Anti-war movement goes AWOL

This reason piece makes the good point that the "anti-war" movement seems really just to have been an anti-Bush II movement. That's too bad, because anti-war activism might actually have a larger effect under Obama.

What War Powers Act?

The whole point of the rule of law, of course, is that the laws have to apply to everyone.

The problem with the War Powers Act is that it does not have an effective enforcement mechanism. It relies on Congress and Congress has no backbone these days.

This illustrates yet another of the many ways in which Obama is essentially the same as Bush II or, put differently, it illustrates that it is very difficult even for the president to push back against the institutions that surround the office.

OBL

The US has killed Osama bin Laden without holding a trial and by mounting a military operation on the sovereign territory of another country without letting that country know about it. The president then went on national television to gloat about the killing.

Adding this to the near-miss on Colonel Klink in Libya and it seems we are in the business of directly taking out bad guys these days. May I humbly suggest Mugabe and the Castro brothers go next?

I actually think it makes a lot of sense to kill one bad guy directly rather than hundreds or thousands of civilians or soldiers or followers in an indirect attempt to get at the bad guy, but wouldn't it be a bit more seemly, and a bit more legal and just, to have some sort of trial (in OBL's case) or declaration of war (in Colonel Klink's case) as a lead-in?

More things I thought I would never say

I agree with Jimmy Carter (?!?!?!) about the Cuba embargo.

Libya cost/benefit

I watched a fair amount of Libya coverage with my father-in-law on Saturday, including BBC, CBC and CNN. I kept wondering why no one was talking about the cost of the war and thinking about it in cost-benefit terms. Wars that are completely voluntarily should be thought about in exactly those terms. Think how much nicer it would be to use the money we will spend on this adventure to pay down the national debt, or to reduce taxes or to provide public goods. Instead, we distract ourselves from the unhappiness of necessary domestic budget cutting with some expensive boom-boom, as though the country were being run by seven-year-olds.

On Libya - will the third Mideast war be the charm?

I never thought I would type the words "I agree with Josh Marshall", as he has always struck me as a snarky, close-minded ideologue who cares way too much about the daily combat of talking points inside the beltway and too little about economics and empirical evidence. But today, I do.

Here are his closing paragraphs:

So let's review: No clear national or even humanitarian interest for military intervention. Intervening well past the point where our intervention can have a decisive effect. And finally, intervening under circumstances in which the reviled autocrat seems to hold the strategic initiative against us. This all strikes me as a very bad footing to go in on.

And this doesn't even get us to this being the third concurrent war in a Muslim nation and the second in an Arab one. Or the fact that the controversial baggage from those two wars we carry into this one, taking ownership of it, introducing a layer of 'The West versus lands of Islam' drama to this basically domestic situation and giving Qaddafi himself or perhaps one of his sons the ability to actually start mobiliz[ing] some public or international opinion against us.

I can imagine many of the criticisms of the points I've made. And listening to them I think I'd find myself agreeing in general with a lot of it. But it strikes me as a mess, poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas, carried out at a point well past the point that it was going to accomplish anything. Just all really bad.

I know that Qaddafi has assembled a human shield, but the loss-of-life minimizing policy might still be to simply take him out (along with his sons). Presumably whoever steps into the power vacuum thus created will be both more sane and inclined to act in ways that would avoid a similar fate.

Via: MR

Libya

Slate offers up some tart words from Christopher Hitchens (not all of which I necessarily agree with, but he is always worth reading) and here is the LSE thesis of one of his kids.

Afghanistan

P.J. O'Rourke on Afghanistan. As always, he is both funny and more insightful than most "regular" journalists.

Via instapundit

Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts speaks out on foreign policy.

It puzzles me that many on the right think that the domestic parts of the government are corrupt and inefficient while the parts that deal with other countries are somehow not.

Despite a bit of looking, I remain unclear on Roberts' current politics. His wikipedia page suggests a sort of left libertarian nationalism, something that sounds like it cannot possibly be a stable mental equilibrium.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Afghanistan's past

Wow ... pictures of Afghanistan (really just Kabul) from the 1950s. Amazing.

When I went to Bath in England a few years ago to see the ruined Roman bath, I wondered a lot about how the people who lived around the bath thought about it after the Romans left and both the social and physical capital that allowed the baths to run crumbled.

This piece addresses that same question after a fashion, and the answer would appear to be sadness and a real sense of loss.

I confess, the pictures make me pretty sad too. Either one of the Soviets dropping by and fundamentalist Islam is a tough challenge for a country. Both .... well, here is the result.

Via the Agitator

Afghanistan

Captain Thom, who appears in the latter part of the video, is my mother's sister's son's son. I am never quite sure if that makes him a second cousin or a first cousin once removed. In any case, I have a picture from when I was in college of me holding him when he was about two. Neither of us looks very happy about the arrangement.

Hearts, minds and ... other bits

Apparently the US is using free gifts of Viagra to powerful figures in Afghanistan as a way to lure them onto our side.

The link is here and it is not work friendly due to the ads that surround the blog post but I could not find another more work friendly discussion that I liked as well (or that had as many clever puns).

It always struck me during the end of the cold war that we were wrong to be in such fear of communism. The fact is, communism is not any fun and no one likes it much, other than the party bosses, once they have experienced it. I think the same is true of radical Islam, which is one reason that I am more optimistic about the future of Iran than about the future of some other middle eastern countries as the Iranians have experienced a heavy dose of it and so have a keen sense, by this point, of what they do not want. I think the way we can help these things along is by exporting the fun bits of our culture, whether it be sports, jazz, or viagra.

Russia and Georgia

A thoughtful Atlantic article on the conflict between Russia and (the other) Georgia is here.

My thoughts:

1. Russia still has a long way to go to be a modern country, but we already knew that.

2. Should the US be worried about Russia? Not so much. They never really were a real superpower even during the cold war. The US wildly over-estimated their economic capactity at the time (for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post but have much to do with large military budgets), in a way that was obvious even to me as a high school student visiting Moscow and Leningrad in 1979. Russia was and is (sadly) just a heavily armed tinpot dicatorship. China will soon overshadow them both economically and militarily. While potentially problematic in its own right given China's excess of nationalistic fervor, China's ascension will provide both a helpful distraction to the Russians and an example of rapid post-communist economic development. Moreover, the likely ever-increasing difference in economic success between Russia proper and the former sattelite states should eventually put pressure on the Russian government to focus on economic reform rather than on nationalist territorial fantasies.

3. Surely Georgia is high on the list of places where our foreign policy should consist entirely of good wishes for growth and freedom, economic and cultural exchanges and nothing else?

Addendum: Dan Drezner has a number of interesting posts about Russia / Georgia on his blog, as well as his own take on the Krugman piece. I remain puzzled that Dan did not get tenure at Chicago.