Rabbi Jill Jacobs writes that a group of North American rabbis, cantors, rabbinical and cantorial students from all denominations of Judaism, who in January were petitioning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cease plans for construction of a new settlement, did not get the hearing they deserved. She writes:
There are some who say that Diaspora Jews have no say in what goes on in Israel, since we don’t put our lives on the line to live there. I don’t buy this argument for a second. We have a stake in Israel because it is the Jewish homeland. We have a stake in Israel because we invest millions of dollars there, and lobby for the U.S. government to invest billions more of our tax dollars. We worry about family and friends in the Israeli army, who risk and sometimes lose their lives defending the misguided settlement project. And we are the ones who must explain to members of other communities, members of our own communities, and even our children why a state built on Jewish values perpetuates a military occupation of another people.
Since long before the creation of the state, the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jews has been an unequal one. For too long, we have accepted the assumption that Diaspora Jews will send money and keep our mouths shut. We have perpetuated a myth that real Judaism lives in Israel, while our own Diaspora lives offer only a pale shadow of Jewish life. So we send our children to Israel for their Jewish inspiration and engagement, we fund hospitals and schools in Israel, and we devote our own political capital to defending Israel from criticism.
Jacobs writes: “We have a stake in Israel because we invest millions of dollars there, and lobby for the U.S. government to invest billions more of our tax dollars.” I have a problem with that. “We” refers to Diaspora Zionists but the tax dollars referred to as “our tax dollars” come from a much wider source, including vast numbers of Americans who do not have the slightest interest or desire to bankroll Israel’s defense forces — 20% of Israel’s defense budget is paid for by American taxpayers. So when Jacobs talks about lobbying the U.S. government to invest billions of tax dollars in Israel, she should be clear about who provides those tax dollars.
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“Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher, born in New Mexico, who had evolved from a peddler of Internet hatred to a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen” — thus the New York Times sets the tone in a report in which the Obama administration leaked a suitable amount of classified information necessary for defending its presidentially-directed assassination program.
The video above shows the preacher back in the days when he was “a peddler of internet hatred” — a description that one might expect to appear somewhere like the New York Daily Post.
“The fact that the U.S. has administered the death and homicide of over one million civilians in Iraq; the fact that the U.S. is supporting the deaths and killing of thousands of Palestinians, does not justify the killing of one U.S. civilian in New York City or Washington D.C. And the deaths of 6,000 civilians in New York and Washington D.C. does not justify the death of one civilian in Afghanistan.” Is this peddling hatred?
The killing of Awlaki in a CIA drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011, has stirred considerable debate about whether an American president has the legal authority to murder an American citizen without any judicial process.
A question of equal importance that has received much less attention is whether the government’s claims that Awlaki had an operational role in organizing acts of terrorism are based on hard intelligence, or whether less substantial evidence was used as merely to provide a pretext to conduct a political killing?
In other words, in the eyes of the Obama administration, did Awlaki pose a threat to the United States because he played an instrumental role in planning acts of terrorism, or because he had sufficient influence to inspire acts of terrorism?
As a figure who could inspire others to plan and carry out attacks, Awlaki arguably posed a much greater threat than he might have as a figure with an operational role in specific acts of terrorism, yet not even the most creative of legal teams would have been able to construct a credible legal argument to justify Awlaki’s killing on the basis that he posed such an inspirational threat.
The New York Times report provides clues that the steps leading to Awalki’s death followed a process in which the decision to kill him preceded the construction of a legal case or the crafting of an operational plan for carrying out the killing. Once all the legal, political, and operational hurdles had been crossed, Awlaki was killed within a few days.
While the Obama administration insists that it only kills terrorist suspects who cannot be captured, Awlaki had in fact been arrested in Yemen in 2006 and then interrogated by two FBI agents while being imprisoned without facing any charges. As the New York Timesreported in 2010:
John D. Negroponte, then the director of national intelligence, told Yemeni officials that the United States did not object to his detention, according to American and Yemeni sources.
But by the end of 2007, American officials, some of whom were disturbed at the imprisonment without charges of a United States citizen, signaled that they no longer insisted on Mr. Awlaki’s incarceration, and he was released.
“He was different after that — harder,” said a Yemeni man who knows Mr. Awlaki well.
While the new report describes Awlaki having been in hiding during the period leading up to his death — the implication being that wherever he was hiding he could also act in the role of an al Qaeda operational leader — it might have been more accurate to simply say that he was attempting to avoid being killed.
That he was believed to be in the home territory of his family’s tribe, the Awaliq, and that in negotiations with Yemen’s then-president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, tribal leaders had offered to hold Awlaki under house arrest, suggests that his capture was not out of the question.
The problem with capturing Awlaki may have had less to do with determining his whereabouts than in not having enough evidence to put him on trial.
It appears that the Obama administration had less interest in building a case upon which Awlaki could be tried than in documenting a legal justification for killing him. That task fell into the hands of two lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: David Barron and Martin Lederman. For that purpose, they wrote a 63-page memorandum “citing dense thickets of intelligence reports supporting the premise that Mr. Awlaki was plotting attacks.”
That this memorandum would come laden so heavily with intelligence specifically on Awlaki, suggests that the lawyers had less interest in establishing any kind of broad legal principles than in justifying this specific assassination and thus mitigating their own potential culpability in murders that had yet to be planned.
At the same time, if there really was such an abundance of evidence proving that Awlaki was directly involved in plotting attacks and that his killing actually “saved lives,” why has this evidence not been made public a year and a half after his death?
In the trial of Rajib Karim, a British Airways computer expert who in 2011 was convicted of plotting an attack that supposedly would have rivaled the 9/11 attacks, evidence was presented of email communications between him and someone referred to as “the professor.” The emails are highly incriminating and present strong evidence of a terrorist plot. Their content alone would not been of much help in convicting Karim however, were it not for the fact that they were found on a computer in his physical possession.
“The professor” is alleged to have been Awlaki and if that turned out to be true, it would support the Obama administration’s assertions about his operational role in al Qaeda. But there’s a missing link: where’s the evidence that the author of these messages was indeed Awlaki?
That isn’t a question that would merely concern a defense attorney — there are plenty of reasons to doubt that Awlaki would have made a transition from preaching to plotting.
This isn’t a matter of assessing the degree of his radicalism, but rather, even if we take it as well established that he supported terrorism, it’s hard to see any reason why he would not remain focused on his well-honed and highly effective skill as an orator. In other words, wouldn’t it have always made sense both to Awlaki and those around him that he continue to expand his power as a professional ideologue, rather than become an amateur terrorist? For al Qaeda, Awlaki’s preeminent value was that he could preach jihad with an American accent and reach a wide audience in the West.
In 2010, Jack Barclay, an analyst for the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, noted the breadth of Awlaki’s appeal:
The ostensibly benign nature of many of his oratories, which often avoid substantive discussion of politics, Jihad, and current affairs, may also have given him a greater level of accessibility and thus helped him cement a stronger online following than some of his more outspoken contemporaries. It is possible therefore, that many of Al-Awlaki’s supporters first developed an affinity for him not because they were actively seeking radical Islamist content to begin with, but because they were initially pursuing broader, beneficial Islamic guidance on the Internet and came across one or more of Al-Awlaki’s more broadly appealing lectures on Islam’s fundamental tenets.
Al-Awlaki’s committed support base have ensured not only that his many audio lectures receive widespread distribution, but that his reputation is vigorously defended whenever it is called into question on Internet blogs and forums.
It is also noteworthy that Al-Awlaki’s popularity appears to rise each time he is perceived to have shown bravery in defending his religion, despite harassment and the threat of imprisonment. Until his move to Yemen, this harassment might have amounted to little more than the periodic attention of television network journalists and the FBI. However, his later imprisonment in Sana’a and subsequent targeting by the US and Yemeni authorities after he continued his controversial writings and oratories, has further elevated his standing. His supporters consider this harassment proof that his enemies are attempting to silence him for merely telling the truth about Islam and the obligation upon Muslims to defend their religion. It is worth considering whether such pressure has been self-defeating in as much as it may have bolstered the perceived credibility of a Salafi-Jihadi cleric who would otherwise have been no more prominent than many of his contemporaries.
When a government grants itself the power to execute its own citizens without any kind of judicial process and refuses to reveal the legal grounds upon which it claims it can exercise such power, then there is every reason to wonder what other powers it might assume.
Having granted itself this absolute power, why would it show restraint in the use of lesser powers? Why, when it insists on shrouding its deliberations in such secrecy, should we have confidence that it would not target for elimination — Constitution be damned — those who in a Stalinist fashion it marks as America’s most threatening political enemies?
Charlie Savage and Scott Shane are two reporters who were party to a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the New York Times to try and force the Obama administration to make public memoranda and related materials providing the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki. In early January a federal judge ruled in favor of the government.
A report written by the same journalists (along with Mark Mazzetti) and published on Sunday begs the question: were Savage and Shane provided with any of the classified information they had sought through FOIA? If so — and it seems virtually certain that they were — then they seem to have seriously compromised their own journalistic integrity.
How can someone argue that the memoranda need to be made public but then go and serve the interests of the administration that refuses to release them, by allowing that administration to cherry pick which portions of the memoranda it wants to reveal?
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Haaretzreports President Obama will be visiting the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during his visit to Israel and the West Bank in a few days.
Four years ago Pope Benedict made the same visit and drew attention to Israel’s apartheid wall by giving a speech in its shadow.
“In a world where more and more borders are being opened up — to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges — it is tragic to see walls still being erected,” Benedict said.
Obama could do the same — at least we can imagine what that would be like and how it would go down in history, like JFK declaring “Ich bin ein Berliner” or Reagan challenging the Soviet Union to “Tear down this wall!”
But what’s he going to do instead? Stand in front of an Iron Dome missile battery for a photo-op alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.
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As an independent news editor and commentator, I use my own judgment. I don’t bow to anyone — not to governments, or political parties, or corporations, or the mainstream media, or advertisers, or think tanks, or academia, or popular opinion, or ideology, or the blogosphere, or social media, or even my own readership.
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Philip B. Corbett, who is in charge of The New York Times’s style manual and has the dubious title of associate managing editor for standards, is responsible for policing sentences like the following, which appeared in a February 8 article:
It turned out the activity was centered around a high school in Orange County.
Centered around? Goodness me. Mr. Corbett knows when a journalist needs a citation and so pulls out his rulebook where it says:
center(v.). Do not write center around because the verb means gather at a point. Logic calls for center on, center in or revolve around.
Stan Carey, a linguist who unlike Corbett does not have his head stuck in the wrong place, points out the center around is an idiom and language isn’t geometry or logic. Corbett probably missed that tweet, or “twitter message,” as the Times insists on calling such pithy statements.
Meanwhile, I came across another lapse in the newspaper — one so commonplace among Americans that even the man in charge of “standards” at the Times probably sees no reason to correct it: the use of England and Britain as synonyms.
In “England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet,” Jennifer Conlin happily exchanges England and Britain, home of the British, in a way that those of us who hail from those parts and now live this side of the pond, know as all too familiar.
Explaining to an American that England and Britain are not the same, can end up feeling like providing an unsolicited tutorial in quantum physics. It’s an issue that probably lies far outside of the scope of the New York Times style guide.
But for what it’s worth — and that probably isn’t much — I put together a nifty graphic for those readers who have an interest and would not be at risk of mistaking the British Isles for a Rorschach blot.
And to round off the picture with a few small caveats: Britain, the UK, and United Kingdom are synonyms for the sovereign state that belongs to the European Union. Its citizens are British, though Catholics in Northern Ireland generally identify themselves as Irish. There are British who identify themselves as either English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish or none of the above. And some of the above don’t identify themselves as British.
Is that all clear? I can’t for the life of me understand why Americans find this confusing!
(Just in case anyone suspects that my omission of the labeling of the Republic of Ireland from this graphic represents some kind of British prejudice — far from it. I wouldn’t want to insult the Irish by including them in a parsing of the meaning of British.)
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On September 11, when President Obama authorized a series of drone strikes over U.S. soil, only this much was clear: four passenger aircraft had been hijacked and were being piloted by the hijackers.
After the aircraft had each been shot down within the space of 30 minutes and 246 casualties been identified, President Obama said in an address to the nation: “No American president would want to have to make the decision I made today, but of this much we can be sure: the citizens of this country whose lives were sacrificed, did not die in vain. Thousand more lives were saved and for this we can be grateful.”
The nation could then let out a sigh of relief, realizing that an even greater catastrophe had been averted — or maybe not.
The problem is that whenever people take actions designed to change the future, they prove that the future is not inevitable.
What happens ultimately trumps what might have happened.
So on Obama’s 9/11, all we would end up being sure of was that the president had decided that it was imperative to kill 19 hijackers even if that meant 246 Americans would become collateral damage in the process.
We might never have discovered what the aims of the hijackers were and thus the threat they posed would be a matter of conjecture.
All that would be certain was that the president saw no limits whatsoever on the extent of executive power exercised in the name of national security.
In the aftermath, what would frighten Americans more? The threat from terrorism, or the powers of the president?
Since American culture measures success in dollars and since Silicon Valley leads the world in technological innovation, the industry’s leaders have a rarely questioned status as not only the richest but also the smartest entrepreneurs in the world. As co-founder of the $250 billion search giant Google, the 39 year-old Sergey Brin surely ranks as a visionary promoting a revolutionary new product: Google Glass. Or maybe not.
In terms of commercial aspirations, Brin’s TED marketing pitch made it clear that Google hopes to leapfrog over Apple by creating a device that ends up replacing the cell phone — that’s no small ambition given that cell phones have penetrated global markets more deeply than any other technology ever created. But for someone with this kind of megalomania, it was amazing to see that Brin could be so dumb as to alienate half the world by saying that cell phone use is “emasculating.”
As Wharton business ethics professor Andrea Matwyshyn noted: “a marketing strategy that positions Google Glass as a ‘man gadget’ potentially alienates half of the consumer base who might have been keenly interested in purchasing the product in the future.”
Even if the product’s marketers manage to recover from this misstep, there’s a more fundamental problem they face: whether worn by men or women, Glass is inherently a socially dysfunctional device.
Wearing this thing is a sure way to alienate yourself from everyone around you (unless you happen to be part of Google’s product development team) as Mark Hurst explains:
The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.
Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.
Now, I know the response: “I’m recorded by security cameras all day, it doesn’t bother me, what’s the difference?” Hear me out – I’m not done. What makes Glass so unique is that it’s a Google project. And Google has the capacity to combine Glass with other technologies it owns.
First, take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers.
And Hurst goes on to illustrate the cascade of privacy pitfalls that will ensue.
So how world-shaking will the consumer release of Google Glass become as it rolls out later this year?
Remember what these breathless predictions were about?
“Cities will be built around this device,” predicted Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “As big a deal as the PC, said Steve Jobs; maybe bigger than the Internet, said John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape, Amazon”.
That was before the owner of the revolutionary two-wheeled vehicle, Jimi Heselden, met an untimely death after driving over a cliff on his own Segway.
How many road accidents or fatalities will there be before Google Glass gains a reputation for not only undermining relationships but also posing a threat to life?
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As an independent news editor and commentator, I use my own judgment. I don’t bow to anyone — not to governments, or political parties, or corporations, or the mainstream media, or advertisers, or think tanks, or academia, or popular opinion, or ideology, or the blogosphere, or social media, or even my own readership.
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“We have to stop [Iran’s] nuclear enrichment program before it’s too late. And I have to tell you, from the bottom of my heart and with the clarity of my brain: words alone will not stop Iran. Sanctions alone will not stop Iran. Sanctions must be coupled with a clear and credible military threat, if diplomacy and sanctions fail.
“I deeply appreciate something President Obama has said repeatedly — you’ve just heard Vice President Biden say it again: Israel must always be able to defend itself, by itself, against any threat to its existence.”
This was the core of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech yesterday as he addressed the key representatives of the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and the Obama administration who had all convened for their annual display of allegiance to AIPAC.
How can Israel possibly continue to make credible military threats against Iran if at the hour of its greatest need, Washington betrays the Jewish state by making cuts in the 20% share of its defense budget that American taxpayers are obligated to pay?
We must stand by Israel, Washington will continue to say with an undivided voice over the coming days, even while failing to stand by millions of senior Americans who will soon no longer be receiving meals-on-wheels thanks to sequestration. When it comes weighing up conflicting demands coming from AARP and AIPAC, our elected representatives know which side their bread is buttered on.
Yet the issue might be seen as a little less clear-cut if anyone paused to parse Netanyahu’s latest evocation of his perennial rhetorical standby: directing military threats against Iran.
There was nothing new in Netanyahu’s statement and taken at face value it might sound like he was issuing yet another military threat. If that was indeed the case, then based on his own reasoning — that the continued expansion of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program demonstrates that diplomacy and sanctions have been ineffective — it follows: military threats from Netanyahu are also ineffective. He’s been making what sound like threats for years and yet enrichment continues.
On the other hand, even if Netanyahu likes to assume a threatening posture, what he is saying strongly implies that Israel is actually incapable of making a credible military threat against Iran. Strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq have arguable done more to demonstrate the limits of Israeli air power than its potential to strike Iran.
What Netanyahu is really calling for is louder threats from Washington. That a military threat remains “on the table” and that “we’ve got your back covered,” is not enough.
If a year ago Obama was telling AIPAC there was too much “loose talk of war,” Netanyahu’s response now is that there isn’t enough talk of war.
For a while the Israeli prime minister thought he could cajole the U.S. by saying: you must do what we can’t, because if you don’t, we will — but the only coherent part of that message was the bit Israel is now left with: we can’t; you must.
Even worse for Netanyahu, he no longer has the power to threaten Obama’s chances for re-election.
As for how all this looks from Tehran, with a jaundiced eye no doubt they are simply asking: what’s new?
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As an independent news editor and commentator, I use my own judgment. I don’t bow to anyone — not to governments, or political parties, or corporations, or the mainstream media, or advertisers, or think tanks, or academia, or popular opinion, or ideology, or the blogosphere, or social media, or even my own readership.
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David Altheide writes: The future of guns in our society may be better understood if we knew more about what they mean to people and why people buy them.
Fear is a major factor for many firearm purchases. Recent trends in gun sales suggest that many citizens are becoming more fearful: Gallup poll data suggest that Americans are more fearful, at near-record high levels, about big government, compared to big business or big labor. This fear overlays the long-term public fear of crime and terrorism.
Reactions to mass killings, particularly the shooting of first-graders at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, sparked a national debate about gun control. But that, in turn, has heightened fear about government’s role in regulating assault weapons, especially popular semi-automatic models like the AK-47 and AR-15 that are bought and sold throughout both the US and the world.
Public reaction to the latest assault weapon massacre is disturbing in view of worldwide trends. Studies show that price increases for semi-automatic assault weapons reflect public moods and fears about social instability. According to author James Barr, in many countries, “The Kalashnikov index is effectively a futures market for violence.” More than 80m AK-47s circulate between countries in predictable patterns that are associated with social instability.
The cost of this weapon doubled and tripled in Iraq and Afghanistan just before the US invasions of those countries. Afghan arms merchants are selling the model favored by Osama bin Laden for $2,000, while Syrians are paying more than $2,100. Demand and prices fall only when citizens believe that things are settling down.
I’d be a bit wary about the idea of viewing the rise or fall of gun prices as a universally reliable index of social stability.
Each time there’s a new rush to buy assault weapons across America, it seems to happen for the same reason: buyers are afraid these weapons are going to get banned.
And even though fear of government is very much a part of American DNA, among those for whom this fear calls them to go out and buy more guns, I see little evidence that it serves as a driving force for broader political action — beyond perhaps attending an occasional Tea Party meeting or paying annual dues to the NRA.
In other words, as vexed as many Americans might be about the power of Big Government, so long as gun control doesn’t go further than a few cosmetic reforms like reducing permitted magazine sizes, then Americans who are afraid of having their guns taken away will remain quite content with the status quo. Indeed, sustaining the fear that gun ownership is under threat, ironically has the effect of legitimizing gun ownership.
The result is this utterly circular reality: that the freedom so many gun owners care more about protecting than any other freedom is the freedom to own a gun.
The government can assassinate U.S. citizens, monitor all electronic communications, use taxpayer money to bail out banks, fight wars without authorization of Congress, serve the interests of corporations above those of the electorate, and all of this will provoke little more than some idle grumbling.
Do anything else — just don’t take away our guns. Try and take away our guns and we’ll start another revolution!
I have my doubts. I don’t think there’s any prospect of an administration that would actually attempt to institute serious gun control — and even if it did, legislation would never get through Congress. But neither do I think in the unlikely event that such gun control was implemented would it provoke a revolution.
However fiercely independent Americans may once have been, that fierceness has given way to a more pervasive docility.
Rami G Khouri writes: Every time I visit the United States, I find without fail that the public’s awareness of the Middle East reflects a pattern that has two dimensions. The majority, which does not follow events in the region, invariably expresses those images that it absorbs from simplistic media coverage of events, usually with phrases like, “Are they ever going to solve the problems over there?” or, “Are things any quieter now over there?” to which the easiest reply is, “Oh, not really, but we hope for the best.”Those Americans who do follow events in the Middle East, however, tend to focus on only one issue at a time, perhaps because it is easier to see it in terms of single issues isolated in time and political context, rather than view the complexities and nuances of our region as they really are: interconnected, fluid and mostly negotiable, among a range of situations and actors such as Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the March 14 and March 8 alliances in Lebanon, the warring sides in Syria, and Iraq’s fragile condition in the run-up to President Barack Obama’s visit to the Middle East this month.
At the start of my current trip in the U.S. the single question that preoccupies Middle East-watchers there is what to do about Syria, and whether or not the United States should provide military assistance to the opposition groups fighting to topple the regime of President Bashar Assad. The issue is topical given the current trip to the Middle East of Secretary of State John Kerrey, who has met with the head of the main political opposition group in Syria, the Syrian National Coalition. Kerry also announced $60 million in nonlethal aid to help the opposition improve services for citizens in liberated areas.
The big question people ask is whether the U.S. should provide military aid to help the Syrian rebels improve their chances of defeating the Assad family regime. The hesitancy of the Obama administration to do this (beyond the military training that is widely assumed to be under way in Jordan) is a classic example of why American foreign policy in the Middle East is so erratic, often leading to the growth of groups that feed off anti-American sentiments.
The U.S. is reluctant to offer direct military aid to the rebels because it fears weapons might fall into the hands of groups the United States does not like, especially Islamist groups such as the Nusra Front or smaller groups with alleged affinities to Al-Qaeda that have grown rapidly in the past year and now spearhead military advances in parts of Syria. Presumably, that is because the U.S. does not want to arm Islamist or other unfriendly groups who might agitate against the U.S. or its allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia or Jordan.
That sounds like a reasonable policy, but in reality it is a total failure. In fact it brings about precisely that outcome that Washington says it wishes to avoid – the rise to prominence, or even dominance, of those Islamist groups the U.S. dislikes. So as the U.S. speaks boldly about bringing down the Assad regime, but does little on the critical military front to help bring this about, Islamist and other rebel groups whom the U.S. dislikes have received plenty of arms and made sustained gains militarily. They have therefore won the confidence of ordinary people across the land, enhancing the likelihood that these groups will dominate the post-Assad system of power.
Vali Nasr says: “It is not going too far to say that American foreign policy has become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.”
So how does this apply to Obama’s thinking on Syria?
I imagine it runs something like this: Who knows how long the war in Syria will drag on? Maybe the death toll will pass 200,000. But here’s the thing we must be sure will never happen: We cannot run the risk that an American-supplied surface-to-air missile might be used to bring down an Israeli aircraft. That would be unthinkable — the rest, that’s just regrettable. After all, no one in Washington has to worry about the Free Syria Lobby.
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Speech is quotation. That is unless someone chooses to construct a language of their own and is content to be understood by no one else.
There is in practice only so far we can go in making words our own, since a word’s ability to possess meaning depends on it being shared. And virtually all of these meanings come used — rare is the word and meaning freshly minted. And yet from this supply of endlessly re-used terms, we can construct a limitless number of novel pieces of language. Duplication and uniqueness get wrapped together.
Out of this endless supply of new sentences however, some turn out so well-formed they demand repetition.
Geoffrey O’Brien asks: What is the use of quotations? They have of, course, their practical applications for after-dinner speakers or for editorialists looking to buttress their arguments. They also make marvelous filler for otherwise uninspired conversations. But the gathering of such fragments responds to a much deeper compulsion. It resonates with the timeless desire to seize on the minimal remnant — the tiniest identifiable gesture — out of which the world could, in a pinch, be reconstructed. Libraries may go under, cultures may go under, but single memorizable bits of rhyme and discourse persist over centuries. Shattered wholes reach us in small disconnected pieces, like the lines of the poet Sappho preserved in ancient treatises. To collect those pieces, to extrapolate lost worlds from them, to create a larger map of the human universe by laying many such pieces side by side: this can become a fever, and one that has afflicted writers of all eras.
Anyone, of course, might develop a passion for quotes, but for a writer it’s a particularly intimate connection. A good quotation can serve as a model for one’s own work, a perpetual challenge with the neatness and self-sufficiency of its structure laid bare in the mind. How does it work? How might a quotation be done differently, with the materials and urgencies of a different moment? Perhaps writers should begin, in fact, by inwardly uttering again what has already been uttered, to get the feel of it and to savor its full power.
Quotes are the actual fabric with which the mind weaves: internalizing them, but also turning them inside out, quarreling with them, adding to them, wandering through their architecture as if a single sentence were an expansible labyrinthine space.
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Centered around? Goodness me. Mr. 
