BIG STICK versus BIG MOUTH

In a January 26, 1900 letter to Henry L. Sprague, Theodore Roosevelt penned the immortal words “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” In the popular memory that saying has transformed to “Walk softly and carry a big stick,” but the core meaning remains the same—be strong, but don’t shoot your mouth off about it—a lesson which seems to have been lost on the current crop of professional athletes and politicians. 

The lesson also seems to be lost on our current crop of Presidential candidates, especially the Republican nominee, who seems to have reversed the maxim to “Bluster loudly and shoot off a big mouth,” as evidenced by his latest statements about military strategy: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we attacked first, and talked about our great victory later?” Perhaps. But publicly suggesting such a stratagem is irresponsible.

Of course, Trump isn’t the only one who speaks loudly and carries a twig. I remember back in 2011 when our current president declared “Assad must go!” And then he began to flog Assad with his twig. Five years later Assad has gone nowhere and Russia threatens to shoot our planes down if we intervene in Syria. Putin feels perfectly safe in making such a threat because of the multi-year record of courageous resolve that Obama has compiled in the Middle East.

And then we have “What Difference Does It Make” Clinton, who claims great knowledge of international affairs but seems to have displayed neither great courage nor good judgment in conducting them. Where can America find a leader with the courage of a Teddy Roosevelt when one is so desperately needed?

UNINTENDED AND UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES IN IRAQ

When George W. Bush began talking about taking military action against Saddam Hussein, I thought it was not a good idea, but not for any of the reasons I typically hear bandied about by those who criticize the decision. Saddam was not a nice man, but he maintained stability in the region. By toppling him we would destabilize the region, and we would have to make a long-term, South Korea-esque  commitment to keeping stability. We change leadership every four years, and I doubted the stick-to-it-iveness of subsequent administrations.

Every action has unintended and unanticipated consequences, and toppling Hussein was no exception. The unanticipated consequence was the complete collapse of the Iraqi government. With Hussein gone, the government just vanished and there was no centralized leadership to deal with—we were confronted with the unappealing prospect of trying to oversee the building of a new government out of chaos and anarchy. In many ways the situation we confronted was like the situation confronted by the Romans in Iberia after the Second Punic War. When the Romans destroyed the Carthaginian government in Iberia they created a power vacuum that it took 40 years and gallons of Roman blood to fill. The early Romans, however, never lacked stick-to-it-iveness and they ultimately prevailed. In Iraq we never intended to create a power vacuum, never expected to have to pay the bill in time and blood to fill it, and not even the Bush Administration was willing to voice a commitment to seeing the job through to the end.

The unintended consequence was the increasing militancy of Iran. Look at a map. Iraq is to the west of Iran, and Afghanistan is to the east. After the invasion of Iraq the U.S. Military occupied both countries. Put yourself in the shoes of the Iranian theocracy. America has taken down a dictatorship to your immediate west and a theocracy to your immediate east. Do you feel threatened? What are the two classic responses to threats? Flight or fight. Flight is impossible, so what is left? The Iranian government begins to [1] figuratively pound its chest and threaten the threatener (us) and [2] work to undermine our increasingly feeble efforts at reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I didn’t see either of these consequences coming. All I foresaw was the need to invest years and years of effort into the reconstruction of Iraq and the basic unwillingness of subsequent administrations to make that investment.  I, like everyone else, am better at hindsight than foresight. You don’t, however, need 20/20 hindsight to see that if we had maintained an adequate troop commitment to Iraq that ISIS would never have blossomed and grown.

Bush sowed the seeds of anarchy by invading Iraq, and Obama cultivated them by allowing the rise of ISIS. Bush’s mistake was to create a situation which required a commitment so lengthy and costly that subsequent administrations would be unwilling to follow through. We had a pretty good handle on things when Bush left office, but we would lose it if troops were withdrawn on the unrealistic timetable the Bush administration had set. Obama’s mistake was sticking to the unrealistic timetable. Somebody somewhere had to be telling him that if we did, things would go to Hell in short order. He had two options [1] stick to the unrealistic timetable and blame Bush for the resulting chaos, or [2] step up to the plate and stay the course. We have ISIS terror cells in the USA today because Obama took Option [1].

BULLIES

When I was in grade school I was fat, unathletic, studious, and a smart-mouth. All I needed to be the perfect nerd was a pair of glasses and a pocket protector. We all know what happens to unathletic, smart-mouthed nerds. They get bullied. I got bullied. I was completely aware of the conventional wisdom that bullies are cowards, but I didn’t see how it made any difference. Whether the bully was brave or cowardly, the fact that he was bullying me was a pretty good sign that he could beat me up. In the wild even the most courageous predators will go after the weak because they are easy targets. The same can be said for bullies.

A number of things happened to end the bullying. I stopped shooting my mouth off; I went out for football; and I got bigger and stronger. I don’t know how things are now, but back in the 1960’s high school football was a wonderful game. You didn’t have to be athletic to play the line. You just had to be big and strong. Although fat, unathletic smart-mouth nerds make prime targets for bullies; big, strong, taciturn football linemen do not.

Having had so much firsthand experience with bullies, I can readily recognize a bully when I see one. Barack Obama is a bully. That fact became evident early in his first term when we were about to go over the fiscal cliff. The Republicans came to him seeking a budget compromise, and he told them "It's my way or the highway." He was in a win/win situation. If the Republicans caved in, he would win. If we went over the fiscal cliff the press would blame the Republicans and he would win. He won and our credit rating took a hit. I won’t catalog all the examples of his bullying tactics, but I will mention one of the latest. He said the Washington Redskins ought to change their name. They refused, and he had their trademark rescinded.

 

On the domestic front Obama is a formidable bully. But remember the conventional wisdom? Bullies are supposed to be cowards. Obama lives up to the conventional wisdom in foreign affairs. Although he bullies Israel because he sees them as dependent on the U.S., he knuckles under to other bullies like Vladimir Putin. As ISIS grew into a formidable threat he bullied al-Maliki into resigning as prime minister of Iraq by withholding aid to the Iraqis. Now that ISIS has matured into a serious threat, he can’t seem to decide upon a strategy for dealing with them.

What we need in the White House now is a courageous leader, not a bully. I sincerely hope that we can survive relatively unscathed for the next two years, and I will welcome the next president whoever he or she may be. If we are lucky (or wise) our next president will be courageous enough to confront and defeat our foreign enemies.

BENDING THE TRUTH FOR A GOOD CAUSE

CAVEAT: Before you read this, please understand that I am not a Grinch and I'm not trying to make light of serious issues. I'm just evaluating the truth value of certain claims. As a prosecutor I spent 29 years and 10 months trying to establish the truth. It offends me when anyone makes untrue claims, no matter how laudable their motives might be.

 

There’s a story circulating on the internet about Barack Obama visiting an elementary school and talking to a group of students. Obama is supposed to have begun snapping his fingers at the rate of about once every three seconds. He told the students that every time he snapped his fingers, a child died of gun violence. A student is supposed to have piped up and said, “Well, quit snapping your fingers, dumb***.”

I had serious doubts about the story, so I checked it out on the Politifact.com truth-o-meter. That website said they couldn’t find any documentary proof that this ever happened. They did find evidence that this same story was told about Hillary Clinton when she ran against Obama in 2007. They also documented a number of other variations of the story involving other public figures.

Trying to find the origin of the story, they said that the earliest variation they could find was a television ad from 2005 in which a number of celebrities snapped their fingers at the rate of once every three seconds, and in the background Liam Neeson solemnly intoned that a child died of extreme poverty every three seconds. You can see the commercial here. This commercial was financed by Makepovertyhistory.com, and although it didn't ask for money I strongly suspect it was aimed at making viewers feel so awful that they'd break out their checkbooks and send in a contribution. Now I'm 100% in favor of feeding children, but I'm also 100% in favor of telling the truth. I decided to investigate Neeson's claim.

The first thing I did was figure out what kinds of numbers they were talking about. I took 365 and multiplied it by 24, giving me the number of hours in a year. I then took that number and multiplied it by 60, giving me the number of minutes in a year. You guessed it, I then multiplied that number by 60, giving me the number of seconds in a year. Finally, I divided by three, giving me the number of children who died of extreme poverty in a year. I’m not a very good mathematician (that’s why I’m a lawyer), but I came up with 10,510,000 child deaths caused by extreme poverty.

Now, here’s where the statistics get dicey. This aggregation of movie starts and pop singers didn’t tell us what geographical area they were talking about. Given that the commercial ran in the USA and they were all speaking English, the uncritical conclusion you would come to is that they were talking about the USA. We also don’t know what they meant when they were talking about children. Were they talking about the prepubescent young or were they talking about anyone under 18? We won’t even attempt to figure out what they were talking about when they spoke of extreme poverty.

Let’s do a reality check on our number. This commercial ran in 2005, so the uncritical conclusion to come to is that they were talking about these 10,510,000 deaths occurring in 2005. I went to the CDC website and pulled up the death rates for 2005. We’ll also take the World Health Organization's definition of child as anyone under 18 living in a country which doesn’t have a lower age of majority. According to the CDC, 46,174 people under age 18 died in the USA in 2005.[1] That number includes deaths from all causes. Conclusion: Neeson was talking about a geographical area larger than the USA.  Let's take the entire world as our geographical area and test the numbers against that.

What are the child death rates worldwide? I’ve checked with the World Health Organization (WHO), and found that they keep track of child deaths under five,[2] but they don’t seem to have the statistics for children from 5-18. I’m going to assume that if the commercial got its children’s death rate from the WHO rather than conjuring it out of thin air, they were talking about the death rate for children under five.

Childmortality.org, which got its numbers from the WHO, says that in 2005 the worldwide total number of children under five who died from all causes was 8,246,000.[3] That doesn’t square well with the commercial’s claim of 10,510,000 deaths from extreme poverty alone.

Conclusion: the commercial's death rate was conjured out of thin air.

Moral: Never take anything you hear at face value, especially if it comes from TV, the internet, or the news media.