Hank Kalet

Lines in the Syrian sand or ‘My foolish pride’

Ooh, what a price I pay,
My foolish pride.

— Gary Moore

I am constantly surprised at the willingness of elected leaders to box themselves into corners by making ultimatums.

“Read my lips, the first George Bush said as a way of looking resolute on taxes — with the inevitable backtracking making look the part of the ineffectual president he was. Jim McGreevey did it when he signed a no-tax pledge while running for governor and then stuck to his pledge even as the state’s budget hole grew.

The effect of these foolish statements, however, did not result in the use of American war-making power oversees. That’s not the case with President Obama’s own foolish pronouncements last year about Syrian chemical weapons.

Here is what he said a year ago — Aug. 20 — during a visit to the White House briefing room:

“What I’m saying is we’re monitoring that situation very carefully,” Obama said in a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room.
But if the Assad regime were to use its weapons stockpiles, or alternatively, move it around, Obama suggested military action could be on the table.

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” the president said. “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

It appears fairly certain that the Assad regime has, in fact, used chemical weapons and the president’s words have left him with little room to maneuver. Secretary of State John Kerry said today that Syria would be held to account for the “moral obscenity” of using weapons against its own people and that the White House “was moving closer to a military response.”

That, of course, is the red line talking. The red line is about credibility, we are told. It is about not looking weak, about putting our muscle where out mouth is. Put another way, the red line is about pride, and pride is one of the seven mortal sins — the root of all sins, in Christian theology. Dante viewed pride as “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbor,” and this seems to me a powerful description what we are witnessing with the red line debate over Syria. This may seem extreme, given the apparently altruistic motives, but the rhetoric here is relying on the language of punishment and power. This rhetorical focus comes not from charity, but from a pride that has

led us to see ourselves as the indispensable nation and the only one with the moral authority to meddle in others’ affairs. We claim it is about realpolitik and pragmatism, but it is not. It is pride expressed as a dangerous national self-regard — the same prideful nonsense that kept us in Vietnam for a decade, that kept us in Afghanistan and Iraq and that has consistently had us act in foolish and counterproductive ways on the world stage.

What we are watching are the beginnings of the next war — one the American people should not be happy about. And it is one that is likely to inflame an already volatile region. Assad is not the target, or maybe he is — that remains unclear as does what might be left in his wake were he removed from power. So we are looking at the military equivalent of a targeted drive-by — a message attached to the nose of a cruise missile. Add to this the uncertainty in Egypt, the continuing hostilities in Iraq and Lebanon and it is unclear to me what any of this can accomplish, aside from more death and destruction.

But we have drawn that red line and our credibility is at stake — at least that is what the military establishment and the Washington pundits are saying. And, you know, they are never wrong about these things.

Tejada suspension: Baseball’s PED overreaction

Major League Baseball has suspended former MVP Miguel Tejada for 105 games, the third-longest non-lifetime suspension in history, because of a positive test for Adderall, a drug used to treat attention-deficit disorder.

The suspension is being praised by many in baseball as proof that testing is working. But I am concerned that there may be more to the story. If the claims that Tejada is making are true — that he suffers from ADD — then we are not talking about another example of Major League Baseball getting its house back in order after years of ignoring a performance-enhancing-drug scandal. If Tejada does suffer from Adderall, then MLB has crossed an ethical line in suspending him.

Here is what Tejada had to say:

“I’ve been using it [Adderall] for the past five years and had medical permission from MLB. But my last permit expired on April 15 and they didn’t gave me another. I knew that I was in risk of breaking the rules, but at the same time, I could not stop using the medicine because I suffer from ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder]. It’s not a vice, it is a disease.”

Tejada has a dicey history with amphetamines and PEDs, but that does not rule out that his claims here are accurate. But the length and timing of the suspension — especially given what Tejada is saying — warranted more than this from MLB:

The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball announced today that Kansas City Royals infielder Miguel Tejada has received a 105-game suspension without pay after testing positive for an Amphetamine in violation of Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. The suspension of Tejada is effective immediately.

The league spent too many years tacitly condoning the home run culture that ultimately created the conditions within which steroid use grew among players. Now, as it attempts to remove the taint of PEDs from the game, it may just be going too far in the other direction.

Send me an e-mail.

Postcards of the mind

The poet H.L. Hix is hosting a special postcard project on his website. The idea, it appears, is to create an intellectual and emotional landscape by using a variation of a medium usually designed for short, pithy notes.

Here is my contribution, a very brief poem about Beach Haven.

Judge stops ‘stop-and-frisk’

There has never been much of a difference between with the New Jersey State Police did in the 1990s — racially profiling minority drivers on the Turnpike, which resulted in court oversight of the state cops — and what Bloomberg’s police were doing with New York’s stop-and-frisk program. Even the arguments that Bloomberg and the police made in defending stop-and-frisk sounded eerily like those made by New Jersey officials when they defended profiling practices.

It is good to see that the courts, at least in New York, are skeptical of the arguments.

In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that on hundreds of thousands of occasions since 2004, the police have systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. She further found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops.

In the words of The New York Times, the city — and not just police officers — were responsible for “a battery of constitutional violations” and that stop-and-frisk amounted to a “checkpoint-style policing tactic, with the intent of deterring minorities from carrying guns on the street.”

Send me an e-mail

NYT headline says it all: ‘U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind’

The American economy remains mired in what likely is a massive transformation that is fast leaving workers behind. As Floyd Norris writes today in his Off the Charts column,

AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.

The rest of the column explains some changes in the way income and gross domestic product are calculated, but the point is pretty clear. We are not in the midst of a magical economic rebound.

Send me an e-mail.