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David Goldman, as Spengler tries to help us make sense of the weekend’s suicide bombing in Iran. This is unusually topical for him and is not one of his better efforts. Perhaps because he didn’t take more time. But it did allow him to retail some of his armchair Obama psychoanalysis previously spiked by Asia Times editors.
… The mass assassination of Iranian officers most likely represented a gesture from Pakistan as to what the future will bring. America’s use of the Pakistani army to chase the Taliban around Waziristan has about the same effect as shaking a warm bottle of cola before opening it.
What is most astonishing is that official Washington seems entirely oblivious to the crack-up of American influence occurring in front of its eyes. None of the wonkish foreign policy blogs, let alone the mainstream press, seems able to focus. That is not surprising, for official Washington and unofficial Washington have a wheel-and-spoke relationship. As the staff at US State Department and National Security Council work up policy papers, they send out feelers to the think-tank community and get feedback. This is what feeds the Washington rumor mill.
The difference between this administration and every other administration I have observed is that there appears to be no staff work, no departmental effort, no National Security Council – nothing but President Barack Obama. Obama’s penchant for policy czars has become the source of continuing controversy, with his opponents at Fox News and elsewhere complaining he has bypassed cabinet departments (whose senior staff require senate confirmation) in favor of 29 “policy czars” who report directly to him.
Like Poo-bah in the Mikado, the president seems to be Lord High Everything Else, Secretary of Everything and a non-stop presence before the television cameras. Some of his supporters are chagrined. The New Republic’s publisher Marty Peretz, who evinces buyer’s remorse over Obama’s Middle East policy, diagnosed the president with “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” in his blog on October 4.
The reason for Obama’s peculiar mode of governance, though, may have less to do with his apparent narcissism than with his objectives. It is a credible hypothesis that this president holds views that he cannot easily share, even with his own staff. As he told the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, he truly wants a world without superpowers: “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”
What does Obama mean by this? How strongly does he feel that America should not be elevated above any other nation? There is some basis for the conjecture that his innermost sentiment is hard-core, left-wing Third World antipathy to the United States. …
Following along on the thread of strange emanating from Washington, Jennifer Rubin has another short, sweet commentary, this time on the Afghanistan rethink and on the Obama policy decision-making process.
David Ignatius concedes that Obama is conducting a do-over on Afghanistan. (”What’s odd about the administration’s review of Afghanistan policy is that it is revisiting issues that were analyzed in great detail — and seemingly resolved — in the president’s March 27 announcement of a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”) But what is most horrifying is the description of the process — academic, indecisive, and seemingly designed to get to the lowest common denominator:
As Obama’s advisers describe the decision-making process, it sounds a bit like a seminar. National security adviser Jim Jones gathers all the key people so that everyone gets a voice. A top official explains: “We don’t get marching orders from the president. He wants a debate. . . . We take the competing views and collapse them toward the middle.” This approach produced a consensus on Iran and missile defense, and as National Security Councils go, Obama’s seems to work pretty smoothly.
Yikes. Works smoothly? Well, if the point is to reach some blissful, mushy middle ground on virtually everything without regard to the real-world consequences of the actions, then it’s like silk. But is the presidency a graduate course on international relations? This one appears to be — filled with platitudes and catch-phrases one would hear in the Ivy League (”interdependence” is right up there), disdain for military force (”Never solves anything!” — er, except slavery and Nazism), and the fetish for “consensus.” It’s all very smooth and polite and the results are very well disastrous. …
Peter Wehner adds incisive comments about decision making in government.
…In the David Ignatius column Jen links to, Ignatius also quotes an Obama adviser as saying: “We don’t get marching orders from the president. He wants a debate. . . . We take the competing views and collapse them toward the middle.”
But this assumes that the “collapse them toward the middle” approach will, almost like the laws of physics, lead to the right outcome. Yet here’s how such an approach often works in practice: Some people (like the commanding general in Afghanistan) might argue we should pursue a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that will require 40,000 or more additional troops. Others believe we should withdraw most of our combat troops and pursue a strictly counterterrorism strategy. So the answer must lie at the Golden Mean between these two positions. Or take Iraq: Before the surge, some people argued for it; others argued that we should essentially abandon Iraq, since the war was unwinnable. The “collapse them toward the middle” approach led to the Iraq Study Group (chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton). But if the Bush administration had followed the consensus approach, which was embodied in the study group’s report, it would have led to failure in Iraq. And if President Obama chooses the Biden approach instead of the McChrystal approach, it will lead to failure in Afghanistan.
Sometimes — in fact, much of the time — the “third way” is a road to failure. Consensus opinions are often wrong; in Ignatius’s column, for example, he writes that the “collapse them toward the middle” process produced a consensus on Iran and missile defense — which, as I argue here, have been, so far, failures.
In the first volume of his brilliant memoirs, The White House Years, Henry Kissinger writes this:
“Before I served as a consultant to [President] Kennedy, I had believed, like most academicians, that the process of decision-making was largely intellectual and that all one had to do was to walk into the President’s office and convince him of the correctness of one’s views. This perspective I soon realized is as dangerously immature as it is widely held. . . . Almost all his callers are supplicants or advocates, and most of their cases are extremely plausible — which is what got them into the Oval Office in the first place. As a result, one of the President’s most difficult tasks is to choose among endless arguments that sound equally convincing. The easy decisions do not come to him; they are taken care of at lower levels.”
Earlier, Kissinger writes:
“The complexity of modern government makes large bureaucracies essential; but the need for innovation also creates the imperative to define purposes that go beyond administrative norms. Ultimately there is no purely organizational answer; it is above all a problem of leadership. . . . Statesmanship requires above all a sense of nuance and proportion, the ability to perceive the essential among a mass of apparent facts, and an intuition as to which of many equally plausible hypotheses about the future is likely to prove true.”
That is a sophisticated, thoughtful account of how decisions ought to be made. And most of the time, taking an assortment of competing views and collapsing them toward the middle is not.
Jennifer Rubin also posts on the President’s indecision.
Dana Milbank observes:
As the administration continues its extended deliberations in pursuit of a new strategy for the war, allies in Afghanistan have begun to grumble about American dithering. The pace of the policy review is causing worry in both parties on Capitol Hill. . . . There seems to be less urgency at the White House, where the president completed his fifth meeting on the subject this week. But the only thing that seems to emerge from these sessions are new adjectives the White House press office uses to describe the conversation.
Among those grumbling are Democrats who have the queasy feeling that the longer this goes on, the worse it looks and the less credible the commander in chief becomes. But this is par for the passive presidency. Milbank argues, “It has caused Obama’s Afghanistan policy to be made for him. . . . Obama is therefore left with various split-the-difference options that will please neither side — not unlike the way the health-care legislation has developed.” …
…Maybe there is some rhyme or reason to deferring to Nancy Pelosi on the stimulus, to everyone on health care, and to the White House seminars on a war. But the cumulative effect is to paint the president as weak and perhaps uncertain of what he wants. Obama wanted to be president, but now that he’s in office, what does he want to do with the presidency? Win a war or pinch pennies for his domestic spend-a-thon? Enact a bipartisan health-care bill or fulfill the Left’s historic dream of government-run health care? He hasn’t told us yet, but he will soon. Well . . . once he makes up his mind.
In the Daily Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden says that judging by the White House press releases, Obama is not quite humbled at receiving the peace prize.
The conventional wisdom is that President Barack Obama was embarrassed by the patently ludicrous award to him of the Nobel Peace Prize. And to be fair it did seem so when he accepted the honour (a term I use loosely) last Friday, quoting his daughter Malia as saying: “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” (call me a cynic but that’s a fabricated quote if ever I heard one).
Since then, however, it’s become abundantly clear that Obama isn’t even faintly sheepish about the award. Yeah, there’s all the usual guff about him being humbled, it’s about us not him blah blah blah. But this can’t mask the fact that he’s as pleased as punch about landing the prize. He’s lapping it up and seems to view it – sadly and mistakenly – as a major validation.
Apart from the clue that he’s going to skip over to Oslo to pick up the gong personally (great opportunity for a wonderful speech), consider the emails his White House is sending out. No opportunity to shoehorn in a mention of the Nobel prize is being missed …
Thank goodness big government is here to keep us safe from Cheerios, writes David Harsanyi.
…You know what we are desperately crying out for? An army of crusading federal regulatory agents with unfettered power. Who else has the fortitude and foresight to keep us all safe?
Mercifully, as The Washington Post recently reported, many of President Barack Obama’s appointees “have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life . . . awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products and most items found in pantries and medicine cabinets.”
If there’s anything Americans are hankering for in their everyday lives, it’s a vast regulatory apparatus. Hey, it’s dangerous out there. …
…This is why I am grateful that one courageous soul has finally stood up to the menacing influence of Big Cereal. Yes, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg has had enough of deceitful infiltration of Cheerios, demanding that General Mills cease and desist a marketing campaign that peddles the fallacious claim that the oat-based cereal can lower cholesterol.
Why stop with oats? Trix are not only for kids, you know. Lucky Charms are nowhere close to being “magically” delicious. …
Melanie Phillips, in the Spectator, UK, includes an embarrassing news story for global warming conspiracists: poor field studies of Arctic icemelt revealed.
The BBC’s brief and historic outbreak of sanity here last Friday when it asked timorously “What happened to global warming?” gave way to normal service today when it reported a prediction that the Arctic could be free of ice in the summer within two decades. The prediction was made by Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was speaking at the launch of the findings of the Catlin Arctic Survey …
But the Catlin Arctic Ice Survey was an embarrassing joke, as detailed on the Watts Up With That? website which describes it as
“nothing more than a badly executed public relations stunt covered with the thinnest veneer of attempted science.”
Among other things, WUWT says Pen Hadow and his team … surveyed very little of the ice and returned very little data, that some of this data was wrongly presented and that another, aerial, survey of the Arctic with a towed radar array from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research revealed that the ice cover was thicker than expected.
In World Climate Report, Patrick Michaels reports on the lowest recorded level of snowmelt during this most recent Antarctic summer.
Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?
The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.
Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:
A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season. …
Jack Kelly gives an account of Phelim McAleer’s question to Gore regarding the inaccuracies in An Inconvenient Truth. Pickings had an article from McAleer yesterday.
…But in the audience was Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who asked him about a 2007 finding by a British judge that “An Inconvenient Truth” is riddled with scientific errors.
Justice Michael Burton had to rule on the veracity of Mr. Gore’s claims because a parent objected to having the film shown in schools. He found nine “significant errors” made in “the context of alarmism and exaggeration.” Screening the film in British secondary schools violated laws barring the promotion of partisan political views in the classroom, Justice Burton said.
When Mr. McAleer asked Mr. Gore what he was doing to correct the errors Justice Burton identified, Mr. Gore, after much stammering, said: “the ruling was in favor of showing the movie in schools.”
That response was technically true, but evasive. Justice Burton said “An Inconvenient Truth” could be shown, but only if Mr. Gore’s “one-sided” views were balanced.
When Mr. McAleer pressed Mr. Gore on his evasion, the Society of Environmental Journalists cut off his microphone and escorted him away. …
Ilya Somin, in the Volokh Conspiracy, discusses an article by Matt Welch about the government handouts that the New York Yankees are receiving.
Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason, takes up an issue that I have written about on numerous occasions: the inexcusable gargantuan public subsidies for the New York Yankees’ new stadium:
“This year the Yankees moved into a new stadium. According to baseball economist Neil deMause of the excellent Field of Schemes website, the facility cost a stunning $1.56 billion, and the total project (including replacing 22-acres of parkland that had been destroyed by the construction) totaled $2.31 billion [pdf]. Both figures are all-time records in the history of sports stadia. “Of that,” deMause estimates, “the public—city, state, and federal taxpayers—are now covering just shy of $1.2 billion, by far the largest stadium subsidy ever…..”
To sum up: The most successful, most opulent, and most hated baseball franchise in North America, widely known as “the Evil Empire,” receives an unprecedented amount of government giveaways in a time of recession and government budget-squeezes.” …
…As numerous studies show, sports stadium subsidies virtually always create far more costs for the public. If the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner and his fellow millionaire owners want to build new stadiums, they should pay for it themselves. …