Obama, dis-illusioner in chief

Obama's year-end press conference on Friday was preceded by breathless expectations, half-voiced, that he would, I don't know, call the election results illegitimate, suspend transition, call on electors not to cast their votes for Trump...the hopes were inchoate.  And the despair when Obama launched into his characteristic slow-talking, methodical, low-drama point-by-points was the Twitter equivalent of Lamentations.

Listening while watching Twitter (twistening?), at first I shared the disillusionment. But gradually I began to feel that Obama's performance was literally that -- dis-illusionment. Obama was telling us some hard truths about the degradation of our institutions. His meta-message was: Russia didn't do this to us - we did it to ourselves.

In fact he was explicit on that point. Here is where my own (wavering) reaction tipped from "he's explaining away his soft-touch response to Russian meddling" to "he's telling us the truth":

The Obamaiad

Early this month, Obama favored Jeffrey Goldberg for a second time with a deep dive into his thinking about the Middle East. This time (for once) I'm going to keep my precis short.* And dear reader, please help me out of a metrical jam by internally pronouncing "neocon" really fast:

Obama, to clear neocon fog,
unburdens himself to Gold blog.
"Though our power's not puny.
we'd have to be loony
to get between Gog and Magog."

And then we were whipsawed off to another quarter:

"Robin" Medvedev gets red-breasted over missile defense

Is it unduly speculative to infer that Medvedev's newfound tough-guy demeanor is early fallout from the WikiLeaks cable dump? From The New York Times online:

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev, expressing continued wariness over the prospect of military cooperation with his country’s former cold war adversaries, warned on Tuesday that a failure by Russia and the West to reach an agreement on missile defense could provoke a new arms race. [snip]

The following alternatives await us in the next 10 years,” Mr. Medvedev told an audience of Russia’s top leaders gathered at the Kremlin. “Either we reach an agreement on missile defense and create a joint mechanism for cooperation or, if we do not succeed in entering into a constructive understanding, there will begin a new arms race.”

In the absence of cooperation, he said, Russia would be prepared to deploy “new means of attack.”

Moral Equivalency Exam

Andrew Sullivan has essayed some moral equivalency testing between Russian conduct in Georgia and the U.S.'s in Iraq and in the "War on Terror." For myself, reading in the Times this evening that "Russian authorities make no secret of their desire to see Mr. Saakashvili tried for war crimes in The Hague," I thought not of current Russian actions but of Chechnya, and how the Russians simply flattened the place, and how easy it was years ago to condemn that indiscriminate violence. Yes, Putin & Co.'s hypocrisy is rife, but now there's that beam in the U.S.'s eye too.

The U.S. in Iraq did not fight like the Russians in Chechnya; the country prided itself on smart bombs and pinpoint strikes and minimized collateral damage. But having gone in on false pretences and unleashed a civil war that killed probably hundreds of thousands, while meanwhile instituting a reign of torture against suspected enemies worldwide, how does the death and suffering and damage to international norms and standards we caused stack up against that of other malefactors?

These equivalences are impossible to score and ultimately false. In fact the U.S. may have still done the Iraqis a service. Saddam had to go sometime, and we'll never know what would have followed his death or deposing (as we don't know, by way of loose analogy, what will follow the collapse of the regime in North Korea). And U.S. forces have done heroic work trying to help put Iraq back together. But in Colin Powell's well-worn formula, we broke it, and we own the damage done -- to our own civil liberties and rule of law as well as to the lives and property of the Iraqis.