IRAQ WAR 3.0

From Informed Comment:

On a 36-month schedule for “destroying” ISIS, the president is already ceding his war to the next president, as was done to him by George W. Bush. That next president may well be Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state as Iraq War 2.0 sputtered to its conclusion. Notably, it was her husband whose administration kept the original Iraq War of 1990-1991 alive via no-fly zones and sanctions. Call that a pedigree of sorts when it comes to fighting in Iraq until hell freezes over.

If there is a summary lesson here, perhaps it’s that there is evidently no hole that can’t be dug deeper. How could it be more obvious, after more than two decades of empty declarations of victory in Iraq, that genuine “success,” however defined, is impossible? The only way to win is not to play. Otherwise, you’re just a sucker at the geopolitical equivalent of a carnival ringtoss game with a fist full of quarters to trade for a cheap stuffed animal.

In his televised address on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, President Obama said, "Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy." and, "...we will not get dragged into another ground war."  Whatever the label for the present war, it is now Obama's war. I thought it right that the US helped to rescue the Yazidis from the mountain where they were trapped and that we provide assistance and military equipment to the Kurds, who seem to me the sanest people in the territory, but we should stop there. Is anyone thinking through to possible consequences of bombing in Iraq and now in Syria?

What will happen if a pilot is shot down and captured by ISIL, and the worst happens? Surely there will be cries for further escalation. Turkey has taken in over 1 million refugees. Are we willing to welcome refugees from Syria and Iraq whose homes are destroyed by our bombs or who flee from their homes for fear of being bombed? While it's true that we created a number of the problems in Iraq, I don't see how bombing, killing, and wounding more Iraqis will solve them. ISIL is a brutal organization, but what is the end game? How will we know when ISIL is defeated?  What if ISIL is not destroyed in 36 months?

Iraq, as a country, was cobbled together by British colonial powers after WWI.  Kurds and Shi'ites tried to break away at the time, but the colonial powers quelled the revolt.  Sunni/Shi'ite divisions go further back than the colonial period.  Despite past interventions by Western powers, we cannot now fix the troubles in the Middle East.  In Iraq, the center will not hold, no matter how many bombs we drop, but the destruction proceeds, and who knows how or when it will all end?  We can be certain the end will not come before more innocents are killed, wounded, or driven from their homes.

DAVID BROOKS AND SCRAMBLED EGGS

Here's what I mean when I say David Brooks' columns in the New York Times turn my brain into scrambled eggs.

Brooks discusses "big data" versus "narrative" as predictors of human behavior.

Then there is the distinction between commodity decisions and flourishing decisions. Some decisions are straightforward commodities: what route to work is likely to be fastest. Big data can help. Flourishing decisions are things like who to marry, who to befriend, what career calling to pursue and what college to choose. These decisions involve trying to find people, places and things that harmonize with your subjective self. It’s a mistake to take subjective intuition out of this decision because subjectivity is the whole point. 

Grammar!  Should be "whom to marry, whom to befriend," right?  Brooks' column appears in the "Newspaper of Record."  I assume the newspaper employs editors.  If Brooks does not know that when a pronoun comes before an infinitive, the object form is used, then surely a checker at the paper does.  Or has grammar usage of "who" and "whom" changed when I wasn't paying attention?

The meaning of the paragraph is cloaked in fog.  I believe Brooks sees himself as a wise, unshrill moderate, who can look at both sides of an issue or problem and come up with opinions that everyone agrees are quite reasonable, even when they disagree with him.  From this position, he sees himself as qualified to advise us how to remake our society into his land-of-the-free-and-home-of-the-brave ideal.  Ah, if only he made sense. 

I remain amazed that Brooks appears regularly in such prestigious forums as the NYT , "Informed Sources" on PBS, and the Sunday talk shows.  That's to say nothing of Yale's invitation to to Brooks to teach a course on humility.  And not just because of the grammar lapses.   He may know what he means, but his muddled style of writing makes it difficult for me grasp the points he wishes to convey to readers and listeners.  Is Brooks the best the hirers at prestigious forums can do?
 
Brooks seems to want everyone to be moral and responsible.  Well, don't we all, each of us with our individual views on what is moral and responsible behavior?  Oh, and he probably wants us to be humble, too, a virtue which he knows well, because he's teaching the course at Yale on humility. 

Moving on; the final paragraph in the column left my brain in so scrambled a state that I can only guess at the root of Brook's worries.

Most of the advocates understand data is a tool, not a worldview. My worries mostly concentrate on the cultural impact of the big data vogue. If you adopt a mind-set that replaces the narrative with the empirical, you have problems thinking about personal responsibility and morality, which are based on causation. You wind up with a demoralized society. But that’s a subject for another day.

My best guess is he means that the use of narrative is superior to big data for the purpose of encouraging moral and responsible behavior, or the culture collapses.   Before he writes on the subject of the state of our society, I hope Brooks looks around outside the upscale suburb, from which he observes the world in his nearly $4 million house, and notes that we are already, in large part, a demoralized society.  Once he's made the discovery, I'll try to remember to read his commentary - that is, if my brain is unscrambled by the time he writes.

H/T to Charles Pierce at Esquire for calling my attention to Brooks' column.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.