Gabriel Snyder — Notes

It’s shocking how cavalier Edward Luttwak’s case for a “limited air attack” on North Korea is — and, given the twitchy short finger on the trigger, how downright dangerous his arguments are. He suggests “the most commonly cited” reasons not to bomb North Korea “are far weaker than generally acknowledged,” but his own case spells out the very reasons why so many are terrified at the prospect of a military escalation on the Korean peninsula spiraling out of control. Let’s look at what Luttwak says would need to happen in order to carry out a mission like “what Israel did to Iraq in 1981, and to Syria in 2007.”

1. Avoiding mass civilian casualties from a retaliatory rocket attack is easy: tell the 20 million South Koreans who live within range to move. “This should involve clearing out and hardening with jacks, props, and steel beams the basements of buildings of all sizes; promptly stocking necessities in the 3,257 official shelters and sign-posting them more visibly; and, of course, evacuating as many as possible beforehand (most of the 20 million or so at risk would be quite safe even just 20 miles further to the south).” Oh, and if a massive metropolitan area  isn’t depopulated and/or hardened in time, it’s a “self-inflicted” tragedy because Luttwak advised the South Koreans to have move government and industry away from Seoul 50 years ago.
2. Instead of letting the U.S. Air Force worry about taking out North Korean air defense systems, just don’t. “The Air Force’s requirements are nothing but an excuse for inaction.”
3. And to get around Chinese objections to a military strike, why not let them run the entire Korean peninsula after the attack? (Somehow, Luttwak’s limited air strikes turned into a total war.) “In theory, a post-attack North Korea in chaos could be rescued by the political unification of the peninsula, with the United States assuaging Chinese concerns by promptly moving its troops further south, instead of moving them north.”

So the case for taking out “less than fewer [sic] dozen installations, most of them quite small” comes down to accepting: relocating and/or mass casualties of millions of South Koreans, overturning American military doctrine, and handing over a democracy of 50 million people to an authoritarian state. How simple!

Trump really wants to build a wall, but you know who’s going to pay? Programs that are actually effective at protecting the border and are already being cut to make room for his “priorities.”

Nothing matters, or the ascent of the confirmation bias industrial complex: Read Charlie Warzel’s very good piece on how Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is the perfect manifestation of the “post-truth” political media era and you’ll understand Sebastian Gorka’s curious op-ed blasting Wolff’s book as untrue while largely confirming his claims of nearly unfettered access to the Trump White House.

It only took a few changes to make this story about Iran’s ban on teaching English in schools sound a lot more familiar.

Texas has banned the teaching of Spanish in primary schools, a senior education official said, after conservative leaders warned that early learning of the language opened the way to a “cultural invasion.”

“Teaching Spanish in government and nongovernment primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations,” the head of the High Education Council, told Fox News late on Saturday.

“This is because the assumption is that, in primary education, the groundwork for the American culture of the students is laid,” the official said, adding that noncurriculum Spanish classes might also be blocked.

The teaching of Spanish usually starts in middle school in Texas, around the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary schools below that age also have Spanish classes.

Some children also attend private language institutes after their school day. And many children from more privileged families who attend nongovernment schools receive Spanish tuition from day care through high school.

Conservative leaders have often warned about the dangers of a “cultural invasion,” and the president voiced outrage in 2016 over the “teaching of the Spanish language spreading to nursery schools.”

The president said in that speech to teachers, “That does not mean opposition to learning a foreign language, but (this is the) promotion of a foreign culture in the country and among children, young adults and youths.”

I have never been happier to see a weather forecast this cold in my life

John Kelly claimed that he hadn’t seen Trump’s “genius” tweets until the pooler, The Hill‘s Jordan Fabian, literally showed him his phone. Now, I don’t recommend anyone follow @realDonaldTrump — or use Twitter at all, for that matter — but maybe the White House Chief of Staff ought to set up an alert on his phone or something? Or at least get an intern to do it?

Setting aside the arguments in this piece, it’s a very good example of why the royal We should be banned from op-ed writing: one doesn’t need to make the (instantly disprovable) case that everyone already agrees with its thesis in order to make the case for the thesis itself. Indeed, if universal agreement were in fact real, there’d be no point in writing the piece at all except to state an obvious consensus (of which this piece most definitely is not). It’s this unsupported claim that pushes the piece, in my humble opinion, into the terrain of outrage-bait.

The GOP circular firing squad gets in formation following the Trump-Bannon split.