Category: politics

When is a war a war?

War is an inherently political instrument used to achieve a political objective, so a credible political adversary is necessary for war to be war.

As the US Presidential election race hots up (or gets more one-sided, depending upon your interpretation), people continue to refer to former President George W Bush leading the US into two “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thinking about it, I’m not sure the two can actually be classified as wars.

To use a chess analogy, real wars seldom end in checkmate – they most often end in resignation, or an agreed draw. War is an instrument that is used to achieve a political objective, to get the other party to do what you want them to do.

And so war ends when one side has established such an utter dominance over the other that the counterparty decides that to resign, or “surrender” is superior to continuing fighting the war.

For this to happen, however, the counterparty needs to have a political leadership that is able and willing to take a decision, following which the war actually stops. In the absence of such a political leadership, the war will continue indefinitely until “checkmate”, and assuming that the losing side’s force “decays exponentially”, it can take a really long time for it to actually get over.

So based on this definition that war is a political instrument used to achieve a political objective, I’m not sure what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan can actually be classified as “war”.

The “government” of the day in Afghanistan (Taliban), for example, would have never come to the negotiating table with the US, so short of complete annihilation, there was no other “objective” that the US could achieve there.

Iraq, on the other hand, possessed credible political leadership (Saddam Hussein) when the US invaded, but by actually killing him, the US denied themselves the chance of a “real victory” in terms of a negotiated settlement. A game of chess might end when the king is mated (remember that the king never “dies”, only trapped), but in a situation such as Iraq, the battle will rage until each member of the opposing force is taken out.

And so fighting continues to this day, over a decade since it started, with no hope of it ending in the near future. Real wars never go on indefinitely.

Brexit

My facebook feed nowadays is so full of Brexit that I’m tempted to add my own commentary to it. The way I look at it is in terms of option valuation.

While the UK economy hasn’t been doing badly over the last five years (steady strictly positive growth), this growth hasn’t been uniform and a significant proportion of the population has felt left out.

Now, Brexit can have a negative impact on two counts – first, it can have a direct adverse impact on the UK’s GDP (and also Europe’s GDP). Secondly, it can have an adverse impact by increasing uncertainty.

Uncertainty is in general bad for business, and for the economy as a whole. It implies that people can plan less, which they compensate for by means of building in more slacks and buffers. And these slacks and buffers  will take away resources that could’ve been otherwise used for growth, thus affecting growth more adversely.

While the expected value from volatility is likely to be negative, what volatility does is to shake things up. For someone who is currently “out of the money” (doing badly as things stand), though, volatility gives a chance to get “in the money”. There is an equal chance of going deeper out of the money, of course, but the small chance that volatility can bring them out of water (apologies for mixing metaphors) can make volatility appealing.

So the thing with the UK is that a large section of the population has considered itself to be “out of the money” in the last few years, and sees no respite from the existing slow and steady growth. From this background, volatility is a good thing, and anything that can shake things up deserves its chance!

And hence Brexit. It might lower overall GDP, and bring in volatility, but people hope that the mix of fortunes that stem from this volatility will affect them positively (and the negative effects go to someone else). From this perspective, the vote for Brexit is a vote of optimism, with voters in favour of Leave voting for the best possible outcome for themselves from the resulting mess.

In other words, each voter in the UK seems to have optimised for private best case, and hence voted for Brexit. Collectively, it might seem to be an irrational decision, but once you break it down it’s as rational as it gets!

When Jesus fails to cross

Ever since I watched Spain in the 2010 Football World Cup, I’ve been fascinated by what I’ve since called the “Jesus Navas model“. In game theoretic terms, it can be described as a “mixed strategy”.

In that tournament, when the normal tiki-taka strategy failed to break down opposition, Spanish manager Vicente Del Bosque would send on (then) Sevilla winger Jesus Navas. Navas would hug the right touchline and fling in crosses. So the opposition defence which would have otherwise been massed in the middle of the pitch to counter the tiki-taka now had to deal with this new threat.

Based on Spain’s success in that tournament (despite them winning most of their games by only a single goal), the strategy can be termed to be a success. The strategy is also similar to how Kabaddi is typically played (at RSS shakhas at least), where six defenders form a chain to encircle the attacker, but the seventh stays away from them to lure the attacker further inside.

I revisited this Kabaddi-Jesus Navas model some 2-3 years back, during the last days of the UPA government, when senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh made a series of comments that ran afoul of the party’s stated strategy.

I’d described Digvijaya as “Congress’s official lunatic”, who had been authorised by the party’s high command to take stances contrary to the main party line. The advantage with this strategy, I had reasoned, was that there was one “official looney form of dissent”, which the party rank and file who wanted to dissent could follow.

At that time, I had pointed out that the then-opposition BJP had lacked such an “official lunatic”, because of which there were too many “fringe elements” associated with the party which ended up damaging the party’s prospects.

I don’t know if anyone in the BJP had read that post of mine, but they presently recruited Subramanian Swamy, who, in 1999, had been responsible for bringing down the BJP-led government. While the induction of Swamy into the party didn’t make intuitive sense, it was clear that he was being brought in to be the party’s official lunatic.

From all measures, he seems to have done rather well. The BJP’s looney fringe has rallied around him, and instead of having different fringes representing different ideas, the fringe has now been united. Swamy’s policies are crazy enough to attract the craziest of the fringe, and for those who find him too crazy, there’s always the mainstream party to back.

The problem for the BJP, however, has been that the “official lunatic” has now become too powerful. When Spain put on Navas, it was one guy who represented the alternate strategy – the rest were all committed to tiki-taka. In the BJP’s case, the official lunatic has got much more weight in the party.

And as Raghuram Rajan’s exit, and the attacks on leading finance ministry officials show, Swamy has actually started getting his way, with the rather large looney fringe cheering him onwards. The question is how the BJP should deal with this.

The obvious solution is to appoint a new official lunatic, one who is lunatic enough to attract the fringe, but no so popular as Swamy to have a following that rivals the mainstream party. A Digvijaya Singh equivalent would do well, but such “moderate lunatics” are hard to find. And even if one is found, the question is how the party can move the looney fringe to backing the new official lunatic.

Even worse, if a new official lunatic is appointed, the party will have to (at least temporarily) deal with two internal official lunatics, not an enviable task by any means. And if they decide to expel the incumbent official lunatic, there is the risk of alienating his (now rather large) support base!

It seems like there is no way out of this mess for the BJP! Sometimes copying policies from political rivals may not work out that well!

Why Uber/Ola is Nehruvian

According to Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, the ostensible reason for India adopting a statist/socialist/planned approach was the scarcity of capital.

With capital being scarce in the newly independent country, Jawaharlal Nehru had reasoned that in order for the country to develop, whatever capital existed had to be deployed in the most productive manner possible. A free market for capital would end up deploying capital where it wasn’t required the most, denying more critical sectors of capital. A planned economy, on the other hand, would result in more efficient usage of capital.

While India has developed significantly in the 70 years since independence, it is still not completely out of the woods. Poverty remains high and India’s per capita income is at the lower end of the spectrum. Thus, while capital may not be as scarce a resource as it was in 1950, effective deployment of capital is still necessary to ensure India’s continued economic growth.

From this perspective, think of the car. When at rest, it is adding no economic value apart from making itself available to its owner (and its owner alone) at a point of time when the latter needs it. From this perspective, the economic value that the parked car adds is almost entirely in terms of “option value”.

A parked car also consumes valuable economic resources, with the most important being the real estate it stands on. This particular resource is so important that it forms an important form of urban regulation in most markets (a building or a business needs to have a certain minimum number of parking spaces and so on).

Moreover, the two common axes on which the value of a car is evaluated are age and distance travelled. Considering that the car adds economic value only in terms of the latter – when it helps transport someone, depreciation of the car in terms of age is entirely uncompensated. On this account, too, a parked car is a dead weight loss.

It is not hard to see, thus, that a parked car is an enormous waste of capital; capital that an emerging economy such as India could very well utilise elsewhere. Yet, the large number of cars in the country that are standing still at any point in time show that despite being an overall inefficient use of capital, a large number of people value the inbuilt option value.

Back in the time when Nehru had his way, he had solved the problem in his own unique way – by limiting the number of cars that could be manufactured and sold in the country, which automatically put a limit on the number of parked cars. In this technologically advanced day and age, however, we don’t need such drastic measures.

All we need is a restructuring of economic incentives such that the option value of a parked car goes down. And what better incentive than to provide the option to summon a car on demand? While this summoned car might have a higher marginal cost per trip than an owned car, taken in aggregate it leads to a significantly lower cost.

Thus, the Nehruvian answer to the inefficient capital wasted in parked cars would be to encourage services that allow you to summon a car on demand. In other words, services such as Uber and Ola fulfil a Nehruvian objective by freeing up capital that was being earlier wasted in parked cars. There is data to show that such services have resulted in a decline in growth of car ownership.

Given that Uber and Ola follow the Nehruvian ideal of reducing wasteful capital, it is baffling that the government in Karnataka, which belongs to the Congress party which is based on Nehruvian ideals, or the government in Delhi, headed by the Nehruvian Arvind Kejriwal, were to campaign to clamp down on such Nehruvian services.

There might be some tremors under Shanti Van.

On liberalism and government control

My first exposure to political ideologies took place in 2004, when I joined the now-defunct (but then brilliant) social networking site Orkut. While filling up my personal details, I was asked to pick my political beliefs from a drop-down.

It had things such as “left-liberal”, “very left-liberal”, “right-conservative”, etc. Now, while I considered myself liberal back then (I’ve moved far more liberal on personal freedom issues since then), there was no way I could describe myself as “left”, since I’ve always been a free market fundamentalist. Finally I noticed there was something called “libertarian” in the dropdown, and assumed it might stand for my beliefs and chose that. In hindsight, it turns out I was right (no pun intended).

A year or two later, I got introduced to a “libertarian cartel” (I was never a member, so don’t know who were members). Presently, I was invited to join some of them in discussions, and my love for the libertarian philosophy grew (these discussions were instrumental in me moving far more liberal on personal freedom issues). Yet, looking around the political spectrum, you had few libertarian parties (going across countries).

You had the set of parties that can be broadly classified as “Republican” which allowed you to do business the way you liked, but sought to restrict personal freedoms. And there were the parties that can be classified as “Democrat” which promoted personal freedoms, but restricted how you could do business. And you had philosophies such as communism which sought to control both. The “fourth quadrant” was (and is) largely empty.

It is not hard to understand why this fourth quadrant is empty – in exchange for responsibilities of governing, politicians desire power, and this power can only come at the cost of restricting freedoms of the constituents. Different political formations choose to exercise this power along different axes, but little differentiates them – they all seek to control. While libertarianism is appealing for the constituent, it doesn’t make sense for politicians since it doesn’t compensate sufficiently for the responsibility of  governance. Hence you don’t find libertarian political parties.

Yet, we find that slowly but surely, reforms do happen. Over time, restrictions on freedoms (both personal and economic) do get relaxed, albeit at a glacial pace, and this is true across countries, despite there being no “libertarian” politicians. Why does this happen?

The simplistic answer is that politicians in functioning democracies have to face lengthy periods of time in opposition, when they are at the mercy of the party that is then in power. Since politicians tend to be vindictive animals, you don’t want to leave behind any laws that might be used to harass you while you are out of power. So the ruling party should tend to ease restrictions that can be used against its members when they are out of power.

Again, this is fine in theory, but why does it not always happen? The answer is that opposing political parties are not “orthogonal enough”. If politicians on multiple sides of the divide have broadly similar ideas on certain issues, there can be a tacit understanding (a “doctrine of no first use”, perhaps) to not use the laws that they agree on against each other.

When you have parties that have orthogonal philosophies, you can expect them to do their bit while in power to undermine the sources of their rivals’ control, so that their rivals might enjoy less control the next time they are in power. And citizens in such democracies are likely to enjoy greater freedoms.

As the old saying (paraphrased) goes, “when politicians from all parties agree to something, it is unlikely to be in the interests of the people”.

Politician salaries and corruption

Recently, Vijay Nair, CEO of OML Entertainment, which organises the popular NH7 Weekender music festivals, tweeted that the Weekender in Delhi last month was the first where he didn’t have to pay a single paisa of bribe.

Just before the event, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal gave a speech in which he stated that he had bought passes for the event by paying for them, and urged his ministers and other government officials to do the same rather than asking for freebies.

Yesterday the Delhi government increased salaries of its legislators and ministers by a factor of four (which the Economic Times incorrectly reported as a “400% increase” – it’s a 300% increase).

The basic monthly salary of Delhi MLAs and ministers is all set to go up by a whopping 400 per cent besides significant hike in a slew of allowances with the assembly today approving a bill to effect the increase considering rising cost of living.

The Delhi government will now send the bill to the Centre and if it is approved, then basic salaries of legislators will rise from current Rs 12,000 to Rs 50,000 …

The move to increase Delhi legislator salaries has been expectedly panned by opposition parties, but it is an important step in reducing corruption, the main plank on which the Delhi government came to power last year.

In order to better understand this, go back to Kejriwal’s statement before the Weekender urging officials to purchase their tickets and not ask for freebies. The on-ground price of a ticket for the Delhi Weekender was Rs. 3500.

As per existing salary structures, a Delhi MLA would have had to spend a quarter of his monthly basic salary for the event. If he were to buy tickets for his family of four, he would have to spend his entire monthly basic salary (I understand there are other components of compensation, too)! And this would have been good enough justification for him to ask for free tickets.

While a higher salary might still not prevent an MLA from demanding free tickets, his earlier moral justification for the demand doesn’t exist any more – since the new salary structure now makes the tickets affordable. This removal of moral justification is certain to have an impact on corruption at the margin.

More importantly, official salary levels have a massive impact on the kind of people the profession attracts. When you get paid a pittance as a politician, it repels people who are loathe to be corrupt – for it is next to impossible to make a decent living on such salaries. People will be loathe to leave well-paying jobs for politics, and the only people politics will attract are those that hope to make money on the side.

I hope the Centre approves the Delhi government’s proposal to increase salaries, and other states match this. Given the small number of legislators and ministers, fiscal impact will be marginal. But the impact it can have on corruption, in terms of removing the moral justification, and on the kind of people it will attract to politics will more than pay for this.

Centralised and decentralised parties

In the spirit of the just-concluded Assembly Elections in Bihar, here is my attempt at political theorising, which Nitin Pai classifies as “political gossip”.

During the ten years of UPA rule at the Union government, the opposition BJP lacked a strong centre. The central leadership was bereft of ideas following defeat in the 2004 General Elections, and this was badly shown up in the 2009 General Elections when the BJP put in an even worse performance.

All was not lost, however. The lack of strong political leadership at the centre had meant that BJP units in different states managed to thrive. Narendra Modi became Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002 (albeit following a directive by the BJP central leadership), and won three consecutive elections there. His track record as Gujarat CM was pivotal to him getting elected as Prime Minister in 2014.

Around the same time, Shivraj Singh Chouhan emerged as a strong leader in Madhya Pradesh, and Vasundhara Raje, who had once before been chief minister in Rajasthan, came back with renewed strength. Manohar Parrikar was a strong Chief Minister in Goa. The period also saw the BJP forming its first state government in South India under BS Yeddyurappa.

This state-level buildup of strength was key in driving the BJP (and Modi, who had managed to appoint himself leader) to success in the 2014 parliamentary elections. Modi brought on his trusted aide from Gujarat Amit Shah as the president of the party.

While the objective of capturing the Union Government had been met, this created a new problem for the party – it had a strong centre once again. And the strong centre has meant that regional leaders now have less chances to thrive. After Modi and Parrikar moved to the Union government, relative lightweights have been installed as chief ministers of Gujarat and Goa, respectively.

Chouhan and Raje have been implicated in scandals (related to the Vyapam recruitment and Lalit Modi, respectively). Yeddyurappa has been kicked upstairs as National Vice President of the party. Elections are being fought in the name of Modi and Shah rather than projecting a strong state leader. No chief ministerial candidate was projected in the recent Bihar poll debacle. The Haryana chief minister was a nobody when he was installed. Lightweight Kiran Bedi was projected in the Delhi polls, which ended in a massacre for the party.

 

In other words, ever since Modi and Shah came to power a year ago, the  BJP has been showing promise towards becoming a “high command driven” party, like the Congress before it. The Congress, which has looked rather clueless since the last days of its 2nd UPA government, should serve as a good example to the BJP in terms of what might happen to an over-centralised party.

The BJP has its own template on how strong state level leadership can lead to success, yet it looks like it’s in danger of discarding its own successful formula and following the Congress path to failure.

On people returning awards

So it seems to have become a fashion nowadays for writers to return any awards they’ve received from the government. It all started with Nayantara Sahgal, and it has set off a virtual procession. Maybe I don’t follow the right kind of people but one in twenty tweets or so on my timeline talks about someone who is rejecting some award or the other, all in protest against the “intolerance” of the government. There’s even a 16 year old who has returned some award.

I must admit I don’t read much fiction, but I must mention I haven’t heard of too many of the people who have returned an award. Maybe the first few returns in Sahgal’s wake were an attempt at cashing in on the free publicity this would get them, but now I think the marginal utility (in terms of publicity) of returning an award has fallen far enough to this to not be the primary reason for the return.

At a more fundamental level, I don’t know what gives these writers legitimacy in making a political statement. I mean everyone has the right to make any statement they want, but I don’t know why we should take these guys’ political views seriously only because they are writers.

While politics forms a significant portion of several novels (for example, my entire understanding of the Islamic Revolution in Iran comes from reading Marjané Satrapi’s Persepolis), that someone has written a political novel doesn’t make them an authority on politics.

As I mentioned on twitter the other day, the core competence of a writer is command over language and power of communication, and so whatever statements they might make they make powerfully. Yet, the fact that they communicate their stand well doesn’t necessarily mean that their stand is right, and give us any reason for trusting them more than we might trust a layperson with their political views.

And in this case, they are not even communicating in the means they have established competence in – what you might have expected from a writer when they are concerned about the social situation around them is to have written about it, and used their usual powers of verbal persuasion to make their case for spreading their agenda. Instead, what we have is a blatantly political message in terms of returning their awards.

I’m not saying they’re wrong to return their awards – they’re well within their rights to do so, and maybe they think it will have an impact. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t read much into this, and not given them credit for their political views.

Putting it another way, understanding of politics is uncorrelated with literary ability, so the latter should not be conflated with the former. I’m not denying that there are authors who have excellent political insight – all I’m saying is that the probability of an author having excellent political insight is no different from the probability of a non-author having such insight.

So for the purpose of crafting government policy in response to these protests, they should be given no greater weight than similar protests by the same number of laypeople. And looking at Arun Jaitley’s response, it seems like the government has internalised this, and it is a good thing.

On 2ab, Communal Harmony and Economic Growth

I’ve used the concept of “2ab” once before, a day after the Prime Minister used the term in a much lampooned remark, to explain why we need Net Neutrality. I turn to the same concept again to explain why communal harmony is necessary for economic growth.

Some 4-5 days back, a mob entered the house of one Muslim guy who was allegedly cooking beef, and lynched him to death. In response, rather than booking the mob, the police sent meat sample from the victim’s house to “test if he was actually cooking beef” – as if its confirmation as beef would justify the murder.

I’ve mostly been off social media (and hence not fully following the story) since then, but RSS leader Tarun Vijay hasmade some remarks about “lynching on suspicion being wrong“, and star Indian Express columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta has laid the blame at the Prime Minister’s feet. Mehta writes (HT: V Anantha Nageswaran):

The blame for this has to fall entirely on Modi. Those who spread this poison enjoy his patronage. This government has set a tone that is threatening, mean-spirited and inimical to freedom. Modi should have no doubt that he bears responsibility for the poison that is being spread by the likes of Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma and Vijay — whether through powerlessness or design is irrelevant. But we can be grateful to Vijay for reminding us that the threat to India’s soul emanates from the centre of power, almost nowhere else. It is for that centre, and Modi in particular, to persuade us otherwise.

Now there were two kinds of people Modi appealed to when he came to power in a resounding victory last year – bigots and aspirers. The former hoped that Modi would “teach a lesson to the Muslims”. The latter hoped that Modi would help accelerate economic growth, after a mostly useless and scam-ridden UPA2 government. And Modi might have thought that these two goals are compatible (else it would make no sense to court these two constituencies). Even in theory they are not.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whose growth rate is seen as a bellwether of the economy’s performance, is a measure of the amount of trade. Trade can be external (let’s set that aside for now) and internal. There are many factors that determine the extent of internal trade (trade between the people of the country), but at the margin, it is proportional to the number of possible pairs of people who can trade with each other.

In other words, trade is another of those quantities that follows Metcalfe’s Law, and depends on strong network effects. If the number of people in a place (region or country or state or city) is N, and if everyone can trade with one another, the number of possible trading relationships is N^2.

Despite the development of the rule of law and Contract Acts and court-brokered dispute settlements, people typically trade with other people they can trust. In the past, this meant that certain families or communities had a monopoly over trade. Over time, with the development of laws and contracts and courts, this has expanded. Yet, people still hesitate to trade with people they don’t trust.

So what happens when there is communal or caste disharmony? Then you will not trust someone who belongs to another caste or community or religion because of the person’s community (and notwithstanding the person’s personal characteristics). And if you don’t trust them, you don’t trade with them. And what does this mean for the total volume of trade?

It’s time to bring out our (a+b)^2 expansion. If you have two communities of sizes a and b, in the absence of trust between the communities, the total trade in the community is ceteris paribus proportional to a^2 + b^2. If the two communities live harmoniously and have enough mutual trust that communal differences have no bearing on trade, the total trade in the community is ceteris paribus proportional to (a+b)^2. The difference between the two? 2ab of course!

Communal distrust and the lack of communal harmony ends up restricting the number of possible trading partners for each person, and thus we lose out in terms of the correlation term. In other words, bigotry costs us in terms of GDP growth.

Lastly, even if the government of the day is concerned more about the welfare of one particular community over another, communal harmony makes sense. For by creating distrust, people belonging to the government’s favourite community are denied trade with people of the less favoured community. And this adversely impacts the more favoured community!

 

Why Europe should back Bashar al-Assad

This might seem like a nonsensical idea, but there are good reasons as to why European countries should back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This is because the most important thing now from their perspective is to bring some sort of stability into Syria.

The thing with the long-ongoing civil war in Syria is that there are no good guys. Initially, Western powers considered backing the rebels, who are mostly Sunni and hence enjoy the support of other Gulf countries. However, a part of the rebel faction turned into Islamic State and started unleashing atrocities not only in Syria but also in neighbouring Iraq.

al-Assad is no paragon of virtue, and his forces have not held back in unleashing atrocities. Yet the fact remains that he has successfully ruled over Syria (albeit as a hereditary dictator) successfully for a few years until the trouble started brewing. The other thing going for him is that he is a strong leader, and can possibly be convinced to talk, given that the only leadership on the other side is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-styled “caliph” of the Islamic State.

The unrest in Syria has caused much trouble in Europe, thanks to heavy migration – much more than what Europe can normally handle. What this has achieved is in turning Syria’s problem partly into Europe’s problem, and it is in Europe’s interest to solve the problem in Syria if they are to address the problem at their own borders.

The fight in Syria is between two horrible regimes (or one horrible regime and one horrible non-regime), and the victory of neither will do good for the people of Syria. Yet, the steady state of the unsteady peace that will follow after the battle is significantly superior to the people of Syria than the current status of civil war. For this reason, there is merit in ending the war as an immediate goal, and then looking to stabilise the country in the long run.

And the best way for an interventionist power to end a war is to support the stronger side. al-Assad’s side has been officially made stronger with the recent intervention of Russia on that side. So now it is clear who the side more likely to win is. And so Europe should intervene to make sure that happens quickly.

There are other collateral benefits also – coming down on al-Assad’s side will earn European countries brownie points with Putin, which are important because they face off against him in other theatres, such as Ukraine. While it remains that Putin is a madman and the value of such brownie points is unknown, the option value of these points is surely strictly positive?

So Europe should act, and act now. The trouble is at their doorstep now. They need not commit actual troops. Some drones will do for a start. The actual fighting will be done by al-Assad’s forces with more direct help from Putin. And the civil war will hopefully be stamped out soon.

The problem of al-Assad won’t go away, and will need to be dealt with another day, but at least there can be some semblance of peace there. Which might stem the horrific flight of so many Syrians across the seas into Europe’s borders (where they are receiving a mostly cold welcome).

The Gulf countries will not be pleased, of course, but with oil prices dropping their bargaining power in the overall geopolitical sphere is dropping, that much collateral damage is okay for the benefit of putting an end to the horrific conflict in Syria.

Update: This post was updated on 14th of November 2015, in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. This is not a nonsensical post any more.