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Fouad Ajami says Obama was right and we had no choice but to act in Libya.
The right thing, at last. The cavalry arrived in the nick of time. Help came as Moammar Gadhafi’s loyalists were at the gates of the free city of Benghazi. There was no mystery in the fate that awaited them. The despot had pretty much said what he intended. He would hunt down those who had found the courage to stand up to him, show them no mercy and no pity.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had seemed particularly obtuse. A decent opposition had coalesced in Benghazi—judges and teachers, businessmen and former members of the Ghadafi regime who wanted to cleanse the shame of their association with the tyranny. Rather than embrace them, rather than give them the diplomatic recognition that France would come to grant them, the secretary of state of the pre- eminent liberal power worried aloud that we didn’t know this opposition, that there were “opportunists” within their ranks. And to cap it all, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took away from the uprising the slender hope that it could still hold back the tide. The despot, he said, out in the open for one and all to hear, was destined to prevail. …
David Harsanyi begs to differ.
… When queried about military interventionism (thanks to Gene Healy at the Washington Examiner for the tip) before the 2008 elections, in fact, Obama explained, “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
No, he didn’t affix the phrase “unless we see humanitarian threats” or “except if the French and British find some good reason.”
Then again, maybe one of the problems is we now place too much stock in world opinion when making decisions. Democrats were so intensely focused on the lack of international support in Iraq, perhaps Obama confuses global approval with our interests. What’s worse than letting your “allies” or the United Nations decide whether you can go to war? It’s letting them tell you that you should go to war.
And when is that, exactly? The president hasn’t said. Yemeni forces have fired on protesters. Syrian forces have shot down protesters. Security forces in Tunisia have killed protesters. Why no help for those freedom fighters? What happens when Saudi Arabian royals are forced to use violence to hold power? Or Iran cracks down on another popular uprising? …
Elizabeth Scalia at the Anchoress Blog asks why the Dems had to trash Bush for so long when now they have decided he was right after all.
… I guess what I’m wondering is, how much further along would the Iraq government’s stabilization be — how much further along would the quest for democratic governance be, in the Middle East (and how much less reluctant would tyrants be to try to stop it by killing their own people), if only the Democrats hadn’t wasted 6 years politicizing our efforts and another two years bowing and scraping and restarting and gasbagging and doing everything they could to say, “we’re not Bush,” only to become all they said they hated?
In the end, all the politics, all the fury and drama and rhetoric delayed an inevitable desire and movement toward liberty, and perhaps costs lives.
In an era of record-breaking government spending and clear wastefulness, perhaps the past 8 years of politically-expedient dissent has been costliest waste of all. …
Just so says Mark Steyn, but he points out some problems.
… Or to put it another way: America picks up the tab for maintaining a global order that enables the rest of the planet to get rich selling stuff to Americans that Americans buy with borrowed money. Within a half-decade or so, American taxpayers will be spending more in interest payments on the US debt than on the Pentagon. And the portion of those interest payments that goes to Beijing will cover the entire cost of the Chinese military. Meanwhile, the Commies use the dough to buy up every useful bit of Africa plus resource-rich parts of Canada, Jamaica, Australia, etc.
From the ChiComs’ point of view, if this is a unipolar world, what’s not to like? The question is: what does America get from it?
Speaking of Steyn, he had a stream of consciousness over at The Corner.
… America is the brokest country in history. We owe more money than anyone has ever owed anyone. And Obama and Reid say relax, that’s no reason not to spend more — because the world hasn’t yet concluded we have no intention of paying it back. When they do, the dollar will collapse, like those buildings in Sendai. When that happens, it will make a lot of difference whether Americans react like the Japanese or Louisianans.
But, in the meantime, Barack Obama goes to Brazil and assures us that life’s a beach: Golf on, Mr. President.
How about a view of the 2012 race from inside the enemy camp. “Enemy” is anyone who thinks we have a president we should keep. Steve Kornacki writes for Salon.
… As a general rule, whenever presidential fields are dismissed as unusually weak or flawed, it’s a good idea to think back to late 1991 and early 1992, when virtually the entire political universe was convinced that the Democratic pack contained nothing but certain November losers.
This thinking was the product of President George H.W. Bush’s astronomical post-Gulf War popularity, which prompted every A-list Democrat to swear off a ’92 campaign, leaving the party to choose from five no-names (Paul Tsongas, Doug Wilder, Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey and Bill Clinton) and one has-been (Jerry Brown). Their individual flaws were easy to spot, especially when Clinton was hit with allegations of womanizing and draft-dodging after seeming to separate himself from the pack. The economy was sputtering and Bush’s popularity was returning to earth, but well into ’92, the consensus persisted that the Democrats were doomed in November by their weak, flawed field. …
Amity Shlaes picks up from Andrew Ferguson’s book about college admissions with her own advice suggesting the school does not matter so much.
… The third misconception is that a top university affiliation is always and forever more valuable.
In 2006, E. Han Kim and Adair Morse of the University of Michigan, along with Luigi Zingales, then of Harvard, looked at research productivity in economics and finance faculty who had connections to the top 25 universities in their fields.
They found that those who were affiliated with a name school in the 1970s produced more, and more original, work, but that that effect declined in the 1980s and weakened further in the 1990s. Some of the cleverest, most useful papers come from the non-Harvards, non-Yales and non-Chicagos.
Another recent paper squelches the notion that a name university leads to higher earnings over the long run. …
Now HERE’s something off the beaten track. A post in blog of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies claims there is no other intelligent life in the universe.
… As far as we can tell, we are alone in the universe. That is, human beings are the only technologically-advanced species for whom we have any evidence.
This observation is known as the Fermi Paradox. In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi famously wondered, “Where is everybody?” He was referring to the strange silence in the universe, the apparent lack of any advanced civilizations beyond Earth.
Fermi reasoned that the size and age of the universe would indicate that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis is inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.
So, where is everybody? Nowhere, it seems, or at least nowhere that we can detect.
Many explanations have been offered for this conundrum, with none coming even close to finding consensus. Physicists, astronomers, and philosophers are as far from answering the question today as when Fermi first posed it.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Fermi Paradox is what it suggests for the future of our human civilization. Namely, that we have no future beyond earthly confinement and, quite possibly, extinction. …