Streetwise Professor

Apropos the ongoing discussion in the comments regarding Russia’s desperate need for an enemy, at all times, and perhaps especially now.  In the aftermath of the attack by a Muslim Black Widow* on a bus in Volgograd, Putin blamed Islamic terrorism in Russia on . . . foreigners.  You knew he would:

“Some political forces use Islam, the radical currents within it … to weaken our state and create conflicts on Russian soil that can be managed from abroad,” Putin told Muslim clerics meeting in Ufa, Bashkortostan’s capital, in southern Russia.

“Tensions between the West and the Islamic world are rising today, and someone is trying to gamble on that by pouring fuel on the fire,” he added.

Where to begin?

The most important point: Russia pours all the fuel on the fire that’s needed, and has been doing so for hundreds of years, especially since the early-19th century.  Consider this description of General Yermoloff, sent to “pacify” Chechnya in 1816(!), from Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern:

Unlike a General Rosas in the Argentine, who was equally cruel but who possessed the means to make his cruelty effective, Yeroloff created problems rather than solved them. [Sound familiar?]  He served in the Caucasus for a decade and seems to have learned nothing there. [Where have I heard this before?] His approach was simple.  The entire region, in his view, was already legally part of the Russian empire, whether actually conquered or not.  All its inhabitants were therefore Russian subjects, and their submission must be total.  Anything less was rebellion; and the punishment for rebellion was death. . . . His attitude indeed was closer to that of a Roman legionary commander of the 2d century AD than that of an educated man born at the end of the Enlightenment. . . .

But the fact that the campaign to subdue the region was still going on in the 1850s is the best testimony of the failure of Yermoloff’s methods.

1850s? Ha! It’s still going on 197 years after Yermoloff.  And consider this:

This horrific reprisal, far from ending Chechen resistance, provoked a jihad, or holy war.  Indeed, it did more than that.  It gave rise to a new and intense form of Muslim fundamentalism known as Muridism.

In other words: managed from abroad my [insert body part of choice here, depending on your sensitivities]. It’s mismanaged from Moscow.  And it has been for hundreds of years. Period.

This speech by Putin provides a perfect illustration of how he is a prisoner of the Russian past. And the Russian past and present and sadly future in the Caucasus provide a perfect illustration of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and over again, and expecting a different result.

*Except she’s not really a widow, apparently.  Her husband-or boyfriend, the accounts vary-a Slavic Russian whom she recruited to radical Islam, is alive, and a very wanted man.

So Edward Snowden has allegedly released a statement justifying his actions.  I say allegedly because there is nothing that actually connects this statement to him:

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden spoke publicly for the first time in many weeks, sort of. The famed leaker didn’t speak for himself; rather, someone read a written statement on his behalf before a committee hearing at the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday.

Read closely.  It’s not just that Snowden didn’t speak for himself, it’s not even certain that he wrote the words read “on his behalf”: “someone read a written statement on his behalf.”  That kinda insinuates he wrote the statement, but the author of the article is obviously not willing to assert that conclusively.  It doesn’t say that Snowden “wrote the statement read . . . on his behalf.”  There was a written statement.  Someone read that statement on Snowden’s behalf.  Like a classic con or deceptive ad, you’re expected to conclude Snowden wrote the statement read on his behalf, even though that’s not what the sentence actually says.  It invites your mind to fill in the gaping gap.

Please. I could read a written statement on behalf of Pancho Villa.  Doesn’t mean that Pancho Villa wrote it, or even endorsed it.

So we have these words that the reporter suggests were from Snowden’s mouth, but nobody saw Eddie’s lips move.

Was a burning bush involved?

And for crying out loud, why does Eddie need people reading stuff on his behalf?  If he is truly a free agent, he could put videos on YouTube: as @libertylynx notes, if Al Alwaki can post YouTube videos, why can’t our Ed?

Obvious conclusion: Snowden is not a free agent.  Likely conclusion: Snowden did not write these words.

So who did?  There are some Greenwald tics (“odious” is one of his favorite words).  And some Appelbaum tics (“creative output” is one of Appelbaum’s h/t @libertylynx.)  I’m guessing a collaborative effort, sort of like Murder on the Orient Express, involving Greenwald, Appelbaum, Poitras and maybe Assange.  Or to extend the Biblical analogy: it’s widely accepted by Biblical scholars that the Word of God is actually the creation of a committee.  This statement, and the acceptance speech for the human rights award won by Snowden (and read by Appelbaum), sure have the same feel.

But let’s suspend disbelief for a minute. Let’s take it as given that these words were written on tablets handed down by Ed.

Behold:

“The surveillance of whole populations, rather than individuals, threatens to be the greatest human rights challenge of our time,” Snowden, via Radack, continued. “The success of economies in developed nations relies increasingly on their creative output, and if that success is to continue, we must remember that creativity is the product of curiosity, which in turn is the product of privacy.

Does this make any sense?  Re surveillance of whole populations, as @catfitz notes, the surveillance of a very limited subset of information on everybody by a big machine is very different from surveillance of an individual by a pair of human eyes: the former is what Snowden has disclosed, and the latter is what we should really be focused on-and which Snowden provides no evidence occurred outside the law.  And how is curiosity the product of privacy?  And how can creative output help economies if it’s secret?  What pompous tripe.  (More evidence of Appelbaum authorship.)

And more:

“If we are to enjoy such debates in the future, we cannot rely upon individual sacrifice. We must create better channels for people of conscience to inform not only trusted agents of government but independent representatives of the public outside of government. When I began my work, it was with the sole intention of making possible the debate we see occurring here in this body and in many other bodies around the world.”

First, who appointed Snowden to this role? He claims to hold others to account: to whom is HE accountable?  In fact, he ran to Russia precisely because he wanted to escape accountability.

Second, there are unintended consequences: why should Snowden’s intentions matter?  The consequences of his acts are what are relevant.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions: and like I say, Snowden’s road led to Russia, which is sort of the same thing.

And third: note the pompous, grandiose tone.

Serendipitously, I was reading World War II Magazine this weekend, and came across an article about another young, grandiose American bureaucrat with access to highly sensitive information that he believed he had both the right and the obligation to reveal to achieve some higher purpose.

Tyler Kent was a clerk who decoded highly classified messages in the US embassy in London in 1940.  Many of these messages were between Churchill and Roosevelt.  Some of these messages involved attempts of FDR to supply Great Britain with war material, arguably in defiance of the Neutrality Acts.

Kent was a Lost Cause Southerner, anti-Semite, and isolationist.  He fervently believed that the US should not become involved in any way in the European war, and that FDR was illegally maneuvering to bring the US into the conflict.  There were many Americans who believed the same thing, and who would have seized upon the documents he stole to accuse the administration of crimes  in the same way that many in the US today have seized upon the documents Snowden stole to accuse the US government of crimes.

Moreover, Kent was in contact with right wing elements in Britain that were opposed to Churchill and supported a peace with Germany: he and they were hoping Kent’s documents could be used to discredit Churchill and isolate his government from American support, thereby achieving their objective, much as Snowden is directly and indirectly connected with various anti-US and anti-German elements in the US and Germany, and as Snowden documents were used (unsuccessfully) by Der Spiegel in an attempt to sway the German elections.  Last, but not least, Kent was deeply enmeshed with Russian intelligence forces: his mistress was NKVD operative, he circulated in groups that were deeply penetrated by Soviet intelligence, and the only question is whether Kent was a knowing or unwitting tool of the NKVD.

So more than 70 years apart we have young, grandiose individuals who believed that their theft and disclosure of highly classified information was a righteous act aimed to end the criminal acts of the government that they had sworn to serve.  Both Kent and Snowden claimed that their intentions were entirely idealistic.  Both were objectively, if not subjectively, serving the interests of truly malign powers: and the most plausible interpretation is that somewhere along the line, they became objective servants of malign powers that were enemies of the US.

Another revealing aspect of the story.  Kent’s treason was discovered by MI5, which had thoroughly penetrated the pro-Nazi groups that Kent was in communication with.  MI5 soon began to spy on Kent quite closely, and eventually raided his apartment, where they found the documents he had stolen.  Suitcases full of them: the 1940 equivalent of USB drives.  (They also found a Russian emigre woman who was almost certainly an NKVD agent: Kent was wearing his pajama bottoms, and the woman his pajama top.)

This, boys and girls, is exactly why allies spy on allies.  Because not everyone who works for an ally is an ally.  In fact, some are the most dangerous of enemies.

And the US was damn glad that the Brits were spying on an American.  I am convinced that say, the Germans, are quite happy that we are spying on them, for they know they have people working for them who are actually working against them.

One final note.  Churchill used the Kent episode to convince a hitherto reluctant Home Secretary John Anderson to support a parliamentary act authorizing the arrest and detention of suspected Nazi supporters.  Unintended consequences are a bitch.

Kent was tried by the British.  Note this further parallel:

Some Americans saw Kent as a martyr whose only sin had been to act boldly in an effort to keep their country out of a European War.

Ambassador Joseph Kennedy was hardly so sympathetic: “I wouldn’t have favored turning Kent over to Scotland Yard or have sanctioned his imprisonment in England.  I would have recommended he be brought back to the United States and shot.”

Edward Snowden need fear no such fate. Other than that, he has a lot in common with Tyler Kent.  A lot.

The Military Channel is showing Operation Pacific, starring John Wayne.  The UVerse description of the movie is: “A Naval commander anxious to get his nonexploding underwater missiles working . . . ”  Underwater missiles?  You mean like, torpedoes?  And “nonexploding”?  You mean like, defective?

This film is about the scandalous experience with the Mark XIV torpedo during WWII.  This weapon malfunctioned with alarming regularity in 1942 and 1943, before the defects in the detonators were discovered.  The Bureau of Ordnance stubbornly refused to believe there was anything wrong with the weapon, and blamed the submariners for the failures.

The movie is a fictionalized account of the process of diagnosing the detonator defects and fighting the Navy bureaucracy.  Not that you’d know that from the description, which reads like one of those instruction manuals translated from Korean by a native Japanese speaker.  Or is it that those who wrote the description don’t know what torpedoes are, or believe that the potential audience doesn’t?

Today is the sesquicentennial of the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga.  This was the most brutal, sanguinary Civil War battle west of the Appalachians, and the second bloodiest of the entire war.  It was also a swirling, confusing affair, a meeting engagement between two armies on the move that metastasized as units arrived on the battlefield.  The Union army was marching hard to get back to Chattanooga; the Confederates were trying to interpose themselves between the Federals and their base.   The conflict started towards the north, and then moved progressively south with charge and countercharge, as new units marched onto the field.  The confusion was compounded by the fact that most of the battle was fought in dense woods broken only by scattered clearings.  Regimental officers could not see their entire battle lines because of the timber and battle smoke that hung thick in the woods.  There were numerous successful flank attacks at the brigade and division levels because units became separated in the woods, leaving open flanks; attackers pounced on these exposed flanks undetected because of the thick foliage.

Bumbling generalship and command strife also contributed to the confused nature of the fighting.  The most egregious blunder was of course Union commander Rosecrans’ order to move Thomas J. Wood’s division out of line based on a misapprehension: Rosecrans’ aide could not see Brannan’s division in the heavy timber, and thought there was a gap in the line between Wood’s division and Reynolds’s.  Acting on this report, Rosecrans thought he was closing a gap when he ordered Wood to “close up” on Reynolds, but he was really opening one: Wood had to move out of line to get around Brannan in order to reach Reynolds.  Through this opening James Longstreet’s corps poured through, routing the entire Union right and center.  (It is quite possible that Longstreet’s attack would have been nearly as successful even if Wood stayed in line.  The Union divisions in front of his corps were small, and had taken heavy casualties the day before, and Longstreet attacked in mass and had great superiority of numbers at the point of attack.  For instance, Longstreet’s left smashed right through Davis’s division in minutes, and would have done so even if Wood had been in line: it is quite possible that Wood’s two small brigades would have been similarly overwhelmed had they not moved.)  That tactical error was just the culmination of a series of Rosecrans’s mistakes.  His scattered and hasty advance south of the Tennessee River based on a belief that the Confederates were in disorganized retreat from Chattanooga made him vulnerable to defeat in detail by the massing Confederates.  He was racing back to Chattanooga to escape the trap he had so injudiciously thrown his army into.

But Rosecrans was not the only blunderer.  Confederate commander Bragg frittered away the golden opportunity of trapping Rosecrans, due in part to his inept planning, and in part to the fact that his subordinates so heartily disliked him that they did not execute his orders efficiently.  Neither commander exerted any real control on the 19th, the day of the meeting engagement, but when the lines stabilized on the 20th, Bragg’s attack on the Union left was woefully executed at huge loss, again largely due to Bragg’s inability to get recalcitrant corps commanders to implement his plan, and the incompetence of those corps commanders (notably Polk).

As a result, this was not a battle of generalship (except in the negative sense).  It was a soldier’s battle.  On the first day in particular, moreover, it was not really a single battle, but a series of disjointed actions fought at close range between regiments, brigades, and divisions.

The Chickamauga battlefield was one of the first preserved by the Federal government, and is almost entirely intact.  Moreover, due to its early preservation, veterans of the battle erected numerous monuments marking where they fought.  The War Department (which managed the Park at the time of its creation and for some years afterwards) also erected numerous plaques describing the movements of each brigade involved in the battle.  Most of the markers are accurate.  One exception is around Snodgrass Hill and Horseshoe Ridge.  Gracie’s The Truth About Chickamauga does a good job at explaining how that part of the battlefield was mismarked, and why.  (In a nutshell: the process of placing markers and writing the descriptions was dominated by a figure, Henry Boynton, who wanted to exaggerate the role played by the brigade to which he belonged.)

I’ve walked pretty much every foot of the battlefield, on multiple occasions.  You really have to do that if you want to understand the action, and appreciate the conditions.  Two pieces of advice if you want to do the same, especially in the summer. 1. Check for ticks (especially if you’re blonde!). 2. Watch for snakes. Both are abundant in those Georgia woods.  Then there was that time I almost stepped on a wild turkey, which flew up right into my face.  I don’t know who was more surprised or freaked out, me or the turkey.  (Don’t go there!)

My grandfather first took me to the battlefield when I was 9, as part of an epic Civil War trip that was the genesis of my interest in the War.  We started at Shiloh, then Vicksburg, then Corinth, then Chickamauga-Chattanooga, then Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, Richmond, and Antietam, before completing the journey in Gettysburg.  Now that’s a helluva trip, and my grandfather was an excellent storyteller who helped bring the battles to life. I have the vivid memory of him illustrating the Wood-close-up-on-Reynolds story using Tiparillo boxes on the kitchen table.

My great-great grandfather George Immel fought in the battle, as a member of the 92nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry.  Ironically, given the blogging proclivities of his descendant, he was an orderly to his brigade commander, Brigadier General Ivan Basil Turchin, nee Turchaninov (Ива́н Васи́льевич Турчани́нов), a Russian emigre.  Turchin was quite a character, as was his formidable wife, who intervened personally with Lincoln to save Turchin’s career after he had been relieved from command for sacking the town of Athens, Alabama in retaliation for guerrilla attacks on his brigade.  He went all Russian, in other words.

There is one story of the battle that  was passed down through the family.  George said that the most remarkable thing about the battle was the continuous noise, from all directions.  The roar was unceasing on Saturday the 19th until night fell (though there was also a night attack by Cleburne’s division that evening).  Then it began again the next morning, and didn’t stop until late in the day.

Turchin’s brigade played a rather prominent role in the battle.  It helped stop the attack of Cheatham’s division near Brock Field on the 19th, then later in the day led a counterattack that flanked elements of Bates’s and Law’s brigade that had penetrated the Union center around the Brotherton House.  On the 20th, it was in Thomas’s main line on the Union left, and behind some log barricades repulsed the attacks of Cleburne’s division.  (It was a part of Reynolds’ division, which Wood was supposed to close up on.)  During the final Union retreat, the brigade executed a bayonet charge through the McDonald Field, driving off the Confederates who threatened to cut off the escape route to Chattanooga.

That is the story of just one brigade, but overall the battle was fought largely at the brigade level.  On the Union side, divisions from the three main corps (XIV, XX, and XXI) were jumbled together, and only the commander of the XIV corps (George Thomas) really exercised any control over his entire unit: the other corps commanders (McCook and Crittenden) were rendered almost supernumerary, and Thomas ended up commanding large portions of their units.  Moreover, the terrain made controlling larger units almost impossible, so much of the battle devolved into brutal firefights between brigades.

Although it is a fascinating battle to study, with many stories of great personal bravery, ultimately all it produced was a monstrous casualty list.  It was almost utterly devoid of strategic impact.  Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland escaped by a hair’s breadth back to Chattanooga, and Bragg’s Army of Tennessee did not pursue (to the fury of Nathan Bedford Forrest).  A desultory siege followed, but Lincoln rushed reinforcements from the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the Tennessee while Bragg’s Army declined in numbers when Longstreet, disgusted by Bragg’s leadership, took off to attack Knoxville.  Under the command of Grant, the reinforced Federal forces drove Bragg from the heights overlooking Chattanooga.  (The 92nd Ohio participated in the decisive charge on Missionary Ridge.)

During this attack, the Union soldiers who had been defeated 150 years ago today shouted “Remember Chickamauga!” as their battle cry.  I remember it, and you should too.

I am working on a project about the economics of commodity trading firms.  One of the interesting questions is what physical assets commodity trading firms own.  In my research on this question, in an attempt to get some historical context, I turned to the excellent Federal Trade Commission Report on the Grain Trade, a five volume study released in the early-20s.  (There is reputedly a sixth volume on manipulation which I and others-Jerry Markham, for one-have feverishly searched for without luck.)   This is truly an excellent piece of work.  Many of the analyses are off, but as a detailed portrait of the grain trade in the 1900-1920 period, it cannot be beat.  Unfortunately, there is nothing comparable for other time periods.

In perusing Volume I, on country grain marketing, I came across this choice quote from the president of the CBOT in 1887:

The alliance between railroads and elevators has resulted in reaching out after millions of bushels not naturally tributary [to Chicago] and when gathered here preventing it by such tricks of the trade as you are familiar with from ever getting away again as long as storage can be collected on it.

. . . .

The grain bought elsewhere by warehouse proprietors is promptly sold to you here on future delivery, which, however, you can only get on payment of such premiums as the urgency of demand may enable them to exact.

. . . .

While the elevator proprietors are willing to pay 1 cent per bushel more for grain to “go into store” in their own warehouses than the market price of the same grain in store . . . is conclusive that the first storage charge is not legitimate, and also that the subsequent terms of storage are unduly profitable.

Replace “grain” with “aluminum”, and you could run this as a news story in 2013.  Goldman’s operations at Metro are almost identical to the operations of the warehousemen in Chicago that President Wright fulminated about 126 years ago.

The FTC study also notes that shuttling grain between warehouses was a part of the game more than a century ago.  It quotes Taylor’s magesterial history of the CBOT, describing an event from 1896:

The Armour Elevator Co. was charged with having transferred 1,200,000 bushels of wheat from one part of the north side system to another, without inspection, on such dates that the receipts resulting therefrom were just regular on the delivery day, May 1.

And not a bankster in sight.  (It is an interesting coincidence that 1896 was the year Goldman-Sachs was invited to join the NYSE.)

The morals of the story.  First, the ability to play warehouse games is inherent to the business of public warehousing of commodities. Second, banks are not uniquely susceptible to playing those games: when conditions are right, whoever owns the warehouses can play the games.  Third, systems of self-regulation are often incapable of addressing these problems.

On the last point, it is important to remember that the seminal case in the history of regulation in the United States, Munn v. Illinois, grew out of the warehousing battles in Chicago during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath.  The Supreme Court decided that the State of Illinois had the power to regulate grain warehouses, and this decision provided the basis for subsequent exercise of regulatory powers by states and the Federal government.

In other words, what is old is new again.  Journalists and regulators and legislators act as if the kinds of games played today are somehow new and unique.  They aren’t.  The commodities business hasn’t changed that much in a century and a half.  The things that were good, bad, and ugly in 1869 are around today, and will be around in 2069 and 2169.

With great fanfare, Kerry and Lavrov announced a deal on Syria.  Well, not really a deal: a “broad framework” under which Assad will declare his stockpiles, allow “unfettered” access by UN inspectors, and then turn them over for ultimate destruction in a facility to be built near Tartus.

I can see it now.  Hans Blix is on the phone to all his old buddies, telling them “we’re putting the band back together.”

I remember the Iraq version of this movie from 10-20 years ago.  Didn’t end well.  Hell, it didn’t begin well.   In fact, it pretty much sucked all the way through.  It sort of worked as a farce, but purely an unintentional one.

Why would anyone expect the sequel to be any different?  The three card monte games played with chemical weapons and inspectors? The Russian interference?  The passive aggressiveness by the targeted government?  The only way it will be different is that it will be even more farcical this time because Assad and the Russians will know with virtual metaphysical certainty that there will be no consequences for obstructing the process, whereas Saddam had no such knowledge.  Indeed, as part of the deal worked out in Geneva, the UN resolution that will implement the agreement will not specify that Assad can be attacked by force for non-compliance.

In reality, I don’t think anybody does expect it to be different.  From the Russian perspective, that’s a feature, not a bug: a big stall that keeps Assad in power indefinitely is exactly what they want.  From the American perspective, Obama is so desperate to extricate himself from the hole he dug with his big mouth (“Red line”, “Assad must go”) he is willing to go along with the charade and declare Peace in Our Time.  His flunkies and fanboys are already pushing this line.

In reality, there will be no peace.  Maybe-maybe-no one will be killed by the Syrian regime with chemical weapons in the coming months, but people will continue to die in their thousands.  They will die in myriad horrid ways, by bullet, shell, bomb, or a by knife in the guts or across the throat.  But there won’t be videos of gasping victims on YouTube, so we don’t have to trouble ourselves about it, apparently.

It is beyond nauseating to read Kerry’s remarks from Geneva about the Syrian civil war generally.  In my mind’s eye, I have this vision of a wooden Kerry (but I repeat myself) propped up on Lavrov’s knee, with Lavrov’s arm up the back of Kerry’s jacket.  That’s because when I read this, it’s hard to distinguish from ventriloquism:

“If we can make this framework a success, we save lives in the region and lay the groundwork for more cooperation” between Moscow and Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday after three days of negotiations with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

“There is no military solution” to the Syrian civil war, Mr. Kerry added. “It has to happen at the negotiating table.”

The Russian line, to the last jot and tittle.

Look. Two sides-N sides, really, given the nature of the opposition-in an existential conflict ain’t going to sit down and talk it over and reach some amicable agreement.  Negotiations necessarily take place under the threat of force, and depend on the fortunes of the battlefield.  The sentiments that Charlie McKerry mouthed (I can see Lavrov’s lips moving!) are all high-sounding and stuff, but they are just bilge.  A noble lie intended to distract attention from a very ugly truth.

In sum, there will be no peace in Syria as a result of this deal, and Obama purchased this (temporarily) face-saving deal at the price of humiliation and dishonor to the United States.

Yes, given the Bush legacy and the nature of the conflict in Syria, there was never an easy way forward there, and it would have been a difficult chore to obtain popular support for American involvement.  The time for involvement was early-to-mid-2011, but once Obama let that opportunity pass, the prospects only worsened.  What’s more, Obama views himself as an ender of wars, and clearly has no heart for a new conflict.  (Drone strikes don’t count: that’s just the Jupiter complex at work, and the preference for drones is actually symptomatic of his unwillingness to use more traditional military methods.)

Given all that, a principled position would have been to state, forthrightly, that the US will not get involved.  But Obama’s contradictory statements, and in particular, his threats to use force post-August 21 have led to an even worse outcome.  Not only will the civil war continue indefinitely with all its ferocity, but by abandoning even a “shot across the bow” against a regime he accused of crimes against humanity and grabbing for a transparently fraudulent deal offered by someone who actively wishes the US ill, Obama has come off as feckless, opportunistic, weak, unserious, lacking in strategic sense, and totally overmatched by Putin.  Hard men in Russia, Iran, China and Syria will become emboldened, and those in the region who look to the US for support will make different calculations.

In other words, even if you believe that the appropriate outcome is for the US to stay the hell out-and that is a defensible position-there are better and worse ways to reach that outcome.  I find it hard to believe any worse way of getting there than the way Obama has managed to do it.  But he still has 3 plus years to go in his administration, so he has time to prove me wrong and make it even worse.

Obama continues to sound a very uncertain trumpet on intervention in Syria.  He spends more verbiage assuring Americans that any intervention will be extremely limited than he does making the case for the necessity of the intervention in the first place.  The affirmative argument that Obama does make is essentially a moral and humanitarian one: that chemical weapons used against civilians is a uniquely abhorrent crime.  (Perhaps this will change in his flood-the-zone PR offensive over the next two days.)

This is of course an inherently contradictory message.  If there is a moral imperative to stop the use of chemical weapons, why should any effort to do so be limited in advance? What if the limited strikes do not eliminate the conduct?  Then what?

One thing struck me about Obama’s remarks in St. Petersburg, in the windup of the G20 root canal:

“When there’s a breach this brazen of a norm this important, and the international community is paralyzed and frozen and doesn’t act, then that norm begins to unravel,” Obama said of the longstanding international prohibition against the use of chemical weapons.

“If that norm unravels, then other norms and prohibitions start unraveling, and that makes for a more dangerous world, and that then requires even more difficult choices and more difficult responses in the future,” he said

That, my friends, is the Domino Theory of the Violation of Important International Norms.  You’ll remember the original Domino Theory, applied in Viet Nam: if we didn’t stop Communism in Viet Nam, all the other dominoes in Asia would topple and fall to communism.

I won’t comment on the validity of this theory, either in Southeast Asia in 1968 or in Northwest Asia in 2013.  I will just point out that ridicule of the Domino Theory was the staple of progressive anti-Viet Nam War rhetoric in the late-60s and early-70s.  It is therefore beyond ironic that a died-in-the-wool progressive who was the political child of the Viet Nam War era progressive movement in the United States would invoke this theory to justify a deeply unpopular intervention in Syria.

But the ironies do not end there, of course.  What could be more ironic than John Kerry’s ringing justification of the use of military force in Syria?  Indeed, an endorsement far more ringing than anything Obama has said.  Kerry was a prominent protestor in the 1960s, and usually an opponent of US intervention during his years in the Senate. (Though one cannot say consistent opponent, for who can forget “I was for the war before I was against it”?)  Needless to say, Kerry was not a fan of the Domino Theory, in its 1968 incarnation.

And the ironies are not limited to one political party.  Many on the right who have historically supported military intervention are either opposed to this intervention or are decidedly ambivalent.  Some for good reasons.  Some are chastened by the experience in Iraq.  Some are troubled by Obama’s drawing of a red line on his own actions, meaning that they have no confidence that the operation will achieve anything positive but will result in various collateral harms to the US, and which may result in an escalation led by a president who is not committed to seeing things through.  (Charles Krauthammer is prominent in this group.)   There are those who are deeply concerned about the lack of strategic rationale and muscle to back it up, but who believe that American credibility is on the line and hence put their reservations aside and support intervention. Then there are those who are nakedly and rather disgustingly partisan: if Obama is for it, they must be against it.  Those who regurgitate Putin or Iranian talking points to support their case are particularly disgusting.

All of which goes to show how the potential American intervention in Syria has reversed the political poles.  To paraphrase John Kerry, those who normally would be for it are against it, and those who would normally be against it are for it.  Nothing illustrates this reversal more strikingly that Barack Obama’s invocation of Domino Theory as his primary justification for the employment of American arms against the Assad regime in Syria.

I’ve written about Germany’s bizarre Energiewende program before.  It massively subsidizes renewables, and pays for the subsidy with a huge premium slapped onto electricity rates, although some big industrial consumers are immune.  The most wasteful part of the program is the huge subsidies for wind, especially offshore wind.  Now Der Spiegel chimes in with a very, very long article savaging the program. (Complete with a bonus snark at greens posing as “saviors of the world.”)

I agree with most of what’s in the article, though I am hardly a big fan of the Swedish approach that Der Spiegel touts as an alternative: it’s just a less bad, and less expensive, than the German way.  If anthropogenic CO2 is a problem, slap a tax on it and let people figure out how to respond efficiently, rather than subsidizing specific technologies and suppliers.  The regressivity of the scheme is also not the worst thing about it, though it’s hardly a feature.  What is interesting is that the allegedly “social” Germans, who carp about American inequality, would implement such a regressive scheme.

One other thing to note, which might lead me to discount the brutal nature of the article if I didn’t know about Energiewende from other sources.  The article is clearly aimed at Merkel and her government: the program is laid entirely at her feet.  Thus, the article is a part of Der Spiegel’s unremitting attacks on Frau Merkel in the lead up to the election that will be held in a couple of weeks.  The most prominent part of those attacks is, of course, the Snowden coverage.

Ironically, the Der Spiegel site appears to be down now.  No doubt part of a US operation to silence the brave Laura.

But maybe it’s German intelligence.  For today Reuters reveals that-brace yourselves-Germany has an intelligence service.  And an intelligence service that collects electronic intelligence on foreigners no less!  Who knew? It even has at least one “naval reconnaissance vessel” that plies international waters scooping up information from the international ether.  (“Reconnaissance”, of course, being a fancy name for “spy”.)

Syrian brigade and division commanders had been asking the Presidential Palace to allow them to use chemical weapons for the last four-and-a-half months, according to radio messages intercepted by German spies, but permission had always been denied, the paper said.

This could mean Assad may not have personally approved the attack close to Damascus on August 21 in which more than 1,400 are estimated to have been killed, intelligence officers suggested.

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND) could not be reached for comment.

Bild said the radio traffic was intercepted by a German naval reconnaissance vessel, the Oker, sailing close to the Syrian coast.

The BND couldn’t be reached? What, are they secretive or something?

And they also intercept phone calls!  I think I’m going to faint:

Members of the foreign affairs committee present at the briefing told Reuters Schindler had said that although the BND did not have absolute proof Assad’s government was responsible, it had much evidence to suggest it was.

This included a phone call German spies intercepted between a Hezbollah official and the Iranian Embassy in Damascus in which the official said Assad had ordered the attack.

But I’m sure Germany would never intercept anything on the Internet, so Laura and Jake can continue to take refuge in Berlin in good conscience.  I’m also sure that it knows exactly who the bad guys are so it only intercepts their communications, and only when they’re plotting bad things.  No NSA needle in a haystack programs for Fritz.

In further irony, Der Spiegel originally posted a story about the interception of the phone call . . . in a brief web posting without a byline.  (I’d link that, but like I say, Der Spiegel’s website is down now.)

Update: The Der Spiegel site is back up now.

This article in the Wall Street Journal regarding the administration’s befuddlement at what Putin wants is cringeworthy:

The U.S. blasted Russia at the U.N. on Thursday, blaming it for preventing collective military action on Syria in response to Aug. 21 chemical strikes and endangering the international security system built to prevent such attacks. “Russia continues to hold the council hostage and shirk its responsibility,” said U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power.

The tension between the two powers has been aggravated by a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings. U.S. officials acknowledge they have struggled to understand Mr. Putin, a former KGB agent. Russia, for its part, bristles at what it sees as the U.S. tendency to use humanitarian abuses as cover to remove regimes it doesn’t like, such as in Libya.
. . . .

U.S. officials haven’t found it easy to get a handle on Mr. Putin or his motivations. While anti-Americanism has been a key theme for Mr. Putin, the U.S. expected he would dial back the rhetoric once he had cemented control after the 2012 elections, a prediction that proved unfounded.

A senior White House official said the U.S. wants to convince the Russian leadership it is in their interest to part ways with the Assad regime. “What we’ve said to the Russians is the United States isn’t interested in removing Syria from Russian influence or acquiring Syria as a client state of the United States,” the official said.

Struggled to understand? Isn’t easy to get a handle on? Thought anti-Americanism was just election rhetoric? (Is that projection?)

It’s really pretty straightforward, and maybe that’s the problem: perhaps the administration thinks there has to be something beneath Putin’s public statements and public persona.  He can’t be that simplistic and crude, can he?  But if you are looking for a good predictive model, go with the obvious and take Putin at face value.

First, the anti-Americanism/anti-Westernism is genuine and has deep roots in the Soviet and Russian past.  It is bolstered by suspicions that the US and the West (including especially the little island that nobody pays attention to anymore) have a global agenda, and that central to that agenda is to humiliate Russia and exploit it for its resources. (Does the administration believe its own narrative that Obama’s very election was transformative and should allay international fears about American motives?)

Second, Putin, and Russian policymakers generally, view things in zero sum terms: if the Americans gain, Russia must lose, and vice versa.

Third, put these two things together:  Putin and the rest of the elite figures that if the Americans want something (e.g., to overthrow the Syrian regime) it must be antithetical to Russian interests and is part of a broader scheme to dominate Russia.

Fourth, like most autocratic rulers in states with highly personalized rule and weak institutions, Putin is obsessed with legitimacy and dreads the prospect of being overthrown.  This too has deep roots, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the 2012 protest movement, the Arab Spring, and Libya have only stoked those fears.  Strict non-interference in internal affairs of states, no matter how brutal they are, is the highest principle of international relations to Putin and the Russians generally: he said exactly that in his remarks at the G20.  To them, internationalism and intervention are an anathema.

In other words, Putin’s obduracy isn’t hard to understand: it’s overdetermined.  What’s hard to understand is why the administration found this hard to understand.  It’s there in plain sight.

Based on its inability to figure out Putin, the administration decided not to play Let’s Make a Deal.  Wise decision, because not even Monty Hall could get Putin to barter.  Though it took way to long to reach that basic insight.

Add to all this that Obama has played his hand very shakily in the Middle East, and has only come to even considering confronting Assad after a lot of throat clearing and Hamlet-like indecision, and Putin and Lavrov conclude that backing Assad to the hilt is in Russian interests, and that they have a good chance of prevailing in a standoff.

Believe it or not, this confession of being mystified by Putin may not be the most embarrassing admission of the past few days. Samantha Power told a liberal interest group that the administration believed that it could use evidence of the chemical attack to convince Iran to abandon Assad:

“Or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran — itself a victim of Saddam Hussein’s monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 — to cast loose a regime that was gassing it’s people,” she said.

I checked.  That story didn’t originate in The Onion.

Words fail.

I am reading Richard Franks’ magisterial history of the Guadalcanal Campaign.  One recurring theme is the vital role played by cryptology.  Our military effectiveness was substantially greater when we could read the Japanese JN25 naval codes than when we couldn’t.  When the Japanese changed codes, we were reduced to relying on traffic analysis, a sort of prot0-data mining, analogous to and as about effective as our relying on terrorist chatter to attempt to discern enemy plans.

Even casual WWII students know that Joseph Rochefort’s cryptology unit made victory at Midway possible.  Although it is somewhat conventional to believe that American victory was inevitable after Midway, the story of the Guadalcanal Campaign gives the lie to that belief. It was a close run thing, and the prospect of defeat-including surrender of the Marines on the ‘Canal-hung heavy on every mind in October and November of 1942.  Our intermittent ability to read Japanese codes was quite plausibly the (very narrow) margin of victory.

And of course the victory over the U-boats in the Atlantic, and the war against Germany generally, depended in a crucial way on breaking the Enigma cipher.

Note the name given to the Allied code breaking efforts: Ultra.  Note further the lengths to which the Allies went to protecting the fact that they had broken Enigma: as Churchill said, these efforts were surrounded with a bodyguard of lies.  Distribution of Ultra intelligence was extremely limited.  There were numerous occasions when Eisenhower and other high commanders decided not to respond to German moves that they had divined from Ultra to protect that secret.  People were died-were sacrificed-to protect that secret, because its revelation would have cost the lives of many more.

Moral of the story: cryptology is a vital military activity.  Corollary to the moral: maintaining secrecy about cryptological capacity is a matter of the highest military and national security importance.

Fast forward 70-71 years from Guadalcanal to the present.  Yesterday the New York Times (along with the Guardian and ProPublica) made massive disclosures about NSA efforts to decrypt internet traffic.  This is indisputably an egregious blow to US national security, if one accepts that there is a legitimate purpose for the NSA at all.

Yet the even more egregious Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden assert that they have released nothing that would jeopardize US national security.

Firstly, that is an obvious lie.

Second, who the hell (and I cleaned that up) delegated to such flagrant and admitted foes of the United States government the authority to judge what is, and what is not, in the vital national security interest?  For them to arrogate to themselves such an awesome responsibility is profoundly undemocratic, and unrepublican.  They are unelected, unappointed, and unaccountable.

And who the hell at the New York Times thinks this is acceptable? (Aside: why is the NYT undertaking actions that are deeply damaging to the Obama administration? Interesting question to ponder: I don’t know the answer.  Relatedly: how are Obama and others in the administration responding to this ideological betrayal?)

There is a capabilities vs. intent issue here. Yes, the decryption capabilities are awesome, and can be used for nefarious purposes that violate the rights of individuals in the US.  (Spare me about spying on foreign governments.)  But these capabilities are also vital to prosecuting wars on terrorists, and state actors that are enemies or potential enemies of the United States.  Pace Guadalcanal: to deny the US military and intelligence services the ability to decrypt is to condemn us to fighting blind.  Information-intelligence-is power, and time and again has proved the difference between victory and defeat.  That we need this capability is manifestly obvious, and it is equally obvious that this capability is profoundly less effective, the more that is known about it.

The issue is how to limit the use of these capabilities to legitimate national security purposes.  Although Greenwald, Poitras, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and now the New York Times have insinuated that these capabilities are routinely abused, they have produced no credible evidence to support these insinuations.  They elide from “can” to “do”, and do so in purple prose.  Every one of their stories elicits pushback that discredits these broad claims about abuse, but by then the narrative is cemented and the damage is done, and to be Glenn Greenwald et al means never having to say you’re sorry.  Because they aren’t.  This is lawfare, directed against the US, and to them, all is fair.  Greenwald et al are walking, talking, and unfortunately writing and leaking illustrations of the adage that truth is the first casualty in war.

Vital defense capabilities-especially cryptological ones-need to be protected, and sometimes protected with a bodyguard of lies.  These lies save lives-and liberties. This is one of the hard truths that statesmen in the real world must accept and grapple with.  The Guardian of Lies, with its new collaborators, flaunting their moral superiority when revealing vital secrets, are jeopardizing lives and liberties, and are doing so when there is no effective means of holding them to account for the damage they are doing.  Indeed, they wrap themselves in the banner of journalism to claim that they cannot be and should not be held accountable.  This mismatch between consequences and accountability for them is a recipe for disaster.