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from The Great Debate:
Learning the wrong lessons from Israel’s intervention in Syria
Israel’s recent attacks on military targets in Syria have made clear the widening regional dimensions of Syria’s civil war. They have also fueled debate about whether the United States should intervene. Look, some say, Israel acts when it sets red lines, and Syria’s air defenses are easy to breach. Israel’s involvement has energized those, like Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who argue for U.S. military intervention in Syria. Unfortunately, the interventionists are drawing the wrong lessons from the Israeli actions.
The first misconception is that the Israeli strikes showed how Israel stands by its red lines in ways that bolster its credibility – a sharp contrast to the perceived equivocation of President Barack Obama’s stated red line that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “game changer.”
Israel has stated that it views any transfer of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s regime to Hezbollah as unacceptable. So its targeting of missile arsenals believed to be capable of delivering such weapons appears to be making good on the threat. But while such Israeli action against Hezbollah within Syria is an escalation, it is not new. Israel targeted such missiles earlier in the year and has been targeting Hezbollah arsenals in Lebanon for years. It also fought a costly war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 largely to degrade (unsuccessfully, it turns out) the group’s missile capabilities. Israel was thus not acting in Syria to maintain the credibility of its red lines, but acting on specific perceived threats to its national security.
If Israel always acted on the basis of maintaining its credibility — a murkier concept than many in Washington like to believe — it would likely already have launched an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has crossed countless “red lines” with no Israeli response. Some former Israeli military officials believe Iran has already crossed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most publicly declared nuclear red line — the one he famously drew at the United Nations last September. Israel has not acted because of concerns and debates among its security establishment about the ability of Israeli action to effectively neutralize Iran’s program. The lesson here is not that countries should act for the sake of maintaining credibility but that they should act when they believe it serves their interests and might make a difference.
from Felix Salmon:
Bloomberg is watching you
All social networks are based on a cognitive con. No one likes to give out valuable personal information to some huge corporate entity, so the trick is to make people feel as though they have some kind of control or ownership, even when they don't. Most of Facebook's privacy controversies boil down to much the same thing: people share personal information with their friends, using the convenient Facebook platform, and then are shocked when it turns out that Facebook has access to that information and is making money from it.
The more centralized and controlling a social network is, and the less that it's run on a peer-to-peer basis, the more likely it is to run into this kind of trouble. So it probably should come as little surprise to learn that Bloomberg, the highly-centralized and highly-controlling social networking company, has now run headfirst into its very own privacy scandal. (Bloomberg is a competitor of Thomson Reuters, which is my employer and owns Reuters News.)
from Breakingviews:
Bangladeshi accord shows limits of market forces
By Edward Hadas
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Tragedy can concentrate minds; minds can be more powerful than markets; globalisation can be a force for good. Those are the lessons of the success of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.
from Breakingviews:
Dan Loeb‘s breakup plan deserves Sony’s ear
By Peter Thal Larsen
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Dan Loeb is taking Japan’s economic renaissance at face value: the hedge fund manager wants Sony to spin off its entertainment arm. Though activists rarely prevail in Japan, Loeb’s idea may have merits. The electronics giant should take him seriously.
from Stories I’d like to see:
The commencement speech market, Obamacare job bonanza, and recess appointment gridlock
1. The commencement speech market:
It’s my guess that the most sought-after commencement speaker this season is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. How many invites did she get, and how does that compare with other top names? And did she accept any? Is she getting paid? Especially now that Benghazi has come back into the news, has she set any ground rules related to the appearance, such as whether she will be available to the press before or after the talk?
Who else is a top drawer graduation speaker this year? And who, in terms of gravitas or lack thereof, is this year’s most unlikely pontificator?
from The Great Debate:
The case for sea-based drones
An X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) demonstrator is towed into the hangar bay of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), May 13, 2013. CREDIT: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Timothy Walter
If all goes according to plan, sometime on Tuesday the military balance of power in the Pacific Ocean could tilt to America's advantage. The U.S. Navy's main warships, whose firepower now cannot match the range of Chinese missiles, could gain a new weapon that more than levels the playing field.
from Felix Salmon:
Why dedecimalization is a bad idea
Dan Primack is excited about a new bill which would give small-cap companies the option to have their stocks be quoted at 5-cent or 10-cent increments rather than the standard one-cent gap. He explains:
Small-cap stocks are trapped in a cycle of arrested development. They are small, so they are ignored by analysts and market-makers. And because they are ignored by analysts and market-makers, they remain small.
from FaithWorld:
Dan Brown’s Inferno novel in hot demand ahead of release
(Inferno, from the Divine Comedy by Dante (Folio 1v), painted by Bartolomeo Di Fruosino/Bibliotheque nationale de France)
Booksellers are predicting that "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown's latest title "Inferno" will become the biggest-selling book of the year, ahead of its release on Tuesday.
from FaithWorld:
Christian churches back Jews facing anti-Semitism in Hungary
(Protestant pastor Lorant Hegedus hides behind the stage as his wife Eniko Kovacs Hegedus (unseen) steps up to speak, during a rally against World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly attended by hundreds of far-right supporters in Budapest May 4, 2013. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh)
When Hungarian radical right-wingers rallied against a Jewish conference in Budapest in early May, a well-known Protestant pastor hid behind the stage while his wife stepped up to the podium to denounce Jews and Israel.
from MacroScope:
Cameron’s dilemma
Britain’s David Cameron began the day on Monday gently slapping down two Cabinet colleagues who said if they had a vote today, they would opt to leave the EU. It was senseless, he said, to throw in the towel before he had had a chance to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Europe. He ended it by caving into rebels in his Conservative party who are demanding legislation now to commit to an in/out referendum before the next election.
The 25 year history of the Conservatives and Europe – internecine warfare and successive election defeats as they obsessed about something which figures low on most Britons’ priority list – suggests no good can come of this and if Cameron wins the 2015 election it moves Britain incrementally closer to the EU exit door. The more immediate question is whether Cameron has lanced the boil. Again, history suggests that if you give ground to the eurosceptics they merely demand more. And what the PM’s pro-EU Liberal Democrat coalition partners make of this isn’t hard to imagine which means he might not even have the numbers to get the bill through parliament. One of the leading rebels seized on that point, saying the move could well fail.
