Vox Sentences: Hillary is not down with TPP (anymore)

Hillary Clinton opposes the TPP, which makes no sense; Russia's giving air cover to the Syrian military; and the bombing of a humanitarian hospital appears to have violated the US's rules of engagement.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Hillary Clinton was for the TPP, and for it, and for it, before she was against it

(Darren McCollester/Getty Images)

• Hillary Clinton told PBS today that based on what she's seen of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, she doesn't support it.

  [Politico / Gabriel Debenedetti]

• Awkwardly for the former secretary of state, she has a long record of statements supporting the deal back when it was still being negotiated (and she was still a part of the government negotiating it).

  [CNN / Jake Tapper et al.]

• It's probably an overstatement to say that Clinton is walking away from a deal she worked on; the State Department is involved but not that involved in trade policy.

  [Bloomberg / Josh Eidelson]

• Two things are clear about Clinton's flip-flop: 1) policy-wise, it makes no sense. The pharmaceutical provisions Clinton's so worried about now are actually more progressive than many observers thought they would be while the deal was being negotiated and she praised it.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• But 2) politically, it's a recognition that Clinton feels pressure from the left — and from its preferred candidate, Bernie Sanders. When Sanders was asked if Clinton would have opposed TPP if he weren't in the race ... he just winked.

  [Washington Post / Anne Gearan and David Nakamura]

• Clinton's defection could be a bad sign for the deal's congressional approval. Anti-TPP members of Congress are already mobilzed and "truculent," in the words of Dan Drezner. Pro-TPPers are relatively silent.

  [Washington Post / Dan Drezner]

Operation Boiling Frog: another escalation in Russia

(Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• The next step in Russia's intervention in the Syrian civil war: launching missiles as air cover for a ground attack by the Syrian military.

  [New York Times / Anne Barnard]

• Russia claims, as usual, that it's only targeting terrorists. Maps show, yet again, that it's targeting the front lines where rebel groups are fighting Bashar al-Assad.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Some of those groups are US-supported, and fought back against the Russian/Syrian assault with CIA-supported anti-tank missiles.

  [New York Times / Anne Barnard]

• This isn't purely a Russian/US proxy war — Iran's involved, too. According to Reuters, Iran had a key role in planning this fall's Russian/Syrian assault.

  [Reuters / Laila Bassam and Tom Perry]

• But according to Der Spiegel, Assad has asked Russia to step in in Syria partly because he no longer trusts the Iranians.

  [Der Spiegel / Christoph Reuter]

Rules of engagement

(Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)

• Evidence is mounting that the US broke its own rules of engagement — and possibly international law — when it bombed a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Afghanistan over the weekend, killing 22.

• Gen. John Campbell, who's in charge of the US's Afghanistan presence, told a congressional committee on Tuesday that the decision to bomb the hospital rested totally within the US chain of command (though he continued to maintain that Afghan soldiers called in a request for air support).

  [The Guardian / Spencer Ackerman]

• And sources close to Campbell say he's becoming convinced that the decision to bomb broke the US's rules of engagement in Afghanistan.

  [New York Times / Eric Schmitt and Matthew Rosenberg]

• A 2015 Pentagon manual says that civilian hospitals may only be bombed after "due warning has been given" — and MSF says the US gave them no advance warning at all.

  [The Guardian / Spencer Ackerman, Sabrina Siddiqui, and Julian Border]

• Campbell's testimony reportedly persuaded President Obama to call the head of MSF Wednesday to apologize for the bombing.

  [New York Times / Michael D. Shear]

• But MSF says that won't be enough. The organization continues to fight for the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission — a body that was created in the 1990s but has never taken up a case — to investigate whether the US violated international law.

  [CNN / Jethro Mullen, Greg Botelho, and Elizabeth Joseph]

MISCELLANEOUS

Economists get a bum rap as selfish and calculating. But on immigration, they're more egalitarian that most people. [NYT / Tyler Cowen]

• In a world where elevators and skyscrapers exist, a city can't really run out of space for new residents. It can only decide not to let them in.

  [Washington Post / Emily Badger]

• The "two questions" rule for talking to strangers seems pretty sensible.

  [Gawker / Allie Jones]

• The main problem in the Galactic Senate: Its political parties are insufficiently polarized.

  [Vox / Seth Masket]

• After a major drug bust, will Wesleyan get to be its wonderful pansexual drug-addled self again?

  [Rolling Stone / Emily Greenhouse]

VERBATIM

"The Islamic State is raping eight-year-olds. And the world is doing nothing." [Politico / Vian Dakhil]

• "Corporations and the wealthy have lots of power, certainly, but in the real world most bad things happen because of ignorance, incompetence, or bad luck, not as a result of grand conspiracies."

  [Ben Bernanke to NYT / Neil Irwin]

• "How often do you think about the fact that underneath your skin, you are a skeleton? When you see other people, do you think about the fact that they, too, are skeletons?"

  [Nathan J. Robinson]

• "With a pound of lox as a housewarming gift, I’ve come to their tax-haven sex mansion to hear their improbable story—how two sons of an ultrareligious Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn witnessed the birth of a new kind of lending, made a fortune, and then saw it all come to an end."

  [Bloomberg / Zeke Faux]

• "Nothing happened from the beginning of time up until something like 1980."

  [Playboy / Steve Coast]

WATCH THIS

Tracking down the sneeze that started seasonal flu [YouTube / Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck]

(Vox/Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck)

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