Strategic ambiquity: a primer

But is it war?

One name not necessarily being heard from the armchairs is Biden. It means the code has not yet been broken. Confusion can be good early in the campaign. Those who do not need to know probably don't. From Slate:

This was the 119th message of its kind since the passage of the War Powers Resolution. It was the first since the rise of the Tea Party, the conservative movement that defines everything it does as a way to keep faith with the Constitution. So the relative lack of Tea Party angst over the no-fly zone has been surprising. There is no discussion of Libya happening at Ginni Thomas' Liberty Central, no statement from Tea Party Patriots or the Tea Party Express.

Fellow blogspot contributor Kenneth Anderson brings a thoughtful analysis on the developing Obama Doctrine. From OpinioJuris:

Liberal internationalist hawks and neocon hawks share hawkishness and willingness to use force, but have a fundamental asymmetry: the liberal internationalists want interventions that lack any obvious US interest (save in some very indirect sense that conflates ideals and interests), in the name of univeralism [sic] and virtue; the neocons are willing to act sometimes on account of pure altruism and idealism, but are also quite happy as well to act from interest in the most material and traditional sense. A fundamental problem for the Power Doctrine within the administration, after all, is that half of President Obama’s team consists of liberal internationalists eager to preserve American power in order to subordinate it to the will of the international community; while the other half has decided the US can’t really afford the power in the first place, and wants the US to belly up to the multilateralism bar as just another one of the folks in the world, in order to stand down from an unsustainable hegemonic role. The President, the national master of strategic ambiguity, uses phrases that can go both ways.

Representative Dennis Kucinich, the new chairman of House Oversight is dutifully hastening to kill funding for a protracted military entanglement. Pure poetry, beautifully executed; only non-believers can't see it. A Third Way President: what a concept!

Ralph Nader on al Jazeera:



South Dakota still in Nutwatch race.