Syria: Here Comes The Creep Again

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There’s a quote I heard somewhere — I can’t remember exactly where — that says, “Men tempt you with your vices; the devil tempts you with your virtues.” I think of that quote a lot when I think about the recent decision by President Obama to send military aid to Syria in addition to the humanitarian aid we’re already providing.

I know I said a couple of weeks ago that the Democrats were just doing their usual act, trying to prove they were all for another overseas military intervention just to keep the Republicans from calling them wimps.

After thinking about it, I’m willing to allow as how maybe, just maybe, both Republicans and Democrats really do think that some sort of intervention in Syria is the right thing to do because what’s going on there is horrible, Bashar el-Assad’s a brutal dictator, and helping the people of Syria out is a good and right and American act because we love to help the oppressed.

I still don’t think we should do it.

The Syrian conflict is as much a sectarian war as a political one. Syria is about 10-14 percent Christian, 10-14 percent Shiite Muslim, with most of the remainder being Sunni Muslims. Except that Assad and most of the elite (including about 70 percent of the career military) are Alawites, which is a branch of the Shiites. Sort of. Even some Shiites are suspicious of the Alawites for some of their more unorthodox beliefs. (This sort of thing is the reason I routinely mock people who talk about “Muslims” as if they were some huge monolithic organization. These people make the Baptists look unified.)

The Alawites were oppressed by the majority Sunnis until Bashar’s father, Hafiz al-Assad, rose to the power that he held with an iron fist for nearly 30 years. One of the reasons the government is fighting so hard, according to some observers, is the fear that the Alawites will be massacred by resentful Sunnis if the regime falls.

It would be a grim and bitter irony if the “oppressed” we spend the time arming turn around and become the oppressors again. It would not, however, be a huge surprise. In 2011, the uprising in the city of Homs left dozens dead, mostly Allawites, after which pro-government forces engaged in a series of drive-by shootings of civilians in Sunni neighborhoods. I hope you’re beginning to see why we should avoid this whole mess.

Saudi Arabia (ruled by Sunnis) is backing the rebels, while Iran (ruled by Shiites) backs the government. Meanwhile, one of the most powerful and best-equipped rebel groups is an al-Qaida affiliate called the al-Nusra Front. On the government side, we’ve got fighters trained by and loyal to the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah.

So we have militias, some of whom are associated with or loyal to al-Qaida, killing and being killed by troops of a government supported by Hezbollah. I’m tempted to say, “Where’s the downside?” — and would if it weren’t for all those poor civilians caught in the middle. Still, putting ourselves on one side or the other of a fight between Muslim sects is a recipe for disaster.

I’m somewhat comforted — but only somewhat — by President Obama’s statement in a televised interview with Charlie Rose that he’s not looking at sending in troops or Special Forces or even setting up the “no-fly” zones that people like Honorable John McCain are clamoring for. “If you set up a no-fly zone,” Obama noted, “you may not be actually solving the problem on the ground.” We’re “just” giving weapons to them, and apparently hoping that they don’t end up in the hands of people who’ll be happy to use them on us once the fighting in Syria is over (if indeed it ever is). And it’s nice to see that no one is (as yet) proposing to give man-portable anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels, since there’s a good chance that one or more of them could end up in the hands of some guy skulking at the end of an American runway, just waiting to bring down a 767 or an Airbus.

But limited assistance has a way of becoming less and less limited as time goes on and the demands of those we’re trying to help become greater. It’s called “mission creep,” and historical examples abound, from Vietnam to Somalia to Afghanistan.

“We know what it’s like to rush into a war in the Middle East without having thought it through,” Obama told Rose. But I’m not completely sure I like the idea of slowly creeping our way into another Middle Eastern war any better, even if we do it with the best of intentions.

Nailed it

This is why Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comics.

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Seems I've Heard All This Before

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The story is told in these parts of a local lawyer who, many years ago, was appointed to represent a man on a charge of indecent exposure.

Sadly, it wasn’t said defendant’s first such charge. In fact, it seems that the disturbed young man had a long record of flashing people. Thinking quickly, the lawyer argued that the law defined “indecent exposure” as the display of one’s “private parts.” This man, the lawyer argued, had displayed himself so many times that none of his parts could be considered “private” any more.

Case dismissed.

If the law ever catches up with Edward Snowden, the former “civilian contractor” who claims to be the inside source for a spate of recent news stories revealing the extent of government data collection of phone and Internet traffic, he could always use the defense my long-ago colleague used: This stuff’s so well-known and has been documented for so long, it’s not really secret.

See, I’m a little bemused (not to mention amused) by the people who are suddenly shocked — SHOCKED, I tell you — to find out that the government is (1) collecting the metadata (which number called which other number and for how long) from millions of phone conversations; and (2) collecting data regarding people’s interactions on the Internet, including “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats,” as reported in the British newspaper The Guardian.

My bemusement (and amusement) are caused by the fact that I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that this was going on. I mean, if I knew and was writing about the phone thing as far back as 2006 (and I was), the knowledge must have been pretty doggone common.

I also recall a conversation I had with someone discussing the government’s collection of Internet data.

“What’s the matter?” the person smirked. “Is there something in your Google searches you don’t want someone to see?”

I answered that, since my online research for the book I was writing had recently included searches on child pornography distribution networks and Claymore mines, I did have concerns that someone might get the wrong idea. (The book, by the way, was my novel “Breaking Cover,” which first came out in 2005. Still available on Amazon. Just saying.)

Anyway, anyone who’s surprised to find out that the government has been using sophisticated computers to spy on phone and Internet traffic really hasn’t been paying a heck of a lot of attention the past few years. What some people claim to be upset about is the breathtaking amount of data trawled by the government’s electronic nets.
“We had no idea,” they claim, “that when we handed incredible amounts of authority to collect data to a government equipped with massive banks of supercomputers, they’d go after THIS much!”

There’s a word for people like that. That word is “fools.”

See, the real scandal is, it’s all legal. In fact, the best thing said about this whole kerfluffle came from John Oliver on his first night as summer host of “The Daily Show.” “We’re not saying that you broke any laws,” he said to the president and the NSA. “It’s just a little weird that you didn’t have to.”

The entire PRISM program, which began in 2007, was a successor to the widely criticized “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” which began after 9/11 under the President Who Must Not Be Named. The TSP drew fire because it hadn’t been authorized by law or overseen by anyone, including the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

PRISM, on the other hand, was created under the umbrella of the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which were renewed by Congress under President Obama in 2012 (because once you give one president power, the next ones are unlikely to give it back). All of this happened without much comment by anyone, except a few liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald (who helped write the Guardian story), and libertarian conservatives like Ron Paul.

That’s another one of the weird things about this whole debate — it’s created some of the strangest bedfellows since Billy Bob Thornton took up with Angelina Jolie. Liberal California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican House Speaker John Boehner both called Snowden a “traitor” and defended the surveillance program, while Glenn Beck and Michael Moore have hailed Snowden as a hero.

So, with the ideological walls crumbling, will some actual, nonpartisan scrutiny be given to the claim that “we need to invade your privacy, because of TERRORISM”? Will we finally get an honest, non-party-driven debate over what privacy actually means in an increasingly nonprivate, nonsecured, globally networked datasphere most of us barely understand?

Well, we live in hope.

Review: A FINE AND DANGEROUS SEASON, by Keith Raffel

A Fine and Dangerous Season by Keith Raffel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What I liked most about this book is the way it showed how history is made by real people, with all their strengths, weaknesses, flaws, old grudges, resentments, grace, loyalty, faithlessness, idealism, and cynicism--sometimes all in the same character. Keith Raffel does a great job of portraying his people, both historical and fictional, so that you care not only about what happens to the country (which you probably already know) but what happens to them. That's what makes the best historical fiction, and the way Raffel handles the "ticking clock" of the Cuban Missile Crisis makes this a top-notch thriller as well. Recommended.



View all my reviews

The Latest Threat to Our Freedoms: Rental Bikes?

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It seems there’s this new thing in New York City called CitiBike. Based on similar bike-sharing systems in other major cities around the world, Citibike, according to its website, “consists of a fleet of specially designed, sturdy, very durable bikes that are locked into a network of docking stations sited at regular intervals around a city. The bikes can be rented from and then returned to any station in the system.” It’s run (and this is important) by a private company and receives no money from the city, although the city’s Department of Transportation (yes, NYC has its own DOT) endorses it. CitiBike brags that it’s “creating 170 jobs and generating $36 million in local economic activity annually.”

Sounds pretty cool, right? Who could possibly object to a job-creating, convenient, innovative transportation option run by private enterprise?

Well, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, for one. Or at least its chairman, a lady named Dorothy Rabinowitz. In an extraordinary five-minute video rant posing as an interview (and entitled “Death by Bicycle”), Ms. Rabinowitz rails against the program asif it were Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Tossed a softball question about why the program was needed (“are we too fat?”) the diminutive and belligerent Ms. Rabinowitz was off and running: "Do not ask me to enter the minds of the totalitarians running this city.” But she was just getting started: "I would like to say to the people who don't live in New York... envision what happens when you get a government run by an autocratic leader."

Well…okay, I will, but what does that have to do with a privately funded and completely optional bike rental program? The raging Ms. Rabinowitz is never really clear. What is clear is that she really doesn’t like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg or Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who she describes as “ideology-maddened.”

She’s not all that crazy about bicyclists, either. “The most important danger in this city,” she insists, “is not the yellow cabs… it is the cyclists, empowered by the city administration.”

Wow. If bicyclists are “the most important danger in the city,” then I guess they’ve completely licked crime, pollution and terrorism. You’d think Mayor Bloomberg would get more credit. She also warns darkly about “the bike lobby” which she characterizes as “an all-powerful enterprise.” (If you wondered where all the Mafiosi went, they’re running Schwinn.)

It’s hard to watch the video without wondering “What on Earth is the matter with this woman?” So, a little Google, a little Wikipedia, and we find that: “Dorothy Rabinowitz is an American conservative journalist and commentator.”

Oh, a conservative. That explains everything. In the past few years, “conservatism” has become less and less about an intellectual movement and more and more about being addicted to hysteria and hyperbole. It’s a mindset where someone choosing to rent a cheerful bright blue Citibike from a private company can become as ominous a symbol of tyranny as a Red Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square. It’s a mindset where Agenda 21, a non-binding, completely voluntary action plan by the UN (essentially 300 boring pages of suggestions—seriously, read it sometime), can be characterized byGlenn Beck as a plan for "centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth” and lead to concerned declarations deploring it by our own county commissioners, who apparently had too much time on their hands.

Some of the blame can be laid, I think, at the feet (or tentacles) of the Internet. No one gets page views, re-tweets, and links to their sites by responding to, for instance, the loss of an election by saying things like “Well, I’m disappointed but the people have spoken”. No, to get attention, you’ve got to respond by thundering “We are no longer a democracy!” (Donald Trump) or “Goodluk America u just voted for economic & spiritual suicide” (Ted Nugent). By the same token, no one’s going to watch a video with a nice little old lady from the WSJ saying, in a reasonable tone, “I think suddenly flooding New York’s crowded streets with rental bikes, probably ridden by people who don’t own their own and therefore may not ride much, may be risky.” That might be a valid point, but it’s not going to go viral.

In the online age, you’ve got to pitch a fit to get people to listen. You’ve got to throw a tantrum. It’s an environment particularly suited for modern conservatives, or, as a writer friend of mine calls them, “The Tantrumists.” Perhaps the WSJ should change its name to the “Tantrum Gazette.”