Syria...the News?

The Syria Babble We Don’t Need

By FRANK BRUNI in The New York Times

OUR country is about to make the most excruciating kind of decision, the most dire: whether to commence a military campaign whose real costs and ultimate consequences are unknowable.

But let’s by all means discuss the implications for Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Iowa, New Hampshire and 2016. Yea or nay on the bombing: which is the safer roll of the dice for a Republican presidential contender? Reflexively, sadly, we journalists prattle and write about that. We miss the horse race of 2012, not to mention the readership and ratings it brought. The next election can’t come soon enough.

So we pivot to Hillary Clinton. We’re always pivoting to Hillary Clinton. Should she be weighing in on Syria more decisively and expansively? Or does the fact that she authorized the war in Iraq compel restraint and a gentler tone this time around? What’s too gentle, and what’s just right? So goes one strand of commentary, and to follow it is to behold a perverse conflation of foreign policy and the Goldilocks fable.

The media has a wearying tendency — a corrosive tic — to put everything that happens in Washington through the same cynical political grinder, subjecting it to the same cynical checklist of who’s up, who’s down, who’s threading a needle, who’s tangled up in knots, what it all means for control of Congress after the midterms, what it all means for control of the White House two years later.

And we’re doing a bit too much of this with Syria, when we owe this crossroads something more than standard operating procedure, something better than knee-jerk ruminations on the imminent vote in Congress as a test for Nancy Pelosi, as a referendum on John Boehner, as a conundrum for Mitch McConnell, as a defining moment for Barack Obama.

You know whom it’s an even more defining moment for? The Syrians whose country is unraveling beyond all hope; the Israelis, Lebanese and Jordanians next door; the American servicemen and servicewomen whose futures could be forever altered or even snuffed out by the course that the lawmakers and the president chart.

The stakes are huge. Bomb Syria and there’s no telling how many innocent civilians will be killed; if it will be the first chapter in an epic longer and bloodier than we bargained for; what price America will pay, not just on the battlefield but in terms of reprisals elsewhere; and whether we’ll be pouring accelerant on a country and a region already ablaze.

Don’t bomb Syria and there’s no guessing the lesson that the tyrants of the world will glean from our decision not to punish Bashar al-Assad for slaughtering his people on whatever scale he wishes and in whatever manner he sees fit. Will they conclude that a diminished America is retreating from the role it once played? Will they interpret that, dangerously, as a green light? And what will our inaction say about us? About our morality, and about our mettle?

These are the agonizing considerations before our elected leaders and before the rest of us, and in light of them we journalists ought to resist turning the Syria debate into the sort of reality television show that we turn so much of American political life into, a soap opera often dominated by the mouthiest characters rather than the most thoughtful ones.

Last week, in many places, I read what Sarah Palin was saying about Syria, because of course her geopolitical chops are so thoroughly established. A few months back, I read about Donald Trump’s thoughts on possible military intervention, because any debate over strategy in the Middle East naturally calls for his counsel.

They’re both irrelevant, but they’re eyeball bait: ready, reliable clicks. I wonder how long I’ll have to wait before a post on some Web site clues me into Beyoncé’s Syria position. Late Friday, Politico informed the world of Madonna’s. (She’s anti-intervention.)

This type of coverage hasn’t been the dominant one. But plenty of it is creeping in.

Here’s a smattering of headlines, subheads, sentences and phrases from various news organizations last week: “Votes on Syria could have huge ramifications on 2016 contenders”; “Vote puts Republicans mulling 2016 run on the spot”; “Democrats and Republicans are choosing their words carefully, lest they take a hit three years from now”; “the difficult line G.O.P. presidential contenders like Rubio must balance in trying to project a sense of American military might without turning off conservatives skeptical about following Obama’s lead”; “the risk for Paul is if Obama’s prescription for Syria turns out to be a success”; “Mitch McConnell’s muddle”; “Hillary Clinton’s Syria dilemma.”

Some of this rightly illuminates the political dynamics that will influence the final decisions about a military strike that individual members of Congress and the president reach. It’s essential in that regard.

But some merely reflects the penchant that we scribes and pundits have for reducing complicated issues to campaign-style contests and personality-based narratives, especially if those personalities have the stature and thus the marketability of celebrities.

Celebrities get clicks, while the nitty-gritty is a tougher sell. I’ll not soon forget a BuzzFeed post from last February with this headline: “The sequester is terrible for traffic.” It didn’t mean Corollas and Escalades. It meant the number of readers bothering with Web stories on a subject they deemed as dry as they apparently did the federal budget and automatic cuts to spending.

THE traffic lament shared the screen with a link to an utterly different style of political feature asking readers to indicate which “presidential hotties” they’d get down and dirty with. The headline on that post? “Sexy U.S. presidents: would you hit it or quit it?” Sex, I guess, brings on rush hour. Maybe presidents do, too. They’re celebrities, even the dead ones.

It’s easy for the media and our consumers to focus on recognizable figures, how they’re faring and what they’re saying (or, better yet, shouting). I even spotted recent reports on what Chris Christie wasn’t saying. They noted that he hasn’t articulated a position on Syria, though that’s unremarkable and appropriate. He isn’t receiving the intelligence that members of Congress are, and he doesn’t get a vote.

He’s not the story, and neither is Paul or Rubio or the rest of them. What matters here are the complicated ethics and unpredictable ripple effects of the profound choice about to be made.

And if we want the men and women making it to be guided by principle, not politics, it surely doesn’t help for journalists to lavish attention on electoral calculations and thereby send our own signal: that we don’t expect, and voters shouldn’t count on, anything nobler. On a question of war and peace, we need nobler. We need the highest ground we can find.

Thoughts About Syria's Civil War

On Syria, a U.N. Vote Isn’t Optional

By OONA A. HATHAWAY and SCOTT J. SHAPIRO in The New York Times

NEW HAVEN — THE world is in a bind. Syria has violated basic norms of international law and humanity by using chemical weapons on its own people. The United Nations, which is supposed to secure international peace, is paralyzed by the intransigence of Russia and China, which hold vetoes on the Security Council.

It is no surprise that both liberal interventionists and neoconservative realists are advocating American military intervention, even if it is illegal. As President Obama said on Saturday, “If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules?” 

But this question ignores the obvious: If the United States begins an attack without Security Council authorization, it will flout the most fundamental international rule of all — the prohibition on the use of military force, for anything but self-defense, in the absence of Security Council approval. This rule may be even more important to the world’s security — and America’s — than the ban on the use of chemical weapons.

Mr. Obama cannot justify an attack on Syria based on any direct threat to the United States. Nor does there appear to be a direct threat to Turkey, a member of NATO, which might justify an assault based on collective self-defense. The sad fact is that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, is visiting horrors, for now, mainly on his own citizens, though the conflict has caused two million refugees to flee to other countries.

Some argue that international law provides for a “responsibility to protect” that allows states to intervene during humanitarian disasters, without Security Council authorization. They point to NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo. But in 2009 the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, rejected this view, finding that “the responsibility to protect does not alter, indeed it reinforces, the legal obligations of Member States to refrain from the use of force except in conformity with the Charter,” a position he affirmed on Tuesday. (The Independent International Commission on Kosovo found that the intervention was “illegal but legitimate.”)

Others say it is legalistic, even naïve, to rely on the United Nations Charter, which has been breached countless times. What is one more, especially when the alternative is the slaughter of innocents? But all of these breaches add up — and each one makes it harder to hold others to the rules. If we follow Kosovo and Iraq with Syria, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to stop others from a similar use of force down the line.

Consider the world that preceded the United Nations. The basic rule of that system, one that lasted for centuries, was that states had just cause to go to war when legal rights had been violated. Spain tried to justify its conquest of the Americas by saying it was protecting indigenous civilians from atrocities committed by other indigenous peoples. The War of the Austrian Succession was fought over whether a woman had a right to inherit the throne. The United States largely justified the Mexican-American War, including the conquest of California and much of what is now the Southwest, by pointing to Mexico’s failure to pay old tort claims and outstanding debts.

The problem with the old system was not that no one could enforce the law, but that too many who wished to do so could. The result was almost constant war.

In the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and in the United Nations Charter of 1945, the world rejected this system. States were forbidden to enforce the law on their own and had to work through a system of collective security.

For all its obvious failings, the United Nations system has made for a more peaceful world than the one that preceded it. No leader may claim the right to collect debts or gain thrones by going to war. States may fracture into smaller pieces, but they don’t get conquered. Gunboat diplomacy is also out of the question.

The desire to respond to the atrocities in Syria with force is natural. The slaughter of civilians is impossible to watch without feeling morally impelled to act. The dysfunctional Security Council’s refusal to act leaves us feeling helpless in the face of evil.

But the choice between military force or nothing is a false one. Most of international law relies not on force for its enforcement, but on the collective power of nations to deprive states of the benefits of membership in a system of states. Mr. Obama can cut off any remaining government contracts with foreign companies that do business with Mr. Assad’s regime. He can work with Congress to do much more for Syrian rebels and refugees — including providing antidotes to nerve agents, which are in short supply. He can use his rhetorical power to shame and pressure Russia and China.

For all their wisdom, the United Nations’ founders showed incredible lack of foresight in freezing in place a system in which five nations hold permanent veto power in the Security Council. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to change, despite almost uniform consensus that the configuration makes little sense. The question is whether we can manage to live with these shortcomings. If not, we have to think very hard about what the alternative might be — and recognize that it could be far, far worse.

The question Congress and Mr. Obama must ask now is whether employing force to punish Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons is worth endangering the fragile international order that is World War II’s most significant legacy.

Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro are professors at Yale Law School.

Eileen Brennan

Obituary in The New York Times

Eileen Brennan, a smoky-voiced actress who had worked in show business for more than 20 years before gaining her widest attention as a gleefully tough Army captain in both the film and television versions of “Private Benjamin,” died on Sunday at her home in Burbank, Calif. She was 80.

Her manager, Kim Vasilakis, confirmed the death on Tuesday, saying the cause was bladder cancer.

Ms. Brennan had had a solid career on the New York stage and in films like “The Last Picture Show” and “The Sting” when she was cast for the film “Private Benjamin,” a 1980 box-office hit starring Goldie Hawn in the title role.

Ms. Brennan played Capt. Doreen Lewis, the slow-burning commanding officer of a pampered, privileged young woman who joins the Army and finds that she isn’t anybody’s little princess anymore. The performance brought Ms. Brennan an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She reprised the role in 1981 in a CBS sitcom based on the film, with Lorna Patterson in the Goldie Hawn role. The TV performance brought Ms. Brennan the Emmy Award for best supporting actress in a comedy, variety or music series. She was nominated for a total of seven Emmys in her career.

But she was forced to leave “Private Benjamin” the following October, when she was hit by a car and critically injured in Venice, Calif. Without her, the series died.

While recovering Ms. Brennan became addicted to pain medication and underwent treatment and later developed breast cancer.

She returned to television in 1985 in a new sitcom, “Off the Rack,” with Edward Asner, but the show lasted only six weeks. Afterward she made guest appearances on other shows. But she never recaptured the attention she had known in the past — as the toast of Off Broadway in “Little Mary Sunshine,” as a film actress in the 1970s, and as an honored comedy star just before her accident.

Verla Eileen Regina Brennan was born on Sept. 3, 1932, and grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a newspaper reporter who also worked in sales and a former actress. Later in life, dealing with her own alcohol dependency, she talked about the alcoholism in her family when she was a child.

After attending Georgetown University in Washington, she studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, did summer stock and worked as a singing waitress.

Her first big role was the title character in Rick Besoyan’s “Little Mary Sunshine,” a 1959 operetta parody that played at the Orpheum Theater in lower Manhattan. She won an Obie Award for her portrayal of the show’s spunky, fluttery-eyed heroine. A year later she complained to The New York Times that she had been “hopelessly typecast as that kookie girl.”

Perhaps to prove otherwise, she promptly starred in the national tour of “The Miracle Worker,” as Helen Keller’s gravely serious teacher, Annie Sullivan.

Ms. Brennan made her Broadway debut in 1963 playing, to positive reviews, Anna in a City Center revival of “The King and I.” In 1964 she was cast as Irene Molloy, the young widow, in the original Broadway production of “Hello, Dolly!,” with Carol Channing.

Among later stage performances, she appeared in John Ford Noonan’s “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking,” a critically praised 1980 two-woman show with Susan Sarandon, and Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “The Cripple of Inishmaan” (1998), in which she played an alcoholic Irishwoman.

Ms. Brennan made her television debut in “The Star Wagon,” a 1966 PBS special, based on Maxwell Anderson’s play about a man who invented a time machine. Her film debut came a year later, in “Divorce American Style,” a comedy about suburban marriage, starring Debbie Reynolds and Dick Van Dyke.

After a brief stint as an original cast member, along with Ms. Hawn, of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” the 1960s sketch-comedy series, she did her first picture for the director Peter Bogdanovich playing a world-weary Texas waitress in “The Last Picture Show” (1971).

Mr. Bogdanovich cast her again in “Daisy Miller” (1974), as a society hostess, and in “At Long Last Love” (1975), as a singing maid.

Ms. Brennan played a madam with a heart of gold in the Oscar-winning 1973 film “The Sting” and appeared in two comedy-noir films written by Neil Simon, “Murder by Death” (1976) and “The Cheap Detective” (1978).

In later years, she appeared in “Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous” (2005), as William Shatner’s mother (despite being a year younger than Mr. Shatner). But she was most visible on television, doing guest appearances on a variety of series.

In addition to her Emmy, she received six Emmy nominations. Two were for “Private Benjamin.” The others were for her work in “Taxi,” “Newhart,” “Thirtysomething” and “Will & Grace,” in which she had a recurring role as Sean Hayes’s formidable acting teacher.

Throughout her career she talked openly about addiction. “It’s so horrible and it can be so disastrous, yet there’s something about the sensitivity of the human being that has to face it,” she said in a 1996 interview. “We’re very sensitive people with a lot of introspection, and you get saved or you don’t get saved."

Ms. Brennan was married from 1968 to 1974 to David John Lampson, an aspiring actor at the time. They had two sons, Patrick and Sam, who survive her, along with a sister, Kathleen Howard, and two grandchildren.

I Am Not this Body

I Am Not This Body

By BRIAN JAY STANLEY

The New York Times

 

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.
— Marcel Proust

Every time I look at my face in a magnified mirror in a hotel bathroom, I jump back in surprise. Seen closely, my skin looks like the surface of a strange planet. Ridges and canyons pock my chin and lips. Forests of tiny hairs grow from my ear lobes. Unnoticed pimples rise from my nose like volcanoes. A sheen of oil coats the landscape. I half expect to see alien creatures living in minute settlements in my dimples or roving the great plains of my cheeks — and could I look at higher magnification, I would see exactly that.
I do not identify with my body. I have a body but I am a mind. My body and I have an intimate but awkward relationship, like foreign roommates who share a bedroom but not a language. As the thinker of the pair, I contemplate my body with curiosity, as a scientist might observe a primitive species. My mind is a solitary wanderer in this universe of bodies.

Though I identify with mind, the mind itself is matter. I remember dissecting a fetal pig’s brain in high school. As I sliced layers of cerebellum and cerebrum, I imagined someone likewise cutting my own brain from my skull and examining the weird intersection of my mind and body. There I would lie in the petri dish, the whole mystery of my being made visible, the unutterable complexities of consciousness, thought and personality reduced to a three-pound mass of squiggly pink tissue. Hello, self. Where is the vaporous soul I am said to be, the exiled child of God from another world? This looks, rather, like some Martian’s bizarre pet.
Last summer I visited the beach on a busy holiday weekend. I never saw so much flesh: I saw more flesh than sand. Sunbathers hung over the sides or out the bottoms of their swimsuits. Sleeping old men roasted their round bellies then flipped like rotisserie chickens. I weaved through a jumbled Picasso of bellybuttons, nipples, sagging breasts, hairy backs and jiggling thighs, most the color and texture of greasy orange leather. I gave thanks that, besides at beaches, society requires clothes.
Plato called the body the prison of the soul. Perhaps our societal prejudice against obesity is a variant of that ancient prejudice against the flesh. Obesity is too much matter. Watching a skinny model strut down a runway, the audience studies the elegant geometry of her shape, shape being matter’s abstract and immaterial container. But an obese body waddling down a sidewalk conveys an absence of shape, like formless matter before the logos tamed it at creation.
Ever since the first man and woman sewed fig leaves for their loins, human beings have been embarrassed by their bodies. Going to school without clothes is an archetypal nightmare of children. Public nudity is grounds for arrest. Clothing’s purpose is not only to keep us warm but to keep us concealed, shielding us more from shame than rain. Our plight is having a higher standard of beauty than our bodies can match; we are pickier than our maker.
We are especially embarrassed by the inside of our bodies. Mucus, sweat, gas, feces, vomit, urine, saliva, earwax — does any desirable substance emerge from our depths? Whatever comes from inside the body is like a foul messenger from the underworld, whom we fear to encounter. What wife does not wince at the stench of her husband’s morning breath? What teenager is not scandalized to hear his girlfriend on the toilet the first time?
Like our buttocks, breasts and genitals, all our interior regions are private parts. When a nurse pins my X-rays to a hospital wall, I am taken aback. If we blush to be seen without clothes, how much more to be seen without skin? Examining my horror of mutilation — femurs poking from thighs and intestines spilling from abdomens in a war scene, or industrial cattle being ground to ribbons of beef in a meat plant— I find, at root, an instinctive shame and fear of having one’s guts revealed.
Squeamishness about bodies contributes much to the fear of death. Were death merely annihilation — the quiet snuffing out of consciousness — it might almost possess a sublime, philosophic poetry. But the accompanying facts of physical decay are merely vile. Dying, we gasp for air and cough blood and vomit, and waste to shriveled remnants of ourselves. After death, bad gets worse, as our rotting organs seep noxious fumes and make mansions for maggots. I only had to read one book about putrefaction before deciding that I would be cremated when I died. Cremation is the soul’s way of death, the closest the mind can come to annihilating the spent body. Let fire evaporate me, not worms liquefy me. Cremation, whatever its terrors, at least is clean.
Besides being squeamish about physicality, I resent how matter lords it over mind. Plato says in one of his dialogues, “Soul is the master, and matter its natural subject.” I agree that it ought to be so, but the facts are opposite. Whenever I get sick or injured, I am dismayed to discover how little control I have of my life. Because someone sneezed a germ too small to see into my bloodstream, my universe shrinks to a pillow and sheets. The mere calcium of my ankle, by breaking inopportunely, can cancel a carefully planned and paid-for vacation. My relation to my body resembles a privy council’s relation to an adolescent king. I am thoughtful and wise and know best what to do, but my capricious body possesses the power and final authority, and I must tiptoe round its whims.
I am always unnerved to hear of a mind of genius—a Nobel laureate or great mathematician—killed in a car crash. Is it not strange that someone so intelligent should be so helpless against mindless metal? In a contest between genius and steel panel, amazingly steel panel wins. The mind’s outward creation, culture, is similarly frail. Centuries of intellectual labor filled the Library of Alexandria, which illiterate fire burned down in a few hours. Eons of human progress could end next year with the smash of an errant meteor. Plato’s Great Chain of Being got hung upside down, for rocks hold sway over humanity.
Granted, it is not entirely fair to criticize matter as stupid. The human body, in keeping itself alive, does a vastly better job than any conscious effort could. How long would I last if I were put at the controls of my physical existence? Fumbling uncertainly with hundreds of thousands of levers, I would go blue from forgetting to breathe, then, remembering, would faint from meanwhile letting my pulse drop. Faced with the endless critical and absurdly complicated tasks of circulating blood, digesting food, interpreting retinal images and fighting bacteria, how would I ever find time to repair sunburned skin cells, grow hair or process the occasional nerve signal from my toes? Doctors go to school until they are 30 to learn a fraction of the great manual of life that an infant’s body knows at birth.
Nevertheless, this intelligence of bodies is cold and alienating. I recall the sense of eeriness I felt several years ago when learning computer science, the eeriness of discovering the lifeless corridors of binary digits and microprocessors beneath the monitor’s meaningful display. The facade of humanized banners, buttons and icons on our screens masks an unstaffed control center of electrical switches, clicking on and off, their changing patterns of charges translating miraculously but mindlessly into the streaming wonders of words and colors we perceive.
So, too, pry behind the rich graphics flashing across the screen of being—the self-organizing of galaxies, the coordination of ecosystems, and the complexity of biological life—and you arrive at the imbecilic machinery of it all, electrons flowing through the circuit boards of the stars, motors whirring on the hard drives of our bodies. Beneath the intelligible there is only the unintelligent, a blank stare behind beautiful eyes, muteness behind the music.

Brian Jay Stanley’s essays have appeared in Pleiades, North American Review, The Antioch Review and elsewhere. He lives in Asheville, N.C. More of his work can be found on his Web site.

Come Home, America

By ELIZABETH COBBS HOFFMAN in The New York Times

SAN DIEGO

EVERYONE talks about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about Germany and Japan?

The sequester — $85 billion this year in across-the-board budget cuts, about half of which will come from the Pentagon — gives Americans an opportunity to discuss a question we’ve put off too long: Why we are still fighting World War II?

Since 1947, when President Harry S. Truman set forth a policy to stop further Soviet expansion and “support free peoples” who were “resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” America has acted as the world’s policeman.

For more than a century, Britain had “held the line” against aggression in Eurasia, but by World War II it was broke. Only two years after the Allies met at Yalta to hammer out the postwar order, London gave Washington five weeks’ notice: It’s your turn now. The Greek government was battling partisans supplied by Communist Yugoslavia. Turkey was under pressure to allow Soviet troops to patrol its waterways. Stalin was strong-arming governments from Finland to Iran.

Some historians say Truman scared the American people into a broad, open-ended commitment to world security. But Americans were already frightened: in 1947, 73 percent told Gallup that they considered World War III likely.

From the Truman Doctrine emerged a strategy comprising multiple alliances: the Rio Pact of 1947 (Latin America), the NATO Treaty of 1949 (Canada and Northern and Western Europe), the Anzus Treaty of 1951 (Australia and New Zealand) and the Seato Treaty of 1954 (Southeast Asia). Seato ended in 1977, but the other treaties remain in force, as do collective-defense agreements with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Meanwhile, we invented the practice of foreign aid, beginning with the Marshall Plan.

It was a profound turn even from 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won a third term pledging not to plunge the United States into war. Isolationism has had a rich tradition, from Washington’s 1796 warning against foreign entanglements to the 1919 debate over the Treaty of Versailles, in which Henry Cabot Lodge argued, “The less we undertake to play the part of umpire and thrust ourselves into European conflicts the better for the United States and for the world.”

World War II, and the relative impotence of the United Nations, convinced successive administrations that America had to fill the breach, and we did so, with great success. The world was far more secure in the second half of the 20th century than in the disastrous first half. The percentage of the globe’s population killed in conflicts between states fell in each decade after the Truman Doctrine. America experienced more wars (Korea, Vietnam, the two Iraq wars, Afghanistan) but the world, as a whole, experienced fewer.

We were not so much an empire — the empire decried by the scholar and veteran Andrew J. Bacevich and celebrated by the conservative historian Niall Ferguson — as an umpire, one that stood for equal access by nation-states to political and economic gains; peaceful arbitration of international conflict; and transparency in trade and business.

But conditions have changed radically since the cold war. When the United States established major bases in West Germany and Japan, they were considered dangerous renegades that needed to be watched. Their reconstructed governments also desired protection, particularly from the Soviet Union and China. NATO’s first secretary general, Hastings Ismay, famously said the alliance existed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Today, our largest permanent bases are still in Germany and Japan, which are perfectly capable of defending themselves and should be trusted to help their neighbors. It’s time they foot more of the bill or operate their own bases. China’s authoritarian capitalism hasn’t translated into territorial aggression, while Russia no longer commands central and eastern Europe. That the military brass still talk of maintaining the capacity to fight a two-front war — presumably on land in Europe, and at sea in the Pacific — speaks to the irrational endurance of the Truman Doctrine.

Our wars in the Middle East since 2001 doubled down on that costly, outdated doctrine. The domino theory behind the Vietnam War revived under a new formulation: but for the American umpire, the bad guys (Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea) will win.

Despite his supporters’ expectations, President Obama has followed a Middle East policy nearly identical to his predecessor’s. He took us out of Iraq, only to deepen our commitment to Afghanistan, from which we are just now pulling out. He rejected the most odious counterterrorism techniques of George W. Bush’s administration, but otherwise did not change basic policies. Mr. Obama’s gestures toward multilateralism were not matched by a commensurate commitment from many of our allies.

Cynics assert that the “military-industrial complex” Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned against has primarily existed to enrich and empower a grasping, imperialist nation. But America was prosperous long before it was a superpower; by 1890, decades before the two world wars, it was already the world’s largest and richest economy. We do not need a large military to be rich. Quite the opposite: it drains our resources.

Realists contend that if we quit defending access to the world’s natural resources — read, oil — nobody else would. Really? It’s not likely that the Europeans, who depend on energy imports far more than the nation that owns Texas and Alaska would throw up their hands and bury their heads in the sand. It’s patronizing and naïve to think that America is the only truly “necessary” country. Good leaders develop new leaders. The Libyan crisis showed that our allies can do a lot.

The United States can and should pressure Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs. It must help to reform and strengthen multilateral institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It must champion the right of small nations, including Israel, to “freedom from fear.” But there are many ways of achieving these goals, and they don’t all involve more borrowing and spending.

Partisan debates that focus on shaving a percentage point off the Pentagon budget here or there won’t take us where we need to go. Both parties are stuck in a paradigm of costly international activism while emerging powers like China, India, Brazil and Turkey are accumulating wealth and raising productivity and living standards, as we did in the 19th century. The long-term consequences are obvious.

America since 1945 has paid a price in blood, treasure and reputation. Umpires may be necessary, but they are rarely popular and by definition can’t win. Perhaps the other players will step up only if we threaten to leave the field. Sharing the burden of security with our allies is more than a fiscal necessity. It’s the sine qua non of a return to global normalcy.

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a professor of American foreign relations at San Diego State University, is the author, most recently, of “American Umpire.”

Stupid Doings by Obama, Reid et al.

Democrats Behaving Badly

By FRANK BRUNI in The New York Times

FOR the textbook definition of not knowing enough to quit while you’re ahead, please turn your attention to Harry Reid, he of the scabrous tongue and rotten temper, a boxer in his youth and a pugilist to this day, throwing mud along with punches and invariably soiling himself.

Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, couldn’t just stand back and relish the recent spectacle of House Republicans making callous fools of themselves by stalling aid to communities walloped by Hurricane Sandy. He wasn’t satisfied that these Republicans were vilified not only in the news media but also by some members of their own tribe, like Peter King and Chris Christie. No, he had to get into the ring himself, and his genius strategy once there was to pit one storm’s victims against another’s, to stage a bout between Atlantic City’s splintered boardwalks and Louisiana’s failed levees. What a titan of meteorological tact.

Noting that Congress had provided help after Hurricane Katrina more quickly and generously than after Sandy, Reid said: “The people of New Orleans and that area, they were hurt, but nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey. Almost one million people have lost their homes. One million people lost their homes. That is homes, that is not people in those homes.”

Let’s put aside, for the moment, his fleeting difficulty distinguishing a biped with a weak spot for reality TV from a wood, brick or maybe stucco structure in which several bipeds watch TV. Let’s focus instead on his math. The one million figure is easily more than twice the combined tally of domiciles not only destroyed but also damaged in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It’s an invention. And if comparisons are to be made, consider this one: as a result of Katrina, 1,833 people died — more than nine times as many as died in connection with Sandy. Using the word “nothing” anywhere in the vicinity of Katrina defies both belief and decency, and Reid was indeed forced last week to apologize, his effort to shame his Republican foes having brought a full measure of shame to his own doorstep, yet again.

Why did he make the effort in the first place? Democrats came out of the 2012 elections looking good, and the country’s changing demographics suggest that they could come out of 2016 and beyond looking even better, especially if Republicans don’t accomplish a pretty thorough image overhaul. And that overhaul isn’t exactly proceeding at a breakneck pace. The perseverance of far-right obstructionists in the House stands in the way, leaving the party in grave trouble. If its foes were smart and humble, they’d do what a sports team with a big lead does. They’d play error-free ball.

Not Reid. And not President Obama, whose recent actions have been careless at best and cavalier at worst. There was the gratuitously provocative nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary, followed by the gratuitously insulting invitation of Louie Giglio, a Georgia pastor, to give the inaugural benediction. That plan was abandoned after the revelation of Giglio’s past remarks that homosexuality offends God, that homosexuals yearn to take over society and that a conversion to heterosexuality is the only answer for them. Giglio would have been the second florid homophobe in a row to stand with Obama and a Bible in front of the Capitol — Rick Warren, in January 2009, was the first — and while it appears that this double bigotry whammy wasn’t the administration’s intent, it’s an example of vetting so epically sloppy that it gives an observer serious pause about the delicacy with which Obama and his allies, no longer worried about his re-election, are operating.

The pick of Hagel underscores that indelicacy. There’s a potent case to be made for his installation as secretary of defense, but there are potent cases for others, and it’s hard to believe that Obama couldn’t have found someone who shared his values and would further his agenda but wouldn’t be such a guaranteed lightning rod for his Jewish, LGBT and female supporters, all of whom played crucial roles in his November victory.

Regarding women, Hagel’s record on reproductive freedom is as conservative as his record on gay rights, and it included his support for a ban on abortions in military hospitals, even for servicewomen prepared to pay for the procedures themselves. What’s more, Obama rolled Hagel out in a cluster of other high-profile nominees (John Brennan, Jack Lew, John Kerry) sure to be noted for their gender uniformity and to rekindle questions about the predominantly male club of advisers and golf and basketball partners who have the president’s ear. The upset was predictable and avoidable.

It has been noted, rightly, that the president put two additional women on the Supreme Court and that his percentage of female appointees is as good as President Bill Clinton’s was. But given the march of time since then, and given the questions raised during his first term about how valued women in the administration felt, and given his drumbeat that he was a champion for women in a way Mitt Romney could never be, shouldn’t he be surpassing Clinton? Going out of his way? There’s a perverse streak of defiance in him, and as donors and even Democratic lawmakers have long complained, gratitude isn’t his strong suit.

While Hagel lurched toward his confirmation hearings and Giglio skittered away, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it was sending each of the 35 Republican freshmen in the House a “tea party membership card,” which spelled out their rights to put “ideology over solutions,” to be horrid to women, to coddle Big Oil and “to create and/or ignore any national crisis.” Thus did the Dems turn legitimate gripes into schoolyard taunts that were more likely to inflame G.O.P. freshmen than to bully them into bipartisanship. What, beyond the theater of the gesture, was the point of it?

Granted, Republicans had done their own adolescent taunting, calling Democrats lap dogs in the Nancy Pelosi obedience school. But Democrats pride and market themselves as the reasonable adults in the equation, and that’s part of their currency with many voters. Why fritter it away?

And why abide the overwrought antics of Reid? He once compared opponents of Obama’s health care reform to enemies of emancipation. He took valid questions about Romney’s low tax bill and spun them into the unsubstantiated claim that Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for an entire 10-year period. Then he said the burden was on Romney to prove the charge untrue. Good thing our criminal courts don’t work that way.

Just before and after the 2012 election, it looked as if Republicans might be successfully burying themselves. All Democrats had to do was hammer the nail in the coffin. But the way they’re behaving, they’ll raise the dead.

More Risk-Taking, Less Poll-Taking

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN in The New York Times

THE U.S. military trains its fighter pilots on a principle called the “OODA Loop.” It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. The idea is that if your OODA Loop is faster and more accurate than the other pilot’s, you’ll shoot his plane out of the sky. If the other pilot’s OODA Loop is better, he’ll shoot you down. Right now, our national OODA Loop is broken. We’re are doing something crazy — taking the country back and forth to the financial brink to produce suboptimal, midnight compromises without any overall plan for how this will lead to growth in the world in which we’re living. We’re doing the worst thing a country can do — cutting taxes and spending without a plan. Maybe you can grow without a plan. But if you want to ensure that every scarce dollar gets the biggest bang, you can’t cut without a plan. It’s deciding and acting without observing and orienting. It’s how fighter pilots get shot down.

President Obama, by his own admission, focused his campaign almost exclusively on the need to raise taxes on the wealthy, and the Republicans focused theirs on lowering them. But neither one offered the country what we need most: a description of what world we’re living in, what is new, and how we maximize our ability to compete and grow in this world — and then offering up a comprehensive, detailed plan of appropriate phased-in spending cuts, tax reforms and investments in research, infrastructure and early childhood education to create more good jobs and the workers to fill them.

What world are we living in? It’s a world in which we face three major challenges: responding to the merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, which is changing every job and workplace; dealing with our mounting debt and entitlement burdens, driven by steadily rising health care costs and unsustainable defined benefits; and, finally, developing energy sources that can grow the world economy without tipping it into disruptive climate change. (At one point last week, the Senate approved a $60.4 billion aid package to help New York and New Jersey recover from Hurricane Sandy. If fully implemented, that would mean we’d spend on one storm all the new tax revenue for next year that the House and Senate just agreed to in the fiscal-cliff negotiations.)

What each party should be saying is, “Given this world, here are the specific tax reforms, spending cuts, investments and policy innovations we need to grow our middle class, sustain our retirees and shrink inequality.” Instead, we have no leaders ready to trust the public with the truth, so both parties are shooting themselves in the foot and our future in the head. As Matt Miller, author of “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas” noted in The Washington Post, “Republicans haven’t identified anything remotely equal to the savings we need. And because many liberals haven’t thought through the long-term budget implications, or wrongly assume that taxes can rise indefinitely or that the Pentagon can be shrunk to something less than a triangle, they resist sensible steps to slow the growth of Social Security and Medicare, not realizing that this course will assure before long that there isn’t any new money to spend on, say, poor children.”

I expect nothing from the G.O.P. It’s lost and leaderless. I expect a lot from Obama, who knows what needs to be done and has said so in the past. I expect him to stop acting as a party leader and start acting like the president of the whole country. When I heard Obama say, after the election, that this time he was going to take his plan to the country, and not make the mistake again of just negotiating with Congress, I thought, “Great, I can’t wait to hear what he says.” But all he took to the country was a plan for increasing taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” There was nothing comprehensive, nothing bold, no great journey for America and no risks for him. Really disappointing.

Maybe Obama has a strategy: First raise taxes on the wealthy, which gives him the credibility with his base to then make big spending cuts in the next round of negotiations. Could be. But raising taxes on the wealthy is easy. Now we’re at the hard part: comprehensive tax reform, entitlement cuts, radical cost-saving approaches to health care and new investments in our growth engines. This will require taking things away from people — to both save and invest. A lot of lobbies will fight it. The president will need to rally the center of the country and the business community to overcome them. He’ll have to change the polls, not just read the polls. He will have to take on his own base and the G.O.P.’s.

Obama has spent a lot of time lately bashing the rich to pay their “fair share.” You know what? There are definitely some Wall Street bankers and C.E.O.’s who deserve that bashing. But there are many successful Americans who got their wealth the old-fashioned way — by risk-taking, going into debt to start a business or pursue a dream. It’s time for the president to do some risk-taking — to stop just hammering the wealthy, which is so easy, and to start selling the country on a strategy to multiply them. We need to tax more millionaires, but we also need more millionaires and middle classes to tax. The president was elected to grow our national pie, not just re-divide it.