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You choose: laugh or cry

U.S. military action in Syria could give the White House an advantage in the looming fiscal showdown with congressional Republicans, according to defense and budget experts.

They said the Syria crisis could boost calls by President Obama and defense hawks to reverse the automatic spending cuts to the Pentagon known as sequestration.

Steve Bell, a budget expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said if the U.S. moves forward with military action, it will underline the arguments of those who say keeping the sequester in place impairs U.S. military readiness.

“I think it has the possibility of advancing fiscal talks, I really do,” he said. ...The Hill

Now that's a really interesting motive for a "narrow, limited" strike on a Middle Eastern nation and possibly a whole new twist on advancing the interests of the "defense" industry.

Doubts, warnings, principles, and oil

“Our biggest problem is ignorance; we’re pretty ignorant about Syria,” said Ryan C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Syria and Lebanon, who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.

The American strike could hit President Assad’s military without fundamentally changing the dynamic in a stalemated civil war that has already left more than 100,000 people dead. At the same time, few expect that a barrage of cruise missiles would prompt either side to work in earnest for a political settlement. Given that, the skeptics say it may not be worth the risks.

“I don’t see any advantage,” said a Western official who closely observes Syria. ...NYT

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The Syrian civil war was formerly an uprising against the brutality of a despot. It has become a battle among sects and ethnicities over which group of Syrians should control the country; part of a fight for regional leadership involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iran; and an extension of the battlefield on which al-Qaeda affiliates carry out their messianic violence.

The complex and dreadful evolution of the conflict has shaken the moral and strategic justifications for intervention, even a short one focused on punishing the regime for its use of chemical weapons and deterring future use. ...SteveCook,CFR,WaPo

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The vote puts President Obama between a rock and a hard place. The formerly solid Anglo-American solidarity has been broken. Obama does not have the Arab League and he does not have the UN Security Council. He does not even have a consensus on the European continent.

Obama should pivot now and choose vigorous diplomacy over a military strike. The latter will now have no legitimacy in international law, and would not be supported even by the British parliament.

The duplicity of Bush and Blair has deeply injured faith in government, even on the part of members of government. Their use of the high-flown rhetoric of protecting helpless populations from tyrants and deflecting dire threats of WMD cheapened those endeavors and trivialized them They bent the sword of state and rendered it useless in any similar situation. ...JuanCole,InformedComment

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The civil war in Syria is coming at a cost to Americans, even in the absence of cruise missiles or other overt interventionism. Here it is in a chart. This is the one-month forward contract for a barrel of crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In other words, the price of oil, more or less. It’s down a bit Friday after a steep rise since the spring.

The pattern is quite clear. The price of oil is up 24 percent since April 17, from $87 a barrel to around $108. It has hovered near 18-month highs in the past few days. ... Oil traders aren’t just responding to this or that supply disruption, but making bets on the long-shot probabilities of an all-out conflagration that spreads to bigger oil producers elsewhere in the Middle East. ...Wonkblog

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...A truly humanitarian intervention must have "right intention" -- it must be designed for the express purpose of protecting civilians from predation at the hands of their government. But it is very clear that the military campaign envisioned is not really about protecting civilians from Assad or an ongoing civil war. Instead, as Kerry reiterated today, the goal is to enforce a weapons norm through a punitive strike. While this may well be a laudable goal in itself and may indeed do some good in reinforcing an important global norm, there is no evidence to suggest that it will have an immediate and beneficial humanitarian effect -- indeed much to the contrary.

Enter another important principle: that any intervention undertaken to protect civilians have a "reasonable likelihood of success" and avoid making things worse. Even if a Western strike were the most effective way possible to enforce the chemical weapons taboo -- and this itself is debated -- it is far less clear that such a strike would have a reasonable likelihood of success when it comes to the wider goal of protecting civilians. In fact, much data and analysis suggests the contrary. A recent study has found that intervening on behalf of rebels increases the number of civilians who are killed. While international relations professor Jon Western of Mount Holyoke College rightly points out that it depends on the type of intervention, successful missions have typically included robust mandates, ambitious goals, a willingness to stay the course, and significant resources from the international community subsequent to the invasion. Many involved regime change. In other words, the kind of intervention most likely to actually protect civilians is the polar opposite of the one now being proposed. ...CharliCarpenter,UMass,The Atlantic

Completely, revoltingly irresponsible

I've heard only sound-bites -- so far, anyway -- from notably long and substantive q&a/debate in Parliament yesterday about staying well away from the imminent US in a strike in Syria. 

But I've heard enough to be beyond disgusted with our Congress.  Obama managed to take a few gulps of fresh air on the Vineyard during a short break.  But he's back in Washington and working.  You may not like  what he's working on, but he is there and he is taking responsibility for decisions that are being made.  Whereas the British PM is obliged take his/her case to Parliament and abide by their decision, the President can order a military "strike" without consulting Congress.*

And here's the  point:  our me-first Congress, in spite of the possibility of military action, are still out there doing town halls, filling their campaign chests.  That's pretty bad. It's more proof than we need that our current members of Congress are more concerned with their own futures than with the future of the country. 

Know what we  need? We need a Snowden -- or maybe a small group of Congressional staffies doing a Snowden.  They'd arrive at the Post or the Times on Monday with discs full of revelations about individual members of Congress.  I'm delighted we are as informed as we are -- so far -- on our intelligence agencies.  But now it's time to move the operation onto the detestable Hill ...

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*I heard reporter/commentator Andrea Mitchell say several times emphatically that Obama will start the "strike" on Sunday night.  Does she really know?  Was this just yackety-yak?  And what about Tuesday when the President will be in St.  Petersburg with Putin?  On Tuesday, members of Congress will be dribbling back to their paid employment.

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Kevin Drum seems to be in the same mood.

Obama never should have set a red line in Syria in the first place, and once he did he should simply have found a way to weasel out of it. It's not that hard. Sure, the forever-hawks would have squealed, but they were going to squeal about anything short of Iraq 2.0 no matter what. So who cares what they think?

As near as I can tell, after five years Obama has been entirely captured by the national security establishment. It's a damn shame. The elite consensus on overseas intervention—and national security more broadly—desperately needed to be challenged after a decade of the Bush/Cheney administration, but after a few nods in the right direction during his early days, he's mostly just caved in to it. What a wasted opportunity.

POSTSCRIPT: Just for the record, Congress hasn't exactly covered itself in glory on Syria either. As usual, most members want to retain their freedom to criticize whatever happens while desperately trying to avoid taking any actual responsibility for U.S. military action. It's pathetic. ...Drum,MoJo

I give in. Yes, teachers do need guns...

But only when "lawmakers" are in their classroom, evidently.

Arkansas state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R), who is leading an effort to give guns to school personnel, accidentally shot a teacher during an "active shooter" drill earlier this year, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports.

"The experience gave Hutchinson some pause, but he still supports giving schools the authority to decide how best to secure their campuses."...PoliticalWire

The awful childishness of Republican party

After six prominent Republicans turned down invitations to speak at the Martin Luther King commemoration, they are complaining that -- I guess -- "those people" didn't beg them to provide a speaker. 

According to Daily Intel, they "took the less classy route by criticizing the organizers for not working hard enough to cajole some Republican into speaking. The RNC says it provided other suggestions, such as Sen. Tim Scott, after six prominent Republicans turned down invitations to speak. Sure, Scott had already been asked to attend and failed to RSVP, but why would organizers assume that meant he didn't want to speak?"

I don't imagine they were missed.

Snowden opens door to black budget

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget. ...WaPo

Edward Snowden has handed over part of his findings to the Washington Post.  Result:  we finally get a close look into the "black budget."

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress. ...WaPo

The Post is withholding much of the data because of the damage it could do.  But we do get a slap in the face and some hard truths about our agencies' activities and failings -- and spending. 

And we do find out that American cyber-intelligence is deep into foreign computer networks not just in a search for intelligence but as destroyers/hackers.  And not just with respect to China, Cuba, and Russia, but also our "ally" Israel, a nation that has "a history of espionage attempts against the United States."  The US now has an "espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War."

I don't feel safer.  But there does seem to be a common reaction of gratitude to Snowden for releasing information that we should have had access to all along.  It's as though we've escaped  from a Hollywood sound studio and are having the real world -- and our vote -- restored.

Experts said that access to such details about U.S. spy programs is without precedent.

“It was a titanic struggle just to get the top-line budget number disclosed, and that has only been done consistently since 2007,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based organization that provides analyses of national security issues. “But a real grasp of the structure and operations of the intelligence bureaucracy has been totally beyond public reach. This kind of material, even on a historical basis, has simply not been available.”...WaPo

The CIA gets the lion's share of the full budget.  Look at their capacity and be worried.

The CIA’s dominant position is likely to stun outside experts. It represents a remarkable recovery for an agency that seemed poised to lose power and prestige after acknowledging intelligence failures leading up to the 2001 attacks and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center. The agency was transformed from a spy service struggling to emerge from the Cold War into a paramilitary force. ...WaPo

The spending is huge, some would say out of control.  But in spite of the huge investment we're making in intelligence, you couldn't call it a particularly successful effort.

Despite the vast outlays, the budget blueprint catalogues persistent and in some cases critical blind spots. ...WaPo

There are substantial gaps in our intelligence.

Other blank spots include questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear components when they are being transported, the capabilities of China’s next-generation fighter aircraft, and how Russia’s government leaders are likely to respond to “potentially destabilizing events in Moscow, such as large protests and terrorist attacks.”...WaPo

Lots of games and tech and  drones and stuff, not a whole lot of research and footwork.

  A chart outlining efforts to address key questions on biological and chemical weapons is particularly bleak. U.S. agencies set annual goals for at least five categories of intelligence collection related to these weapons. In 2011, the agencies made headway on just two gaps; a year earlier, the mark was zero. ...WaPo

But still, some real achievements... and a certain amount of shutting the barn door after the horse has run off.

For this year, the budget promised a renewed “focus . . . on safeguarding classified networks” and a strict “review of high-risk, high-gain applicants and contractors” — the young, nontraditional computer coders with the skills the NSA needed.

Among them was Snowden, then a 29-year-old contract computer specialist whom the NSA trained to circumvent computer network security. He was copying thousands of highly classified documents at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and preparing to leak them, as the agency embarked on the new security sweep. ...WaPo