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Kanye West Performs for a Dictator’s Family, and Human Rights Activists Are Livid

by Abe Johnson Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Trying to steal Taylor Swift’s thunder is no longer the most cringeworthy thing Kanye West has ever done.

Over the weekend, the hip-hop artist performed for a dictator’s kin. On Saturday, West was in Almaty (Kazakhstan’s largest city) performing at the wedding reception of Aisultan Nazarbayev, the 23-year-old grandson of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Nazarbayev has ruled the central Asian country for 23 years since its independence from the dissolved Soviet Union, and has come under fire by human rights organizations for his authoritarian tactics, including attacks on a free press, torture, torpedoing workers’ rights, and jailing the political opposition. (In 2011, Sting canceled a gig in Kazakhstan after Amnesty International got in touch with him about the human rights abuses.)

For his performance (which included a rendition of “Can’t Tell Me Nothing“), West reportedly received $3 million. Here’s a brief clip from the event:

A news agency in Kazakhstan reported that West was a personal guest of the controversial strongman. As you can imagine, human rights advocates aren’t thrilled about any of this.

“Kazakhstan is a human rights wasteland,” Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), said in a statement sent to Mother Jones. “The regime crushes freedom of speech and association; someone like Kanye, who makes a living expressing his views, would find himself in a prison under Nazarbayev’s rule.”

“The millions of dollars paid to West came from the loot stolen from the Kazakhstan treasury,” said Garry Kasparov, a noted critic of Vladimir Putin and chairman of HRF. “West has supported numerous charities throughout his career, including a few specifically focused on international human rights work. Kanye has entertained a brutal killer and his entourage…It’s up to the public to hold him accountable.”

West is now in the growing club of celebrities caught getting chummy with despots. In 2012, Kim Kardashian, the reality-TV socialite and mother of West’s child, is in it, too. In 2012, she traveled to Bahrain and generated positive press for a regime that was still taking heat for its bloody crackdown on political dissidents. (Following her arrival, Bahrain police were deployed to control “hard-line” Islamic protesters enraged at her presence.)

Earlier this summer, Jennifer Lopez was slammed by human rights groups for her paid performance at the lavish birthday bash of 56-year-old Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the human-rights-quashing dictator of Turkmenistan. Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Lionel Richie, and Usher had all danced and sung for relatives of the deceased Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi. Godfather of Soul James Brown and blues guitar legend B.B. King performed for Zaire president Mobutu Sese Seko, a vicious anti-communist tyrant. British supermodel Naomi Campbell was caught hanging out with Charles Taylor, a convicted war criminal and ex-president of Liberia. And the list goes on.

The human rights violations and internationally denounced actions of all the above can be found in five seconds on Google. Maybe famous people who don’t need the money—and the people they hire to vet their appearances—should use it more.

West’s publicist did not respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment.

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Kanye West Performs for a Dictator’s Family, and Human Rights Activists Are Livid

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Bombing Syria: A Running Guide to the Debate

by Nomi Steen Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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When President Barack Obama announced that he would seek congressional authorization for a limited military strike against the Syrian regime in retaliation for its presumed use of chemical weapons, he turned the ongoing op-ed tussle over Syria into an official debate. Since the August 21 chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, foreign policy experts, columnists, cable news commentators, bloggers, and others have been arguing over what to do about Syria, and it was hard to know how much any of this policy wonk combat mattered because the decision appeared to rest with one man, the commander in chief. But with Obama recognizing Congress’ role in war-related decision-making, the ensuing debate in the House and Senate—and the external, surrounding debate that could well affect congressional deliberations—will shape how the United States responds to events in Syria.

Below is our running guide to the Syria debate raging on and off Capitol Hill. As Congress moves toward a vote, we will track commentary within Congress and within the commentariat, and gather it in one handy place. (To jump to the latest updates, click here.)

Helping Syria could destroy it. The day before Obama gave his Rose Garden statement calling for a congressional vote—and declaring the United States needed to hit Bashar al-Assad’s regime to deter it and others from using chemical weapons—Steven Cook, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece in the Washington Post on Friday contending that an assault on Syria would do far more damage than good. Cook, who previously had recognized a case for intervention, wrote:

The formidable U.S. armed forces could certainly damage Assad’s considerably less potent military. But in an astonishing irony that only the conflict in Syria could produce, American and allied cruise missiles would be degrading the capability of the regime’s military units to the benefit of the al-Qaeda-linked militants fighting Assad—the same militants whom U.S. drones are attacking regularly in places such as Yemen. Military strikes would also complicate Washington’s longer-term desire to bring stability to a country that borders Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. Unlike Yugoslavia, which ripped itself apart in the 1990s, Syria has no obvious successor states, meaning there would be violence and instability in the heart of the Middle East for many years to come.

“It is on occasions like this that I am grateful that I am no longer a White House aide.” Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, wrote this on his Tumblr on Saturday. He presents the White House’s conundrum as such:

Imagine that you are a White House adviser and you have been asked to calibrate a military intervention that will send an unmistakeable message to Assad that his use of CW was a serious error and persuade him that any such action in the future would be unacceptably costly to Syria generally and to the Assad government in particular.

However, the attack should not change the fundamental balance of power in the civil war — specifically it should not empower the radical Sunni opposition forces that are potentially worse than Assad. The strike should not be so great that it inspires reckless behavior by other states or parties in the region — specifically it should not provoke retaliation, for example, by either Hezbollah or Syria against Israeli targets.

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Bombing Syria: A Running Guide to the Debate

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Dancing in Damascus

by gjrrkjujp Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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As I think of Syria today, two neighborhoods of Damascus are on my mind.

One is Yarmouk, a neighborhood of mostly Palestinian refugees and their descendants. When I think of the “the camp,” as it was so often called, I don’t usually think of the fact that it’s population has shrunk to a fraction of the 112,000 people that once lived in that 0.8 square mile space. I don’t think about allegations of a little-reported chemical attack there last July. I don’t think about the shelling and crushing of homes.

When I think of Yarmouk, I think of that hour, at about 4am, when pious old men shuffled to the mosque to begin the day and clutches of young people walked home with a swagger to end their night. I think of the way the sky at the end of Palestine street would turn pink at the end of the afternoon as I carried bags of cucumbers or peas or cherries home from the market. I loved how the streets felt lived in—how they filled every night with scraps of fruit rinds and newspapers and plastic bags yet were clean by the morning. I loved that everyone lived so close together in Yarmouk and that the voices of gossiping women and kids playing soccer in the alley blended with the music of Fairuz and Um Kalthoum and the cooing of pigeons in our windows.

When I think of Yarmouk, I think of Mazen’s house. Mazen had done five years as a political prisoner, but he didn’t really talk about it much. He was the glue to an intellectual and cultural circle in the camp. Most Thursday nights, he’d cook an elaborate feast and sometimes he’d show a film or people would read poetry or someone would present their photography. Later in the night, the music would come on. Some would dance, flicking their wrists above their heads and jutting their hips sideways. Others would spill out onto the little courtyard, where conversations would build: Was Obama better than Bush for the Middle East? What was the best collection of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry? Was it wise to ally with “enlightened sheikhs” to spread political messages through the mosques? What was the future of Assad?

When I left Yarmouk in July 2009 for a short trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, I had no idea it would be the last time I’d see it. One friend, Ayman, saw us out that morning. He was quite a bit younger than me, but he was always worrying about us. “Be careful,” he said as we left. I couldn’t have imagined that in a few days, my girlfriend (now wife) Sarah, my friend Josh, and I would be captured and thrown in Iran’s Evin prison. Or that within a few years government snipers would position themselves on Yarmouk street and pick off men who entered the camp.

Ayman (not his real name) had agreed to take care of our plants while we were away. A handful of days after we left, he saw a report on our capture on the news. He went back to our apartment and sat there alone, silently. Then, he gathered up as many of our things as he could—our trinkets from Yemen and the Old City of Damascus, my Arabic books, the beautiful short stories of the Syrian writer, Zakaria Tamer. (I love his shortest of all: “A sparrow left his cage, and when he grew hungry, he returned to it.”) He took all these things and stored them in his parents’ house. He left Sarah’s dry-erase board just as it was.

Our friends went to the Iranian embassy to plead our case, taking considerable risk in identifying themselves with Americans whom Tehran was accusing of espionage. A few days later, the secret police took over our apartment. Ayman never went back. Neither did we.

Before living in Yarmouk, we lived in the far north of the city. The neighborhood was called Muhajireen, and it clung to the side of Mount Qasioun. Had it been in the United States, Muhajireen would have been prime real estate, perched so high above the city. In Damascus however, the rich didn’t like to climb hills. Most people didn’t, really. It was difficult to get our friends to come there, it felt like such a trek.

It was a hard climb, it’s true. I remember walking down on winter days, sliding on ice as I descended. Cars would skid and slip sloppily down the hill. I’d walk down to the bottom of the hill, past the cemetery where people dusted off their loved ones’ tombstones, past the mosque that held the tomb of ibn Arabi, the 13th century Sufi philosopher. I’d enter suq al jumaa, the most beautiful market I’ve ever seen, where barrels of brightly colored pickles were stacked along the cobbled roads. The air smelled of spice and fresh bread.

Muhajireen was like an incredible little secret—you could see almost the entire city, all 1.7 million people of it, from up there. At dusk, I’d sometimes go up onto our roof. I’d watch pigeons take flight from the coop on our neighbor’s rooftop, spiraling upward in tight circles so high that they almost became invisible. Then, with a piercing whistle and a wave of a bright flag, my neighbor would send them diving back toward earth, swooping straight into their coop. I could see such flocks of pigeons rising across the entire city, tracing little rings in the sky.

We often sat on the roof at night too, smoking apple tobacco from our argilla pipe and reading the roads of the city, laid out in front of us like a giant illuminated map. As I stared at the Old City, a vaguely circular 5,000-year-old patch in the midst of straight lines, I’d often think of the prophet Mohammed. Legend has it that he stood atop Mount Qasioun as he passed through Syria. From its apex, he looked down on the city of Damascus, but declined to enter it. “Man should only enter paradise once,” he said.

Even after we moved across the city to Yarmouk, I would come back sometimes to go up on Mount Qasioun and look out over the city at night. The last time I went up there, Sarah, some friends, and I climbed up just above the line of houses. We wanted to go farther, but we stopped short when we saw what looked to be a military base.

I couldn’t have imagined rockets flying down from that spot and waking people before dawn, making them choke and kick and scream, shrinking their pupils down to needlepoints. I don’t know for certain that chemical weapons were launched from there, as some have reported—the US is now saying some were shot from another base. What I do know now is that the base we came upon when we climbed that night was a station of the Republican Guard and that it is one of several sites that witnesses said they saw rockets raining down on Ghouta the night of the chemical attack.

If the United States does decide to strike in Syria this station will almost certainly be a target. If there are chemical weapons there, will they explode? Which direction will the wind be blowing—away from, or toward the houses beneath the pigeon coops?

Sometimes, when I think of Damascus, I think of a park on the edge of Yarmouk. It was barren—some plastic chairs and tables placed across an expanse of mostly dirt. Neon lights hung off dry, leafless trees. Nearby, a grumpy man was perpetually chasing children out of his artichoke field. I’d often go there in the afternoon. In the distance, Assad’s presidential palace seemed to be looking over us, over everything.

“You see this road?” a friend asked me one day as we sat there, pointing to the street that hugged the edge of the camp. “This didn’t used to be here. When I was a kid, if you came out past these houses, this was all fields. Then Assad built this road all the way around the camp so they could gain access to it quickly, should they need to.”

Not long after the uprising began, Syrian rebels occupied the camp and the military put it under siege. Most of our friends left, but Ayman’s family stayed. Eventually, the Syrian military burned their house down.

Still, they didn’t go. One day, Ayman’s family drove down Yarmouk street, that thoroughfare I remember as a teeming stretch of glitzy shops, internet café’s and juice bars. As they drove, a bullet from a sniper pierced the front window and entered Ayman’s stepdad’s head. He died instantly alongside his wife and step-daughter.

I had met him once, at Ayman’s house. We were eating pizza. I remember the night being warm. He came home to find Ayman dancing in the middle of the living room for no apparent reason. I think the music on the stereo was Algerian, which was the rage at the time. He hugged his wife and gave her a kiss, then he sat down on the couch, laughing and watching as Ayman continued to dance.

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Dancing in Damascus

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After the Fire: The Uncertain Future of Yosemite’s Forests

by da3xs1z Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Wired website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For nearly two weeks, the nation has been transfixed by wildfire spreading through Yosemite National Park, threatening to pollute San Francisco’s water supply and destroy some of America’s most cherished landscapes. As terrible as the Rim Fire seems, though, the question of its long-term effects, and whether in some ways it could actually be ecologically beneficial, is a complicated one.

Some parts of Yosemite may be radically altered, entering entire new ecological states. Yet others may be restored to historical conditions that prevailed for for thousands of years from the last Ice Age’s end until the 19th century, when short-sighted fire management disrupted natural fire cycles and transformed the landscape.

In certain areas, “you could absolutely consider it a rebooting, getting the system back to the way it used to be,” said fire ecologist Andrea Thode of Northern Arizona University. “But where there’s a high-severity fire in a system that wasn’t used to having high-severity fires, you’re creating a new system.”

The Rim Fire now covers 300 square miles, making it the largest fire in Yosemite’s recent history and the sixth-largest in California’s. It’s also the latest in a series of exceptionally large fires that over the last several years have burned across the western and southwestern United States.

Fire is a natural, inevitable phenomenon, and one to which western North American ecologies are well-adapted, and even require to sustain themselves. The new fires, though, fueled by drought, a warming climate and forest mismanagement—in particular the buildup of small trees and shrubs caused by decades of fire suppression—may reach sizes and intensities too severe for existing ecosystems to withstand.

The Rim Fire may offer some of both patterns. At high elevations, vegetatively dominated by shrubs and short-needled conifers that produce a dense, slow-to-burn mat of ground cover, fires historically occurred every few hundred years, and they were often intense, reaching the crowns of trees. In such areas, the current fire will fit the usual cycle, said Thode.

Decades- and centuries-old seeds, which have remained dormant in the ground awaiting a suitable moment, will be cracked open by the heat, explained Thode. Exposed to moisture, they’ll begin to germinate and start a process of vegetative succession that results again in forests.

At middle elevations, where most of the Rim Fire is currently concentrated, a different fire dynamic prevails. Those forests are dominated by long-needled conifers that produce a fluffy, fast-burning ground cover. Left undisturbed, fires occur regularly.

“Up until the middle of the 20th century, the forests of that area would burn very frequently. Fires would go through them every five to 12 years,” said Carl Skinner, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist who specializes in relationships between fire and vegetation in northern California. “Because the fires burned as frequently as they did, it kept fuels from accumulating.”

A desire to protect houses, commercial timber and conservation lands by extinguishing these small, frequent fires changed the dynamic. Without fire, dead wood accumulated and small trees grew, creating a forest that’s both exceptionally flammable and structurally suited for transferring flames from ground to tree-crown level, at which point small burns can become infernos.

Though since the 1970s some fires have been allowed to burn naturally in the western parts of Yosemite, that’s not the case where the Rim Fire now burns, said Skinner. An open question, then, is just how big and hot it will burn.

Aerial diagram (above) and three-dimensional recreation (below) of 10-acre plot prior to logging in 1929 (left) and in 2008, after 79 years of fire suppression (right). USDA/USFS/Pacific Southwest Research Station

Where the fire is extremely intense, incinerating soil seed banks and root structures from which new trees would quickly sprout, the forest won’t come back, said Skinner.

Those areas will become dominated by dense, fast-growing shrubs that burn naturally every few years, killing young trees and creating a sort of ecological lock-in.

If the fire burns at lower intensities, though, it could result in a sort of ecological recalibration, said Skinner. In his work with fellow US Forest Service ecologist Eric Knapp at the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest, Skinner has found that Yosemite’s contemporary, fire-suppressed forests are actually far more homogeneous and less diverse than a century ago.

The fire could “move the forests in a trajectory that’s more like the historical,” said Skinner, both reducing the likelihood of large future fires and generating a mosaic of habitats that contain richer plant and animal communities.

“It may well be that, across a large landscape, certain plants and animals are adapted to having a certain amount of young forest recovering after disturbances,” said forest ecologist Dan Binkley of Colorado State University. “If we’ve had a century of fires, the landscape might not have enough of this.”

As of now it’s not known which parts of Yosemite have burned at tipping-point levels and which have stayed within historical, possibly rejuvenating parameters. That will become apparent in years to come. In the meantime, said Binkley, the Rim Fire and other megafires of recent years have demonstrated that fire should not always be fought.

“If you want to preserve something, you have to put it in a jar and pickle it. If you have a living forest, getting older and older, it’s not something we have an option to conserve in an unchanging way,” he said. “Some fires are going to be necessary if we want to sustain these old forests.”

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After the Fire: The Uncertain Future of Yosemite’s Forests

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Charts: How Big Debt on Campus Is Threatening Higher Ed

by Michalak876 Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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The explosion of college tuition and student debt is leaving more grads with big bills and doubts about their futures. Some back-to-school stats:

1. College costs a lot more than it used to.

The good news: College grads earn 84% more than high school grads.

The bad: Getting that sheepskin is getting a lot more expensive.

Between 2000 and 2012:

• Consumer Price Index increased 33%.

• Median household income (adjusted for inflation) dropped 9%.

• Average four-year college tuition increased 44%.

• Private for-profit tuition increased 19%.

• Private nonprofit college tuition increased 36%.

• Public college tuition increased 71%.

Between 2000 and 2012:

• Public spending on public education has dropped 30% even as enrollment at public colleges has jumped 34%.

2. So we’re borrowing more to go to school.

As college costs have shot up, so has student debt. Americans owe almost $1 trillion on their student loans, 310% more than a decade ago.

In 1989, 9% of households had student debt. Today nearly 20% do.

The average amount of student loan debt has increased 177% since 1989.

3. But we can’t pay it off.

Debt is increasing fastest for those who have the least money to pay it back.

56% of all student loan debt is owed by households headed by people 35 or older.

47% of total student loan debt is held by households with incomes below $60,000.

4. And we’re putting our dreams on hold.

Nearly half of college graduates with student debt say it has made it more difficult for them to make ends meet. 24% say it has affected their career choices.

25% of recent grads say student loan debt has made them take unexciting jobs just for the money.

Student debt’s impact on borrowers’ long-term plans:

• For every $10,000 in student debt: Borrowers’ likelihood of taking a nonprofit, government, or education job drops more than 5 percentage points. Their long-term probability of getting married drops at least 7 percentage points.

• Student loans affect the housing market: Larger student debt burdens are making it harder for recent college graduates to get home loans, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

• Student loans affect the entire economy: The Financial Stability Oversight Council reports that high student debt levels could “lead to dampened consumption,” and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns that unpaid student loans “could be a drag on the recovery.”

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Charts: How Big Debt on Campus Is Threatening Higher Ed

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The Real Reason Kansas Is Running Out of Water

by Merv Carlson Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Like dot-com moguls in the ’90s and real-estate gurus in the 2000s, farmers in western Kansas are enjoying the fruits of a bubble: their crop yields are borne up by a gusher of soon-to-vanish irrigation water. That’s the message of a new study by Kansas State University researchers. Drawing down their region’s groundwater at more than six times the natural rate of recharge, farmers there have managed to become so productive that the area boasts “the highest total market value of agriculture products” of any Congressional district in the nation,” the authors note. Those products are mainly beef fattened on large feedlots; and the corn used to fatten those beef cows.

But they’re on the verge of essentially sucking dry a large swath of the High Plains Aquifer, one of the United States’ greatest water resources. The researchers found that 30 percent of the region’s groundwater has been tapped out, and if present trends continue, another 39 percent will be gone within 50 years. As the water stock dwindles, of course, pumping what’s left gets more and more expensive—and farming becomes less profitable and ultimately uneconomical. But all isn’t necessarily lost. The authors calculate that if the region’s farmers can act collectively and cut their water use 20 percent now, their farms would produce less and generate lower profits in the short term, but could sustain corn and beef farming in the area into the next century.

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The Real Reason Kansas Is Running Out of Water

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Has the World Reached Peak Chicken?

by John Graham Posted on September 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Northern California animal sanctuary Animal Place will airlift—yes, you read that right: airlift—1,150 elderly laying hens from Hayward, California, to Elmira, New York, in an Embraer 120 turbo-prop.

The pricetag? $50,000.

Right. So obviously, this isn’t the most efficient way to spend your chicken-helping money. It didn’t take me very long to think of some alternatives: For example, you could couple all 1,150 hens off and buy each pair its own home. You could feed 758 chickens fancy organic food for an entire year. You could feed 157 people the very fanciest, most coddled, free-rangest, organic-est eggs ever for a year. You could buy flocks of chicks for 2,500 farmers in the developing world through the charity Heifer International.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I think that these soon-to-be-airborn hens don’t deserve a better life. They come from an undisclosed California battery cage egg operation, and as most people know by now, that is no picnic. Animal Place’s Marji Beach explained to me that once laying hens reach the age of about 18 months, their egg production slows, and it’s no longer economically feasible for egg operations to keep them around. The result is that each plant has to get rid of thousands of “spent” hens every year. What happens to those hens? In most cases, they don’t end up in your chicken soup broth, or even in your cat or dog’s food. That’s because most slaughterhouses don’t accept them—they have too little meat on their bones to turn a profit. Instead, egg producers often kill spent hens with highly concentrated carbon dioxide gas. (That probably costs far less than flying the hens across the country, but it doesn’t appeal to Animal Place, whose website urges visitors over and over again to go vegan.)

When a few other Mother Jones staffers and I heard about all those spent-hens problem, it got us wondering: Has the world reached peak chicken? Considering the fact that Americans eat 79 billion eggs a year, that’s an awful lot of laying hens. And that’s to say nothing of the so-called broiler operations that make chickens for supermarket shelves and fast-food sandwiches and nuggets.

According to UC Davis professor and poultry expert Dr. Rodrigo Gallardo, there are several reasons why the world is eating more chicken than ever these days. “If you think about several years ago, most people at beef or pork because there was more availability and because it was cheaper,” Gallardo says. But chickens have become more attractive as options over time: they’re lean, they’ve been bred over time to produce more meat, and raising them takes up much less land than raising cows or pigs.

That’s not to mention eggs. “If you think about eggs, eggs are cheap, they are easy to consume, they are fun—people can cook them in different ways,” Gallardo explains. “Kids always like them, and they are the cheapest protein you can get from an animal source.”

Exactly how many chickens does the world have these days? we wondered. The answer, we found, is a whole lot—and it’s increasing. Here are a few charts that will give you a sense of the scale of the chicken explosion:

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Has the World Reached Peak Chicken?

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Where Does Your Congressman Stand on Syria?

by donnajansen Posted on August 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, President Barack Obama announced that he would ask Congress for an authorization to use military force in Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack in Damascus that killed more than 1,400 civilians. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R–Ohio) quickly scheduled a vote for the week of September 9th, after Washington returns from August recess. But will the measure pass? Here’s a quick guide to emerging factions on Capitol Hill.

The Republican Anti-Interventionists: Led in the House by Congress’ only member of Syrian ancestry, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, and a growing cohort of allies like North Carolina Rep. Walt Jones and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who previously sought to block military aid to Syrian rebels. (Amash’s response to Obama’s announcement Saturday: “Thank you, Mr. President.”) They’re likely to argue that any military action without authorization from Congress is unconstitutional—and any military action with authorization would simply waste American resources. On the Senate side, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul announced their opposition last week. Paul fretted that a “piddly attack with a few cruise missiles” would only worsen the conflict and possibly threaten the security of Israel. They are joined by Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who says “there is still no compelling national security impetus for American military involvement in a civil war in the Middle East.”

The Democratic Doves: Best represented (unsurprisingly) by Florida Rep. Alan Grayson. He’s skeptical of US intel on the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons—and even if he were convinced, he still wouldn’t support American military intervention. “There is nobody in my district who is so concerned about the well-being of people in Syria that they would prefer to see us spend billions of dollars on a missile attack against Syria than to spend exactly the same amount of money on schools or roads or health care,” he told Slate. “Nobody wants this except the military-industrial complex,” he also said. Also, on Saturday, right after President Obama wrapped his speech calling for a vote in Congress, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) went on CNN to say there is still no reason to place Americans “in harm’s way” over the Syria conflict. (Rangel expressed similar concerns in this June USA Today op-ed.)

The GOP Maybe-if-You-Ask-Nicely-Caucus: New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte endorsed military strikes in Syria on the condition that Obama first seek the support of Congress. Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen told constituents that “we cannot simply allow Assad to continue this unthinkable brutality against his own people,” but insisted that congressional approval is a necessary step. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the number-two Republican in the upper chamber, expressed skepticism at the idea of intervention but would not rule it out entirely—provided he had a chance to vote on it. Virginia Rep. Scott Rigell and several dozen colleagues wrote a letter to the White House last week demanding a Congressional referendum without making any promises on how he would vote.

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Where Does Your Congressman Stand on Syria?

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Obama Calls for Military Strike Against Syria—But Only if Congress Votes for It

by olikellopas Posted on August 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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In a tough-worded statement delivered in the Rose Garden this afternoon, President Barack Obama made a case for launching a limited military strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in retaliation for the chemical weapons attack mounted presumably by regime forces near Damascus earlier this month. “This menace must be confronted,” Obama declared. This was no surprise. The Obama administration has clearly been heading toward such a decision. But in an unexpected move, Obama said that it was not necessary to rush into such an attack—his military advisers had assured him that such an assault could be effective even if taken weeks from now—and that he would seek authorization from Congress before ordering an attack on the Syrian regime.

With these remarks—the president took no questions—Obama has put Congress on the hot seat. In the years since a Vietnam-shocked Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, members of Congress have often eagerly ducked taking a vote on military actions launched by a president. Routinely, congressional leaders have complained about a lack of consultation from the president without demanding a hard-and-fast chance to accept joint responsibility for a military action. (See Libya.) In recent days, while House and Senate leaders have called for consultation, none have said they must be allowed to vote on strike (while some back-benchers have indeed demanded a vote.)

So Obama is now saying, you want consultation, I’ll see you on that and raise you a full (and apparently binding) vote. Some folks—particularly hawks and neocons yearning for a strike—will, no doubt, blast the president for wimping out on executive privilege. Others will see this as a historic moment, when the president rejiggered the constitutional balance on power. But this quasi-decision certainly will lead to a robust debate on not only what to do in Syria but also the fundamental question of who is responsible for waging acts of war within a democracy.

(UPDATE) Here is the full transcript of Obama’s remarks:

Good afternoon, everybody. Ten days ago, the world watched in horror as men, women and children were massacred in Syria in the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century. Yesterday the United States presented a powerful case that the Syrian government was responsible for this attack on its own people.

Our intelligence shows the Assad regime and its forces preparing to use chemical weapons, launching rockets in the highly populated suburbs of Damascus, and acknowledging that a chemical weapons attack took place. And all of this corroborates what the world can plainly see — hospitals overflowing with victims; terrible images of the dead. All told, well over 1,000 people were murdered. Several hundred of them were children — young girls and boys gassed to death by their own government.

This attack is an assault on human dignity. It also presents a serious danger to our national security. It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria’s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm.

In a world with many dangers, this menace must be confronted.

Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. Instead, our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope. But I’m confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out.

Our military has positioned assets in the region. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has informed me that we are prepared to strike whenever we choose. Moreover, the Chairman has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now. And I’m prepared to give that order.

But having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I’m also mindful that I’m the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that’s why I’ve made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.

Over the last several days, we’ve heard from members of Congress who want their voices to be heard. I absolutely agree. So this morning, I spoke with all four congressional leaders, and they’ve agreed to schedule a debate and then a vote as soon as Congress comes back into session.

In the coming days, my administration stands ready to provide every member with the information they need to understand what happened in Syria and why it has such profound implications for America’s national security. And all of us should be accountable as we move forward, and that can only be accomplished with a vote.

I’m confident in the case our government has made without waiting for U.N. inspectors. I’m comfortable going forward without the approval of a United Nations Security Council that, so far, has been completely paralyzed and unwilling to hold Assad accountable. As a consequence, many people have advised against taking this decision to Congress, and undoubtedly, they were impacted by what we saw happen in the United Kingdom this week when the Parliament of our closest ally failed to pass a resolution with a similar goal, even as the Prime Minister supported taking action.

Yet, while I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective. We should have this debate, because the issues are too big for business as usual. And this morning, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell agreed that this is the right thing to do for our democracy.

A country faces few decisions as grave as using military force, even when that force is limited. I respect the views of those who call for caution, particularly as our country emerges from a time of war that I was elected in part to end. But if we really do want to turn away from taking appropriate action in the face of such an unspeakable outrage, then we just acknowledge the costs of doing nothing.

Here’s my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Make no mistake — this has implications beyond chemical warfare. If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorist who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?

We cannot raise our children in a world where we will not follow through on the things we say, the accords we sign, the values that define us.

So just as I will take this case to Congress, I will also deliver this message to the world. While the U.N. investigation has some time to report on its findings, we will insist that an atrocity committed with chemical weapons is not simply investigated, it must be confronted.

I don’t expect every nation to agree with the decision we have made. Privately we’ve heard many expressions of support from our friends. But I will ask those who care about the writ of the international community to stand publicly behind our action.

And finally, let me say this to the American people: I know well that we are weary of war. We’ve ended one war in Iraq. We’re ending another in Afghanistan. And the American people have the good sense to know we cannot resolve the underlying conflict in Syria with our military. In that part of the world, there are ancient sectarian differences, and the hopes of the Arab Spring have unleashed forces of change that are going to take many years to resolve. And that’s why we’re not contemplating putting our troops in the middle of someone else’s war.

Instead, we’ll continue to support the Syrian people through our pressure on the Assad regime, our commitment to the opposition, our care for the displaced, and our pursuit of a political resolution that achieves a government that respects the dignity of its people.

But we are the United States of America, and we cannot and must not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus. Out of the ashes of world war, we built an international order and enforced the rules that gave it meaning. And we did so because we believe that the rights of individuals to live in peace and dignity depends on the responsibilities of nations. We aren’t perfect, but this nation more than any other has been willing to meet those responsibilities.

So to all members of Congress of both parties, I ask you to take this vote for our national security. I am looking forward to the debate. And in doing so, I ask you, members of Congress, to consider that some things are more important than partisan differences or the politics of the moment.

Ultimately, this is not about who occupies this office at any given time; it’s about who we are as a country. I believe that the people’s representatives must be invested in what America does abroad, and now is the time to show the world that America keeps our commitments. We do what we say. And we lead with the belief that right makes might — not the other way around.

We all know there are no easy options. But I wasn’t elected to avoid hard decisions. And neither were the members of the House and the Senate. I’ve told you what I believe, that our security and our values demand that we cannot turn away from the massacre of countless civilians with chemical weapons. And our democracy is stronger when the President and the people’s representatives stand together.

I’m ready to act in the face of this outrage. Today I’m asking Congress to send a message to the world that we are ready to move forward together as one nation.

Thanks very much.

For more coverage on the developing situation in Syria, read Mother Jones’ explainer on whether chemical weapons are reason enough to go to war, how the neocons are pushing Obama to go beyond a punative strike, and Obama’s conundrum on Syria.

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Obama Calls for Military Strike Against Syria—But Only if Congress Votes for It

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Obama’s Big Syria Conundrum

by Freince Charles Posted on August 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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Just because you should do something doesn’t mean you ought to.

That might sum up one way of thinking about whether the United States should bomb Syria in response to the horrific chemical weapons attack presumably launched by regime forces against civilians earlier this month. The assault, which led to the deaths of 1,400 Syrians, including children, was a dramatic step over President Barack Obama’s “red line” and prompted the administration to move toward a punitive strike that would be designed not to affect the ongoing balance of power in the continuing Syrian civil war but to deter President Bashar al-Assad and his military forces from further use of chemical weapons. Immediately, a trans-Atlantic debate ensued over whether such military action would be appropriate, effective, and wise. And this afternoon—as the White House released a four-page unclassified assessment declaring that Assad regime officials “were witting of and directed the attack on August 21″—Secretary of State John Kerry made a public statement presenting the case for a limited attack.

In the face of public opinion overwhelmingly opposed to US military action in Syria, Kerry argued that the United States had a humanitarian obligation to respond to Assad’s use of chemical weapons and a duty to preserve America’s credibility and that of the civilized world:

It matters to our security and the security of our allies. It matters to Israel. It matters to our close friends Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, all of whom live just a stiff breeze away from Damascus. It matters to all of them where the Syrian chemical weapons are—and if unchecked they can cause even greater death and destruction to those friends. And it matters deeply to the credibility and the future interests of the United States of America and our allies. It matters because a lot of other countries, whose policy has challenged these international norms, are watching. They are watching. They want to see whether the United States and our friends mean what we say.

Killing people—no doubt, some civilians would perish in a limited strike—to demonstrate credibility and toughness is not the most high-minded of arguments. Should innocents die because Obama (perhaps in a misguided move) drew a line in the sand? But there is some merit to the contention that a tyrant should not be permitted to deploy unconventional weapons with impunity.

A few days ago, I asked David Kay, the former UN weapons inspector who led the search for the nonexistent WMD in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, why he supported an attack on Assad in response to the chemical weapon massacre. He noted:

It is a terror weapon of extraordinary power…I believe if Assad gets away with showing other regimes how they can use CW to gain the upper hand in a conflict…it is something we should not want. Imagine if the Libyan rebellion had not occurred first, but were to be about to start. In this interconnected world we should want to maintain a ban on the use of weapons that can have large and sudden impacts. To kill 100,000 has taken Assad more than a year…Unless we now take action the wrong lesson is likely to have been learned.

It is hard to watch the videos of the victims of the chemical weapons attack and shrug. But all actions have their costs—even justifiable actions. And the question here is this: Can Obama mount a limited, targeted, and effective strike that will indeed deter Assad without drawing the United States deeper into the ongoing civil war, causing unacceptable unintended consequences (say, a high number of civilian casualties), and/or further inflaming conflicts within the region? That’s a tall order. Perhaps he and his military aides can devise such an assault and thread this needle. But Kerry, who took no questions after delivering his statement, neglected to discuss various options. Which was natural, for the administration understandably has no desire to telegraph the specifics of what apparently now is an inevitable strike (with or without any explicit approval from Congress, which is hardly rushing to vote on the matter).

In his tough-worded statement, Kerry, the onetime anti-war activist, resorted to a familiar rhetorical device. “What is the risk of doing nothing?” he asked. (George W. Bush repeatedly used similar language in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.) Yet decrying doing nothing does not justify a specific action. The Hippocratic Oath counsels: First, do no harm. A military strike would do some harm. Will the gain outweigh the harm? Obama is often adept at working through complicated calculations. But in war—and in the Middle East—intelligent calculations can look rather different after the fact.

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Obama’s Big Syria Conundrum

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