saw when George W. Bush was president, there’s a crucial difference. Back then, there was a Republican president taking actions against America’s enemies, while Democrats supposedly didn’t want to protect the country (even if, in reality, elected Democrats gave ample support to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other elements of the “War on Terror”).

Today, however, it’s a Democratic president who is taking action against terrorists. Even if you believe that action is inadequate, it still creates a fundamentally different impression with the public when they see Tomahawks launching and jets taking off from aircraft carriers on Barack Obama’s orders.

Which may explain why Josh Green found that few GOP ads thus far have mentioned ISIS:

Now that the U.S. has begun bombing Syria, those ads may start to materialize. Then again, maybe they won’t. Republicans leaders such as House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have endorsed Obama’s latest campaign. “ISIL is a direct threat to the safety and security of the United States and our allies,” Boehner said of the group formerly known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, according to a statement. “I support the airstrikes launched by the president, understanding that this is just one step in what must be a larger effort to destroy and defeat this terrorist organization. I wish our men and women in uniform Godspeed as they carry out this fight.”

The View From Your Window

Herzlyya, Israel, 12 pm

Because More Bombing Is Always The Answer

Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, writing in Politico, wants the US to target Assad, not just ISIS:

Assad’s record presents clear evidence: If his regime somehow survives the current conflict, ISIL will mysteriously regenerate itself while Assad approvingly observes. Unless the United States wants to be striking ISIL in Syria yet again in another five to 10 years, America should hit Assad now.

Larison pulls his hair out:

Attacking Syrian regime forces would drag the U.S. into a much larger, riskier, and more ambitious campaign that could have very dangerous consequences for U.S. pilots and could create yet another crisis in U.S.-Russian relations. The war against ISIS already promises to be long and desultory, and a war against the Syrian regime would make everything harder, raise the costs of the ongoing campaign, and risk the possibility of regime collapse and the even greater chaos that would consume the country as a result. The war against ISIS is a serious mistake, but fighting both the regime and ISIS at the same time would be a disaster.

Where Golf Is Driven Out Of Range

In a review of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham describes the peculiar role of the sport in Chinese society:

[A]s Dan Washburn writes in his compelling new book … golf “offers a unique window into today’s China,” a country of paradoxes perhaps best exemplified by the fact that although construction of new golf courses has been banned in China since at least 2004, more than 400 were built between 2005 and 2010, making China the only place in the world experiencing a golf boom. Government officials who enjoy hitting the links register at golf courses under false names, afraid of leaving a paper trail connecting them to a game most often associated with capitalism and corruption. And while massive golf course complexes lined with luxury villas populate large tracts of land outside Chinese cities, their owners attempt to hide the courses in plain sight, giving them convoluted names like the “Anji China Ecotourism and Fitness Center.”

Like so much else in contemporary China, golf occupies a gray zone: officially forbidden, yet tolerated — even encouraged — behind the scenes, as local government officials and land developers reap massive profits from the construction of new courses.

(Photo of a golf course in Kunming by Philippe Semanaz)

Confusion Contagion

Jessica Love reviews a study that suggests “we can experience bewilderment on behalf of others”:

Psychologists at the University of York plunked students in front of a computer and presented them with pairs of sentences. The first was always presented aurally, with the students wearing headphones; the second appeared silently as text on the monitor. Crucially, some of the participants were seated next to someone withoutheadphones—someone, that is, who could read the second sentence, but couldn’t listen to the first one.

For some sentence pairs, the second sentence was easy to comprehend on its own: one doesn’t need to hear The fishmonger prepared the fish to make sense of The fish had gills. But in other pairs, the first sentence provided some crucial context: without first hearing In the boy’s dream, he could breath under water, it was tough to interpret The boy had gills.

Yet even the students who’d heard the first sentence experienced an N400 (a pattern of neural activity associated with processing difficulty) in response to the second sentence—but only if seated beside someone without headphones. They knew their neighbors were probably confused, and registered that confusion vicariously. In fact, the N400 pattern was just as strong for students sitting next to people who hadn’t heard the contextualizing sentence as it was when these students themselves read a sentence like The boy had gills without context.

The Best Of The Dish Today

But first, get psyched for Wednesday:

I went to grad school and shared some classes with Zeke Emanuel, who just wrote a great piece for The Atlantic on why he doesn’t want to live much past the age of 75. Money quote:

By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations.

Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy. Indeed, I plan to have my memorial service before I die. And I don’t want any crying or wailing, but a warm gathering filled with fun reminiscences, stories of my awkwardness, and celebrations of a good life. After I die, my survivors can have their own memorial service if they want—that is not my business.

I also happened to catch this little piece on Leonard Cohen’s decision to take up smoking again now that he is 80 years’ old:

At any age, taking up smoking is not sensible. Both the smoker and those who breathe his secondhand smoke can suffer not only long-term but acute health problems, including infections and asthma. And yet, Mr. Cohen’s plan presents a provocative question: When should we set aside a life lived for the future and, instead, embrace the pleasures of the present?

It’s a vital question this one – and not because of the extraordinary costs of maximal healthcare at the end of many of our lives. It’s vital because it challenges our Western denial of death, our cult of life-extension, our refusal to fully absorb the fact that we are finite, mortal, obsolescent. I was horribly lucky to be forced to confront this at a very early age – 29 to be exact. The prognosis back in 1993 was not great for HIV infection, and I watched a close friend die at the age of 31. Is my life somehow worth more than his, I wondered, simply because I’m going to be here longer? Some called this survivor’s guilt. I thought it was merely addressing a core existential question.

One day, a simple thought occurred to me and a huge amount of stress and worry and anxiety lifted. It occurred to me to see life the way we see college. No one gets extra points for staying in college for longer than four years. We understand that it’s finite; and our response is to value the content of that experience rather than its length. I vowed that that was how I was going to treat life from now on. And, although, of course, those feelings waned as my prospects brightened, I haven’t ever fully let go of it.

It lies behind many of the things I did with my life since then – the apparently quixotic fight for marriage equality (the kind of nutty thing you throw yourself into if you only have a few years left); even more quixotic attempts to re-describe conservatism; the crazy idea that I could write directly for readers with no middle man; the equally risky prospect of making an independent business out of a very idiosyncratic blog. I think knowing I was living past my expiration date helped me live more fully and less fearfully. And it makes the idea of trying to live into one’s eighties as a goal a little beside the point.

There’s wisdom in Zeke’s outlook; and, of course, wit in Cohen’s. I think of Hitch. Maybe he could have lived a different, more upright life – which would have been much longer. But would he still have been Hitch? And isn’t it better to have one real Hitch for a short time than a less authentic version that lived into his dotage?

I know this much: I just want to be alive when I die.

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Tweets Of The Day

And the man who got the scoop on IS bombing is @3bdUlkaed6r pic.twitter.com/8iF61CH4Ov

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) September 23, 2014

Another country, another US bombing. And the beat goes on …