The Daily Overdose of Logic for Friday, 21 October 2011: America Polices the World (Again)

The United States of America has a long-standing policy of justifying its military interventions in the affairs of other sovereign states on humanitarian grounds, with varying levels of ingenuousness. We had to save the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam from the horrors of communism. We had to save Afghanistan from Islamic fundamentalism. We had to save Iraq (twice, no less) from a demented tyrant. And this is all to say nothing of military actions that, for reasons not always entirely clear, don't seem to rise to the level of a war in the general discourse, e.g. Kosovo.

An intelligent, impartial observer analyzing each of those cases will no doubt come to the realization that the United States had, of course, an ulterior motive (or several) in intervening, but even I will concede that, from a moral standpoint, each case also involved the oppression of a foreign people that the United States, with its truly unfathomable power, attempted to undo. On the whole, though, the degree to which that moral overtone was compelling had little or no correlation with the success of the intervention; where Vietnam, which we invaded, unsuccessfully, for basically no other reason that that it had the gall to choose an economic system different from ours, is today a stable and peaceful country whose standard of living is rising at a breakneck pace (largely due to a surprising degree of market freedom), it is a legitimate question whether Afghanistan, which really was being terrorized by fascist religious zealots, is any better off today that it was in August 2001. (And, of course, the temporal length of the Afghan Adventure has now almost equaled Vietnam, with no end in sight.)

It's clear, then, that where America's track record of attempting humanitarian interventions is second to none, its track record of actually correcting the perceived humanitarian outrage is spotty at best. What, therefore, to make of President Obama's decision to combat the Lord's Resistance Army, a militant group that has been committing gross atrocities in central Africa, primarily in Uganda and what is now South Sudan, since 1987 (not that Rush Limbaugh would know anything about that)? And if this band of poorly resourced (but heavily armed and irrecoverably bloodthirsty) undesirables has been belligerent for nearly a quarter-century, why is it only at this moment that this President has decided to act?

The answer is that this is an attempt by a President whose popularity is badly flagging and who faces myriad seemingly intractable domestic problems to erase a decade-long narrative of the complete incompetence of the American military to address even the simplest issue and, in so doing, maximize his own chances of four more years in power. Is that the cynicism talking? You bet your ass, it's the cynicism talking, but there are also plenty of perfectly good reasons to think it's true. For one thing, the President, for all the high ideals he invoked in deciding to intervene, seems to have overlooked quite a number of far more serious humanitarian crises in favor of one that, up until two weeks ago, the vast majority of Americans (shamefully) had no idea was occurring. For another, it is usually much easier to sell such an intervention to Congress and the electorate when the misbehaving party is an insurgent group rather than a foreign state.

But, most crucially, when it comes to humanitarian interventions, the mere appearance of doing something is usually worth much more politically than making any real progress. Small wonder, then, that the President saw fit to dispatch a whopping one hundred American soldiers to combat an organization that, as estimated by international observers in 2008, counts thirty times that many members. This places the President in a no-lose situation: if the LRA is defeated, he can claim that it was swift, decisive action by Los Quesos Grandes of the American military establishment (i.e., by him) that tipped the scale, and if the intervention fails, he can, with minimal sunk costs, quietly bring home a tiny detachment of soldiers whose success was never crucial to legitimate American interests in the first place.

All of the foregoing presumes, for the sake of argument only, that humanitarian intervention can ever be successfully justified (which this non-interventionist certainly does not take as given generally), and, more importantly, that the President's subtle political calculation is correct. He must hope fervently that it is, for he is gambling with the very lives of American soldiers for his own benefit.

In case you missed it: Apparently, reports of Col. Gaddafi's death have not been greatly exaggerated, and, relevant to the brief discussion of nuclear power in yesterday's Overdose, Friend of the Program Phillip passed along in the comments a very interesting analysis of the cost efficiency of various forms of electrical generation.

In other insufficiently logical news:

World: The notorious Basque separatist group ETA, which for 52 years has waged a campaign of terror in northern Spain, announced today a "definite cessation of armed activities" (link in Spanish, English report from Reuters here), prompting a wave of celebration across a country which in recent times has had precious little to celebrate. As always, I am skeptical; there remain plenty of hard-line Basque nationalists, which may eventually pressure the group into re-arming. (One wonders also at the high degree of trust being placed in the statements of what is nearly universally described as a terrorist group.)

Business: After rising 193 points on Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now, rather remarkably, on the plus side for 2011. I do not place too much stock (ha! get it?) in the DJIA as an indicator of overall economic health--the stock market takes little account of the vast economic activity represented by privately held firms, and even so the S&P is a more representative measure of the market collectively--but after four years of doom and gloom, today is not the day for raining on the parade. (Today being Friday, there's a good chance we'll see a sell-off that will put the DJIA back below break-even, which makes tomorrow the day for parade-raining.)

Obvious science, pt. 1: The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (which has the most pretentious acronym ever), using 1.6 billion data points going back 200 years, has found "reliable evidence" that worldwide temperatures have risen substantially since the mid-1950s. To which the reasonable reaction is: duhhhh. I consider myself an AGW skeptic, which is distinct from (and, sadly, usually conflated with) AGW denialism--that is, I accept that Earth is currently warming but require convincing as to the magnitude of anthropogenic effects. For somebody like me, this study changes absolutely nothing ("sure, the planet's getting warmer, but this says nothing about causation"). For somebody who accepts the conventional AGW theory, this study changes absolutely nothing ("see? just more evidence that we're right!"). And for a denialist, this study changes absolutely nothing ("them godless librul scientiss is at it agin!"). So . . . awesome, I guess.

Obvious science, pt. 2: For the umpteenth time, a scientific study has found absolutely no compelling evidence that cell phone use causes brain cancer (or any other kind of cancer). To which the reasonable reaction is: duhhhh. This study, published in the British Medical Journal, is supposedly newsworthy because (1) it is the largest such study ever undertaken (more than 350,000 subjects) and (2) it conclusively refutes the possibility of a link between cell phone use and glioma that some other studies had left open. But no other study found positive evidence of such a link; glioma is simply so rare that it is typically difficult to obtain sample sizes large enough to make statistically valid conclusions. I'd like to think this BMJ study will finally put this tiresome myth to bed, but I know better.

Colorado: Holly's Jensen Farms, the source of the listeria-contaminated cantaloupes that have caused the worst food-borne illness outbreak in the U.S. in 25 years, received a food safety compliance score of 96 out of 100 from a private auditor in July. I am anticipating the usual chorus decrying yet another failure of what we might call private regulation, but I am hesitant to tar the entire concept with that brush after the gross negligence (in a prima facie sense, at least) of a single auditor, especially when the exact limits of the FDA's oversight capabilities in this realm are quite poorly defined. That's sure to be cold comfort for Jensen, which is now facing an almost certain death by class-action tort suit.

Wildcataganda: Northwestern, after four straight losses (three to Big Ten foes), will try to right the ship tomorrow against Penn State. I can't say I'm optimistic, but given that Penn State still appears not to have a quarterback, maybe Northwestern's tire fire of a secondary won't prove quite as much of a liability. It's also Homecoming, and a night game, so Ryan Field should be rocking under the lights. Kickoff is at 1700 MDT on the Big Ten Network. If you read this blog and live within driving distance of Evanston, you hereby have a solemn duty to go here and buy tickets. Otherwise, Sippin' on Purple will help keep your Tears of Unfathomable Sadness to a minimum.

Anti-depressant: I promise I won't link to super-spiffy webcomic xkcd in these pages too often, since I don't assume that all my readers are like me, i.e. colossal nerds. However, when the comic itself includes a quantum mechanics joke and the alt-text has This the Finest of All States laying waste to the pointless states to its east, it's a no-brainer.