John Cassidy's Blog, page 68

John Kerry’s Case For Bombing Syria

Two memorable images dominate perceptions of John Kerry. The first of them, taken from the Fulbright hearings, in April, 1971, shows a lanky twenty-seven-year-old Navy veteran, hair below his ears, medals pinned to his military fatigues, testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about alleged war crimes and atrocities carried out by his fellow soldiers in Southeast Asia. The second image, less flattering to Kerry, emerged during his abortive 2004 Presidential campaign, and it showed him windsurfing off Nantucket. Now, there is a third image: a somber, gray-haired Secretary of State standing behind a podium and talking about rows of Syrian children “lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital floor, all of them dead from Assad’s gas and surrounded by parents and grandparents who had suffered the same fate.”

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What Has Changed Since Lehman Failed?

A week from Sunday, it will be five years since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, sparking the biggest financial crisis since the nineteen-thirties and a seven-hundred-billion-dollar bank bailout. In a recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, of the Times and CNBC, Hank Paulson, the man who, as Treasury Secretary, was primarily responsible for the rescue of Wall Street, expressed outrage—or at least misgivings—about the fact that many of the bankers whom the taxpayers rescued promptly turned around and gave themselves huge bonuses. “To say I was disappointed is an understatement,” Paulson said. “My view has nothing to do with legality and everything to do with what was right, and everything to do with just a colossal lack of self-awareness as to how they were viewed by the American public.”

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Obama Shouldn’t Be Rushed Into Bombing Syria

Like my colleague George Packer, I’m of two minds about the prospect of the United States and its allies taking military action against the Syrian government. Having seen the pictures from Syria, and having been brought up on stories of the horrors in the trenches during the First World War, when both sides used mustard gas and other toxins, I’m in favor of punishing the perpetrators of what appears to have been a large-scale gas attack on civilians. On the other hand, I have deep misgivings about the U.S. intervening on the side of the rebel forces, which appear to have turned into a ragtag army dominated by jihadists and thugs.

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Steve Ballmer and the Art of Managing a Monopoly

Steve Ballmer hasn’t been getting much love recently. On Friday, when he announced that he plans to retire as Microsoft’s C.E.O. at some point within the next year, the firm’s stock had its best day in years, rising seven per cent. Since that Bronx cheer from the markets, the critics have been piling on, describing Ballmer as the tech boss who somehow managed to miss search, social networking, and mobile—the three big trends that have revolutionized the industry in the past decade and a half.

Tim Bajarin, the president of the research firm Creative Strategies, told Bloomberg News: ”He stayed too long at Microsoft with a position focused on PCs, and didn’t really anticipate the dramatic impact of mobile computing.” MacDaily News called his thirteen years as C.E.O. “the luckiest dorm assignment in the history of the universe.” (Ballmer met Bill Gates, who eventually appointed him as his successor, when they were both students at Harvard.) My colleague Nick Thompson noted that Ballmer’s “reign has done more to defang Microsoft than the Justice Department could ever have hoped to do.” Even Paul Krugman took a day off from bashing the Republicans to weigh in, comparing Microsoft under Ballmer to a medieval dynasty that was too corrupt and complacent to fight off the barbarians.

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Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Plan is No Gimmick

New York City’s public advocate is suddenly learning about the downsides of being the surprise front-runner in the city’s mayoral race. During a debate between the candidates on Wednesday night, he emerged as the primary target. Christine Quinn, the leader of the City Council, portrayed Bill de Blasio as an ineffectual windbag, and the former city comptroller Bill Thompson described de Blasio’s plan to raise taxes on upper income New Yorkers to fund a big expansion of pre-kindergarten education as “a tax in search of an idea.”

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History Will Pardon Manning, Even If Obama Doesn't

Sometimes things that are fully expected still have the capacity to shock. That’s certainly the case with the news that the former Army private Bradley Manning has been sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. My colleague Amy Davidson, who has been writing about the Manning story since the beginning, has a post on the verdict, which contains more details. I’ll confine myself to three points:

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Snowden’s Legacy: A Public Debate About Online Privacy

As you may have noticed, my friend and colleague Jeff Toobin has a post up questioning whether Edward Snowden’s leaks have really served the national interest of the United States. Having already debated this one with Jeff before in print and on television, I am a bit reluctant to get back into it, but here are a few points I think most people can agree upon.

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The Lessons of Classified Information: From Mossadegh to Snowden

For connoisseurs of irony, there was much to savor in the timing of Monday’s announcement from the White House that, while it had been notified in advance of what was likely to happen, it had nothing to do with the British government’s decision to detain David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, at Heathrow airport, hold him for nine hours, and strip him of his laptop, cell phone, and various other possessions. Absolutely nothing to do with us, was the White House line: strictly a matter for our British friends. “This is a decision they made on their own,” said the aptly named spokesman Josh Earnest.

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Obama and Egypt: The Limits of Pragmatism

In a recent short book on U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century, Joseph Nye, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, divided American Presidents into two camps: “transformational” leaders, such as Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, who pursued a vision of spreading democracy and liberty; and “transactional” pragmatists, such as Dwight Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush, who had more modest goals—and, in Nye’s opinion, often proved more effective. “There is little evidence to support the general assumptions of leadership theory and public discourse that transformational foreign policy leaders are better in either ethics or effectiveness,” he writes.

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Jamie Dimon and the Case of the Dastardly Europeans

Mais bien sûr! It was all a dastardly Frenchman’s fault. Or, rather, it was the fault of two dastardly Frenchmen and one untrustworthy Spaniard. Nothing to do with us at all. And most certainly nothing do with our great leader, the prince of Wall Street, Jamie Dimon.

On Wednesday afternoon, federal prosecutors unveiled criminal charges against two former traders at J.P. Morgan Chase’s London office, for falsifying records and trying to cover up the multi-billion-dollar losses accumulated by a fellow-employee, Bruno Iksil, the French-born trader known as the London Whale. One of the men indicted, Julien Grout, is also French. The other, Javier Martin-Artajo, is Spanish. Somewhat surprisingly, the bank didn’t have anything to say about the charges. It didn’t offer up any senior executives to be interviewed by the Times or the Journal, and it didn’t put out a press release. So I wrote one myself. It isn’t couched in the language that Dimon’s P.R. flacks would have used, but I think it pretty much summarizes their position: the blame for this mess lies a very, very long way from J.P. Morgan’s Park Avenue headquarters.

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