How about a Harvard school on the art of “not doing stupid stuff”?

Built just beyond the green-hued shadows of Harvard’s Kennedy School on Governance, our school would also teach tomorrow’s influential advisors and elected leaders how to climb and survive while not doing stupid stuff* — before being allowed to coin geopolitical strategies.

—How to help the press entertain the people without making entertaining decisions.

—How to keep Washington excited and empathetic without straining the nation’s resources.

—How to keep the base without offering fresh doctrines and world-views.

*The school’s mandate has been inspired by Barack Obama’s exquisite gaffe about “not doing stupid shit.” By all means, let's keep the word “shit” but not in our motto. The contribution of this advanced learning center will only be universal if it attracts uptight as well as cool political junkies. We know already that without excellent training, awkward leaders are easily forced to stick out their chins, cross their fingers, and just do — you know what.

Building even a small Obama School on Prudence alongside Kennedy’s storied edifice would be neat — and poetic to those who are less dreamy about JFK than about BO. However, there are two drawbacks: Clinton Democrats wouldn’t bother to raise a penny, and the name would scare off moderate Republicans most in need of help.

Syria postscript: the war-weary and the peace-weary

Before democracies actually choose to go to war, there is a short revealing debate; facts are not discovered necessarily, nor all the lies exposed. But we do see more clearly what ideas drive decision-makers and those who prosper in the sport of urging them on.

Thanks to a surprise diplomatic intervention by that introvert in Moscow, Americans and their friends have a few moments of peace to consider the arguments that were deployed to punish Assad by bombing Syria.

My interest isn’t the reluctance of Obama and the equally rock-hard will of the neo-con radicals to join every hot fight in the Middle East. What deserves greater attention now is the easy willingness of powerful so-called transatlantic intellectuals to pick up the masculine clichés of America’s chronic warriors.

John Kerry’s rhetoric demonstrated that you can survive Vietnam as well as dog it, graduate from Harvard, live in Boston and sound like John McCain—that the shame of Munich can be twisted as smoothly by liberals as by conservatives to break the rules of collective security authored by the West.

Not appearing weak or weary—rather than not being soft-hearted about war casualties—drove the case for bombing. From the op-ed page of the New York Times and last week’s leader in The Economist came the same challenge: are Americans and their dutiful representatives ready to put the Bush errors behind them and resume the task of being the West’s global policeman? Or are they just timid cynics living in the heartland of another shrinking giant?

Over the lead, “Our New Isolationism,” op-ed columnist and former executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller, sets the stage for Congress’s aborted war resolution by asserting:

“Idealism is in short supply. So, as another far-off war worsens, Americans are loath to take sides, even against a merciless dictator, even to the extent of sending weapons. The voices opposed to getting involved range from the pacifist left to the populist right. The president, fearful that foreign conflict will undermine his domestic agenda, vacillates.

“This is the United States in 1940. Sound a little familiar?”

The Economist—the world’s greatest voice of liberal economics, including peace, open markets, and the rule of law—asserted baldly:

“By being the world’s policeman, America can shape the rules according to its own interests and tastes. The more America steps back, the more other powers will step in. If it is unwilling to act as enforcer, its own norms will fray. If it is even thought to be reluctant, then they will be tested. China already prods at America; Vladimir Putin’s Russia has begun to confront it—and not only over Syria. Whether Syria was a vital American interest before this attack was debatable, but not after Mr. Assad’s direct challenge to Mr. Obama’s authority.”

The consequences might not have all been good, but the atmosphere of ideas in Washington would have enjoyed a good cleansing if the Syria bombing resolution and the man-boy Churchillian bluster quoted above had been defeated in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Their peace-weary arguments don’t ring of 1940. They recall the cocky, lawless, righteous spirit that rescued the bored elites from the respite from violence that ended during the summer of 1914.

Obama graciously denied that America is the “policeman of the world.” The defeat of his resolution, however, would have also settled that America is not a weekend vigilante either.

America’s authority in the world will shrink if its economy shrinks, and trust in its government shrinks amongst its friends. Both would be best served by not acting unilaterally in Syria.

Obama’s ‘policing’ problem is still in America

Partisan conservatives complain that Obama is “light-footed” when it comes to policing violence abroad, especially in the Middle East, while at the same time being suspiciously hawkish about the use of guns and capitalist "animal spirits" at home.

Up until now, he’s shrugged off questions about his machismo by winning elections and keeping his biggest promises to Americans.

Bombing Syria to honor a one-liner about chemical weapons, however, could undo his historic campaign to economize on the use of US military power and to restore respect for the competence of liberals in international affairs.

Obama and John Kerry worry that if the US doesn’t punish Assad for his conduct in his country’s civil war, America’s credibility will shrink and the taboo against the use of chemical weapons will diminish globally. Stunningly, they have put new life into the idea that the US has been the “policeman of the world” since 1945.

Under the Financial Time’s overblown headline “The World Would Miss the American Policeman," Gideon Rachman repeats the myths about what imperial Britain was doing in the 19th century and America in the last half of the 20th, and closes with the Cold War’s sloppy obsessions with dominoes and respect:  

“For better or worse, Mr Obama drew such a red line over Syria. As he suggested over the weekend, America’s adversaries will draw conclusions if the US fails to act over Syria, and the same would be true of its allies. The governments of Japan, Israel and Poland – to name just a few – will all feel less secure if Congress votes against military action in Syria. The world relies on the American policeman more than it realises.”

Not all her allies are democracies, but all democracies are friends of the United States. For the foreseeable future, therefore, she is democracy and consensual problem-solving’s indispensable ally. Nevertheless, America has never had the resources nor the appetite to be everyone’s policeman.

Policemen are expected to show up. The US hasn’t taken up arms in support of righteous causes in Africa, Eastern Europe, and throughout most of Asia. Its intrusiveness in the Americas has receded and originally was hatched up to keep the world, i.e. European empires, at bay. 

America has been an unreliable cop and a highly credible senior ally. It now maintains its credibility as an ally, in part, by not pretending to police the world.

Japan, Israel, and Western Europe didn’t lose confidence in the US when it left Vietnam and won’t now if it stays out of Syria. 

Maureen Dowd brings it all back

Once in a while, without a hand from outside "fact-checkers" or partisan "attack machines," the best journalists in the mainstream media light up the sky and show us what is at stake.

With one column, and its ghastly aftermath, Maureen Dowd reintroduces us to the people Mitt Romney would bring back to the White House—the warrior intellectuals of the Bush years. Her New York Times column Neocons Slither Back, and the next morning’s Politico summary of their outraged responses, should be read together.

Alone, Dowd’s column is merely a workmanlike reminder that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan rely on the same neocons George Bush used to intellectualize about shaping events around the world with US armed forces. It contained two rather unoriginal insults: suggesting that Paul Ryan relies on the words of his campaign manager, Dan Senor, a right-wing flack with a world view, and repeating Paul Wolfowitz’s concern that Obama should not be allowed to “slither” back into office without a clear position on Libya.

By next morning, five neocons were already on record accusing the outrageous Maureen Dowd of being a creepy, hate-mongering, and lazy peddler of anti-Semitic imagery. Apparently "slither" has Jewish copyright. It can be used by Jewish American hawks when questioning the "moral clarity" of a Kenyan-friendly president, but can’t even be repeated by an insolent Catholic feminist in the New York Times.

The accusation that Dowd was reviving a vile ancient stereotype about doltish gentile politicians being manipulated by “clever and snake-like Jews” is laughably self- aggrandizing, ineffectual, and uncivil. It tells us, however, that the neocons have lost none of their edge, that their menace is as fresh as a fall north wind.

Maureen Dowd is too smart to think and too good a writer to imply that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush were stupid, innocent puppets of the neocons. She was simply reminding us that the staff a president assembles reflects on the character of the president, and doesn’t diminish his power.

This incident, however, does say quite a lot about the caliber of the public intellectuals Romney and Ryan are presently indulging. They misjudged the Middle East over the last decade and misjudge their detractors at home today.

Accusing someone of being anti-Semitic is going nuclear. It’s the polemist’s application of “shock and awe.” It’s designed to cower weaklings. Dowd, however, is still at it.