The Supreme Court and Gay Marriage

Before going any further, may I say that I believe gay marriage should be legal, and, indeed, that I think the Constitution can legitimately be interpreted to require it.  In that sense the Supreme Court's decision nearly two weeks ago was worthy of applause, even though nearly everyone seems to agree that Justice Kennedy's decision was not a highlight of American jurisprudence.  I did not think so either.  I think it embodies some unfortunate trends that have changed the role of the high court and changed our laws in unfortunate ways. And I am one of those who believe that consistency and fidelity to precedent are critical to a well-functioning judiciary, even if those qualities sometimes make it harder to reach my preferred result. Thus, I want to discuss the decision, and to show how I think the court could have reached a better one.  To do so--and believe me when I say that I am just as shocked to write this sentence as you are to read it--I am going to rely mainly on the opinion of my contemporary, Justice Clarence Thomas. Please pick yourself off the floor and be ready to proceed.

Kennedy's majority opinion (which none of his liberal colleagues thought fit to supplement with reasoning of their own)  relies, to begin with, on the doctrine of "substantive due process." Both the 5th and 14th amendments state that no American citizen shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.  That looks like a mere protection against arbitrary detention or imprisonment to me.  As my old friend, the legal commentator Ken Jost, helped explain to me, however, these clauses have been read to give the citizens other liberties never enumerated in the Constitution, and, indeed, which early Americans did not enjoy.  The Griswold and Baird cases that legalized birth control, Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion, and Lawrence v. Texas which legalized gay sex, all relied on this doctrine.  They did not invent it: it comes originally from a 1923 case, Meyers v. Nebraska, which struck down a law that  banned the teaching of foriegn languages by anyone to any child not old enough to attend the eighth grade. Here is what Justice McReynolds said then, speaking for the Court.

"While this Court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36; Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent City Co., 111 U. S. 746; Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356; Minnesota v. Barber, 136 U. S. 313; Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U. S. 578; Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45; Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy R.R. Co. v. McGuire, 219 U. S. 549; Truax v. Raich, 239 U. S. 33; Adams v. Tanner, 244 U. S. 590; New York Life Ins. Co. v. Dodge, 246 U. S. 357; Truax v. Corrigan, 257 U. S. 312; Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U. S. 525; Wyeth v. Cambridge Board of Health, 200 Mass. 474. The established doctrine is that this liberty may not be interfered

with, under the guise of protecting the public interest, by legislative action which is arbitrary or without reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the State to effect. Determination by the legislature of what constitutes proper exercise of police power is not final or conclusive, but is subject to supervision by the courts. Lawton v. Steele, 152 U. S. 133, 152 U. S. 137."

While McReynolds defined liberty broadly, he did so in terms of tradition, both under the Constitution (the reference to religious freedoms, properly defined) and with respect to the common law.  He also established a test for legislation--that it could not be arbitrary or lacking any reasonable purpose.  But he did not use the clause to invent any new liberties, as the Warren and Burger and Rehnquist courts did to legalize birth control, abortion, and gay sex.

In their dissents, Justices Roberts and Scalia took Kennedy and the majority to task for inventing new law that reflected their own beliefs, or perhaps the beliefs of a large portion of contemporary society.  Kennedy essentially admitted that that was what he was doing, acknowledging that opinions of what is right and proper change, and declining to wait for all our state legislatures to pass laws reflecting new views of gay marriage.  I think Roberts's and Scalia's accusations had more than a grain of truth, but they have repeatedly been guilty of the same sin.  It was not until the decisions they joined in Heller and Citizens United that anyone asserted that the Constitution protects a citizen's right to bear almost any arms, or that restrictions on campaign spending are illegal.  And in striking down the key section of the Voting Rights Act, they invalidated a very recent act of Congress.  I honestly would prefer it if the present court included at least one genuine strict constructionist, who might have voted against the gay marriage decision, but also against all of those conservative decisions as well, on the grounds that every one of them went well beyond what the Constitution says.  Unfortunately there is no such person on today's court.

Justice Thomas's dissent starts with a flat-out, carefully argued rejection of the whole doctrine of substantive due process, and goes back to Magna Carta to show that "liberty," under English and American law, had the clear definition of freedom from physical restraint, period,  With this I am inclined to agree: I do not think those clauses of the 5th and 14th amendment referred to broad and undefined liberties.  The court going back at least to Griswold would have been better advised, in my opinion, to find additional rights in the 9th and 10th amendments, which specifically state that the people enjoy rights not specifically guaranteed in the Constitution.  Unfortunately, they did not.  At the same time, Justice Thomas makes a second argument, one dear to the heart of present day "conservatives" like himself, which seems to me quite absurd.

Stating the new conservative view of the Constitution and its origins, Thomas claims that liberty does not come from government.  John Locke, he argues, said that men enjoyed perfect liberty while still in a state of nature.  "When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal," he writes, "and 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,' they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which this Nation was built."  But this is not correct.  The authors of the Declaration did not refer to "God," but to a "Creator." More importantly, Thomas, like most contemporary conservatives, conveniently omits the next sentence in the Declaration: "To secure these rights, governments are established with the consent of the governed." 
 We enjoy our rights only because we have an effective government.  Without it, we would be at one another's mercy.

This fundamental misreading of history and law allows Thomas to embark upon a real flight of fancy worthy of a 19th-century French Catholic conservative.  "The corollary of that principle," he continues, "is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved.Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

"The majority’s musings are thus deeply misguided, but at least those musings can have no effect on the dignity of the persons the majority demeans. Its mischaracterization of the arguments presented by the States and their amici can have no effect on the dignity of those litigants. Its rejection of laws preserving the traditional definition of marriage can have no effect on the dignity of the people who voted for them. Its invalidation of those laws can have no effect on the dignity of the people who continue toadhere to the traditional definition of marriage. And its disdain for the understandings of liberty and dignity upon which this Nation was founded can have no effect on the dignity of Americans who continue to believe in them."

Now Justice Thomas, a Catholic himself, is free to believe that he owes nothing of his dignity to his status as a free and equal citizen of the United States, but our whole history and body of law screams the exact opposite.  The greatest and most radical achievement of our revolution, as Tocqueville along with the framers themselves understood, was to create a society without distinctions of rank, in which all were equal before the law.  The abolitionist movement based itself upon that principle as well and it was embodied in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments after the civil war.  The twentieth century has extended full legal dignity to women.  Under Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, we fought the Second World War to make four fundamental freedoms safe in the world at large.   It seems that Clarence Thomas, had he been an adult living in 1776, would have been a Tory, complaining that the Continental Congress had opened a revolution against an earthly authority whose doings should not unduly trouble any of God's creatures. Fortunately for the United States and the world, those views, while present in the revolutionary era, did not prevail.

It was these words of Justice Thomas that convinced me that the Supreme Court had made the right decision, even though its reasoning could have been much better. Gay sex has now been legal in the United States for more than ten years.  The majority of us who are disposed to love and desire members of the opposite sex have always had the freedom to marry a partner of our choosing.  In Loving v. Virginia, the case that struck down laws against interracial marriage in the 1960s, the Court did what it had been doing for a long time: it put an end to laws that created two classes of citizens, one free to marry whom they chose, and the other not.  That is what it has done now. With gay sex recognized as legal, there is no basis for denying gay men and women the right to marry, based on the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.  As the court held in Meyers, liberty at common law includes the liberty to make contracts, including marriage contracts.  When homosexuality was illegal, such contracts would also have been, but we live now in more enlightened times and it is not.  My thanks go to Clarence Thomas, whose utterly baseless view of the foundation of our law and the source of our rights led me to see why the Court was right to legalize gay marriage.



 

Why the Declaration of Independence still matters

This weekend's post appears here.  Have a glorious 4th!

Why the Confederate Flag flew so long

 

 Most of the white southerners whom I have known well left their region as young men and women, at least in part because of its political values.   Several of them have talked very frankly about the psychology of their native region, and to them I owe some of the ideas behind this painful post. But meanwhile, other white southerners whom I never met have loomed large on my horizon for as long as I can remember: the barons of the House and Senate in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Senator Richard Russell of Georgia and House Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith; the defiant governors, George Wallace and Ross Barnett, who rallied their white constituents behind segregation; and perhaps the most interesting of all, those like Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama, who were liberals on virtually every issue but race. Their fellow Alabamian Hugo Black had already been on the Supreme Court for twenty years when I became aware of him, and he had joined the civil rights coalition.  So did Ralph Yarborough of Texas and Estes Kefauver and Al Gore, Sr., of Tennessee.  I studied race relations in college with Thomas Pettigrew, a liberal white Virginian, and I have never lost interest in them.  And thus, although the evidence I want to present today is primarily circumstantial, I think I do understand why the Confederate flag is displayed even today on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol, and why it remains a potent symbol in white southern politics.  I do not think it is primarily a symbol of hate; rather, I see it as a sign of fear, which in turn is fueled by a very bad conscience over what white southerners have done to black ones for five centuries.

Because slavery explicitly denied the full humanity of the slaves, it also forced the masters to suppress many of their own human feelings.  Holding other men and women in bondage and forcing them to work, often with violence, is a brutal, degrading, and frightening affair.  That is why, as  I learned from Pettigrew, planters customarily delegated the dirty work to an overseer—a white without property, not infrequently from the North, like Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whom Harriet Beecher Stowe specifically identified as a Yankee from Vermont.  When feelings between the overseer and the slaves became too intense, he was fired and replaced.  But the real burden of slavery on the master lay in the fear it inspired, the belief, amounting to a certainty, that the slaves would gleefully take their revenge upon white men and women if ever given half a chance.  And what is more natural, after all, than a belief that one’s slaves would treat one’s self just as one had treated them—or worse—if given half a chance?  While some antebellum white southerners undoubtedly felt slavery had been a mistake to impose in the first place, nearly all agreed that to give it up would be madness.  But the more extreme, who became more and more influential in the decades before the civil war, argued that it was a positive good that not only had to be maintained, but expanded.  That was why they defied the will of the nation in 1860 and seceded rather than live peacefully under Abraham Lincoln, who was elected without any plans to free the slaves.

Four years later, when the Confederacy’s resistance finally collapsed and emancipation took place all over the South, the nightmare appeared to have come true.  In the next ten years, the radical Republicans insisted upon black suffrage, and black governments ruled a number of southern states.  They were not, as southerners claimed for a century, simply corrupt and inefficient: some of them were the first southern state governments to provide what even then were regarded as basic services.  But the white power structure re-asserted itself through a campaign of terror led by the Ku Klux Klan, and eventually wore out the North. After federal troops left, the white elite not only terrorized and disenfranchised the black population, but created a new myth of “redemption,” arguing that they had saved their people from the horror of a race dictatorship.  And until the 1950s, intimidation, including lynchings, kept the black citizenry subjugated.  Then, fueled in part by the votes of blacks who had moved north, the federal government began once again to take an interest in the fate of black citizens.

Once again, this meant, to white southerners, the terrifying prospect of black rage let loose.   In the 1950s reporters who went south to report on civil rights issues heard the same line from whites again and again: that they didn’t have any trouble with “our Negroes,” it was just the outside agitators from the North who were causing the trouble.   That is why it was in 1962 that the Confederate flag first began flying over the capitol in Columbia, South Carolina, and why it was then that it was revived in other states.  Once again the Yankees were threatening to unleash black rage upon white southerners, and symbols of resistance had to be revived.    And suddenly, in the 1960s, when the civil rights movement reached its climax, most white southerners once again forgot every other issue, quit the Democratic Party en masse, and became the backbone of the Republican coalition.  By the 1970s, a new rhetorical trick had emerged to conceal what was happening.  Since it had become impossible openly to defend racism or the “southern way of life” (segregation), some new buzzword was needed around which southern whites could rally.  Fundamentalist Christianity provided it, and “Christian values” became the glue that held southern whites together.  It had become unfashionable to vote in favor of racism, but who could vote against Christianity?  (This morning, Charles Blow of the New York Times noted that a couple of Fox News commentators actually tried to spin Dylan Roof’s crime as an attack on Christianity—even though Roof is a member of a Lutheran Church.)  Dylann Rooff was inspired by the website of a neo-Confederate group that keeps lists on black-on-white crimes.    When he told the parishioners that he had to kill them because “you are raping our women and taking over our country,” he expressed the white southern fears that have dominated southern politics for much of the last two centuries.  

What is so painfully, dreadfully sad about all this, is how unnecessary it all has been.  Slave rebellions in the antebellum South were extremely rare, and attacks upon whites after emancipation seem to have been even rarer.  Having been thoroughly intimidated by slavery, new black citizens would have been more than happy to exercise the benefits of citizenship peacefully—but this they were not allowed to do.  Black violence has always been more directed against other blacks than against whites.  Still, the election of Barack Obama still symbolized, for many southerners, their worst nightmare, and white southerners have become more solidly Republican than ever in the Deep South.  And so respectful are Republican politicians of white southern fears that not a single Republican presidential candidate dared suggest that the Confederate flat come down on the state capitol grounds.  

Since I first drafted this post, however, an extraordinary wind of change has blown around the South.  Governor Nikki Haley os South Carolina is to be commended for taking the lead.  It is interesting that when the South Carolina legislature decided to fly the flag at a Confederate memorial on the grounds, it specified that only a 2/3 vote of both houses could overturn their decision.  That, too, looks like an attempt to defend the views of white folks against a growing minority tide.  But the South Carolina legislature has quickly come around, and a vote to remove the flag seems certain.  Similar moves to take Confederate flags off of license plates and remove statues of prominent Confederates from state capitols are gaining ground, and white Mississippians are talking about removing the Confederate battle flag from their state flag.

Wednesday morning’s New York Times describes what is happening at length, and includes a remarkable quote from a South Carolina state legislator with a famous name. “Our ancestors were literally fighting to keep human beings as slaves, and to continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will,” said State Senator Paul Thurmond, a Republican, explaining that he would vote to remove the flag.  “I am not proud of this heritage,” said Mr. Thurmond, the son of Strom Thurmond, the former governor and United States senator who was a segregationist candidate for president in 1948.  To be quite frank, I had given up on ever hearing any white southern politician say words like those.  Senator Thurmond has used his family’s prestige to try finally to move his state and his region forward.  He is a great American.

Counterinsurgency and stabs in the back

Two years ago, a good friend and former colleague of mine, Douglas Porch, published an extraordinary book, Counterinsurgency.  Porch is a prolific historian and, frankly, one of the few in my generation whom I regard, at the very least, as a peer.  He has written numerous books on French colonial warfare and other military topics, and Counterinsurgency is not only his personal magnum opus, but one of the most important books to have appeared in years.  The point of it was to situate the U.S. experience in Iraq, in particular, within the whole history of French, British and American counterinsurgency since the nineteenth century.  I intend to devote at least one long post to the book in the next month or two to really do it justice, but I do not have time just now to prepare it. Instead, I am going to address one aspect of his argument--one that was perfectly exemplified in an article by a Marine officer, Owen West, in an op-ed in the New York Times predicting that President Obama's strategy in Iraq was going to fail, and blaming the last two Presidents for what has happened there since 2011.

In Counterinsurgency Porch showed how recurrent myths have dominated the discussion of colonial and neo-colonial war from the French in Algeria in the mid-19th century through the British in South Africa, the Middle East, and Malaya, and the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq.  He particularly addressed the myth of what might be called "good" counterinsurgency, which is supposed to consist of working closely with the local population, earning their trust by providing good governance, and isolating the guerrillas.  I shall return to a Vietnam-era example of this myth in just a moment.  He argued on the other hand that these kinds of supposedly "small wars" are inevitably brutal, involve the displacement of large percentages of the population, exploit local ethnic rivalries, and succeed or fail not because of the skill of certain key practitioners or the use of particular tactics, but because of broader strategic factors.  The French, for instance, failed in Algeria because their tactics were invariably brutal, alienating essentially the entire native population except for those directly in their pay, and because neither world opinion nor French public opinion would accept an endless war along those lines.  In Vietnam, he showed, the U.S. carried out some successful counterinsurgency experiments, but they could not make up for the endemic political weakness of the South Vietnamese government, the extraordinary organization of the Viet Cong, and the support available to the VC from North Vietnam, and to North Vietnam from the USSR and China.  But critically, Porch also showed a continuing tradition of stab in the back legends surrounding virtually every lost colonial war.  Thus David Gallula, a French veteran of the Algerian conflict, wrote a book in the mid-1960s arguing that the French Army's tactics in Algeria had won the war, but that the de Gaulle government had simply abandoned it for political reasons.  General Stanley McCrystal was relieved in Afghanistan largely because he was already beginning to sing a similar tune even before the war was over.  West's op-ed is, sadly, in exactly the same tradition.

West argues, to begin with, that the small training groups which the Obama Administration is now sending to Iraq will not be sufficient to strengthen the Iraqi army. He is right.  But he also argues vehemently that he and other advisers turned things around between Fallujah and Ramadi (now both securely in the hands of ISIS) in 2007-8 by insisting on daily combat patrols by the Iraqis, and by pairing Iraqi units with American ones.  That may be true, to quote a famous, anonymous North Vietnamese officer in 1975--but it is also irrelevant.  The American effort was doomed because there was no long-term political basis for creating the kind of Iraq we had in mind--a pluralistic democracy allied with the United States.

West is certainly intelligent, and at times he seems to understand this.  He knows that the Shi'ite-dominated, Iran-allied government that we helped to create hopelessly alienated the Sunnis after we left in 2011.  He also admits that it was originally George W. Bush who agreed to that deadline, but rather than simply acknowledge that the Iraqi government did not want a large, permanent American presence, he blames Barack Obama for not doing enough to get the decision reversed.  But what West can't do is to admit that the whole enterprise--which was not his fault, or primarily the fault of any military officers--was hopeless from the beginning, because we could not break the Sunni domination of Saddam and the Ba'ath party without setting up a Shi'ite-led Iranian ally in its place. Outside of Kurdistan, there were no other alternatives.  West really wraps himself around the axle in his piece when he admits this, in effect, by saying that we have to aid the Sunni areas directly, by-passing the Baghdad government, while re-entering the ground war ourselves.  Clearly he feels an emotional commitment to the people of those areas among whom he and his troops risked and sometimes gave their lives.  But the Iraqi government exists, and it would never agree to this.  We would be committing ourselves to an endless presence surrounded by hostile forces.  In any case, thanks to the Maliki government, ISIS seems to enjoy a solid base of support in those areas.

"West," I thought, when I saw the op-ed.  Another proud member of the COINdinista brigade, as Porch calls it (using the acronymn COIN for counterinsurgency), was Bing West, a Marine from the Vietnam era, who wrote The Village, a fascinating account of his service in a Marine Combined Action Platoon in a South Vietnamese hamlet.  He too suggested that he and his fellow Marines were pursuing the proper strategy and that it could have won the war. Sure enough, a quick search revealed that Owen West is Bing West's son, and that they have a joint web page dedicated to the glories of counterinsurgency.   Dynasties are in fashion in the United States today, and this is another one.  Nearly every generation produces a new war in remote lands.  Most of them fail, and all those, in turn, give rise to books by bitter military officers, who sadly cannot accept that all their dedication, skill and sacrifice could not overcome the lack of any political basis for what the United States wanted to achieve.

A Blow for Diplomacy

In a 6-3 decision last week, the Supreme Courtruled in favor of the Obama Administration in the case of Zivotofsky v. Kerry, which turned on the President's power to determine whether Jerusalem is, or is not, part of Israel.  The case was brought by the parents of Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky, the child of two U.S. citizens whose mother gave birth to him in Jerusalem.  Those parents sued the government some years ago to force the State Department to list his country of birth as Israel on his passport, even though the United States has never acknowledged full Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.  The Congress, however, in 2002 passed a law specifically declaring that Americans born in Jerusalem should be able to claim Israel as their country of birth, and George W. Bush signing it, while declaring in a signing statement that U. S. policy towards Jerusalem "remains unchanged."  The law was one of many tributes to the power of AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby.  It also represented a terrible trend in Congressional interference in foreign policy.

Not only AIPAC, but other lobbies working for or against governments such as those in Taiwan and Cuba, have managed to get Congress to pass laws reflecting their views.  The Taiwan Relations Act essentially demanded that the U.S. government maintain Taiwan as an independent nation, even though President Nixon had affirmed that it was part of China.  Several laws have been passed to try to make any reconcilization Castro impossible, as well.  Congress actually passed a law in the 1990s committing the United States to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and AIPAC is about to make an all-out effort to stop the nuclear deal with Iran by getting the Congress to maintain sanctions against that country.  In this case, five and a half Supreme Court Justices (the half being Clarence Thomas, who wrote a kind of half-concurrence in the opinion), went back to first principles and struck a blow for sanity in government.

Justice Kennedy's majority opinion is of a much higher standard than most of what comes out of today's court, a carefully reasoned summary of international law and history going back at least to the days of the Founding Fathers.  While the Constitution does not mention the power to recognize governments, it does give the President the power "to receive Ambassadors," which even then, Kennedy shows, was interpreted to mean the power to recognize the authority of a particular government over a particular territory.  The concept received a key early test when George Washington recognized the French revolutionary government.  The President, Kennedy notes, also has exclusive power to negotiate treaties and to send Ambassadors.  We have lost sight of the importance of all this today because of the facile assumption that the whole world must run on a single set of rules, rules developed in Washington think tanks and American universities. The Founding Fathers understood that their new government had to deal with dozens of other sovereign entities and gave the President the power to do so.  And the Supreme Court, as Kennedy shows, has reaffirmed that principle again and again in the last 200-plus years.  While he acknowledges that Congress must make numerous laws incident to the conduct of foreign policy, he emphasizes that recognition--in this case, determining who, if anyone, is currently sovereign over the city of Jerusalem--is the prerogative of the President alone.  He even shows that in the case of Taiwan, following President Carter's formal recognition of Communist China in 1979, the Congress, while passing the Taiwan Relations Act, never contested the President's power to recognize Chinese sovereignty over the island if he chose to do so.  And Kennedy proceeds to rule the 2002 law specifying that Americans born in Jerusalem have Israel listed as their country of birth on their passport unconstitutional.

What is rather astonishing is that Justices Roberts, Scalia (who wrote the principal dissent), and Alito, who have been zealous advocates of presidential power in cases involving the detention of suspects at Guantanamo under the Bush Administration, now stretch precedent and language to argue that Congress can indeed determine that an American born in Jerusalem has in fact been born in Israel.   I frankly find it hard to understand why they did this, unless it is for the simple,. partisan reason that Republicans now control the Congress while a Democrat sits in the White House. Meanwhile, Judge Thomas, in a lengthy and detailed concurrence, splits hairs very finely, arguing that Congress does not have the power to determine what should go on Zivotoksky's passport, but that it does have the power to make the State Department file a "consular report" stating that he was born in Israel.

I cannot help but note, also, that the three Jews on the Supreme Court--Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, and Breyer--all voted with the majority, joining three of the six Catholics.   In allowing their reading of the law to trump any ethnic loyalty the case might have triggered, they acted as good justices and good Americans.    They also gave the President the authority to exercise real leadership over a highly politicized issue.

The President, meanwhile, is failing to do just that on another issue relating to the Middle East, the continuing war in Iraq.  Barack Obama has some good instincts, and one of them led hm to reduce, if not eliminate, the presence of US ground forces in Muslim lands.  So far such forces have done far more harm than good and there is no reason to think that could change in the future.  The decision to leave Iraq some years ago was a good one, even if the United States could have chosen to remain, which I do not think that it could, since the Iraqi government would not extend the status of forces agreement.  Now, because the civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis continued after our departure, ISIS controls much of Iraq.  And while the President still opposes US ground forces, he has also adopted the consensus view that we must eliminate ISIS--something we clearly do not have the power to do.  And thus, step by step, he inserting US forces back into Iraq.  Our new deployments have echoes of Vietnam in 1962:  while they are touted as advisory, most of the forces we are sending are not advisers at all, but will provide logistical support and protect the advisers.  Only time will tell whether they, like the forces that went to Vietnam in 1962, will also prepare the way for larger deployments.  Our tragic involvement in Iraq continues,. but that will be a subject for a later post.