Am I free not to talk about Jeffrey Goldberg?

I remember the time — 16 years ago — he got annoyed at me for objecting to his characterization of Dahlia Lithwick as a "haiku genius."

Now, there's something about his bizarre inclusion in a group chat about crushing the Houthis.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: When did Shakespeare use the plot device of a character who thinks he's secretly eavesdropping who is being deliberately fed false information to get him to do something? (The answer involves "Othello," "Much Ado About Nothing," and "Twelfth Night.")

I'll just say...

Whispers cloak the stage
Hidden ears catch crafted tales
Truth bends in the dark

"Today, I have ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen."

Writes Trump, on Truth Social.

They have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones. Joe Biden’s response was pathetically weak, so the unrestrained Houthis just kept going.

"Harris, characteristically, has made a lawyerly assessment of pros and cons. She and her advisers have queried whether, given the limited number of ATACMS available..."

"... they might be more useful striking Russian targets in occupied Crimea — especially given intelligence reports that Russia has pulled its aircraft that target Ukraine back to bases beyond the missiles’ 300-kilometer range. Another concern for the Harris team is whether the Russians might retaliate by giving long-range missiles to adversaries, such as the Houthis in Yemen, further threatening Red Sea shipping and perhaps Israel.... Lawyers have played a decisive role in national security policy — from Dean Acheson to Jake Sullivan. Harris would sustain that long line of lawyerly balancers and trimmers who weigh risks and benefits before they take action. She might turn a page in our domestic life, but not so much in foreign policy."

Writes David Ignatius, in "These people have seen Harris in the Situation Room. Here’s what they have to say. Harris is 'more hard-line than most people think,' says a retired four-star general who has briefed her many times" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Ignatius assumes we understand what "trimmers" are — "lawyerly balancers and trimmers." There are a lot of meanings to the word "trim," including distracting slang usages (see Urban Dictionary). But, relying on the OED, I've got to choose the nautical meaning: "To distribute the load of (a ship or boat) so that it floats on an even keel." There's also: "To adjust (the sails or yards) with reference to the direction of the wind and the course of the ship, so as to obtain the greatest advantage." But the load distribution metaphor is the one that has been used in politics. The OED has a separate entry for "trimmer," and meaning #5 is expressly political: 

"We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind."

"In fact everything the president has been doing has been trying to prevent any escalation of conflict, including the strikes last night."

Said John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, quoted in "The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get? With the U.S.-led attacks in Yemen, there is no longer a question of whether the Israel-Hamas war will escalate into a wider conflict. The question is whether it can be contained" (NYT).

"On Monday, a Saudi-led military coalition battling Tehran-backed rebels in Yemen said it reserved the 'right to respond' to the missile attack on Riyadh at the weekend..."

"... calling it a 'blatant military aggression by the Iranian regime which may amount to an act of war.'... Analysts said it was unclear how far Saudi Arabia would be willing to go in the escalating confrontation. The kingdom is in the midst of an unprecedented purge of its upper ranks, with dozens of senior figures arrested at the weekend, as 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman consolidates his hold on power. Prince Mohammed, who is also defence minister, is seen as a key supporter of the intervention in Yemen...."

Yahoo reports.

"Even by the standards of Yemen, where violence, uncertainty and a weak central government are endemic, the power vacuum has produced a serious crisis..."

"...  that threatens to tear the country apart, allow a resurgent Qaeda room to expand and accelerate a sectarian conflict between the Houthis, who are a Shiite sect, and Sunni tribes and militants."

It also may undermine the United States’ antiterrorism operations in the region, since the ousted president was an ally of Washington.

Still, the mood here remained calm, almost festive at times, as hundreds of Houthi supporters — bitter opponents of Al Qaeda — gathered in the district of Al Juras, their main stronghold in the capital, to condemn the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. It was the local Qaeda franchise that claimed credit for planning the attacks at the newspaper and a kosher market that left 17 dead in Paris this month.

“God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews, victory to Islam," scattered groups chanted as they strolled back to their cars.

It's only Yemen. Are you paying attention to what is arguably — as opposed to 11 deflated footballs — the most important news story of the week?

"[T]he President wanted so much to make his surgical strike bloodless that he could not make the incision..."

"The mission's failure is wrongly interpreted as evidence of the folly of direct action.... In fact, the reason the rescue failed was not that one helicopter pilot lost his way, but that the conception of the raid was not bold enough..."

From a 1980 essay by William Safire about the failed mission to rescue the American hostages during the Carter Administration.

I'm reading that this morning after seeing the news today:

Two hostages, including an American journalist, who were being held by Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen were killed during a rescue attempt by United States commandos early Saturday, American officials said.

In a statement, President Obama said the hostages had been “murdered” by militants belonging to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula during the rescue operation. A senior United States official said that the American, Luke Somers, 33, was badly wounded when commandos reached him. By the time Mr. Somers was flown to a United States naval ship in the region, he had died from his injuries, the official said Saturday.

Mr. Obama said in his statement, “It is my highest responsibility to do everything possible to protect American citizens. As this and previous hostage rescue operations demonstrate, the United States will spare no effort to use all of its military, intelligence and diplomatic capabilities to bring Americans home safely, wherever they are located.”

I'm not a military expert, so I hesitate to express an opinion on any military effort, but I want to say keep up this kind of pressure. Isn't a rescue attempt that fails like this better than leaving terrorists to make theater out of killing a man according to their schedule and their methods?

"Yemen wedding celebration to ‘Gangnam Style’ ends with three dead when dancer accidentally shoots AK-47."

"The horrifying mistake turned the dance floor into a bloodbath and sent guests running in horror."

Replete with viral video.

"They detained me in a room... They kept beating me hard... After five days, they gave me an injection and I slept... When I woke up my hand was not there."

When Ansar al-Sharia ruled Yemen's Abyan province.

"Turmoil in the Arab world linked to an American-made video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad spread on Thursday to Yemen..."

"... where hundreds of protesters attacked the American Embassy, two days after assailants killed the American ambassador in Libya and crowds tried to overrun the embassy compound in Cairo."

Writes the NYT, where I struggle to figure out how they know the precise motivation of a mob. Who is conveying this information to the NYT? And even if we do know that it is that video that's firing up the mob, I'd like to know the source of the mob-members' knowledge of the video? Surely, they are not individually clicking on YouTube and watching it and deciding on their own how outraged to be. There must be intermediaries inciting the mob, saying things about the video to stir people up and set them off. Who are they? What are they saying?

The U.S. kills an al Qaeda leader... after releasing him from Guantanamo.

It's a nice achievement for the Obama administration... except that the man — Ali al-Shihri — could have been in detention all these years, instead of contributing to terrorism. Exactly when was he released? WaPo says:

Shihri was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and spent nearly six years as a prisoner at Guantanamo. He was released to the custody of the Saudi government as part of a rehabilitation program for militants. In 2008, however, he decamped for Yemen and helped to revive al-Qaeda’s organization there.

The Bush administration released him. There's better detail in the UK Telegraph:

2011 Nobel Peace Prize has "included the Arab Spring... but we have put it in a particular context."

Unless the new governments include women "there will be no democracy."

The Nobel Committee characterizes the prize to Yemeni rights campaigner Tawakkul Karman as a "signal" to the Arab world to deal with "the oppression of women."

Sharing the prize are Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee.

***

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — Africa's first elected female head of state — is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. She received a degree in accounting in 1964.

"The American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning 'regime change' for the past three years."

Reports the UK Telegraph, looking at a WikiLeaked document:

In a secret diplomatic dispatch, sent on December 30 2008, Margaret Scobey, the US Ambassador to Cairo, recorded that opposition groups had allegedly drawn up secret plans for “regime change” to take place before elections, scheduled for September this year...

Ambassador Scobey questioned whether such an “unrealistic” plot could work, or ever even existed. However, the documents showed that the activist had been approached by US diplomats and received extensive support for his pro-democracy campaign from officials in Washington. The embassy helped the campaigner attend a “summit” for youth activists in New York, which was organised by the US State Department.

That's 2008 — pre-Obama. And here's Elliott Abrams in the Washington Post: "Egypt protests show George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab world."

[The developments in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen] seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological and meant essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush's support for the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was defending self-government, not the use of force. Consider what Bush said in that 2003 speech, which marked the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, an institution established by President Ronald Reagan precisely to support the expansion of freedom.

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."

"While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq."

"Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed."

Is President Obama the victim of "the stubborn complexity of his national security inheritance"?

That's Scott Shane's angle in the NYT:

For much of President Obama’s first year in office, his national security team worked to devise a secure plan to send dozens of Yemeni detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the largest single group at the prison camp — home to Yemen, perhaps to a rehabilitation program....

Since November, the administration had been preparing to move the highest-profile Guantánamo prisoners — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accomplices accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — to Manhattan for a federal criminal trial.

It seems to me that the President is the victim of his own ideas about how to do things differently. If he had graciously accepted the inheritance left by George Bush, he wouldn't have had either of these problems. He squandered an inheritance that he failed to value!

Bush — despite his reputation for simplicity — did understand the complexity of the problem, and he had a solution. There was stability. After posturing about "change" in his political campaign, Barack Obama seemed to think that he could apply the immense power he had won to changing things in the real world. And there is no blaming Bush for failing to know the difference between what sounds good and what works well.

George Bush — the extreme contrast to Barack Obama — knew that he was doing a lot of things that didn't sound good and left him open to harsh criticism, but he made a decision early on to accept that and to do what he thought was right. He didn't get enough credit for that. Maybe he will some day. But he also avoided the torrent of justified criticism that would have fallen on him if there had been further terrorist attacks.

Fortunately, there is a limit to how far Obama will go in his dream world of "hope and change." I voted for Obama, but the Obama I voted for was Obama the Pragmatist. I'm glad to see OTP finally emerging, even if part of his pragmatism is blaming Bush. But he will throw that aside if it doesn't work, which it shouldn't. For now, I'm glad he's making some better decisions... even as those freed detainees roam around Yemen.

ADDED: Click and scroll here for all my "Obama the Pragmatist" posts. Like, remember in August 2008 when Joe Biden assured us that Obama "is a clear-eyed pragmatist who will get the job done"? And then there was the time I said:

Forced to choose between Clinton and Obama [in the Wisconsin primary], I voted for Obama — even though he stated positions that were farther from what I want than Clinton's — because I thought he had more mental flexibility and pragmatism, that he was more likely absorb and process evidence and advice and exercise sound judgment.

"Since women cannot bear the hot sun, why would they want to get a job when they can stay safely inside their homes?"

A young woman in Yemen.

The Obama administration is still going to send Guantanamo detainees to Yemen.

But don't worry: "We are making sure that we don't do anything that's going to put Americans at risk."

"Iraq was yesterday's war, Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war."

Said Joe Lieberman.

ADDED: Spencer Ackerman said:

Is it a mistake to respond to this with more than ridicule? Maybe, but if not: it’s a ludicrously blithe and cost-free assertion to say that we need to take preemptive action in Yemen. What the fuck does Joe Lieberman know about Yemen? What does anyone in the Washington policy community know about Yemen? .... Lieberman just gets to go on Fox and monger away, unchallenged. Such is life....

Kind of hard to backpedal from that, but the NYT has this:

In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.

A year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sent many field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according a former top agency official. At the same time, some the most secretive Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said.

The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels....

AND: Instapundit notes:

What’s interesting is the raft of commenters accusing Lieberman of being a stooge for Israel because of this statement, when he’s quoting an administration official.

I'm seeing, at the original report that I began with: "an administration official told him that..." So I didn't think I was quoting a quote. It's a paraphrase, I think. But Lieberman didn't make it up, and the NYT article makes it pretty clear that the attacks on Lieberman are embarrassing and should be withdrawn quickly.

"I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school."

Says the 8-year-old girl Nojud Mohammed Ali, whose lawyer said "I believe there are thousands of similar cases" in Yemen.

In other news from the Middle East:

A Turkish barber accused of swearing at God is sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia, with his family back in Turkey calling on authorities to intervene....

According to reports, Boğday argued with his neighbor, an Egyptian tailor, and was arrested after the tailor told the police that he had sworn at God....

Muazzez Boğday said her husband knew the laws of Saudi Arabia well and would never swear. “Even if he did, he would never swear at God. He knows what the punishment would be,” she said.