To make war on Assad in the absence of a democratically validated decision for war and in the absence of an international legal justification for war would further undermine foundational American premises. Achieving both would not be impossible, but the Heaven and Earth-moving effort is not something that the United States of America or its President is presently likely to attempt on behalf of the united friends of Al Qaeda.
My comment today at “Ordinary Times” (first in more than a year): You think you want to live in a world where the murder of Americans as Americans, or politically, could be broadcast to all, in connection with the rescue…
Referring to the group simply as “IS” quietly constitutes the enemy as “the Islamic State,” and reinforces perception of the struggle as anti-Islamic for some, for others as significantly a different thing: anti-Islamist.
It is hard to imagine a world in which acts like the murders of James Foley and Steven Sotloff simply as Americans, in connection with an American decision to rescue others from imminent annihilation, did not produce among Americans a demand for punishment as both practical and moral necessity. Yet there is a tendency even among many would-be supporters of President Obama, or of his plans to “degrade and ultimately destroy” “the group known as ISIL,” to diminish and disdain politically aggravated homicides as actual and compelling bases for a specifically American reaction.
Carl Schmitt might have been amused by the criticism John Kerry has received for declining to characterize operations against ISIS as “war”: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday would not say the United States is at war with…
The sound strategy, in expressing and re-producing as well as in defending or advancing the order on behalf of which it is conceived, represents the world as though orderly – as though knowably causational and susceptible to agency, one might say for Elkus – with one’s own side properly and thoughtfully led by qualified and ethically sound commander-politicians, their stratagems effectuated by courageous, skilled, and virtuous warriors supported by a willing and sympathetic people, all together on the way to deserved victories, with God in His Heaven and, eventually, all right with the world or anyway as right as the world ever is. The opposite, put as starkly, is “sauve qui peut,” each doing right in his or her own eyes, or the state of nature, and, on the way to that dreaded condition, the commander perceiving and pursuing a treasonously merely private interest at the expense of the general good.
Summary: A year ago, Americans were being asked to kill non-enemies because it was abstractly right; now are being asked to kill enemies at war with us.
As for our Achilles-Nemesis, what reason is there to believe, along with apparently the professor, that it is our decision alone, or within anyone’s ability, to define the fight in some essentially different way, and still to fight at all?
Leon Wieseltier, in “Obama Was Wrong[:] The Era of Humanitarian Intervention Is Not Over”: Barack Obama believed that he could preside over the end of humanitarian intervention, which he called simply war. He was momentously wrong… History, whose course he…
IN THE SHADOW OF INSTEAD RT @rmslim: By far this is one of z best, if not z best analysis, of unfolding devepts in the Arab region penned by Yezid Sayigh http://t.co/zMW7oGUsKZ 09:52:10, 2014-08-29 #prt among most interesting aspects the…