Richard Fernandez:
One of the most interesting forms of rebuttal is to invoke the counterfactual. Apparent failure must always be contextualized against the background of the what-might-have-been. For example president Obama once claimed he saved 1.1 million jobs that would have been lost [1] had he not bailed out Detroit. We are also told that Obamacare has saved everyone money, although premiums are rising under it, because premiums would have risen faster without the program. These are successes despite appearances.
Today president Obama justified his policy in Yemen saying the alternative [2] to his strategy would have been disaster. The rise of Isis, the loss of vast territories in Iraq, the dissolution of Libya, the upheaval in Egypt are the best of possible worlds in comparison to what would have occurred if Bush were in charge.
President Barack Obama defended his administration’s drone-based counterterrorism strategy against al Qaeda militants in Yemen, saying the alternative would be to deploy U.S. troops, which he said was not sustainable.
While the outcomes of his policies do not seem to be a success in themelves, they are deceptively brilliant when it is considered they headed off some alternative [3] future which would have been far worse. This type of reasoning is called counter-factual thinking “a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened.”
Thus you can rationalize, for example, the “failure” of the Secret Service to protect president Kennedy in Dallas by arguing that ‘if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have’. If you think about it in that way the protective detail prevented what could have happened.
The most interesting thing about counterfactual justifications is they only pertain to events that have already occurred in the past, which leads people to think they are a form of sophisticated excuse-making. Certainly if you had asked the administration to explain why Yemen was its “model” last year, they would would not have characterized it in terms of what actually happened. That kind of rationalization has to applied retrospectively to be useful.
Herman Cain [4], who apparently lacks the mental flexibility to engage in such gyrations, asked the simple minded question: ‘Are we toast? #KingAbdullah is dead, ISIS is expanding, we’ve abandoned Yemen and now Iran has missiles’. You would think so, but had Cain the mental capacity of Obama, he would have realized that it only looks like the president’s losing, but only because he’s waiting to spring some brilliant trap.
You sure could have fooled Newt Gingrich [5] who rather naively thinks the U.S. is losing the war against radical Islam. But what does Newt know? First of all Islam has nothing to do with the violence filled headlines, not even in Yemen. Second, who’s trying to win? Poor Newt Gingrich misses the point entirely. Max Boot [6] says that country is going over the cliff like Syria. Here’s how Boot puts it:
The Houthi militia, a Shiite group armed and supported by Iran, has overrun Sana, the capital, and seized the presidential palace. It only agreed to release President Hadi after he agreed to share power with them.
This does not sit well with Sunni tribes who are threatening war on the Houthis, which will undoubtedly draw them into league with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist group which has taken responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.
Meanwhile Saudi Arabia, the main sponsor of the Hadi government and major adversary of Iran and its proxies, is vowing to cut off all aid to Yemen as long as the Houthis are in control. Yemen, in short, is on the verge of plunging into a Libya-like or Syria-like abyss, which would certainly make it representative of Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East but not in the way the president intended.
You would think that was bad, but don’t be alarmed. Think instead of how much better that is compared to a world where an asteroid smashing into earth sends five mile high tsunamis over the Himalayas. Of course Obama is winning in Syria too if you really think about it deeply. The New York Times [7], which think no other way, describes how the administration is letting Bashar al-Assad stay in power.