I don’t feel that comfortable discussing war and that kind of thing. To me, it is obvious that our interventions normally do as much harm as good. What’s more, the reasons we go to war are rarely the reasons we claim. But other than these general guidelines, I am not plugged into what people in the field think about these matters. With Syria, I’ve become a little more familiar with what’s going on. And to my surprise, it is exactly the way things are in economics—a subject I do pay attention to.

In economics, there are a lot of things that we know. For example, businesses are not hiring and investing because there is a lack of demand for their products. There are very few business owners who claim that they aren’t investing because of “regulatory uncertainty.” And anecdotally, those who do claim this for a reason seem to be conservative ideologues who say it but don’t really act that way. (That is to say, if demand increased, they would not refuse to hire because they were afraid some new environmental regulation would be enacted next year.) In foreign policy, there are similar things that people know. It’s just that you aren’t going to hear it coming from politicians on the Sunday talk shows.

I thought about this after reading Ibrahim Al-Marashi’s excellent article in The Guardian, Syria Intervention: the US Should Heed the Lessons of the Iraq Weapons Dossier. Al-Marashi is an academic, so the only reason to listen to him is that he knows what he’s talking about. In this case, what he knows about is modern Iraqi history and that includes a lot about Syria.

Most of the article is about how the probability of success in Syria is low and the risks are high. He notes, “[A] surgical strike envisioned by the Obama administration will probably do little strategic damage to Damascus’s arsenal.” But the risks?

This is exactly what we should expect. In fact, it is economics: incentives matter. And indeed, the administration is trying to make an incentives case for war with Syria. Supposedly, a few days of bombing will hurt the Syrian government, but that is hardly clear. Al-Marashi notes, “If deterrence is Washington’s goal, Bashar al-Assad should have already learned the lesson that he does not enjoy the impunity that Saddam did. The military buildup and saber rattling communicated this fact, without an air strike occurring.” But more than that, if the United States really wants to help, there is a solution:

But that won’t happen. At this point, I’m not at all clear on why the United States is hell bent on bombing Syria. We seem to want to do it because we’ve worked ourselves up into a froth about it. But clearly the best option is to stop the civil war. But that clearly isn’t even on the table for discussion—at least among those who have the power to do anything.

Won’t you look at that! Joe “War Is a Hell of a Lot of Fun!” Lieberman was on Fox News Sunday this morning. He is not happy that we aren’t bombing Syria right now. He told Chris Wallace, “I’m sure that our enemies are cheering now as a result of this decision because they realize it’s not clear the president will get authority, and our allies are worried.” Who exactly are these “enemies” of which he speaks? It must be Syria and that speaks volumes about what is going on with him and others who are so hot for an attack. They just want to attack Syria and the chemical weapons allegations are just an excuse. As for our allies, he can’t mean the UK. I guess he’s talking about the rebels, but they are at best a mixed bag.

Now this the man who spent the 1960s avoiding the draft. First it was as an undergraduate. Then it was as a law student. Then, by the time he graduated, he was married with a kid so he got a deferment for that! But since then, he really has never seen a war he doesn’t like. The man really should just have been a Republican. It’s not like he represented a conservative state; Connecticut went for Obama by over 17 percentage points. So he really believes what he says.

Meanwhile, someone who actually did go to war and who was vilified for it by the Republican chicken hawks, John Kerry is appearing on 5 talk shows this morning! Samuel Knight reported, “Kerry’s hypocrisy, thinly veiled by an over-eager swagger—including a refusal, on This Week to consider the possibility that the administration’s case for war will be rejected by Congress—is reminiscent of the dark days of 2002-2003.” But it likely doesn’t matter anyway. Kerry also said that Obama “has the right to do this no matter what Congress does.”

Let’s just think about that. Obama wants to bomb Syria because they allegedly broke international norms by using chemical weapons. Note: they broke norms and not laws because Syria never signed any chemical weapons treaty. But all of those involved in this push to war think that it is right for Obama to just bomb Syria. United States law doesn’t matter. And international law doesn’t matter. Apparently, laws are just for the little countries.

I’ve been amazed at how often I hear the argument that the United States has to bypass the United Nations because Russia and China are blocking our war plans. This is just amazing. The idea is that the United Nations is only a useful institution so long as it allows us to do whatever we want. Russia and China aren’t just countries that disagree with us; they are objectively wrong. This is madness and the American press—television especially—is allowing it to happen by not providing the broader context but just allowing Kerry and Lieberman and anyone other random person (As long as they are pro-war!) to pontificate on the matter.

Update (1 September 2013 10:07 am)

This from Glenn Greenwald:

Why do we love Steve Kornacki? Because he doesn’t believe his own bullshit. Sure, he’s pleased that he said that Eliot Spitzer might not cruise to an easy victory over Scott Stringer for New York City comptroller, and that looks to be at least partly correct. But he was quick to point out how he is more often wrong. Most pundits and commentators accept the acclaim for being right but never admit their failures. No one pays attention to when I’m right or wrong. But when I make predictions, I do it for other reasons—to make some point about a situation, and sometimes just to be a crank. And I think that is true of most others when they make predictions. But I’m really glad that Kornacki took the opportunity of being right about this to highlight the fact that what’s important about him—and the reason we listen to him—is not his prognostication skills.

And for the record, it isn’t at all clear that Spitzer won’t cruise to an easy victory. According to a New York Times/Siena College poll that came out on Friday, Spitzer has a 15 percentage point advantage against Stringer. I don’t especially care. I like Spitzer and I know next to nothing about Stringer. It would certainly be nice to see Spitzer back in elected office because I think he has done a good job. But if he doesn’t win, I’m sure there will be lots of other chances for him to serve the public.

Good news on Syria. Really! Obama is backing out. For some time, he has claimed that legally he can do whatever the hell he wants. When he was a candidate, however, Obama had a very different opinion. Note how that works. It isn’t that Obama got into office and finally had a chance to read the Constitution and its interpretations, and figured out, “Oh, I was wrong!” As people are fond of bring up all the time he was a constitutional law professor. So it is just that once he got the power he changed his mind. Power corrupts even boy scouts like Obama.

But this Syria bombing campaign seems to be different than the Libyan bombing. In Libyan, Obama didn’t get Congressional approval because, as we all know, Obama can kill anyone he likes without asking permission. (This is different from, say, minting a trillion dollar coin to save our economy from radical Republicans; that would actually make things better, so Obama can’t do it.) Now Obama claims that we really need to have a “debate” about the bombing.

This is good news, but it still annoys me. After all, if the situation is Syria is so clear as Secretary Kerry has said, what is there to debate? But of course, there is a whole lot to debate. It is just that Kerry is showing himself to be a much greater jackass than we had ever thought. I’m sure this part of the administration’s plan. Kerry was supposed to out in public braying like a donkey in heat to see if it would turn the country back to those halcyon days of 1990 and 2003. Quick! Who does this remind you of:

This decision by Obama puts him in a much better place. First, it extends the amount of time before he has to bomb. In that time, maybe cooler heads will prevail or maybe the nation will lose interest. Maybe John Kerry will shut the fuck up? Second, Congress may pull a Parliament and vote not to give authorization. And third, even if they do give him authorization, he gets more political cover. None of this will change the fact that it is an illegal act of war. But who cares about such things? Certainly not American presidents who can commit any war crimes they like without having to worry about being held accountable.

Any day that we don’t attack is another day that we aren’t killing people in Syria. Given that the Syrian government is likely to react to an attack by killing more people, this is unquestionably good. As I noted last night, Obama is being very weak in this whole thing. But if he’s going to be weak, this is the way to do it. Better a weakling than a weak bully.

Update (31 August 2013 8:11 pm)

Samuel Knight has done an excellent job running the Political Animal blog today. He’s been writing about Syria a lot. He is highly (but reasonably) cynical about the administration, Obama to Ask Congress for Permission to Bomb Syria—Let the Repulsive Horse Trading Begin. We exchanged email where I said that I hoped he was wrong but that if it weren’t, it would be the perfect storm of clusterfucks: domestic and international. He responded that he hoped he was wrong too. But hope only takes you so far.

The New York Times just published an article that pulls me in two directions, President Pulls Lawmakers Into Box He Made. On the one hand, the subtext seems to be that Obama just really doesn’t want to bomb Syria. On the other hand, he was arguing that he wanted to get Congress’ approval in case he later needed to attack Iran. In addition to this, it seems that all of the people surrounding Obama are keen to attack Syria. This is pretty bad if the only one in the White House with any reluctance about this is Obama himself. That is, of course, assuming that the whole “leaked” story isn’t just bullshit.

It is the weekend, so barring war, I’m going to try to get some of my backlog posted. And right now, that brings me back to Thursday when Chris Hayes had his big interview with Cory Booker on All In. As you may know, I’m not a fan of the major. He is New Democrat all the way. He’s fine on social issues, but on economic issues, he’s terrible, and he is firmly in the pocket of Wall Street. You may remember the dust up during last year’s election when he defended Bain Capital on Meet the Press. That’s who Booker is and Democrats continue to delude themselves when they think electing someone like him will result in any change. Booker and Obama and all the New Democrats are just smarter, more competent Republicans. I want more from my elected officials, and barring that, I at least want the choice to vote for an economic liberal.

But here’s the thing: in addition to everything else, Booker is a coward. At worst, he is leading in his Senate campaign by 16 percentage points. Other polls show him leading by far more than that. But as you will see in the interview below, the man cannot answer a straight question that goes outside of his talking points. And Hayes’ questions are not at all rough. It is a very friendly interview:

As we liberals move into the future, we have to recognize that people like Booker really are a big problem. It looks like that Republican Party is determined to destroy itself. If that happens, the Democratic Party will rightly divide itself on the economic issues. And that will put Booker and friends in the New Republican Party. And once again, that will make the party one of ideology over practical solutions. Because this love of Wall Street, big banks, and the rich is not based on all the great things they do for society. It is based on affinity bias. Booker’s friends are bankers just like all the New Democrats. And that’s just fine: people should be allowed to be evil in their own ways. I can work with people like Booker as the opposition—but not as a member of my (liberal) party. On the single most important issue that we face as a people, he wants to make things worse.

I’ve been really busy this week, so I haven’t been doing much cooking. And cooking is the only time I watch television. But tonight, I had to cook because I had some Spanish rice and corn tortillas that really needed to be used or they were going to go bad. So I found myself in the kitchen trying to make something like taquitos. I failed miserably, but the result was still delicious. But mostly, I got to watch All In, which was all about the coming Syrian attack. Even though I seem to agree with Chris Hayes on the issue, most of the guest were there cheer leading for war.

I was hoping for something more from The Rachel Maddow Show. The truth is that I’m really depressed about what’s going on. It really does seem that Obama has painted himself into a corner with all that talk of “red lines.” And now he thinks he will look weak if he doesn’t bomb Syria. It’s sad, because to me, he does look weak. He looks weak the same way that bullies always look weak. He looks weak because he cares more about saving face than doing what’s right. So I was hoping that Maddow would make me feel better, even though I thought the odds were long.

Alas. Rachel Maddow was off. In fact, the whole The Rachel Maddow Show was off. Instead, there was a special edition of Hardball with Chris “War Monger” Matthews. But I continued to watch. After all, my pseudo-taquitos were not ready to go into the over. (I know, I know: they are fried, not baked!) Anyway, how bad could Chris Matthews be? Surely he had learned something from being so painfully, so aggressively wrong about the Iraq War. Right? Right?! Right?!!

One thing that Chris Hayes discussed on his show is how disheartening it is to see people pushing for war with Syria by saying exactly the same things proponents of war with Iraq said 10 years ago. The only difference is now they add some obligatory statement about how it is different this time. Sure, the intelligence that was indisputable last time was wrong, but this time it really is indisputable. But other than saying such things really deliberately and forcefully, we have no reason to think anything has changed.

Matthews came out swinging. He said the bombings were about killing. Okay, that got my attention. But it was just a fake. It was just so that he could go on to claim that killing innocents was a small price to pay for sending a message. And he doesn’t see that message being sent to Syria and the Assad government. No, bombing Syria is about sending a message to Iran about not building a nuclear weapon. And he had others on to parrot back his words to him. Matthews really belongs on Fox News, because that’s all his program is: propaganda. And I would say that even if I agreed with him.

Here’s the thing: bombing might indeed make Iran very careful in public. And it might make them really determined in private to get a nuclear weapon. Because everyone knows that Obama wouldn’t be about to bomb Syria if it had a nuclear weapon. As I wrote about earlier this week, when the United States intervenes, we send unintended messages. But all of this talk of messages from Matthews is just smoke and mirrors. He loves a good war. He loves a bad war. He loves any war.

MSNBC should have fired him long ago!

In this day in 1748, the great French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David was born. How great was he? All you have to do is check out Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces from about a year before he died.

Perhaps the greatest Romantic period English author, Mary Shelley was born in 1797. Look, I know. Frankenstein is kind of slow by modern standards. But Shelley’s sense of plot and tempo is amazing. If you haven’t read the book, you really should do so. The movies, as much as I love them, are candy compared to the book. It is also, in addition to everything else, an indictment of who we are. The real monster in Frankenstein is not the creation of our modern Prometheus, but rather us.

The German chemist, one of the founders of physical chemistry, Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff was born in 1852. Mathematician Carl David Tolme Runge of Runge–Kutta fame, was born in 1856. Russian landscape painter Isaac Levitan was born in 1860. The father of nuclear physics Ernest Rutherford was born in 1871.

Actor Fred MacMurray was born in 1909. He was really great at playing awful characters as he did in Double Indemnity and The Apartment. Baseball player Ted Williams was born in 1918. Abstract painter Guy de Lussigny was born in 1929. And writer Molly Ivins was born in 1944.

Slightly less than totally evil billionaire Warren Buffett is 83 today. Blues singer Jewel Brown is 76. Here she is doing “Did You Hear About Jerry” with Louis Armstrong’s band:

Comedian Lewis Black is 65, so we won’t be seeing him anymore. And actor Cameron Diaz is 41.

The day, however, belongs to the great cartoonist Robert Crumb who is 70 today. I don’t know what to say about him. I’ve admired him since I was very young. He has a very distinct style that is becoming less so because of his huge effect on the profession. But what most comes across is his extreme honesty. It is hard to read his first person work and not uncomfortably identify with him. But that probably says more about me than anything. I think there is something about being a skinny, shy, but opinionated guys that binds us together.

Happy birthday Robert Crumb!

Since speculation seems to be the word of the day, I thought I would offer up some more. Is it possible that President Obama is trying to use Syria as a kind of “wag the dog” scenario? You may remember the modestly successful 1997 comedy Wag the Dog. It told the story of a president who is caught making advances to an under aged girl two weeks before the election. So the campaign brings on spin-doctor Conrad Brean, who stages a war to distract the people from the sex scandal.

I’m not suggesting that Obama wants to start a war to avoid a sex scandal or any scandal at all of his own making. Rather, wars have a tendency (in the beginning) to make people love the president. And if a war was going on, he could easily say to the Republicans, “Quit fucking around the raise the debt limit. We’re at war for Christ’s sake!” The fact that we are already at war in Afghanistan doesn’t really matter. That war’s a total clusterfuck, but no one mistakes it for something that Obama has to focus on lest it become even more of one.

The idea is wonderfully America. It would be saying, 120,000 Syrian civilians don’t mean a thing. But the government’s credit rating is at state, and well, them’s fightin’ words! So why not Syria? The use of chemical weapons is an outrage. (That’s why Bush Sr said very mean things when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds!) And if world history teaches anything it is that leaders only need the tiniest of justifications for their invasions. Remember that when Germany invaded Poland, there really were people in Poland who welcomed them. They were liberators, not conquerors!

Any reasonable person would have to wonder how likely this scenario is. Not likely, I’m afraid. But I do think that it is frosting. It is a sweetener for something that the administration (for very poor reasons) thinks it ought to do. After all, it isn’t just that it will likely improve Obama’s approval rating and make the Republicans look like even bigger dicks than normal. It will also highlight the 5% sequester cuts that the military has suffered this year. On a domestic level, it has a lot to recommend it. It also answers Steve Benen’s question this morning, “It remains unclear why action must happen so quickly.”

Much of my reason for speculating about this comes from an excellent article that Matt Yglesias wrote yesterday, The Case for Doing Nothing in Syria. He sets out the case as clearly as one could for why war with Syria is madness. The argument for war is all about false framing:

But as Steve Benen also reported this morning, “With this in mind, the likelihood of a U.S. military strike appears all but certain. Indeed, it’s not at all clear what could change President Obama’s mind.” And I’m just trying to figure out why.

It seems that budget negotiations between the White House and Senate Republicans have broken down. This is part of the effort to avoid a government shutdown and then default. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. Why is the White House negotiating with Senate Republicans, when it is the Democrats who control the Senate? Oh, that’s right! Because Congress, the Senate in particular, is totally fucked up.

The problem in the negations is that the Republicans want to cut entitlement programs. The White House is fine with that, but they want corresponding tax increases in the form of reduced tax deductions. The Republicans will have none of it. Let us take a moment to think about how absurd this is. Our economy is in a bad state. So the Republican response: make it worse by cutting entitlements. The Democratic response: we will only make the economy worse if you agree to do even more damage by raising taxes!

The economics of this is very simple. Our economy is running below capacity. Businesses are not investing because there is not enough demand for their products. Think about it: why buy a new widget making machine if you already have more widget making machines than you need to keep up with the widgets that people are buying? As a result, there is a lot of money just sitting around. So lowering the amount of money that the government borrows is not going to increase the amount that businesses are borrowing. (Also note: businesses are currently sitting on huge piles of their own money.)

I don’t expect much from the Republicans. They don’t want to cut entitlements because they think it is good economic policy. They want to cut them because it takes money away from the poor and that is just what Republicans do. But I do expect something from the Democrats and this raising taxes obsession is madness. While it is true that taxing the wealthy will not have the deleterious effect that taking money away from the poor will, it is still bad for the economy right now. What’s more, it all seems so much like a game. When Obama got the Republicans to agree to a tax increase earlier this year, Democrats were triumphant. It wasn’t that it was good policy; it was simply that “Obama forced the Republicans!” Big deal.

From a political standpoint, this doesn’t make sense either. Let’s suppose that Obama got what he wanted: cuts to entitlements and raised taxes. The budget would pass through Congress with primarily Democratic votes. So in 2014, the Republicans would campaign on the fact that the Democrats cut Social Security and raised taxes. Brilliant guys!