Obama Failure Thread Part VI

Duly noted. You may resume whining.

[edit]Oh, and please learn how to use the quote function. Thanks!

 

You know, our leadership in Washington has done a very good job relative to previous global superpowers in terms of keeping us out of foreign entanglements, regardless of what you may think. Let's compare ourselves to Great Britain:



That map is a list of territories (in white) that the United Kingdom has not ever invaded. Let's compare ourselves to the USSR, as well. Or the current Russian government, which has invaded Georgia, fought insurgencies in Chechnya and Dagestan, and propped up leaders in Belarus and the Ukraine. Or Chinese history, which has been a pretty bloody list of foreign interventions into Southeast Asia, Manchuria, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Central Asia, etc. French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colonialism was far more intrusive than ours. That doesn't even include German and Japanese imperialism. So as far as a global superpower goes, our bungles in Iraq and Vietnam are pretty much our worst transgressions (depending on how you feel about Hiroshima and Nagasaki), definitely not the norm for US foreign policy, and show that we've evolved our way of thinking about global power. So you should give the US a lot more credit on its restraint than you do.

 

Since it's apparently "Assign Opinions To Other People Day"...

Unlike you, I don't necessarily see "the government" as an alien occupying force.

Unlike you, I'm far less concerned about the size of "government" than about the quality of "government".

Unlike you, I therefore don't see all tax cuts as always good and all tax hikes as always bad. Unlike a straw man "liberal", I also don't see all tax cuts as always bad and all tax hikes as always good. Not to get all Ecclesiastes on your ass but there's a time to cut taxes and a time to raise them. The same is true for government spending and even government deficit spending. The trick is to know when to cut which taxes and when to raise which taxes.

Unlike you, I don't think that the government cutting taxes is not giving money to the people. I also do not think that cutting taxes is giving money to the people. Cutting taxes is shifting control of the use of our money from our elected representatives who invest or spend our money on our behalf to us to invest or spend directly. It's still "our money" either way the same way the you still own a stock and are therefore (part) owner of a company even if you do not directly control the company.

Now that we've gotten that over with, if you want to discuss the Agency Problem (ie., the interests of owners versus the interests of controllers) that is equally at work in the private as well as the public sector, well, I think that's a topic for another thread.

 

So what you are saying is Mitt Money was right and the USA is like a corporation?

 

Not really. For one thing, the formal rule for electing the agents in the US government is that each voter gets one vote whereas in a corporation each share gets a vote and if any voter owns more than one share, that voter gets more than one vote. Also, the purpose of a corporation is to create a profit for its owners whereas that is not the purpose of a government, even if some muddle-headed wingnuts think it is. There are other differences too. If you're interested in learning more, there are some good books I can recommend to you.

 

So what you are saying is that the more people contribute to the corporation the more votes they should have? Interesting.

 

Wrong again. I'm saying that under current law and custom, the more shares a person purchases, the more votes they have. Let's see if you can spot the differences between your statement and mine.

*grabs popcorn, waits for hilarity to ensue*

 

Learn the difference between prescriptive and descriptive.

 

Hey hey hey!!! No assistance from the peanut gallery!

 

So you are saying that governments and corporations are not that similar?

 

I'm saying you're playing a game of "Sophist". And losing.

 

I did not know there was going to be a scoring system.

 

Fire game is on. Gotsta jet. It's been nice toying with you.

 

Effectively the only question I have with drones is, "Would it be different if it was manned?"

I don't really see the difference between raining down explosives on people whether they're dropped by a human or dropped by a robot that's controlled by a human.

By that measurement, I don't really have a problem with intelligence gathering by drones, since nobody would *really* complain if it was done by a human. But I do have a major, perhaps existential, problem with armed drones.

PS. This is what I want for Chanukah:



It's a $400 drone. What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B007HZLLPY/b3ta-21


Also, I know this is old but it never fails to arouse a chuckle (possibly NSFW). Too bad it wasn't armed with mayonnaise.

 

Another oldie but goodie.

 

You know, you're right. I do owe an apology. Therefore, I apologize to the rest of the thread for the embarrassment they now feel on your behalf because I made you look silly and caused you to get all passive aggressive and whiny.

 

Cool. We're invited there 146/148 times, IIRC. That's a big jump from previous global superpowers, and whoever comes after us as the global power than us will do a better job. You can at least admit we're learning as a species, right?

 

While Matt wastes his time posting witless insults because he's butthurt that I pointed out the many and obvious deficiencies of his stance on drones, I've doing research on the topic. Because, unlike winguts who can only operate within their echo chamber, I try to get as many sides of a story I've even cruised the libertarian Cato Institute website.

Sure, some of the Cato response is utterly predictable given their ideological biases, but they are usually a cut above the normal glibertarian blather and occasionally make a good point so they cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Here is a recent post by Cato research fellow Trevor Burris which is thankfully free of much of the paranoia mongering found among the glibertarians here in P&CE:

http://www.cato.org/blog/presidents...=Feed:+CatoHomepageHeadlines+(Cato+Headlines)

It's interesting that Burris never questions the necessity for drone strikes as such. He even states that:

"I agree, as I think most Americans would, that there are times in which the government can justifiably use lethal force against even its own citizens."

Burris even acknowledges the reason why not only the Obama administration but many Reeps support drones as one component of counter-terrorism measures:

"Currently, the president and other high-level officials suffer almost no costs for drone attack mistakes. Conversely, the costs to them, politically, personally, and in their legacies, of allowing a terrorist attack on U.S. soil are quite high. Many people will blame President Obama for any attack that occurs over the next four years. Intelligence reports after a future attack will inevitably point out when the U.S. could have acted but chose not to. Perhaps a drone had the eventual terrorist in its sights but the kill order was not given, maybe because innocents were in the area. Therefore, we can reasonably expect high-level officials to err on the side of overkill, and perhaps this is a defensible policy."

But....

Burris, it turns out, has many of the same problems and concerns that Chris M., I and others have already expressed about the program, namely that innocent people do get killed in drone attacks and that there is currently a lack of oversight and transparency in the program to ensure that the responsibility to keep Americans safe doesn't cause enough mistakes to make the negatives outweigh the benefits. So the question again is not of ending all drone strikes but beefing up the safeguards which I've argued for all along.

Even more interesting is the "debate" in Cato Unbound. It's over a year old but still relevant:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/january-2012-how-drones-are-changing-warfare/

While Cortright is a bit overwrought bordering on paranoid, Barry echoes Burris in being a more moderate voice who again expresses many of the same concerns discussed in P&CE.

There are a few things missing from the Cato material, though.

First, there's no recognition that drones are replacing the failed Bush program of invasion and occupation which were much, much worse.

Second, it's not like Obama created AUMF or drone strikes. So where was the opposition to them before 2009 when we were killing a higher percentage of civilians and lower percentage of terrorists?

Third, regarding the "drones make it too easy to start wars" meme, how are drones different from the cruise missiles we fired into Iraq and other places? Or any other military technology since the hand-held stone chisel that have allowed us to kill at greater distances?

Fourth, for all the legitimate concerns, there are no suggestions of alternative solutions that aren't too vague, fuzzy or long-term. Malou Innocent tries but she overplays the "you can create terrorists" card which expired some time around 2002 (or decades before that, if we consider the effects of our support of Israel) and the following isn't terribly feasible as a short-term replacement for an intelligent drone program with the proper legal and procedural safeguards:

" Military force against insurgents must be applied precisely and discriminately. On the ground, Pakistani security forces lack training, equipment, and communication gear to carry out a low-intensity counterinsurgency. But drones provide a poor substitute if the goal is to engage rather than alienate the other side.

A better strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is for the United States to focus on limiting cross-border movement by supporting local Pakistani security forces with a small number of US Special Forces personnel. To improve fighting capabilities and enhance cooperation, Washington and Islamabad must increase the number of military-to-military training programs to help hone Pakistan’s counterterrorism capabilities and serve as a confidence-building measure to lessen the Pakistan Army’s tilt toward radicalism."

Pakistan harbored OBL for almost a decade and does anyone here really think that Afghan forces will beat the Taliban any time in the next 20 years? Even innocent acknowledges "Ending drone strikes is no panacea for Pakistan’s array of problems" but she doesn't tell us exactly what will marginalize the religious extremism and its sympathizers in the Muslim world.

Which still begs the question nobody seems able to answer "If not drones, then what?".

 

The Romans were "invited" to plenty of places too. It's amazing how many parties you get invites to when you got yourself a big-ass army.

Ratdog, hopefully you'll get a few drones in homeland America in the near future. Unarmed ones are already in the pipework, maybe they'll arm them in due course. Maybe then you'll manage to raise a few alternatives to killing people from half the world away with no knowledge of who they actually were.