Shrike
2hr ago
The steelman for bombing working is that if you take out the C&C or communication nodes of the enemy and perhaps hit a few troop concentrations they will scatter, loose coordination, and then fall to pieces before the troops that are already on the ground (the protestors). Coordination is extremely important and if you deny that to the enemy they might collapse quickly.
FWIW I tend to think the US should stay out.
Shrike
2hr ago
Thank you for the substantive comment. A few thoughts:
Firstly, the excerpts that you listed (and the NYT article as a whole, if you're not reading it closely) gives the impression that the IGs are just disappearing into the void. But I don't think that's true – for instance, Trump fired Phyllis Fong and replaced her with John Walk; Michael Missal was replaced by Cheryl Mason, Thomas Bell was confirmed as the IG for HHS, and it looks like (although I didn't do an exhaustive search) the other IG slots are filled by acting IGs. So while the implication seems to be that Trump is slashing the nation's oversight, it seems that he is replacing personnel. Obviously whether that is good or bad is probably something people will fight over, but it's not the same as just deleting the IG apparatus.
Secondly, it's not clear to me how the whistleblower protection positions are supposed to safeguard from "bad shoots" by ICE, particularly since federal LEOs had quite a few controversial shoots under presidents following Nixon. (It's actually not clear to me they work very well if at all, but I might be overgeneralizing based on an incident I heard about in a personal context once where someone's attempts to reach out were brushed off.) Certainly the problem with the most recent ICE shooting wasn't that someone needed to blow the whistle on it.
Finally, I'm not sure I would characterize it as "naive" to follow the Constitution. It also seems like at least one appeals court (as per the Times) agrees with Trump that he has the legal ability to remove these IGs, at least in some cases, so it's likely not some weird of oddball theory. Instead it is (unless I am mistaken, but this is admittedly a somewhat-informed guess) being done under the theory that the chief executive can, as a matter of Constitutional law, appoint his own officers and Congress has limited ability to stop him from doing so.
I once made a comment about how Trump is taking in one hand the powers that have been slowly ceded to or accumulated by the President and with the other hand seizing the powers that had always been the President's but that had lain dormant for some time under the new arrangements. This seems like an example of that in action.
Shrike
3hr ago
It's hard to tell what played out in the favor of the US compared to a counterfactual baseline that doesn't exist, but Grenada, Panama, Haiti and Brazil don't really seem to have backfired.
Shrike
3hr ago
Seems like the US could provide e.g. airborne tanker support without really doing anything that would be considered "going to war with Iran" (although ofc material support is technically an act of war [ETA: or at least a cause for war] and all that)
Shrike
4hr ago
Trump has dismantled the exact same Nixon-era protections all across the board.
Which ones did you specifically have in mind? Why didn't they stop FBI abuses since Nixon?
Shrike
7hr ago
Long-range air defenses are not very effective against low-flying aircraft* (unless essentially colocated with the target, in which case they don't perform better and may perform worse than other cheaper systems) – you can see this in Ukraine, where Russian and Ukrainian aircraft have been able to operate despite the presence of air defenses much superior to those of Venezuela. Being able to get in, yoink a leader defended by small arms and MANPADS (as Maduro was) and fly off without (allegedly) loss of life or destruction of equipment is impressive. Frankly, just coordinating a joint-services time-on-target operation is difficult enough without any sort of resistance at all.
*you might be wondering "what's the point of long range missiles then?" and the answer is that is if all you are doing is forcing the enemy to do risky nap-of-the-earth operations where they will be susceptible to small-arms fire and have worse performance then your long-ranged missiles have paid for themselves already.
Shrike
8hr ago
Everything is no longer fine; the system is breaking; its replacement would only be worse; beware of helping it along.
Agents of the federal government have killed moms, kids, dogs, dads, tampered with evidence, lied, entrapped, falsely accused and stolen for decades. Is this genuinely the last straw for you? Why this? Serious question.
But if you are somebody who feels like you have a fuckin 'don't tread on me' bumper sticker. I don't see how you've suddenly gone from this to supporting a mass militia of the government killing people.
I don't think it's hard to explain this, and since I did half of it above I may as well keep going. I can summarize by quoting David Hines: "This is what you ordered, eat it." [I don't mean you, the poster, to be clear!]
To elaborate a bit: uncharitably, righties and libertarians aren't quite so happy to stop the wheels of the state grinding now that it's finally gotten around to grinding their political foes. More charitably, righties and libertarians understand that "the wheels of the state grinding Group A is fine, but they must stop immediately if they touch Group B" is just a recipe for perpetually being abused if you are Group A.
Note that I am not saying this is the correct response. But I don't think it's hard to understand the game theory of it.
Shrike
8hr ago
If Israel did well last time around (which on balance it seems to me they did) wouldn't the smartest thing for the US to do be "nothing" and let the Israelis sort it? They almost certainly have better intel and assets, their strike apparatus seems adequate, and they likely have better understanding of Iranian culture and society, and they have much more skin in the game.
The main argument I can see cutting against this is that US action might be more palatable to Iranians than Israeli action.
Shrike
13hr ago
MN could have enforced the immigration law but decided it didn't want to
Not really, as I understand it, thanks to Arizona v. US (2012).
Conservatives were locked out of a state-by-state approach to immigration (which even then would have been derivative of federal law) and had to seize control of the federal government in order to enforce it.
Shrike
1d ago
Also, why do it in front of God and everybody (the shooter was both aware he was being filmed and apparently documenting it himself).
I think on balance if ICE agents wanted to assassinate people they would probably both preplan it (planning planning planning is a big thing in the US military and I think it's trickled down into law enforcement) and carefully control the media exposure around it, to say nothing of their own personal safety.
I would guess OP's position is likely that they are doing stochastic assassinations, or essentially taking any plausible opportunity to shoot people, under the guise of self-defense.
Shrike
2d ago
But without broad freedoms of speech and the freedom of running for office, their system was very far away from what anyone would consider a functioning liberal democracy.
To me one of the immediate risks of having a government overthrown is a lack of continuity of government. Most democracies are insufficiently respectful of human rights to my mind. The reason that Iran's democratic government seems like a positive to me in this specific circumstance is because there might be a system of government that could survive the fall of the Ayatollah and provide basic order and, ideally, legitimacy, not necessarily because they would be a liberal democracy. In other words, ideally there is a known factor, not an unknown power vacuum, if the current system of government is overthrown.
If you simply remove the Ayatollah from their parliament, it seems likely that during the next depression, people will vote for the fundamentalists and they will install him again.
I doubt the ayatollahs are actually this popular in Iran, but I could be wrong!
Shrike
2d ago
I didn't mean to suggest they weren't powerful, only that there was a clear successor government and electoral process.
But I haven't looked into it as much as I would like, either, it's possible that the Parliament would have trouble governing "on its own" at this point.
Shrike
2d ago
From what I understand, Iran has democracy, and has in fact had a very long-running democracy, it's just that it has a theocracy stapled on top of it – sort of like how the Constitution restrains US democracy, the Ayatollahs restrain Iranian democracy.
In my mind, this makes me more optimistic about regime change if it is genuinely a popular uprising, simply because (at least in theory) Iran would not need to reinvent the wheel from the ground up. They could (in theory, as I understand it) simply remove the Ayatollah and theocratic laws and keep the regular government in place. But real life is often messier than in theory.
Iran is aligned with Russia
I think this is correct, although I would suggest the tightness of their relationship is sometimes overblown. People sometimes suggest that Russia and Iran are joined at the hip, but Russia actually has pretty good relations with Israel and (from what I understand) has refrained from top-end weapons deliveries to Iran out of deference to Israel, and worked to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. (At this rate the Iranians are never going to be able to replace their F-14s...)
However, Russia and Iran definitely share an interest in containing US power. It's going to be tremendously interesting if Iran and Venezuela both switch to US-friendly or at least US-neutral within a month of each other. It is tempting to say that neutralizing Iran as a foe would wrap up US concerns in the Middle East, particularly if a lack of Iranian support crippled the Houthis. I think that's likely an overstatement, but if Iran and Yemen went down that would basically be the end of Middle Eastern governments that were really hostile to the United States.
Shrike
3d ago
My personal preference would be to absorb Greenland into the state of Maine.
Interesting idea!
Shrike
3d ago
he thinks Bush wasn't evil enough to make it work
Maybe he just thinks Bush wasn't smart enough to make it work.
If Bush had pursued something like Trump's methodology, everyone (in the West) would remember the Global War on Terror as a success, or at least not the failure it is often viewed as now. If Bush had removed Saddam in a lightning strike and then negotiated with the remaining Baathist regime to stop doing dumb stuff under pain of also being removed, tens of thousands of people of deaths would likely have been avoided, along with the rise of ISIS and decades of costly and painful US occupation. (FWIW this doesn't seem very evil to me, but YMMV I suppose.) Same deal with simply punitively bombing Afghanistan and doing SOCCOM raids to snatch AQ leaders.
This basically seems to be Trump's plan in Venezuela. I want to caveat here that THERE IS STILL A CHANCE TO SCREW IT UP and that oftentimes such plans work out in unexpected and often bad ways. Maybe Venezuela will turn out to have been a horrible idea! But supposing a counterfactual where Bush had successfully done what Trump appears to be doing now, I think Bush would be viewed much more differently.
People forget that the US has a fairly successful track record of lightning interventions (arrive, blow everything up, install a new leader if necessary, leave). This may not be ethical or moral, but it "works" from the perspective that the military interventions tend to achieve their goals and be relatively popular or at least not unpopular. The US tends to do poorly (particularly in the public square) when it gets drawn into a prolonged intervention. People are now wary of the former because of the latter, which I think is entirely understandable, but it's important to understand that not all foreign interventions are created equal.
Shrike
3d ago
I think something that is often missed is that Greenland does not want to remain Danish. Greenland wants independence. Right now they are subsidized by Denmark which makes straight up leaving a financial problem.
I suspect that #3 is at least a large part of the reason (although obviously it's possible that it's an idea for a number of good reasons, and/or bad ones!), and the US doesn't want to gamble on Greenland finding a better partner in e.g. Russia or China or to have to worry about the status of its bases if it leaves Denmark. I could be wrong about this, but it does answer the question of "why not just station more troops under the arrangement with Denmark we already have?" - it's possible there's concern about that being a viable strategy long term. Even if Greenland doesn't declare independence, there may also be concern in the Trump administration about the long-term viability of Denmark as a partner.
It's also worth noting that apparently the Danes tried to get the US to leave Greenland after World War Two (when the US seized Greenland) and the US...didn't, although we did offer to buy it in 1946. So this is a longstanding US security concern.
I also wonder if "US owning Greenland" is a stretch goal with the idea being that by pushing for buying Greenland outright something like US-subsidized independence with a Compact of Free Association suddenly looks very tame and reasonable.
Shrike
4d ago
But even if she was, of his own safety is what he is worried about, getting out of the way is far more effective and better for all involved than standing his ground, pulling out his gun, firing at her and then stepping out of the way once she starts moving.
Perhaps, but on the other hand if you thought someone was in the process of trying to kill you with a car you might be disinclined to give them them additional opportunities to do so.
Shrike
4d ago
normally, when there's a threat, you have a duty to flee. You do not have the right to kill someone unless necessary to protect yourself from serious injury or death.
Federal law enforcement don't have any duty to flee that I am familiar with, and in many circumstances law abiding Americans at large have no duty to retreat even if they are not serving in a law enforcement capacity. Furthermore, if there's a threat then serious injury or death is what is being threatened (unless it's like cyberbullying or something).
None of the above means that the shoot in question was necessarily a good one. But starting from wrong presuppositions about this sort of thing will make judging whether or not it was a good shoot harder.
Shrike
5d ago
I think "normal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I don't think that's good. Firstly, (as discussed elsewhere) what's normal is for people who drive cars in the general direction of the police to get shot by the police if the police feel menaced by it. Secondly, what's normal has no direct bearing on what's good - if cops were normally threatened by gun-pointing escapees, that would be not resolve the question of whether or not shooting them is good or bad.
the arrest-enhancing effect of blocking the path is entirely mediated through the circumstance that now it will be legal for police to kill you if you try to escape.
This is untrue, anyone in a car with police officers blocking the way can attempt to dismount and flee on foot.
The general sentiment here seems to be that it's unfair that if you attempt to flee in a car you because could die, whereas normally you wouldn't die attempting to flee from the cops otherwise. But that's not necessarily true: if you flee from the cops on foot, and they pursue you, and you don't surrender, you could die. And in fact sometimes when this happens people get upset about the unarmed techniques that the police use to restrain people. And there's less outrage than deaths, almost certainly, because the rare Taser death or suspect-falls-off-of-a-building death aren't as much of a scissor statement.
Note that I am not arguing that the police should shoot at every car that maneuvers around them; for example, the police might be well advised, prudentially, to flee a car rather than engaging in a shootout in a crowded location, or a car could be traveling in such a way as to pose no objective threat to the car. And I agree that, generally speaking, cops should not step in front of a car that is already nearby and moving towards them to generate a pretext to shoot. But I do think asking the question "did the suspect do something that could reasonably endanger the life and safety of another person?" is a good question to start any inquiry about a law enforcement or self-defense shooting and the answer to that question is probably "yes" if you are pointing a car at someone, same as a gun.
Shrike
5d ago
All right, supposing the police have someone cornered and his only plausible way out is to point the gun (he doesn't know movie karate that would allow him to defeat half a dozen cops unarmed). How is this different from the police having someone cornered and their only way out is to point a vehicle at a police officer? Shouldn't the duty to retreat be roughly analogous in both situations?
Shrike
5d ago
Supposing instead of any of these Rube Goldberg machines the person fleeing just decides to point a gun at the police and tell them he will shoot if they get any closer. Shouldn't the cops back off?
Shrike
5d ago
I do think there's a difference between a cop stepping in front of an already moving vehicle (this should be banned by departmental policy for officer safety if for no other reason) and a vehicle moving into a cop.
And conveniently as a general rule you can replace "cop" with "person" and the result and rules are the same.
Shrike
5d ago
Setting aside the question of the appropriate response to a fleeing suspect, this (and a lot of comments here) seem to be glossing the fact that fleeing the cops in a motor vehicle is a choice, just as much as fleeing the cops with a gun is. You can always attempt to flee on foot if you decide to flee.
The intervention (where we prepared an invasion, showed the ruler of the country a videotape of paratroopers en route, and then he decided to step down) seems to have played out in the US' favor in the sense of accomplishing our objectives at low cost.
I suppose it's fair to question whether or not the benefits from that were worth the cost, but OP didn't ask if regime-toppling exercises had solved all of the problems of the countries we toppled, just whether they had played out in the US' favor.
Probably some of those other ones should be on my list...
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