Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 156

Everybody’s Working On The Weekend

Looking at a new NBER study, Christopher Ingraham counts the ways Americans are overworked compared to our European peers. For one thing, we’re more likely to take that business call on a Saturday:

The U.S. has the highest incidence of people reporting any paid weekend work. 29 percent of Americans reported performing such work in the American Time Use Survey, more than three times the rate among Spanish workers. It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that these workers are working 9 to 5 every weekend, only that they reported performing paid weekend work in a time use survey. This would include things like going into the office for a few hours to finish up a project.

The study showed that Americans are also more likely to work nights. Max Nisen notes the obvious origins of our weird work hours:

These strange work hours probably happen because Americans work so much and lack the enforced vacations and limitations on overtime that exist in some European countries. Nearly twice as many U.S. workers work 45+ hour weeks than in Germany, and more than twice as many do so than workers in France, the Netherlands, and Spain. As the work week grows longer, weekend and “strange” work becomes much more likely.This stands to reason: Someone moving from a comparatively standard week of 35 to 44 hours to a 55- to 64-hour week is almost twice as likely to let that work bleed into weekends and nights, according to the study. …

So what would happen to the U.S. if it adopted similar controls? According to the study, if the country adopted the French distribution of work hours, night and weekend work would drop substantially, but would still remain well above that of continental Europe.

Jordan Weissmann considers other explanations:

[T]he sheer time we spend working doesn’t explain why so many of us find ourselves staring into a glowing Outlook screen at 12:43 a.m. on a Wednesday. Even if Americans worked the same amount of time as the French, Dutch, or British, Hamermesh and Stancanelli find that we’d still be more likely to stay up late tooling around with Excel, reading memos, or doing whatever else it is that keeps us up at ungodly hours. It might be a cultural issue. It might be because we have fewer laws governing when people can and can’t be on the clock. Though it feels unlikely, there might even be a happy story here about enlightened American companies allowing their employees to use flexible schedules to accommodate their personal needs. Whatever the reasons, Americans structure their workweeks differently than Europeans. We’re night owls and weekend MS Office warriors—which, in the eyes of the rest of the world, probably looks pretty nuts.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like ISIS?

A military approach alone won’t do the trick, Zack Beauchamp argues, emphasizing the extent to which Obama’s strategy depends on political factors largely outside his control:

Even assuming the Iraqi and Syrian rebel forces can be made strong enough to take on ISIS in purely military terms, there’s a list of everything that needs go right — politically — for Obama’s strategy to work out:

The Iraqi government needs to stop repressing and systematically disenfranchising Sunnis. It also needs to accommodate their demands for positions of power in government in perpetuity, so ISIS doesn’t just pop back up after the US leaves.
The US must avoid sending the signal that it’s coordinating with Iran, which would put it on the Shia side of a sectarian war.
Syrian rebels armed and trained by the US don’t simply take their new weapons and defect to ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al-Qaeda affiliate.
US airstrikes and US allied military campaigns need to avoid killing large numbers of civilians, which could cause a pro-ISIS popular backlash.
If the US actually does manage to demolish ISIS’s control on territory, it needs to ensure that neither Syrian President Bashar al-Assad nor al-Qaeda simply take over the land that ISIS has vacated.
The United States has to do all of this without deploying ground troops or otherwise getting caught in a bloody, brutal quagmire.

For the outcome to end well, every single one of these events must go the right way. There’s a reason that one US General told the Washington Post that the new campaign in Syria is “harder than anything we’ve tried to do thus far in Iraq or Afghanistan.” Given how those wars ended up, that’s a pretty ominous comparison.

Deborah Avant also considers ISIS a fundamentally political challenge:

The US has done better at managing crises to roll back attacks in the Middle East. It has not been as successful translating these short-run gains into positive steps toward inclusive governance. Furthermore, US anointment in Iraq and Afghanistan has led to leaders with little legitimacy and little attention to US concerns. The last thing the US wants to do is to intervene in a way that pushes the various anti-government rebels in Iraq (and/or Syria) together with ISIS against perceived US puppets. Though less may not be enough, I agree with Joshua Rovner that less is more when it comes to US presence in the Middle East. A broad strategy involving many others is a good idea. Doing that under the mantle of an American coalition is not. A plan with the US in a supporting, background role has best chance for long run success.

Beyond that, however, what will the US and its allies do about the malaise upon which al-Baghdadi and others have been able to capitalize? … Messages about global citizenship, human security, and an inclusive global politics seemed to evince more hope in the 1990s – perhaps for good reason. The shreds of a hopeful message visible in parts of the Arab Spring have blown into hiding. The US talks more about how to combat extremism than about what might replace it. Though some audiences in the US believe that America holds the keys to the future, many across the world do not.

#WhyIStayed, Ctd

The reactions to the Ray Rice story continue to roll in. CBS Sportscaster James Brown speaks out:

Amanda Marcotte rejects lines of commentary that suggest Ray Rice is a victim:

Because of this vast gulf in male and female experiences of domestic violence, unsurprisingly the impact also varies dramatically. On Tuesday, Catherine Cloutier of the Boston Globe published an examination of how much more seriously women’s lives are impacted by intimate partner violence. The CDC surveyed around 14,000 people to determine the impact of domestic violence on their lives. Men and women were somewhat similar in rates of having endured some kind of assault, at 27.5 percent for men and 29.7 percent for women.

But looking beyond counting individual touches, a different picture emerges. Twenty-four percent of female victims report feeling fearful, compared to 7 percent of men. One in five female victims suffer from PTSD symptoms, whereas only 1 in 20 male victims do. Only 3 percent of male victims suffer physical injury, but over 13 percent of female victims do. Twice as many female victims as male victims missed work because of domestic violence.

The disparity is likely the result of male abuse simply being way more violent and chronic than female abuse. Asking people if they’ve been hit once is relevant, of course, but in measuring the realities of domestic violence, the more important question is if you’re being hit frequently, being terrorized by violence on a regular basis, being stalked and controlled, or being threatened with your life if you try to leave.

Yes, no one should hit anyone else. But that statement is the beginning of the conversation about the problem of domestic violence, not the end of it.

And the Dish is channeling that conversation here. Josh Levin wants the NFL’s other abusers to held accountable:

The best analogy here is to the awful scourge of sexual assault on college campuses. In addition to going to local police, a student can have her complaint heard through a campus adjudication procedure, one that uses “the preponderance of evidence” as a standard of proof rather than a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. (As Emily Bazelon has explained, preponderance of the evidence means “reviewers must find only that it’s more likely than not that the sexual assault or harassment occurred.”) There are problems with these campus systems—the New York Times story on Hobart and William Smith Colleges offers a harrowing account of all that can go wrong—but at least they acknowledge the existence of something akin to institutional responsibility.

At least before TMZ released the Rice video, such a concept did not exist in the NFL. Teams have long operated on the assumption that they could say they’re “aware of the situation,” and then just pretend like nothing happened as soon as the news blew over. At some point, individual teams may decide that it makes sense for them to move to a preponderance-of-evidence standard—to decide that it’s in their best interest to cut a player if it’s more likely than not that he’s a domestic abuser. I don’t know if we’ve reached that point yet, but the Rice video has gotten us closer to that day. Seeing a sports star clock his fiancée in the face has changed something—for fans, for the media, and ultimately, I think, for the teams. If it doesn’t, then the NFL’s problem with domestic violence runs even deeper than we thought.

Alyssa Rosenberg finds wanting NFL Commissioner Goodell’s standard operating procedure:

When it becomes impossible to deny that bad news utterly, his task then becomes to respond in a way that has minimal impact on the NFL’s finances and on the week-by-week play on the field. As long as Goodell is willing to accept the public perception that he is dishonest or in denial, absorbing the damage on behalf of the league, I suppose it is a viable approach to protecting “the integrity of the NFL.” But no matter how much pain Goodell is willing to accept, this is a way of operating that leaves his league a little more battered with every incident. In life, unlike on the gridiron, sometimes it is better to take the hit and move expeditiously to heal from the damage.

Robert Silverman thinks the NFL needs more women:

If the league actually wants to solve the problem, instead of treating it as a particularly thorny public relations issue; if the league had a vested interest in trying to win back a semblance of trust from the 46 percent of their fan base that happens to be female and the unknown percentage of men who are equally repulsed? Here’s one solution: Hire more women and place them in positions of real power.

New Russia Sanctions: A Salvo In The Energy War?

The US imposed additional sanctions on Russia’s finance, energy, and defense sectors today over its involvement in the Ukraine crisis, on the heels of another round of sanctions from the EU:

The U.S. Treasury Department tightened on September 12 debt-financing restrictions for sanctioned banks from 90 days to 30 days. And it added Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial institution, to the list of state banks subject to the restriction. It also prohibited the exporting of goods, services, and technology for Russian deepwater or offshore projects for five Russian firms: natural gas monopoly Gazprom Gazprom, its oil unit Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas, and Russia’s largest oil producer, Rosneft. Gazprom Neft and pipeline operator Transneft also have new debt restrictions of over 90 days’ maturity. … The European Union’s new sanctions include asset freezes on 24 senior officials and lawmakers, including nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinosvky, bringing to 119 the number of people sanctioned by the bloc over the Ukraine conflict. The measures also include restrictions on financing for some state-controlled Russian companies such as Rosneft, Transneft, and Gazprom Neft.

Noting that the sanctions on Rosneft might freeze a $500 billion joint project with ExxonMobil to drill for oil in the arctic, Matthew Philips comments that “these latest energy sanctions could sever what are arguably the closest ties remaining between Russia and the West”:

In the two decades since the Cold War ended, Russian and American astronauts have worked together on the International Space Station, and the Russian military has helped the U.S. get equipment in and out of Afghanistan. But the strongest area of cooperation has come in the energy industry, where U.S. oil majors such as Exxon and Chevron(CVX) have entered into a number of joint ventures with Russia’s state-controlled energy giants Rosneft and Gazprom (GAZP:RM).

The Bloomberg View editors also tie the EU sanctions to the energy war:

Putin may have himself to blame for tipping the EU’s internal debate against him. By reducing natural gas deliveries to Poland and Slovakia this week, Russia made it clear that it still plans to escalate its effort to turn Ukraine into a failed state. Russia’s state gas company OAO Gazprom has cited maintenance work as the cause of the stoppages. That’s hard to believe. Poland and Slovakia happen to be the two countries that are reversing pipeline flows to pump natural gas from the EU into Ukraine, which Russia cut off from supply in June. The goal was to ensure that Poland doesn’t have enough gas to sell to Ukraine — which is exactly what happened. Slovakia has been warned.

Keith Johnson sees the Kremlin’s latest moves as an escalation in the gas war:

It’s not entirely clear whether the sudden drop in Russian gas exports to those countries is politically motivated or if there is a technical reason, such as maintenance on the Russian gas system or the pipelines themselves. Gazprom said that shipments to both countries remain unchanged. In any event, Polish officials said they have been assured by Russia that gas volumes will return to normal on Friday.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin made clear earlier this year that Moscow would aggressively go after countries that buy Russian gas and then turn around and ship it to Ukraine. That kind of energy trade, known as “reverse flow” because most of the gas pipelines pump fuel from east to west, has long incensed Gazprom and the Kremlin, which charge different countries different prices for gas and which rely on energy exports to maintain leverage over former client states in Central and Eastern Europe.

But Bershidsky calls sanctions on Russia a lose-lose proposition, particularly for Europe:

In this race to the bottom, Russia may prove the more resilient, if only because Putin’s authoritarian regime has a mandate from a majority of Russians to wage a new cold war. The food embargo and the price increases it caused in Russia did not drive down Putin’s approval ratings, and Russians have stoically accepted the ruble’s recent losses against the dollar. The currency depreciation can also help the government weather low raw materials prices by boosting the value of foreign-currency exports in ruble terms.

Europe, on the other hand, cannot take much more economic pain. A new slump could send some governments tumbling. In France, 62 percent of the population already wants President Francois Hollande to resign. The world is too interconnected economically, and the European recovery too fragile, to keep using trade disruptions as weapons. Even Ukraine is taking a hit from slumping metals prices: Steel and iron ore account for about a third of its exports.

Mental Health Break

Who knew Mario was such a dick:

This Is How Homophobia Ends

The relatively quiet, undemonstrative and yet decisive moment to allow self-identified gays to march in New York’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade is an almost text-book case of how homophobia can be undermined. There was mercifully no coercion – freedom of association is a critical principle for a free society. There was growing social pressure – from ordinary folk, organized gays, and, more critically, boycotts by New York politicians. No one is jumping up and down rubbing this quiet victory in. Yes, it took years of protest and anguish and anger to get here – and all the while, homophobia ran rampant. Cardinal Dolan has decided to remain the Grand Marshall of the parade, even with an explicitly gay group in its ranks – a remarkable turn-around from the past. The decision was a pragmatic one:

Dolan said Wednesday that the parade committee that operates the annual event “continues to have my confidence and support.” “Neither my predecessors as archbishop of New York nor I have ever determined who would or would not march in this parade … but have always appreciated the cooperation of parade organizers in keeping the parade close to its Catholic heritage,” he continued. Dolan concluded by praying “that the parade would continue to be a source of unity for all of us.”

Is that a sign that the Francis effect – downplaying the divisiveness of the issue in the Church – or just a sign that the society has evolved to a point where exclusion of gays seemed to counter “unity”?

My bet is that the threat of Guinness boycotting the parade was the final straw. The decision by the march’s organizers to include one gay group was unanimous. Bill Donohue is livid, of course. But even Donohue was reduced to merely arguing that a pro-life group be explicitly included in the parade alongside the gays – and when that didn’t transpire, he threw a tantrum and his organization – presumably him and his fax machine – will not be gracing the parade with its presence.

Too bad. He’s part of the New York Irish community and he belongs there as well. And what you see here, I suspect, is simply another reflection of greater informality in many religious groups and congregations, in favoring more inclusion without explicit rejections of orthodoxy. Michael Paulson has an interesting take on that development in American religion, especially with respect to gays and lesbians:

In the new results, 48 percent of congregations allow openly gay people in committed relationships to be members, up from 37 percent since the second study in 2006, and 27 percent of congregations allow them to serve as volunteer leaders, up from 18 percent.

Alas, Catholics are going backward – because inclusion was easier when gay couples couldn’t get married in a civil ceremony (creating a bizarre discrimination against those gays who have committed to one another for life). But the society moves on – as do congregations, as do public events.

Know change. And it may well come not with a bang, but a whimper.

Thailand’s New Dictator Settles In

Gen. Prayuth praying at a shrine in front of the Gov't House before his first official day of work as Prime Minister pic.twitter.com/CIWMP2VTHm

— Khaosod English (@KhaosodEnglish) September 9, 2014

Duncan McCargo checks in on Bangkok, where General Prayuth Chan-ocha, the leader of the May coup, has installed himself as prime minister. McCargo writes that the new regime is already starting to wear on people:

The coup has been largely a Prayuth affair: Besides the song he wrote in early June, in which he exhorts his fellow citizens to “have faith” in the military, the general has his own Friday night television show, on which he lectures his fellow Thais on topics ranging from education to how to raise their kids. (The show, broadcast on every Thai TV station, is called “Returning Happiness to the People.”) His fellow senior officers, including Supreme Commander Thanasak Patimaprakorn, who is nominally Prayuth’s superior, find themselves at the beck and call of the army chief. His office even vets their schedules before they can confirm appointments, two people familiar with the matter told me.

According to a former Thaksin minister, “the boss,” as he called him, had told everyone to lie low and to wait for the military to begin alienating people. That may have already begun. Despite the soft lyrics of his song, Prayuth is not setting out to win friends. After an initial flurry of overt resistance in the first couple of weeks from anti-coup groups — mainly “red shirts” loyal to Thaksin, who now lives in self-imposed exile in Dubai — the opposition has largely gone underground, as a result of the junta’s harsh crackdown on dissent.

Predicting that Prayuth’s creeping authoritarianism will only get worse, Josh Kurlantzick considers how the US should respond to the prospect of an entrenched military regime in Thailand:

Washington and Brussels continue to operate as if this coup were similar to previous Thai coups, just a bump in relations that will soon be overcome. Many American officials have quietly pressed for resuming Cobra Gold joint exercises with Thailand next year, for example, arguing that Thailand is a critical partner on everything from counterterrorism cooperation to narcotics interdiction to dealing with troublesome neighbors like Myanmar and Cambodia.

But this assumption, of a quick return to robust ties, is based on flawed thinking. Thailand will continue to remain highly unstable under prolonged junta rule, since the military cannot maintain power indefinitely. The large numbers of Thais who have repeatedly voted for pro-Thaksin parties will not be silenced forever. Instead of simply preparing to return to normal, the United States should be making plans to move operations in Thailand to other partners in the region and, overall, to become much less dependent on the kingdom, while reminding contacts in the Thai government and military that, if the kingdom returns to real democracy, the robust U.S.-Thai partnership of the past would resume in earnest.

Charlie Campbell spotlights the general’s many eccentricities, including his beliefs in feng shui and black magic:

He has told residents of Bangkok to each pick up to 20 water hyacinths from the Chao Phraya River to help unclog the iconic waterway. Farmers, he says, should only grow rice once a year to keep the grain’s price up. The poor need to alleviate their woes by “working harder” and the indebted must return to solvency by “stopping shopping.” If such dictates faintly echo the on-the-spot guidance dispensed by North Korea’s tyrannical Kim clan, then Prayuth’s growing superstitiousness is reminiscent of Burma’s former military rulers, who governed with the advice of numerologists, mystics and astrologers. In a high-profile speech last week, Prayuth said, “Today, I have a sore throat, a pain in the neck. Someone said there are people putting curses on me.” His solution was to have so much protective holy water poured over him that he “shivered all over.”

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I write this from the perspective of one who didn’t participate in politics before Barack Obama, but I voted for him twice. I’m part of that “Obama coalition” that political writers like to talk about – a “creative class” member, family man, early 40s, white, with deep skepticism toward American politics and outright disdain for the two major political parties.

Watching the president last night made me think two things. First, my gut reaction was that this wasn’t the guy I voted for – what happened to that guy? Second, it made me think more deeply about why I had supported him in the first place. Sure, the idea of a black president was interesting to me, but that really had very little to do with my vote. I also didn’t vote for Obama out of fear of Sarah Palin’s lunacy or John McCain’s warmongering (though both were certainly compelling reasons). No, he was different. We didn’t vote for Obama because we hated or feared the other side, and that is actually something that makes him different from most of the milquetoast candidates the two parties typically put forward (and are already planning to put forward in 2016).

I think the disappointment in Obama stems in part from the fact that most of us who voted for him did so affirmatively.

We actually voted for Obama, not against McCain or Palin or Romney or Ryan. We voted for the guy he ran as – a profoundly intelligent, intellectually independent, thoughtful man who insisted on treating the public like adults and who, on issue after issue, self-consciously refused to be responsive to whatever the Beltway shouting about. In short, he decided he wanted to be president on his own terms.

Obama knew he couldn’t control events, obviously, but he certainly could control himself – and his composed, sober, longer view of the churn of day-to-day issues conferred an inherent dignity upon himself. The political class and some in the media didn’t always “get it”, still breathlessly chasing after the latest big story, trying to “win the hour”, etc. But Obama’s poised refusal to go along (remember how he used to deride what he called “cable chatter”? I sure do…) was a major dog whistle for people like me. I saw the president acting the way I wanted him to act. That was the guy I elected. The guy who wouldn’t play along with all the bullshit, who would insist that we actually deal with both policy and politics based on facts, reasoning, and long-term strategy.

This can seem mundane, but for people like me who have watched Obama closely over the years, that’s what we liked and what we voted for. I work in a corporate job with mostly conventional Fox-news Republican types, and time and again over the years, every argument they make bounces off me like Teflon. It was always so easy to see how they had to mischaracterize Obama in order to effectively criticize him.

Not anymore.

Last night’s speech looked transparently political. OK, so Obama goofed and said we didn’t have a strategy, a rhetorical blunder that handed the Republicans a short-term tactical advantage in the midterm elections … so, after enough Democrats bitched about it, he goes on TV to announce a strategy. The actual content was secondary to the fact of the speech itself. That’s just not the guy I voted for. It also lacked any actual strategic thinking – what are we going to do, who’s going to help us do it, how long, costs, risks and mitigants. It was a political errand dressed as a speech, which frankly was one of the things I despised most about George W Bush.

It is sad to see Obama fall this far. Furthermore, beyond even the inadequate content of the speech or the stench of midterm politics behind it, didn’t anyone bother to think of how the speech elevates ISIS around the world? I admit they’re extremely violent and completely incapable of being deterred. But they’re what – 30,000 guys? A primetime presidential address gives them stature, legitimacy … which can only help them strengthen their hold on those they already have, and recruit even more. How does that serve a real strategy to defeat them?

This is not the guy I voted for. I remembered thinking this during the first debate with Romney, and now I’m thinking it again. Is he checked out? What happened? Last night was a failure not only for Obama himself, but his political and policy teams. Every president is surrounded by people for whom part of their responsibility is to not let the president look ridiculous. Where are THOSE people?

The president looks like a solitary, adrift figure to me, a guy who may have already written off these next couple of years.

The Problem With Partners

In contrast to the right’s caricature of Obama as a president too feckless to stand up to our enemies, Benjamin Wallace-Wells posits that his real quandary is “whom the United States might trust — the problem of friends”:

The futile hunt for friends characterized the long Obama withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. In Syria, the long, pained, ultimately failed search for a tolerable proxy in the opposition precluded any American involvement, a hesitation that now looks like the biggest foreign-policy error of Obama’s presidency. During the Gaza conflict, Obama was far cooler towards Israel than his predecessors have been. If you want to hang back from the front lines, to hover overhead and urge your friends to the front lines, then the question of exactly who those friends are becomes crucial. ISIS, in its radicalism and its cartoonish barbarism, solved the enemy problem for Obama. It hasn’t completely solved the matter of the friends. Obama spoke confidently about the new, “inclusive” government that Iraqis had formed “in recent days.” Given the long history of sectarian animosity and slaughter in Iraq, it seems worth wondering whether this new coalition of a few days duration will hold under the pressures of a war.

Afzal Ashraf calls the decision to rely on regional partners “the most immature and risky part of the US strategy”:

Middle Eastern countries have spent billions on their defence capability but have shown a remarkable reluctance to deploy it beyond quelling mostly unarmed civilian rebellions. A history of petty squabbling and so little experience of political cooperation or joint military operations further reduces their potential impact. If the anti-Iranian attitude of the Saudis and other Gulf states is not checked before any troops from those countries arrive in Iraq then there is a danger of sparks flying if they come into contact with the Iranian military “advisers”, who appear to be advising very close to the frontline. Increasing efforts to remove President Assad from power in Syria is probably the greatest strategic flaw. Identification and maintenance of a single clear aim is a maxim of strategic success. If defeating Isis is the main aim of this strategy then why complicate an already difficult task by simultaneously engineering regime change in Syria?

Bobby Ghosh makes the easily overlooked point that Arab leaders who join this war will have to sell their publics on it as well:

The template for the coalition against IS should be the international effort in 1991, marshaled by another US secretary of state, James A. Baker III, to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. The presence of many Arab nations was not only vital for the military strategy, it also prevented Saddam from portraying the conflict as a battle between Islam and the West. Kerry will no doubt invoke the Baker coalition in his conversations with Arab officials in Riyadh.

But as effective as the 1991 military campaign was, many Arab people felt no sense of ownership over the victory. Their leaders had not sought their approval, and had failed to explain why it was necessary to join non-Arab armies to eject Saddam from Kuwait. This explains why Saddam remained popular among Arabs long after his defeat in Kuwait. It also allowed Osama bin Laden to portray the 1991 campaign as an unholy alliance between Arab elites (mainly the Saudi royal family) and the Western “crusaders.”

Turkey, for its part, is already signaling that it wants no part in combat operations, while the UK and Germany also appear to be bowing out of the air campaign. That doesn’t comfort Daniel Larison:

The lack of Turkish cooperation will presumably make the air campaign more difficult and therefore make it last even longer. The more striking thing about this is that the U.S. is going back to war in the region and still cannot count on support from its sole NATO ally in the region. That draws attention to one of this war’s basic flaws: the U.S. is taking the regional threat from ISIS more seriously and doing more to oppose it than many of the regional states that have far more to lose. The U.S. has allowed itself to be pulled into a new, open-ended war for the sake of “partners” that are contributing little or nothing to the war.

Ed Morrissey also finds it troubling:

[W]hat does this say about Obama’s strategic preparation? Did he bother to check in with the Brits and the Germans before pledging his “broad coalition of partners” last night? It would appear not, and that Obama just assumed that they would follow whatever plan he laid out last night. Obama could have framed the Syrian phase separately as a uniquely American security concern and set expectations properly. Instead, it looks as though Obama and his political team wrote a speech without building the necessary commitment from allies to allow them to be part of a united front on global security.

There’s also that niggling matter of finding an acceptable partner in the chaos of the Syrian civil war. Keating complicates that question, reminding us that the task of dividing the belligerents into “good guys” and “bad guys” is not nearly as clear-cut as we’d like it to be:

While the Syrian civil war may once have been viewed as a fight between Assad’s regime and “the rebels,” it’s now much more complicated than that. The major groups now fighting for territory and political influence within Syria include (but are not necessarily limited to): the government; ISIS; the Western-supported Free Syrian Army; the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra; the Kurdish PYD, which has gained control of significant territory in areas near the Turkish border; and the Islamic Front, an umbrella group of Islamist groups distinct from both the “moderate” rebels of the FSA and the hardline jihadists in ISIS and Nusra. The last group on that list has gotten relatively little attention, but recent events show it could be critical. A bombing in northern Syria decimated the leadership of Ahrar al-Sham, a long-established and well-organized rebel group that was one of the primary organizers of the Islamic Front alliance.

And Thomas Pierret and Emile Hokayem make a fresh case against allying with Assad:

Given its lack of homegrown manpower, the regime has owed its survival to auxiliaries in the Alawite-dominated National Defense Forces—an evolved, more sophisticated version of the shabbiha militias—and foreign Shia fighters from Iraq and Lebanon. As in Iraq, this has further alienated the Sunnis, with the difference that in Iraq, at least, these militias are entirely homegrown. This is the point of the argument where those who favor working with Assad point out that defeating the Islamic State will require deploying ground troops in large number—and in the very regions that Assad’s forces have intensively pummeled since 2011. Here’s the rub: Local populations in these areas, crucial to the success of any counterterrorism effort, are unlikely to cooperate with their recent oppressor. Sending pro-Assad sectarian forces back into the Islamic State’s safe haven in northern and eastern Syria would only lead to more communal violence—but almost certainly not victory.

(Photo: Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki (L) shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama in the Oval Office at the White House November 1, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

From The Annals Of Chutzpah

Russia suddenly discovers international law:

“The U.S. president has spoken directly about the possibility of strikes by the U.S. armed forces against ISIL positions in Syria without the consent of the legitimate government,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said. “This step, in the absence of a U.N. Security Council decision, would be an act of aggression, a gross violation of international law.”

Morrissey retorts:

Gee, I must have missed the UN Security Council resolution that granted Russia sovereignty over Crimea, and the invitation to send armor and infantry into eastern Ukraine. For that matter, perhaps the Kremlin could be kind enough to point us toward the UNSC resolution that authorized the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the seizure of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well. After all, Vladimir Putin’s regime appears to be an expert on international law, so …