Chaos into Fourteen Lines

Amazing.

2012-01-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

Here is a photo of the new Egyptian parliament in their first session. Obviously, the future is unsure, but that this moment has even occurred is staggering and wonderful.

Oh, good lord

2011-03-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

PJ Crowley has stepped down now. The whole thing over Manning has been making my gorge rise in a general way, but this is really the cherry on top. As Sullivan said, Obama unequivocally owns this now.

(Pfc. Bradley Manning is the soldier suspected of leaking docs to Wikileaks; he's been imprisoned under inhumane conditions [forced nudity, solitary] despite having been neither tried nor convicted. Crowley, a State spokesperson, called Manning's treatment "counterproductive and stupid" at MIT and has now stepped down after a 30-year career. Defreakinglightful.)

Silence and noise

2011-02-21T00:19:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting lately because a) I'm stupid busy and b) there's so much happening so fast that I can't keep up with it the way I'd like, and I refuse to just bullshit.

That being said, I thought I'd throw up a tidbit from Abu Muqawama that is one of the only thoughts on the role of communication technologies in the overthrow of Mubarak that I actually find interesting and unexpected:

Both sides of the debate, a friend told me last night, are essentially correct: yes, the Internet, Facebook and Twitter played a terribly important role in mobilizing the Egyptians who filled the streets of Egypt to protest the regime. But yes, too, it took ACTUAL BODIES out there in the streets and not "Facebook Revolutionaries" just re-tweeting the struggle from the comfort of their homes. One interesting piece of analysis I have now heard from several smart observers is that by shutting down the Internet and the cellular phone networks, the Egyptian regime actually *increased* the number of Egyptians on the streets protesting. Not only did shutting down the Internet force people to leave the house and physically connect with their fellow protesters, but one friend noted that if you really want to piss off all of Egypt, a good way to do so is by shutting off cell phone service. More than Facebook or Twitter, cellular phone service unites Egyptians in a virtual community. And by shutting down cellular phone service, you're sure to anger Egyptians of all generations and classes -- and not just the college kids with Facebook accounts. So score one for the enduring power of 20th Century technology, perhaps.

Case in freaking point

2011-01-25T23:40:00.001-08:00

I've said many times (though perhaps not here) that no communicative technology is instrumental to a political revolution in and of itself, for its own special reasons. Rather, a technology can be important in this respect simply by virtue of being new. The revolutionaries, being naturally future-oriented and tuned to marginal or otherwise non-institutionalized means of movement and communication, can dominate and make use of these new channels; meanwhile, the existing regime, which at the point of revolution is almost always stultifyingly conservative, backward-looking, and disproportionately focused on the spheres it already controls, has not bothered to learn anything about how to lock down those channels.

This is what's really at work in all the "Twitter revolution" and "Facebook revolution" buzz. (Note that things are constantly called Twitter revolutions and rarely, in my experience, called Facebook revolutions; this has nothing to do with which is more useful but rather with which is newer and trendier at the moment.) I tend to get really ornery about all the "Twitter OMGZZ" and "IT WAS WIKILEAKS" coverage, but it's not because I necessarily think those things are irrelevant. It's because the fact that new communication technologies played a role in a political revolution is so not news that most stories on those phenomena place way too much emphasis on the particularities of the medium in question.

My classic favorite example is the role of the new railways in the 1917 Russian Revolution; as I learned in high school, the critical mass of people, and the necessary in-advance networking, could not have occurred without them. Of course, trains' ability to move people around was very important to that; but if there had been a giant public taxi service, or a local teleportation service, more or less the same thing could probably had been achieved. The point is not trains; the point is the ability of people to communicate and organize in ways that the ruling regime has not managed, or bothered, to figure out how to dominate yet. Today, trains are about as likely to be a major factor in a political revolution as wagon trains are. (Perhaps they'll get so forgotten as a factor that they'll come back around to effectively edgy, but it's a long shot.) Meanwhile, who knows? Maybe we'll have a recorded-Skype revolution someday soon (there's a huge potential for a charismatic politician there--not unlike what Ayatollah Khomeini did in 1979 with cassettes).

Anyway, I bring all this up because this Middle East Channel post by Ashraf Khalil does a great job of giving a medium its factual due without way overemphasizing its impact:

I spent the day moving throughout downtown Cairo trying to keep track of a dizzying series of fast-moving events. It started with a lesson on how a new generation of activists -- dismissed ahead of time by Interior Minister Habib al-Adly as "a bunch of incognizant, ineffective young people" -- is using electronic means to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

Organizers announced long ago that the protesters would gather outside the Interior Ministry downtown, prompting police to lock down that area. But shortly after noon, it became clear that was a clever bit of misdirection, as a whole new set of gathering points was distributed via Facebook and Twitter.

Egyptians used the #jan25 Twitter hashtag to spread news and encouragement about the course of the protests. "If Mubarak goes down, there are going to be enough presidents in Saudi to make a soccer team!" read one representative tweet by @MinaAFahmy. Other tweets linked to Facebook groups that listed a series of new meeting spots and contact numbers.

As the day progressed, the series of scattered protests moved through different parts of the city, growing in strength as they joined up with other groups and induced onlookers and residents to join in.

Now that's what I'm talking about in terms of covering the role of a medium in revolutionary organizing! It gives the medium its due, explains how it's working, gives the humans involved full credit (rather than making it a technologically determinist story), and embeds it within the larger, and ultimately more important, human-social story. The real thrust of the piece, you see, is this:

The Egyptian government's standard operating procedure is to overwhelm any public protest with a massively disproportionate wave of black-clad police. As a result, most protests tend to boil down to the same 500 noisy hard-core activists hopelessly penned in by thousands of riot cops.

But today those numbers were reversed, and the police, at times, seemed completely confused and struggling to keep up. In one confrontation outside the Supreme Court building in downtown Cairo, the riot police attempted to lock arms in a human chain to block the protesters' path. Their effort, however, proved hopelessly ineffective -- waves of marchers simply overwhelmed them and continued on their path.

Which is to say that the point of the piece is that something real is happening in Egypt, and we should pay attention to it. The mechanics are just mechanics. Social media should not be the why; they should be a how.

Come on, people

2011-01-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

I know we're all supposed to hate Iran, yada yada yada. But this Danger Room post really crosses a line for me:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad likes to think of himself as a pretty patient guy, but all these dead Iranian nuclear scientists are starting to give him a rash, United Nations Security Council. The scientists who’ve been killed before today? He’s willing to float you those. But if one more gets killed — just one more — he’s putting all your Security Council asses on trial.

On Monday, unknown assailants on motorcycles attached bombs to the cars of two Iranian nuclear scientists, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi, killing Shahriari and wounding Abbasi. In the past, Iran has been content to point the finger at Israel for the mysterious ends that some of its nuclear scientists have met. But this is starting to get annoying, so now Ahmadinejad is taking his ire up to a higher geopolitical echelon.

“By God, if such an incident takes place one more time, we will bring each permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to trial,” Ahmadinejad said today, referring to Shahriari’s death.

Ahmadinejad didn’t elaborate on how exactly he planned to bring the entire United Nations Security Council to trial in Iran [...]. But he did explain why the U.N. Security Council is the responsible party in the killings. Sure, murder’s a crime in Iran and Ahmadinejad could have waited for a credible, transparent investigation into the incident. But that’s a formality. After all, those U.N. sanctions resolutions against Iran are practically a license to kill.

Dead Iranian scientists are still dead scientists. If this were happening just about anywhere else, you wouldn't see a post like this anywhere outside of some weirdo corners of the Internet. Seriously, I tried to think of an example of a country that I could switch out for Iran and leave the rest of the piece the same, and I couldn't.

Furthermore, even if we subscribe to the narrowest, most middle-of-the-road, neocon ideas about how dangerous Iran is--and the perception of that threat is way inflated--the last people we should want dead in Iran is scientists. If we recall the period of unrest in Iran in 2008, we may also recall that this sort of pundit was a huge fan of the Green Revolution. In fact, they all piled on Obama for not supporting the movement enough.

What was so great about the "Green Revolution"? (Side note: will we ever be allowed to observe a revolution or protest movement overseas without giving it a nickname? Because I cannot wait for that day.) It was an honest protest movement dominated by the educated classes, the young people, the intellectuals. It was a democracy-promoter's dream. If some of the most educated people in the country--and some of the few who can directly translate their higher education into a career (even in the US and Europe, people that educated have trouble finding jobs)--are being systematically slaughtered, that is not good for Iran's democratic or revolutionary prospects. It can't be good for the morale of the very people who might drive any such movement in the future. Indeed, Massoud Ali-Mohammedi, the first scientist to be killed, taught at the University of Tehran and supported Mousavi, the leading figure in the political opposition. (To be fair, the most recently attacked scientists seem to have been much more closely attached to the regime, so this incident may not apply as much.)

To focus on the substance of the actual killings for a minute: Iran has pointed to the US and Israel as responsible, and it seems entirely possible to me that they're right. While Mohammedi was not an ally of the regime, the two scientists more recently attacked (Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi, the former dead and the latter injured) are apparently quite high up in the government's nuclear efforts. I can also imagine a scenario wherein some of Iran's friends who want to be able to continue straddling the fence--Russia is an example here--are trying to quietly forestall the day when Iran gets its nukes. It's plausible either way: this is the kind of thing nation-states have been doing to each other for as long as they've had specialized personnel to snipe at.

All of that is very interesting and worth covering--as in this excellent Danger Room piece from the first killing. (More like that, please!) I'm not saying we should all have a Very Serious national day of mourning; as I said, this is just reality in geopolitics. But just because we've all been conditioned to thumb our nose every time Ahmedinejad gets worked up about something doesn't make it funny.

A military exception

2011-01-21T21:22:00.000-08:00

Steven Cook has a wonderfully illuminating and relevant post on why the military didn't step in to shore up Tunisia's existing power structure (via Andrew Sullivan, also up at Foreign Policy):

Although the armed forces intervention defied expectations of Middle Eastern militaries, the fact that officers sided with the Tunisian people actually makes perfect sense. The Tunisian military — made up of about 36,000 officers and conscripts across the army, navy, and air force — is not the oversized military common throughout the Middle East that is short on war fighting capabilities but long on prestige and maintaining domestic stability. Defense spending in Tunisia under Ben Ali was a relatively low 1.4 percent of GDP, which reflects not only the fact that the country has no external threats, but also part of a Ben Ali strategy to ensure that the armed forces could not threaten his rule. This was clearly a mistake. Had Ben Ali followed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has always taken great care to make sure that the Egyptian armed forces were well-resourced, General Ammar and his fellow officers may have thought twice about tossing their sugar daddy overboard.

Yet there is a more profound difference between the Tunisian military than its counterparts in Algeria, Egypt, and Turkey to name a few. Unlike Mustafa Kemal and his comrades, the Free Officers, and Armee Liberation National, Tunisia’s military did not found a new Tunisian regime after the country’s independence in 1956. This was largely a civilian affair under the leadership of Habib Bourgiba — a lawyer. As a result, there is no organic link between the military and the political system.

There is a real risk for the military here, however. What if the civilians cannot manage Tunisia’s new political reality? [...] If the interim government botches this very sensitive phase in Tunisia’s transition, the military may have to stay on. This does not mean that Tunisia’s officers would become directly involved in governing, but they may be forced into a tutelary role during the search for a workable political formula that will guide Tunisia going forward. Any long stay outside the barracks could have serious repercussions for the coherence and professionalism of the armed forces as the officers are exposed to the vicissitudes of politics.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing; you'll get some nice comparisons to 1952 Egypt in the bargain.

The revolution will be photographed

2011-01-20T22:37:00.000-08:00

The Big Picture has photos from Tunisia. Glorious and evocative, as always:

Tinker Toy columns

2011-01-16T04:46:00.000-08:00

I never understand what people whose worst fear is Sharia law--wherever it may arise--really mean when they say something could lead to "the imposition of Sharia law." It sounds like they think of it sort of like the Rapture: when the conditions are right, the prophecies are fulfilled and BAM! Each is judged and found wanting or worthy, and all of a sudden your wife can't drive the kids to school because driving is a big no, and you can't even drown your petty sorrows in a Scotch. Or maybe it's more like fairy dust: one minute you're sitting there in your nightgown, the next you're flying to Neverland, where all children are orphans, the infrastructure sucks, and nobody is allowed to kiss.

The Rapture model of sharia is one example of a kind of Tinker Toys, modular way of putting columns together that is sadly widespread, especially when dealing with complex subjects. This "instant sharia" idea is one of the Tinker Toys: it can be slotted in almost anywhere without much worry for logistics, time frame, context, etc., because it is a unit unto itself.

You see, this thought was triggered by this post by Aaron Goldstein on what might happen next in Tunisia (via Larison). In it, at one point, he writes:

The thing that has caught my attention about the events in Tunisia is the support it has received from al Qaeda. If elections are not held in a timely manner or if the results of said election are not deemed acceptable by the new administration an opportunity could present itself for al Qaeda to assert its influence and impose Sharia law. Should such a development come to pass then it could have grave implications not only in the Middle East but for the United States and the West. We could have an Afghanistan in Africa.

This is a brilliant example of Tinker Toy thinking, which I consider the worst kind of ignant, pundit-infected platitudinous thinking on Middle East politics. It's worse than the completely crazy stuff, like the thing about Hizballah and Mexico a few posts down, because at least the crazy stuff involves an actual thought process. The ingredients are totally wack, but at least there is an effort and some, um, creativity. Plus, it's pretty easy to spot.

Here, though, the writer is working with a highly limited set of ideas that came from elsewhere. To continue the toy analogy for a minute (follow me, here), if all you ever had was Tinker Toys--and not that many of them, either--there would be a limit to the kinds of things you could come up with. You could in theory go to the store and get a newer, fancier, more complex toy--by, oh, consulting an expert or doing some research--or you could play with something very basic and abstract, like blocks, and create almost anything just with your own thoughts. But Tinker Toy columns have neither of these virtues. They just keep plugging around the same limited repertoire.

Let me break it down for you here. Let's look at the last paragraph again:

The thing that has caught my attention about the events in Tunisia is the support it has received from al Qaeda. If elections are not held in a timely manner or if the results of said election are not deemed acceptable by the new administration an opportunity could present itself for al Qaeda to assert its influence and impose Sharia law. Should such a development come to pass then it could have grave implications not only in the Middle East but for the United States and the West. We could have an Afghanistan in Africa.

It's depressingly easy to translate this entire paragraph into some snarky equations and lose pretty much none of the meaning. Each equation is a Tinker Toy piece that we've all seen a million times in a million columns, most of which were likely Tinker Toy ones. The pared-down set of equations looks like this, where t = time:

Poorly understood Middle East event + (Al Qaeda connection ± relevance(x)) = DANGER
DANGER + (Elections + Perfection(x)) = Al Qaeda takeover
Al Qaeda takeover + t = Sharia law
Sharia law + t = problem for U.S. = Afghanistan

As it happens, the trusty formula has failed, because none of it actually makes any sense for Tunisia. This is what happens when you just string together a bunch of modular bits and bobs in a time-honored pattern without thinking too hard about it. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (North Africa) is pretty negligible; their support for the revolution is because, um, they're revolutionaries. Their exhortations to the Tunisians to fight on in the good fight so they (Tunisians) can impose Sharia law later are just that: exhortations. That does not mean that they will be followed. This will really not happen. Fun fact: Tunisian feminists are talking about greeting one of the exiled opposition leaders--a fundamentalist--at the airport in bikinis. (I say rock on.) On a broader note, this Foreign Policy piece on Tunisia's history of fanatical secularism argues--convincingly, IMO--that the Tunisian political structure caved as easily as it did precisely because the revolution was absolutely not Islamist.

All that is well and good--after all, it's not a real day if someone writing about the middle East hasn't gone overboard regarding the threat of fundamentalism--but what really kicks the excerpt up a notch in Tinker Toys silliness is the nod to Afghanistan. The only way that makes sense is if you think of Afghanistan as more or less simply a cipher bearing the conditions of Fundamentalist, Uncivilized/Backward*, Scary, Ungovernable, and Big Problem For Us, which would mean anything else that bore those same conditions would be the same thing.

It's much easier to think this way when you don't know much of anything about the subject--if Tunisia is a completely non-defined cipher, it can become anything very easily, and if Afghanistan is an ill-defined cipher, then it's very easy to find parallels to it. The two places are very, very different, and no AQ In the Maghreb boogeyman can just show up, declare sharia, and change that. A much better parallel for Tunisia is probably Turkey: like Turkey a few decades ago, Tunisia has a fairly strong economic track record for a developing nation; trade, tourism, geographic and institutional ties with Europe (including strong French influence in political thought); an ingrained history of state-enforced secularism; and a strong class of intellectuals and professionals (who spearheaded the revolution in Tunisia's case). Turkey has evolved and grown since the '80s, but Tunisia is a plausible younger sibling.

The real things to worry about for Tunisia at this point are a relapse to authoritarianism, as has happened with many of the so-called color revolutions in the past few years; or, a bloody fight for a new equilibrium that leads to civil war like the Algerian Civil War. One of the things to definitely not worry about is impending, sudden sharia law.

_________________
*Barf. I do not endorse yada yada I hate those words.

I wish it really were all like Four Lions

2010-12-25T23:52:00.000-08:00

In the proud tradition of violent Islamic extremism being mostly counterproductive, a suicide bomber who seems to have been supporting Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (which has claimed responsibility against a rival group who had been taking over territory from TTP. They are referred to as "the Salarzai tribe," (though my reading in more specialized places suggests that going straight to tribal classifications is often not the best course, cough, understatement).

The counterproductive part is that while the bomber (gender apparently still in contention, no ID that I've seen anywhere) took out several of the intended targets, the chosen place for this event was...a World Food Programme event. The words coming to my mind go something like "I mean, honestly" but that doesn't seem right. It just seems, again, counterproductive--there was no other way to do this? Of course intimidation is a major part of coercing the local populace in any insurgency effort, but this sort of thing is not too far off from what lost al-Qaeda a lot of support elsewhere.

At any rate, 43 people were killed in this incident, and:

On Friday, a force of 150 militants in Mohmand Agency (just south of Bajaur), had targeted 5 checkpoints of the Frontier Corps, a Pakistani government paramilitary unit, killing 11 troops in the Safi and Baizai districts. Some 24 of the rebels were killed in a riposte by government sources. This attack also came in revenge for the Taliban having been expelled [by the Salarzai] from those areas of Mohmand Agency.

On Saturday, Pakistani troops using helicopter gunships came back after the insurgents, allegedly killing 40 of them in Baizai and Lakro villages.

This leaves the headline at "Over 80 Dead."

Juan Cole has a pretty good roundup of what all went down.

If only Four Lions were all there was to it.

[Note: embedded video is even worse now than it was before. Once upon a time I could adjust the size in the code, but not now, noooo. Link is all you get. Sorry.]

Sad news

2010-12-13T21:11:00.001-08:00

RIP, Richard Holbrooke.

Fun with words!

2010-12-02T23:40:00.000-08:00

Ezra Klein points us to a fun new toy:

Citizens for All That Is Good About America
By Ezra Klein

Americans for America. The New Century Foundation for Progress. A Bright Future for Children and Families. PAC names are a genre unto themselves. A proud, optimistic, vapid genre that's designed to sound so much like apple pie that you never think to look at the filling -- or, to be less metaphorical, the money. The Sunlight Foundation decided to have some fun with this and set up a PAC-name generator. Some of these PACs are the real deal, but most are just perfect PAC names waiting to find a home.

He seems to have chosen "Strong Women, Good-Looking Men and Above Average Children for Liberty" as his flag to fly, but me? Well, unbeknownst to all, I am actually the founder of "New Englanders against Sinister Sentiments."

You're welcome, world.

They're coming to get you

2010-12-01T01:25:00.000-08:00

I just. I can't. This is really quite amazing. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) has convinced Huckabee--who had her on his Fox News show to talk about this--that Hizballah operatives are being funneled from Iran through to Venezuela, up to Mexico, and then infiltrating the U.S. via the Mexican border in collaboration with drug cartels. In order to plant car bombs, or something.

I swear, I am not making this up:

As [TPM has] reported, Myrick believes Hezbollah "is partnering with Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. borderlands and may be planning 'Israel-like car bombings of Mexican/USA border personnel or National Guard units.'" Part of her evidence of this is that "well trained officials are beginning to notice the tattoos of gang members in prisons are being written in Farsi" along the Southwest border.

She's since expanded on this theory, claiming that because Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are "very good friends," Iranian members of Hezbollah "go from of course Iran into Venezuela, stay up to two years, learn the language, get false documents, and then transit up through Mexico to come across our border."

Huckabee had Myrick on his show on Sunday, and was quite alarmed at this "pretty explosive information," because "we're not hearing this - not from the Department of Homeland Security."

This is shatteringly stupid for a number of reasons. As many commenters at TPM pointed out, the drug cartels would have to be very, very dumb indeed to do anything like this, as it would certainly be very bad for business. Secondly, a Hizballah member with Farsi tattoos on would be an odd duck indeed, Iranian influence or no.

Thirdly, the slender thread of truth here--that Hizballah once was active in Latin America--is being rather abused. Hizballah has not been active in a major way in this hemisphere for over a decade, as far as I know; and when they were active in Latin America, the attacks took place in Argentina.

Now, if you Google around, you can find what look like some fairly reliable sources backing this claim up (MSNBC, for one). But no serious academic source I've encountered has ever mentioned the ongoing existence of a widespread fundraising operation by Hizballah in Latin America (which at least seems a slightly more plausible version of a similar claim), and the DHS has officially stated that it has no "credible information on terrorist groups operating along the Southwest Border."

Finally, the only way this could ever possibly work would be if a) all brown people looked alike and b) no brown people of any kind had any interest in stability/the absence of car bombs in the U.S.; otherwise the terrorists would be immediately distinguishable from the drug dealers, and/or the loyal American citizens of Hispanic or Arab descent might choose to enlighten their chalky ~~overlords~~ neighbors.

I assume I don't need to elucidate what's wrong with those premises.

A thought

2010-11-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

What is the deal with genies these days? For one thing, they keep showing up in ads all of a sudden, and for another, they seem to be mostly not Arab. Like not in any way. One of them is a Scottish man in a tux:

And the other, whom I am certain I will not be able to find, is a guy who I suppose could be Arab (or meant to be) but at least initially came off Hispanic, and who was wearing a muscle shirt. He was advertising really cheap phone service.

I have no idea what this means. Not that this is the most serious trend in the zeitgeist regarding anything east of Istanbul or south of Sicily, but what the hell, I've been watching a lot of TV lately.

Wow

2010-11-22T21:46:00.000-08:00

US totally grifted by random Afghan:

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

It really just kind of sums everything up, huh.

Rolling Stone ventures to MENA (!)

2010-11-22T20:10:00.000-08:00

Rolling Stone is launching Rolling Stone: Middle East.

Needless to say, I subscribed immediately. I hope it's obvious why this is a huge deal; for one thing, this is a major American pop-culture publication showing major interest in the cultural products and pop life of a region that is almost uniformly understood as backward, primitive, and totally lacking in anything Rolling Stone could ever be interested in. That in itself is a huge deal.

If people in the region read it, that could be even better. It would be complicated, as validation by Western observers always is for almost any Arab group, individual, movement, or trend; but it could also be very valuable. It depends on how they play it at RS, and on how many people in the region actually read it and take it seriously. (Those variables are, of course, related--it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing). As much as it can be fun to make fun of RS these days, when I was in high school that magazine was incredibly important to me. I was the proverbial sad indie kid, and it was kind of a lifeline at times. There are some kids in the Middle East who are probably already consuming this kind of Western media, whether they can actually get their hands on the glossy or whether it's via an Internet cafe; how great is it that they could get their own deal? Something actually meant for them?

The major caveat is that as far as I can see, it's all in English. That worries me a little, and it throws the emphasis back toward the remedial-Orientalist perspective. Maybe there is or will be an Arabic-language version or website; I really, really hope so. Even if that doesn't happen, I still very much applaud this step.

And finally, it'll just be fun for me.

rollingstone.me.com, people: go. Read. Be pleased.

Here we go

2010-09-16T16:36:00.000-07:00

It seems the ever-restrained Texas Board of Education is now on a mission to remove "Muslim propaganda" from our nation's poor, defenseless textbooks.

It's no surprise at all--it's perfectly to be expected, right on schedule, really--but it still blows.

Veeery interesting

2010-06-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

This AP article packs some pretty interesting things into a few short lines:

JERUSALEM — Israeli officials say a Cabinet minister met secretly with Turkey's foreign minister in an attempt to improve relations between two allies after ties dramatically deteriorated.

The officials say Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer met Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Europe Wednesday.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because the government did not confirm details.

The supposedly secret meeting was reported by Israel's Channel 2 TV. The Israeli prime minister's office eventually confirmed an "unofficial meeting."

The talks drew an angry response from Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who said he was not informed.

If this is true, it could mean that Lieberman's stock is falling pretty fast in the government and perhaps Netanyahu and co. are finally starting to see him as the obstacle that he is, rather than a convenient conduit to right-wing votes.

Memory

2010-06-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of major posts about Israel lurking in the back of my mind, but I doubt I'll find the time or energy for them until after finals are over (oy). Instead, here's an image-heavy, slightly sappy post about Afghanistan. At the very least, the pictures are really worth scrolling through.

Foreign Policy has a gorgeous photo feature about the Afghanistan of the 1950s. It really underlines the tragedy that Afghanistan and Iran, among other Near Eastern and Central Asian countries, share--a past that seems almost unthinkable after it was wiped out and covered over by civil war or civil strife and extreme social repression.

I wrote an essay a couple of years ago that dealt with the treatment of Afghan women as one of its case studies, and my research for the paper turned up nostalgic accounts of this past, as the authors I read sadly sought to fix in history the fact that Afghanistan enjoyed a brief, but not negligible period of stability, higher education and far more equitable gender relations for about thirty years up until sometime in the 1970s (the year escapes me--Afghanistan is not an area of my expertise). The photos give that period a clearer face, and so in some ways a sadder sepia tint.

Afghanistan is one of the few cases where I feel pretty comfortable abandoning the relativist skepticism of broad negative statements that was drilled into my every pore as a liberal child of a liberal family in a liberal city getting a liberal education. I certainly don't mean to say that Afghan culture is necessarily or inherently retrograde, evil, or anti-women; but Afghanistan--and Yemen, while I'm rambling--are the two places from which stories of women's lives consistently go much further than making my feminist blood boil and induce a simple, awful sadness in me. It's a place with some really incredible cultural heritage, as an exhibit at the Met last year demonstrated beautifully (that is the only time I can actually remember buying the damn book at the gift shop--the combination of amazing artifacts and a syncretic tradition that I knew nothing about was irresistible).

There's just something tragic about a place spanned by the Silk Road, whose history includes Mesopotamian influences,

Hellenic influences,

South or Southeast Asian influences--there are things about this that remind me both of India and Cambodia--

and a nomadic culture that carried around artifacts like these:

(The crown is collapsible, if I recall correctly!) That is to say, a place whose heritage included all of this, as well as, eventually, some pretty great-looking record stores:

Only to have nearly all of it burned and bombed away. The collection that was loaned to the Met is only extant because some courageous museum workers hid it in the presidential palace; the rest of the Kabul Museum's collection was lost in the civil war.

From all of that (with, of course, a great deal of history in between about which I admit I know next to nothing), to dark streets and girls burning themselves to death rather than be sold in marriage to pay off opium dealers.

I hope I get a chance at some point to learn more about Afghanistan's rich history that is not quite so recent. The introduction to the FP photo essay begins:

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire for calling it "a broken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that he was wrong, but that he was overly blunt. He's hardly the first Westerner to label Afghanistan as medieval. Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince recently described the country as inhabited by "barbarians" with "a 1200 A.D. mentality." Many assume that's all Afghanistan has ever been -- an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills. Given the images people see on TV and the headlines written about Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the country never made it out of the Middle Ages.

But that is not the Afghanistan I remember.

It's important to remember not only what is lacking, but what was lost.

Two and two together

2010-06-01T02:10:00.000-07:00

Marc Ambinder, who seems to have gotten some kind of fire lit under him in the past month or so--all of a sudden his stories are about forty times more interesting--has a brilliant piece about some of the interagency jockeying going on around the war in Afghanistan. It's a lesson in how to read for subtext and hidden information, and how much you need to know to be able to do so at all:

Greg Miller, the Washington Post's ace intelligence and national security reporter, poured a bucket of ice down the backs of American officials with his publication last night of a story about how U.S. special operations forces are hamstrung from pursuing high value targets in Afghanistan, even as they're quietly drawing up plans for direct military retaliation against entities who plan terrorist attacks in the United States. The Post chose to headline the story with what I thought to be of secondary importance -- the drawing of contingency plans for retaliatory attacks: "Options studied for a possible Pakistan strike." [...]

But the real interesting part of this story is subtextual. Miller is a fantastic journalist, and he has sources almost no one else has. But even the most voluble of sources chose to speak at moments when disclosing information would best advance their equities in a particular debate. So why are Miller's sources talking right now, and what message are they trying to communicate?

He proceeds to tell you his thoughts--which seem pretty plausible, but I'm hardly in a position to evaluate when it comes to the subtle discontents of CENTCOM vs. SOCOM in targeting procedures--and then wallops you at the end with a protip that, if you're me, leaves you gaping at the obvious genius of it while he vanishes cackling into the interweb.

By the way, note how two of the quotations in the piece use the word "punitive." If you've got some time today, run the word "punitive" and the names of the senior officers associated with the special operations command and see if you can figure out who likes to use that phrase a lot. (Do the same thing, incidentally, for the words "pulse" and "kinetic" and "senior administration official." That has nothing to do with this article, but it's going to be revealing, nonetheless.)

Trust, if I had any idea what the relevant names were, I would be happily digging around LexisNexis and not sitting here typing this.

Nerd moment

2010-05-31T03:55:00.001-07:00

One of my major geeky interests is religious history, particularly in the form of a) fairy stories/fairy lore and taxonomy (i.e. Irish folk history, Jungian and other analysis of the content of fairy stories, et. al.), b) ancient Mesopotamian history (anything and everything I can get, but the Sumerian and Babylonian polytheistic traditions are fascinating), and c) early Christianity (which is to say Judaism and early Christian or Christian-like sects in Palestine and the surrounding area in the first century CE). (Islamic religious history I place in another category, which is to say that it's a branching of my actual area of focus and therefore not simply an area of geekdom).

All of this is by way of saying that while some people may spend their Saturday nights out drinking and partying, I spent mine drinking and watching Blade Runner with my roommate (a deep meditation on existence and mortality if ever I saw one) and then watched a lengthy lecture on the location of the historical Jesus within Jewish sectarian and mainstream tradition. I share it because, as I said, I'm having a nerd moment.

Enjoy, if this is your thing!

So I've been watching the West Wing over again

2010-05-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

And I love it as much as I always did. And I couldn't help but be reminded of Aaron Sorkin's distinctive cadence--and I know this is maybe going out on a limb a little--by this clip of NJ Gov. Chris Christie (R) calling out a reporter on, you know, caring about knucklehead stuff:

Gov Christie calls S-L columnist thin-skinned for inquiring about his 'confrontational tone'

So I got curious and I went and looked up his record--and by looked up I mean I went to his Wikipedia page--and it's kind of mixed for me. Not sure quite what I think of the man, not that it matters at all yet. (I'll be marginally surprised if he never runs for President.) Anyway, one to keep an eye on.

P.S. I don't know enough HTML to really know why there's that huge gap there or what to do about it; I also decided screw making the video fit entirely in the margins, since you can see all of him and if I did it it would be either tiny or very distorted. I hope everyone will manage to get through their day regardless.

Kagan

2010-05-12T04:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not qualified to talk about Elena Kagan in terms of jurisprudence, so I won't. I haven't really done much research on her politics, but from what I hear nobody really knows much, and while this is a (worthy) subject of much discussion, it's not what I want to talk about since I haven't done what's necessary to discuss it intelligently.

The main thing I feel like commenting on right now is the whisper debate going on regarding her sexual orientation. I have no idea if she's gay or straight. I can understand, I suppose, why some people think that she is. But I'm going to join Digby in saying that what Elena Kagan chooses to say about herself is her truth by right. I don't mean by this that a person can be nominated for a major political office and declaim whatever biography they choose; I mean, rather, that in this case and on this point if she says she's straight, she's straight, and that's good enough for me. Where does anybody else get off saying she's lying or mistaken in this day and age?

I can construct a vaguely reasonable argument for where they get off, of course, and the argument has no doubt been made; but the argument rests on the significance of her hypothetical homosexuality for future decisions on gay rights, and how that significance changes if she is out or not. It does not rest on the fact that she's denied it. I choose to believe her because to do otherwise is patronizing and disrespectful.

I won't lie; I would love it if President Obama would nominate and stand by an openly gay justice. I've been revisiting my favorite show of all time, The West Wing, a great deal lately, and my hunger for a lefty President with the courage of his convictions and a record of wins to back it up remains as real as it was when I was fifteen and convinced I wanted to be Deputy Chief of Staff when I grew up. But as far as I know, Obama's not the guy and this is not the fight I'd love to see. For that matter, this is probably not the universe in which that fight ends as I'd like it to.

Given all that, I have no problem with Elena Kagan other than a certain wistfulness which is certainly not her fault. I wish her a smooth, vigorous, and serious confirmation process and I wish everyone would shut up about why she has no kids and wears her hair short.

Burnt Ochre was always my favorite crayon name

2010-05-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

We all have our burdens in life

2010-05-06T01:15:00.000-07:00

I must say that all of this yelling about Miranda rights and the fact that it's now being referred to as "the Miranda debate" consistently leaves me very confused. This on top of years of people making jokes about how I should read them their rights upon being told my name.

Little did my parents know what they were burdening me with.

Are you--yes. Yes, you are crazy.

2010-05-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

This one is not that fresh from the interweb presses, but the bouquet of its madness remains as aromatic as on the day I first read it: Israel must topple Assad in next conflict with Syria proxies.

I tried to find a money quote, but the crazy is so artfully laced throughout that I couldn't pick one. It's really in the way all the parts relate to one another. The parts are as follows:

1. Syria has delivered SCUD missile systems to Hizballah [though it seems the proof of this actually having happened is a tad iffy; I've seen it confirmed by sources I trust, too, though, so I'm not sure what I think about it].

2. Goldstone concluded that any and all deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime as a form of collective punishment. However, Israel need not obey this ruling, only find a way to dance around it or get away with violating it.

3. Therefore [?!], Israel should announce that any aggression by Hizballah will lead to a direct and unrelenting attack on Syria's infrastructure and the deposition of President al-Assad instead of/before retaliation to Hizballah. Further, Israel should make it clear that it has no choice in doing so.

4. This will act as a deterrent.

So, yeah, this is beyond crazy in a variety of ways. And who wrote it? Oh, no one very important, just the former head of the IDF artillery corps, which is, you know, no big deal--oh, wait, it is. I'm not saying this makes him the voice of the government, but it's not like he's ignorant of military matters.

I can't imagine who would support Israel were it to take such a step. Even the U.S. would be hard put in that situation, I think. Not to mention the "you break it, you bought it" rule--what happens to Syria after that? Does Israel just withdraw and assume that will be the end of things? Until the current president (Bashar al-Assad)'s father, Hafez al-Assad, took over, Syria was a realm of total chaos and massive political instability. (There's a reason Syria invited Egypt to form a political union with it and take over the country back in the late fifties, and it wasn't because they loved Gamal al-Nasser so much, okay?) I have no idea what it would be like without the Assad family in charge.

I just--it's nutso, okay? Let's just leave it at that and go about our lives.

File under "le sigh"

2010-05-03T07:34:00.001-07:00

At least 10 states look like they'll be dealing with at least attempts to emulate Arizona's immigration law. Granted, it seems like lots of these ideas won't go far (Ohio, really?), but it's still...unfortunate, I guess.

I've never quite understood why states seem to go through fads with hot-button issues. One state moves on something and all of a sudden an equivalent is being proposed at the state house or offered as a ballot initiative all over the country--even though most of these issues don't affect all states in the same way or to the same degree.

I do understand the kick-in-the-ass effect of having one of your peers go where none has gone before or what have you, but it always feels stupid to me even when it's working in a direction I agree with. You'd think if it's that important, you'd want to take the time to do it right--or perhaps you'd already have done it--rather than waiting for one audacious (or in this case, totally effing crazy) state to lead a straggling charge.

For the record, my favorite of the initiatives discussed at the link is Missouri's:

The state legislature is considering a law that would make it unlawful for any person to conceal or shelter "illegal aliens," and would also make it a crime for illegal immigrants to transport themselves. Similar local laws have in the past been declared unconstitutional.

It just brings me back to when I was learning about the Underground Railroad in second grade, you know?

Um.

2010-04-25T00:14:00.001-07:00

Oh, Tom Friedman. How do I put this delicately?

I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years. Never mind. I’m sure like all such protest movements the Tea Partiers will get their 10 to 20 percent of the vote. But should the Tea Partiers actually aspire to break out of that range, attract lots of young people and become something more than just entertainment for Fox News, I have a suggestion:

Become the Green Tea Party. [...]

The manifesto is easy, too: “We, the Green Tea Party, believe that the most effective way to advance America’s national security and economic vitality would be to impose a $10 “Patriot Fee” on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”

Um. The problem with this is that it is completely unmoored from reality. As if the Tea Partiers would ever consent to being associated with something as highfalutin as Green Tea.

Well, I'll be

2010-03-26T04:04:00.000-07:00

Turns out Obama sent Netanyahu a message after all.

Oy gevalt

2010-03-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

It seems Turkey's Prime Minister Erdoğan is making vague threats to expel 100,000 Armenians currently working in Turkey "should it become necessary" because...the U.S. and Sweden decided to call the WWI massacre a genocide.

This sort of thing regarding non-Turkish and/or non-Muslim minorities is not new in Turkey's history, but this particular example of it seems rather boneheaded. Armenia isn't even directly involved, so far as I know. If the aim is for Turkey to avoid looking bad (where "bad" is taken to mean "perpetrator of genocide" or at least "mean to Armenians"), then this sort of thing doesn't really help.

Proof

2010-03-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

We can now see once and for all that the Mongols were the biggest badasses of all time. I think at the end the video should have marked Damascus in addition to Baghdad and Jerusalem--it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, after all--but then, I'm biased.

H/t Juan Cole.

Duck

2010-03-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

I wonder what Mike Vanderboegh's opinions are on terrorism. I bet he'd say he's not a fan. And yet:

Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Ala., former leader of the Alabama Constitutional Militia, put out a call on Friday for modern “Sons of Liberty” to break the windows of Democratic Party offices nationwide in opposition to health care reform. Since then, vandals have struck several offices, including the Sedgwick County Democratic Party headquarters in Wichita.

[...] “We can break their windows,” he said. “Break them NOW. And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.”Vanderboegh told The Kansas City Star that the action was meant to “get everyone’s attention.”

“What I was trying to get across was that people do not understand how on the edge of civil conflict this country is,” he said.

Calorie labeling: aw jeez

2010-03-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

So Ezra Klein points out one of the "prevention" provisions of our shiny new healthcare bill, as is is job, wont, and duty:

One of the bill's provisions is a menu labeling proposal for chain restaurants with more than 20 locations. The proposal requires chains to post the caloric content of each item (and the total calories of combo meals) next to its listing on the menu, the menu board, and even the drive-through menu kiosk. This goes into effect next year, and will be one of the most visible effects of the health-care bill. You can read the provision here (pdf).

The early evidence on menu labeling has been undeniably mixed, but this is good information for people to have. In 20 years, I think we'll be baffled that there was a time when it wasn't easily available to us.

So here's my thing. The immediate parallel, to my mind, is the nutrition facts labels on food products. I know I have a hard time imagining buying prepared foods, whether that means orange juice or microwavable Indian food, without being able to see what-all's in 'em.

But the difference is you have a choice. I can pick up, buy, unwrap, and eat a candy bar without ever looking at the calorie count or the saturated fats percentage or the nature of the carbohydrates locked within it. When that number is splashed big and loud and in red on a menu--a menu that in some situations will be the equivalent of a poster--that is a whole different story. Furthermore, nutritional information gives you much more than the bare number of calories. At least it gives you information that you can use to manage your diet in the way that works for you, if you so choose.

I understand that its inescapability is the point of the provision. But my god, what about the eating disordered in this country? Many will be perversely overjoyed: no need to privately estimate calorie counts, round up wildly to be "safe," google around for others' tallies. But many will also be terrified. They will be terrified that if they consistently pick the lowest-calorie option when obliged to eat out at a chain restaurant, their friends and family will notice; and they will be terrified that on the occasion that they venture, manage, or feel obliged to pick a higher calorie option, someone--anyone who knows what they picked, whether a dining companion or a server or a bystander, will be thinking, "what is that fatass doing eating anything but naked lettuce." Fat people who want to be left alone to eat a goddamn meal will face even more detailed commentary and well-intentioned, yet ultimately hurtful advice from friends, family, and random strangers than they do now. "Normal" people (i.e. those not included in the previous two categories) will find themselves competing with themselves or others to limit their calories while restaurants compete to offer the lowest calorie options (with no incentive to do so with regard to nutritional content or to provide customers with the ability to consider nutrition, rather than calorie-counting, themselves).

This is not to mention three larger points: 1, not all calories are created equal; 2, weight loss is not health. It is not necessarily not-health, and I am not saying that this provision is the only mechanism in the bill (lord knows if it were Ezra would be singing a much different tune), but I would really like to see some work on urban food deserts, for example, before we start giving ourselves even more tools for public body and diet shame.

Finally, 3: in many ways one of the biggest issues around food and health for Americans is that our culture can't conceive of food as food. It's all calories and good fats and bad fats and antioxidants. Having to intellectualize and moralize the shit out of everything we eat is not good for us. It leads to deprivation/binge cycles, depriving ourselves of things we need because they're "bad," sometimes relying on companies or fads to figure it all out for us (read: diets). Many of these diets are not very nutritionally sound, and almost none of them promote healthy relationships between mind and body--which is really one of the bases of health.

I think this further standardization and commodification of food into points which are good or bad but ultimately to be conquered will do nothing to help this pathologization of food and plenty to further it.

Compare:

MeMe Roth: "We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we’re behaviorally and neurochemically dependent upon food."

Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."

Our culture, sadly, is much more in tune with the former sentiment than the latter. I don't think putting calorie counts on menus nationwide will help.

U.S. hiding its teeth very well

2010-03-23T00:56:00.001-07:00

There was an AIPAC meeting yesterday. Benjamin Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton both spoke at it.

Bibi at AIPAC:

“The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today,” Mr. Netanyahu said to the group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Jerusalem is not a settlement; It’s our capital.”

Clinton at AIPAC:

She warned that the Obama administration would push back “unequivocally” when it disagreed with the Israeli government’s policies. But she reaffirmed that America’s support for Israel was “rock solid, unwavering, enduring and forever.” [...] “There must be no gap between the United States and Israel on security,” she said to loud applause.

As for how far off we are from anything remotely resembling a rational state of affairs:

“I thought she was excellent,” said Hal Rosnick of Easton, Conn. “She wants the parties to get back to indirect negotiations.” But Diane Hornstein of Chicago, said, “I would like her to recognize that Jerusalem is not a settlement. There’s no evenhandedness in the demands made of Israel.”

Wooo! Indirect negotiations!

To be clear, "indirect negotiations" means George Mitchell talking to the PA in Ramallah, driving over to Jerusalem, talking to Bibi's government, then driving back to Ramallah, and so on ad nauseam. That this is the goal--for Clinton to smooth things over enough for Bibi and Abu Mazen to consent to essentially sit with their backs turned and have their poor friend play the "Bibi says you're a stupidhead," "Well, tell him HE'S A STUPIDHEAD" "...Abu Mazen says you're a stupidhead" game--is really all you need to know.

Oh, just kill me now

2010-03-22T23:46:00.001-07:00

The Camel Method, it seems, is a method of converting Muslims to Christianity by using the Qur'an.

“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.

Sure it is. And the rifle sights supplied to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan with Christian scriptures engraved on them are just a celebration of the manufacturing company's faith.

"We believe that America is great when its people are good," says the [manufacturer's] Web site. "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals." [...]

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group [the Military Religious Freedom Foundation] who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they've told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as "spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ."

Well, hey, we'll get 'em from the inside and out. Use the Gospels to shoot 'em down on the battlefield and to convert them in the streets until soon there won't be any pesky Muslims to deal with anymore. At least, not any upper-case ones:

“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”

So what if there are a million ways of saying you're a believer in god that wouldn't elicit this kind of confusion? So maybe you have to engage in a little shell game to get your foot in the door. It's for their own good. Come to Jesus, hajji.

Another Quartet statement, cont.

2010-03-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

Rosemary Hollis at FP's Middle East Channel has much more to say on the Quartet statement, though the upshot is basically the same:

All that being said, this latest Quartet initiative does not constitute a breakthrough. It provides no new ways to oblige the parties to make "the difficult choices" required to deliver "an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel." That will require more than an end to settlement expansion. It will require the removal of a good many settlements plus land swaps.

What she says it does do is hopefully give Abu Mazen cover to begin proximity talks despite the settlement debacle during Biden's Israel visit, as well as give the US the opportunity to "use the Quartet as a vehicle to send a strong message to the Israeli government that Washington's support is not automatic."

I don't see this as all that strong of a message to that effect in the light of the U.S.'s fairly rapid drawdown of displeasure since the incident. Washington needs to make a much sharper gesture than what we've seen if that's the message it wants to send.

Buh?

2010-03-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

Brazil and Argentina have agreed to negotiate a free trade agreement with...the Palestinian Authority.

The piece is a bizarre read. It's like an alternate universe, almost (an impression no doubt enhanced by the fact that I study mostly Gaza and I assume this article is about the West Bank).

Through the looking glass

2010-03-22T15:31:00.001-07:00

Private military companies have officially gone meta. Just when I was getting used to the idea of corporate entities that make war for pay and maybe run some mining and transport operations on the side, Cambodia went and solicited corporate sponsorship for its military along the Thai border.

Then it turns out that one of the corporate sponsors is owned by the military. I at first assumed this meant the Cambodian military, which would make it the most circular arrangement since the cinnamon bun I ate yesterday--but no. It's owned by the Vietnamese military.

Which is just sort of mindboggling to me.

Another Quartet statement

2010-03-21T00:59:00.001-07:00

The Quartet had a meeting, after which they released a statement. The Majlis has the transcript.

As one would expect, it contains nothing new and doesn't hold out much to be hopeful about.

Nepalese reconciliation not going so smoothly

2010-03-16T04:16:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the chief of the Nepalese Army has declared that no, he will not induct the Maoist rebel troops into the Nepalese regular army en masse, thanks all the same. That the rebel fighters should become part of the national army was part of the peace agreement between the Maoists and the government; after General Gurung's statement, the Maoists have of course started hopping up and down.

What I find much more bizarre than their reaction is that a) this concession was ever a part of the agreement to begin with, and b) that both the Times of India article discussing it (linked above) and the World Politics Review post that linked the ToI (I love me some Off-The-Radar News Roundups) seem to take the tone that this move by the general is unwise. ("The stance is in contravention of the 2006 peace accord that put an end to Nepal's insurgency, and already destabilized the country last year when the previous chief of staff adopted the same position.")

I don't know if there was a different way that General Gurung could have gone about this, but integrating several thousand rebel forces with strongly demonstrated disloyalty to the state into your armed forces en masse, in the context of a very recent total breakdown of state sovereignty, is a recipe for disaster. Wikipedia says that the Nepalese army is 95,000 strong; it does not, however, say how it knows, and despite the surprising excellence of the website of the Nepalese Army, I can't find such numbers there. If Wikipedia is correct, then 6-7,000 Maoists (this being the conservative claim from the Times of India) in an army of 95,000 is not nothing. Even if you split them up pretty extensively you could have real problems with cohesion, authority and morale.

Look, Frederick the freaking Great understood this (per a deeply pompous* series of rebuttals to Machiavelli constituting the aptly named "Anti-Machiavel"). It seems reasonable to me that General Gurung, in the advanced year of 2066 in the Nepal Sambat calendar, should understand it too. I can't pretend to know much about how this agreement came about in 2006 (the Gregorian calendar year, not Nepal Sambat)--while I do need to make a bit of a study of Nepal's situation as an ancillary case to my thesis, I haven't gotten to it yet--but all I can say is that I hope this concession was a highly, highly necessary one.

General Gurung has some pretty good suggestions for what to do with the People's Liberation Army instead, if you ask me:

Gurung said the PLA could be accommodated in the police, border security forces and other non-military agencies. They could also be sent overseas for jobs or be rehabilitated with an economic incentive.

Meanwhile, the PLA seems to be acting in pretty bad faith, waiting for an excuse to break the agreement:

Gurung also expressed concern at Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda giving training to the PLA in their cantonments and urging them to be ready for another revolution if the government failed to implement the new constitution by May 28.

And, of course, what would be an attempt at post-civil-war reconciliation without a "you first" standoff:

There is growing uncertainty over the fate of the fighters with their own leaders saying the new statute should be promulgated before they are disbanded while the ruling parties are demanding the discharge of the PLA first.

At any rate, I currently feel quite a bit of sympathy for the good General, who seems to be very sensible and is being asked to do something that seems to me to be rather less sensible.

*Actual excerpt from Frederick the Great, I kid you not:

Where do these examples leave Machiavelli, and what comes of the ingenious allegory of David refusing to fight Goliath with the armor of Saul because of its weight? It is a lot of whipped cream! I admit that auxiliaries sometimes inconvenience princes, but I ask if conquering cities and provinces is not worth a little inconvenience.

Upon first reading, I recall picturing David facing up to Goliath covered from head to toe in whipped cream armor. Oops.

Don't do it, Kirkuk!

2010-03-09T01:30:00.000-08:00

Firstly, I want to note the launch of ForeignPolicy.com's Middle East Channel, which is already shaping up to be fantastic (how could it not be, being edited by the likes of Marc Lynch and Daniel Levy?).

From that very channel comes this piece, Kurds No Closer to Taking Kirkuk After Iraqi Elections.

The piece is of course interesting on a topical level, as the fate of Kirkuk (whether it, and its oil, should become part of Iraqi Kurdistan or not) has been a major sticking point in Iraqi politics. However, being all caught up in my thesis as I currently am, I found this bit particularly interesting:

In the public eye, every election in Kirkuk turns into a census and quasi-referendum rolled into one. This is because the ethnic communities here assume that Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans vote for their own candidates; that this shows the respective communities' sizes; that the vast majority of Kurds want Kirkuk to be attached to the Kurdistan region; and that these factors combined suggest the probable outcome of a future referendum on Kirkuk's status.

[...]

Moreover, matters are complicated by intra-Kurdish divisions. Some of the heaviest campaigning in Kirkuk was not between Arabs and Kurds but intra-Kurdish: between the Kurdistani Coalition which combines the two Kurdish principal parties - the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan - and the upstart Goran, or Change, movement. Goran's strong showing in the Kurdistan regional elections last July was a dire warning to the ruling parties, especially the PUK, the party from which Goran's frustrated would-be reformers sprang last year. Today, when no open campaigning was allowed, the PUK and KDP went all-out in their bid to outpace their rival. Cars bearing KDP and PUK flags and blaring their horns crisscrossed Kurdish neighborhoods as if the campaign was still in full swing. Men beat drums; in some areas, women - decked out in their most colourful finery - danced to the beat.

Some Goran candidates may not be following the main parties', and possibly their own leadership's, line on Kirkuk. For five futile years, the KDP and PUK have insisted that the only way to resolve Kirkuk's status is by a referendum based on an ethnic vote. They have loaded the outcome through their control of local government, which allowed them to change the governorate's demography in their favor. That outcome, therefore, is unlikely to be accepted by the losers, who have threatened violence if they are inducted into the Kurdistan region against their will.

Some Goran officials in Kirkuk, by contrast, seem to be saying something new - that the only sensible way to proceed is to restore trust between the ethnic communities and let Kirkukis decide for themselves, over time, what the best solution is for Kirkuk, by referendum or otherwise. This is music to the ears of Arabs and Turkomans, who have made no secret of their hope that Goran will gain a couple of seats at the PUK's expense, even if they themselves wouldn't vote for Goran, lest they increase the overall Kurdish vote.

It sounds like the PUK and KDP have been trying to take the province in a Lebanese direction--that is to say, legislating and statebuilding based on demographics. What is at stake in this case is different from what was at stake in Lebanon when the various agreements on which Lebanon's confessional system is based were made, but the consequences might not be dissimilar--widespread violence and general anarchy. I'm not sure what "letting Kirkukis decide for themselves, over time, what the best solution is for Kirkuk, by referendum or otherwise" would entail other than paralysis and punting--some kind of decision needs to be made one way or another--nor do I know how Goran would propose to go about "restoring trust between the ethnic communities", but all of that said, I can't see the PUK's and KDP's approach ending anywhere very good.

In lieu of a real post

2010-03-07T03:45:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid I've gotten too busy to keep up with this like I used to--I keep catching things I want to post about and never getting around to posting them. So here we'll have a link dump, but first I wanted to mention:

I AM THIS HIPSTER PUPPY:

don’t use the term “world music” around thurston unless you want a 20 minute lecture

It's true. I will give a lecture about the problematic nature of "world music" to most anyone. Maybe not a full 20 minutes, though.

Anyhoodle, here are some things I've been meaning to post about:

Kate Harding on Kevin Smith's Southwest experience and the perils of flying while fat.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on how we define terrorism, who is a terrorist and who is not, and the lessons we have failed to learn from our national history of domestic race terrorism.

Finally, this article on depression and what it does to your brain--and what it may do for your brain--struck a chord with me.

Al-takfir (التكفير)

2010-02-23T01:03:00.000-08:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates was away in Chicago for a while, so he had some friends guest blog in his absence. Adam Serwer was one, and his post, "American Takfiris," is as good a piece as any blogger could hope for from a guest.

The theological justification for al Qaeda's wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, "The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge," that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.

The legal memos justifying torture aren't very different in terms of reasoning--it's clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.

It's worth reading the rest. I don't subscribe to the more or less optimistic conclusion Serwer comes to, but I'm very inherently cynical about this sort of thing. It would certainly be nice if he were proved right.

Christopher Street boys

2010-02-19T12:28:00.001-08:00

The only way this video could be improved is if his cat had made an appearance.

Israel-Hizballah conflict on the horizon?

2010-02-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

"Everybody and their brother thinks that 2010 will witness a second round between Hezbollah and Israel," says Qifa Nabki; like him, I hope that's not the case and don't see it as inevitable (at least for the next few months, barring a game-changing event--which, in today's Middle East, is not too unlikely). The post is worth reading--it features a few different takes on what might be the catalyst for a conflict between Israel and Hizballah and how Hizballah and/or Israel (depending on the scenario) might try to spin it.

The short version of my opinion: you never know, it doesn't take much for these two, but it would be stupid on Israel's part. The long version is below.

Nabki's reason for thinking conflict doesn't have to happen too too soon is that the current situation is mutually beneficial: "Israel gets a quiet northern front and Hezbollah gets to re-group, re-arm, and weigh their options while certain relevant regional powers weigh theirs." (Cough cough Iran.) I think there's one more reason: the current Israeli leadership doesn't have any hawk cred to prove or warlike, manly flexing to do. They're still pretty fresh off Operation Cast Lead and they're not due for elections anytime soon.

In addition, Operation Cast Lead didn't exactly go well for Israel in global public or diplomatic opinion--I mean, who outside of Israel was happy about that? Anyone? Not even the U.S. was on board (okay, maybe Charles Krauthammer)--and another war, even one provoked by Hizballah, would not help Israel in that department. The Goldstone Report is still being investigated by both sides, and the U.N. will probably send it to the Hague--a reasonably ominous development for Israel and its ongoing investigation, since according to The Majlis "Richard Goldstone recommended the UN send the report to the International Criminal Court only if both sides aren't willing to conduct legitimate investigations." Human rights groups are still on the scent. Israel doesn't need to give them new material.

I think the half-life on Goldstone will have a lot to do with whether we see a full-scale conflict in Southern Lebanon, even if Hizballah provokes--Israel has a choice to escalate, and right now there are few upsides and lots of downsides to taking it. (Indeed, that choice is a large part of what won Ehud Olmert such opprobrium in the aftermath of 2006's July War, and has won him the privilege of being referred to as "stupid," "idiotic," etc. forever after whenever that war is discussed.)

Of course, that hasn't always stopped them before. Nabki says, "Israeli strategists are talking about the Dahiyah doctrine and the concept of punishment, not dissimilar to Ops Accountability and Grapes of Wrath in 1993 and 1996. Next time, they say, we won’t bother try to defeat Hezbollah, instead we’ll smash Lebanon to demonstrate to the Lebanese the folly of tolerating them."

On the one hand, not trying to crush Hizballah is probably wise. It didn't go well last time and will just add fuel to a number of fires. On the other, punishing the people for a group's politics and actions hasn't been working too well in Gaza, nor, as Larison keeps hammering away (here too--there are too many good ones), does it generally in the case of sanctions (against Burma, Iran, Gaza, ad nauseam) or in principle.

What's more, while I have no doubt in Israel's ability to lay waste to Lebanon no matter what Hizballah does (unless Nasrallah is hiding a large air force very well), they still have to deal with the risk of Hizballah's managing to make them look bad tactically. Israel doesn't just have to win to avoid that; they have to embarrass Hizballah. Otherwise, in the context of asymmetrical expectations, the specter of 2006 combined with an impressive or even decent showing from Hizballah will not help the nyah nyah narrative one bit.

Finally, I fail to see how this plan works out well for Israel in the strategic long run. Even if it goes brilliantly, they'll then border an impoverished, destabilized Lebanon full of a lot of very mad, very suddenly poor people for whom employment with Hizballah could start looking very good (especially if Iran is smart and sends a bunch of cash Hizballah's way to pay recruits--Hizballah was offering $100-$200 a week back in the mid-eighties, thanks to their Shi'i parent). Hizballah, in this scenario (only the one-sentence version, to be fair), will be left more or less intact, and it will be ready, willing, and able to make Israel's northern border very unhappy (especially given their stated intention, per Nabki, to go on the offensive "next time" rather than fighting "defensively and reactively" as they did in 2006). (Though Syria has a role to play here, too, which I think could go either way in terms of giving the green light.) The Israeli government will probably have a reasonably doubtful chunk of the electorate on its hands, especially if the government is seen to have started or disproportionately escalated the conflict that created this situation.

This particular plan of attack would really, really not help Israel on the human rights front, either--Hizballah is their best target from the point of view of avoiding civilians and hitting an internationally unpopular enemy, despite recent softening from Britain and international observers toward the group in response to their new platform.

All of this said, I wouldn't be shocked if it happened: Hizballah is maybe due to remind everyone of its war-waging chops (it's coming up on four years now)--they did just redeploy their rockets deeper into Lebanon, raising the stakes of a conflict--and Israel has been known to get in deeper than necessary when the IDF feels it has something to prove (cf. Israeli-Lebanese war, 1982-2000), which it probably does with regard to Hizballah. On that front, it's at least promising that Ariel Sharon isn't Defense Minister, even if Netanyahu isn't a huge improvement on Menachem Begin.

Plus, well, in this arena, it doesn't take much. But if there's a good option for Israel that includes conflict, I don't see it.

Once again, there's just nothing to say

2010-02-04T05:27:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday morning, a suicide car bomber slammed into a Frontier Corps convoy of vehicles heading to inaugurate a girls school in the village of Kad, in the Lower Dir district of northwest Pakistan, killing 7 and wounding at least 130. Among the dead were 3 US troops in Pakistani dress and a Frontier Corpsman. The others were schoolgirls. The attack occurred as the convoy was reaching two girls' schools, one an elementary school and one a high school rebuilt with US funds. The force of the blast collapsed the high school's walls, but it was empty. Most of the wounded were schoolgirls in the elementary school, hit by flying glass and debris; ironically, given that the Taliban claim to be Muslims, some were having their class on Islam when the shrapnel hit them.

H/t Juan Cole.

New steps by Hizballah

2010-02-04T00:33:00.000-08:00

A recent article from the Washington Post says that Hizballah has redeployed its long-range rockets "deep into northern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley"--that is, away from the southern border with Israel--which would mean conflicts between Hizballah and Israel would now involve a much broader territorial swath of Lebanon, probably forcing a conflict between the two states (or a crackdown by the Lebanese government on Hizballah, which seems unlikely, though I would be fascinated to see how that would play out--it would be very tricky PR for the government and a very interesting test of the rebuilt Lebanese army).

This is an interesting development for its own sake, but particularly so coming fairly quickly after Hizballah's announcement of its new political platform, which has been received by most observers as a sign of moderation and a swing away from militiadom and toward full-fledged political party status. Qifa Nabki agrees.

Nabki in particular is not necessarily saying that this represents a moderation or a path toward full political engagement and military quiescence, but that is a sense I get from much of the commentary. I didn't quite buy this notion at the time and I still don't. Hizballah is and has been a political movement for a few years now; they are also, at the same time, a guerrilla fighting force. I don't think they have any plans to give up either end of the operation, because what they are is, in fact, something different from either of these characterizations. I'll wait to talk more about what that is after I've actually written my thesis, but this is what it's about.

In addition, I find this bit from the WaPo article interesting:

Hezbollah "learned their lesson" in 2006, when vital intelligence enabled the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the group's long-range launch sites in the first days of the conflict, said reserve Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, a former head of IDF intelligence. In effect, he said, "the 'border' is now the Litani River," with Hezbollah's rocket sites possibly extending north of Beirut.

It's an interesting statement because the original objective of Israel's 1978 intervention into Lebanon was to make the Litani river the actual border (see Benny Morris's Righteous Victims). The notion of annexing Lebanon south of the Litani and leaving the rest for a Christian Maronite state that would enter an alliance of religious minorities with Israel in a sea of Arab Muslims goes back to David Ben Gurion.

I have no way of knowing if it was Gen. Farkash's intention to reference this particular tradition. If it was, it's an unfortunate reference to make on the public record (or at all, one would like to think). Either way, his statement seems to interpret Hizballah's move as a defensive one, a form of retreat. This is inaccurate. It represents, as most other observers have concluded, Hizballah's confidence in its penetration of greater areas of Lebanon and its aim to strategically invest more of Lebanon in its endeavors, rather than remaining limited to the South. (Of course, the Bekaa is and has been a Hizballah stronghold for years, but as far as I know this represents a new level of military investment.)

I'm interested to see what Hizballah's next move is.

Postgame analysis

2010-02-04T00:19:00.000-08:00

Larison has some interesting public opinion numbers from Iran.

I don't know nearly enough about Iran, so I won't comment, but I figured I'd pass them along.

O rly?

2010-02-01T14:42:00.000-08:00

It is with much dis-gusto that I present to you the Make Me Skinny Jacket by Rebecca Taylor.

Listen. Blazers and fitted jackets can indeed produce the illusion of a small waist, hourglass figure, and other features that translate to "flattering" by today's dominant beauty standards. This is one of the many, many things I love about them. (In the "black blazer" category alone I have three. This should tell you something.)

However. I must point out that they do not actually change one's body composition, and that while it is not this or any one company's fault that we have a national obsession with thinness, marketing products on the basis of future or illusory thinness (usually both) is really unhelpful to everyone (except the ones counting the cash, I suppose). This is just such a pathetically transparent and tasteless example of it that I actually couldn't quite believe it when I saw it.

That's all, really. Carry on.

Good advice

2010-01-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

"It's always hard to say, 'I don't know.' But no one else can say it for you."
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, January 28th, 2010.

Now the question is, when I say this to my hypothetical future children, do I say "there was this blogger..." or do I just lie and say Grandpa said it?

Undeserving of response

2010-01-28T13:02:00.001-08:00

It would be a waste of time and energy to try to explain to someone so willfully stupid and profoundly heartless why his thoughts on Haiti are offensive. Better to let him keep hanging himself with his own rope, which he does in this piece at least four times.

If You Rebuild It, They Will Come by Paul Shirley.

True enough. But what about when people repeat their mistakes? And what about when they do things that obviously act against their own self-interests?

In the case of mistakes and warnings as applied to Haiti, I don’t mean to indict those who ignored actual warnings against earthquakes, of which there were many before the recent one. Although it would have been prudent to pay heed to those, I suppose.

Instead, I’m referring to the circumstances in which people lived. While the earthquake was, obviously, unavoidable, the way in which many of the people of Haiti lived was not. Regrettably, some Haitians would have died regardless of the conditions in that country. But the fact that so many people lived in such abject poverty exacerbated the extent of the crisis.

How could humans do this to themselves? And what’s being done to stop it from happening again?

After the tsunami of 2004, the citizens of the world wailed and donated and volunteered for cleanup, rarely asking the important – and, I think, obvious – question: What were all those people doing there in the first place? Just as important: If they move back to a place near the ocean that had just been destroyed by a giant wave, shouldn’t our instinct be to say, “Go ahead if you want, but you’re on your own now.”?

We did the same after Hurricane Katrina. We were quick to vilify humans who were too slow to respond to the needs of victims, forgetting that the victims had built and maintained a major city below sea level in a known target zone for hurricanes. Our response: Make the same mistake again. Rebuild a doomed city, putting aside logic as we did.

And now, faced with a similar situation, it seems likely that we will do the same.

Shouldn’t there be some discourse on how the millions of dollars that are being poured into Haiti will be spent? And at least a slight reprimand for the conditions prior to the earthquake? Some kind of inquisition? Something like this?:

Dear Haitians –

First of all, kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure, and birth control should be applauded.

As we prepare to assist you in this difficult time, a polite request: If it’s possible, could you not re-build your island home in the image of its predecessor? Could you not resort to the creation of flimsy shanty- and shack-towns? And could some of you maybe use a condom once in a while?

Sincerely,
The Rest Of The World

Seriously, this is such splutter bait. It tempts me so to just start ranting about structural economic inequity and reproduction rates across economic strata and on and on and on--but that a) will make no difference to anyone and b) is the only sane goal I can imagine Shirley had when writing this piece.

And yet, I can't stop. I need to quote at least one more time. It's sort of like watching a car wreck, or a scary alien from a sci-fi movie--you know what it is, you know it's awful, its every move is pretty predictable, and you can't stop looking at it.

And I’m not as naïve as I once was – I don’t think the people of Haiti have the option of moving. But I do think that our assistance should be restricted, like it should be in cases of starvation. It simply does not work to give, unconditionally. What might work is to teach. In the case of famine-stricken segments of Africa, teaching meant making people understand that a population of people needs a certain amount of food, and that the creation of that food has to be self-sustaining for the system to work. In the case of earthquake-stricken Haiti, teaching might mean limited help, but help that is accompanied by criticism of the circumstances that made that help necessary.

First of all, congratulations to Shirley for inventing sustainable development all on his own without any help from all those dumb bleeding hearts who have been working on it for decades. Secondly, I completely agree that when entire countries in Africa have their weekly community meetings they should be discussing whether there was a big enough crop this year to have any babies yet rather than, I don't know, sitting around playing drums? Oh, Paul Shirley. What a guy.

I'll just end with this:

A Haitian woman, days after the earthquake:

“We need so much. Food, clothes, we need everything. I don’t know whose responsibility it is, but they need to give us something soon,” said Sophia Eltime, a mother of two who has been living under a bed sheet with seven members of her extended family. (From an AP report.)

Obviously, a set of circumstances such as the one in which Ms. Eltime was living is a heart-wrenching one. And for that, anyone would be sympathetic. Until she says, “I don’t know whose responsibility it is.” I don’t know whose responsibility it is, either. What I do know is that it is not the responsibility of the outside world to provide help. It’s nice if we do, but it is not a requirement, especially when people choose to influence their own existences negatively, whether by having too many children when they can’t afford them or by failing to recognize that living in a concrete bunker might not be the best way to protect one’s family, whether an earthquake happens or not.

Of course, Sophia Eltime was living in a concrete bunker because it's just so industrial chic, and she's always been really into post-apocalyptic science fiction and this way she got to feel like she was a character in a Philip K. Dick story! And family planning was, of course, entirely under her control, what with her excellent sex education, easy access to contraceptives, and well-respected rights to control her body that have never been questioned by the social and familial context in which she lives. She just loves children, you know? They really brighten up the bunker.

Dammit, he got me in the end. At least I kept my sarcasm. I'm going to end this now before I get tempted to actually comment on his website.

Ouch

2010-01-25T20:15:00.000-08:00

Juan Cole:

Gates went to Pakistan to emphasize to Islamabad that the US was not again going to abandon it and Afghanistan, as it had in the past. Pakistan, he wanted to say, is now a very long-term ally of Washington. He hoped for cooperation against the Haqqani, Taliban and Hizb-i Islami guerrillas. He wanted to allay conspiracy theories about US mercenary armies crawling over Pakistan, occasionally blowing things up (and then blaming the explosions on Pakistanis) in order to destabilize the country and manipulate its policies.

The message his mission inadvertently sent was that the US is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated; that he is pressuring Pakistan to take on further counter-insurgency operations against Taliban in the Northwest, which the country flatly lacks the resources to do; and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it.

Oof.

In, uh, less significant good news, I've written 18 pages of thesis!

Oh no pigeons!

2010-01-22T16:46:00.001-08:00

Thanks, Pictures for Sad Children, for explaining everything!

The glories of social networking

2010-01-10T00:34:00.000-08:00

I just got a message on Facebook from a friend in Syria. I spent a lot of time--and I do mean a lot--helping him with his English studies and tutoring him. Our friendship was one big language exchange and we taught each other a lot. Anyway, he said the following:

Hi! How is it going . what dose girrrrrl maen in USA does it mean lettel girl . and that why you wrote boyyyyyy .for jock or somthing .انا حبيت الرساله كتير . يعني كتير شكرا وحظا سعيدا مع الجامعة. انت شاطرة وانا فخور بك . انا الان في المسوى السابع في الانكليزي وادرس جيدا. طبعا انت السبب في ذلك

First let me say that his spoken English is exponentially better than his written English. I mean unbelievably so. He picked up a good accent from me and he speaks and understands very well. But his reading and writing are not so hot, partly because the English program he's in sucks. They didn't even teach them that capital letters come after periods. ANYWAY, what he said in Arabic was:

I liked the message [from you] a lot. I mean, thanks very much and good luck with university. You are clever and I am proud of you. I am now in the seventh level in English and I study well. Of course you are the reason for that.

I feel really good about that, what can I say? Last I heard from him he had stopped studying, so I'm really happy he's back at it.

Colbert Speaks

2010-01-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

Regarding new TSA policies, that is.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Ideal or No Deal

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Economy

Que maravilloso!

2009-12-29T23:17:00.001-08:00

Congratulations to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina on affirming the legality of gay marriage!

It's Idiot Day and this time someone told me

2009-12-29T22:56:00.001-08:00

Reproducing John Cole's post in its entirety:

And 100% of Popes are Catholic

by John Cole

Here is the MSM’s go-to guy on terrorism, Rep. Peter King (R, NY), on Fox News:

The fact is while the overwhelming majority of Muslims are outstanding people, on the other hand 100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims, and that is our main enemy today.

We are to the point that merely exposing yourself to right-wingers makes you dumber.

This on the same day that I read this discussion of environmental economics from Ezra Klein featuring a lovely quotation from Larry Summers:

THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.

I love it when this happens.

2009-12-25T12:36:00.000-08:00

The singer from The Shins is collaborating with Danger Mouse. The single (and website, actually) is pretty cool. Looking forward to the album.

Christmas has been very nice. I asked primarily for socks, and I got so many! I can make it through the winter now! (This at the age of 21. I shudder to think what I'll want for Christmas by the time I'm 70).

Happy holidays to anyone reading!

Some quick hits

2009-12-16T01:28:00.000-08:00

The situation for Afghani women isn't getting any better. There's not much new in the report, which could be fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, I guess; just a tragic sameness. I've posted about this topic before, and I wrote a paper that was about half on this subject. I don't really want to go over it again right now--it's too sad.

I'm getting to this way late, but Switzerland banned minarets a couple of weeks ago. In protest, a Swiss businessman built a minaret on top of his business in protest. Awesome.

Morand said he viewed the ban was all the more "scandalous" given that Switzerland actively encourages Arabs to "visit the country and to spend their money here."

The minaret, which has been in place since Tuesday, has "generated a lot of interest," he said, adding that he will wait and see before deciding if further action was needed to push his point.

I vote further action.

Andrew Sullivan flagged a video a while ago where a suicide bomber was interviewed on "All Things Pakistan." He titled the post "Interviewing Evil," which I object to--I think largely because I don't believe in evil. I'm not interested in this interview for purposes of staring into the underbelly of moral absolutes; I want to know what the suicide bomber thinks, that's all. Here's the video:

As always, there's more, but I'm too tired right now.

Fair's fair

2009-12-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

In light of my last, rather vehement post on Uganda's kill-the-gays bill and American Evangelical Christians, it's only fair to acknowledge Rick Warren's speaking out against the Ugandan initiative:

Andrew Sullivan comments:

This is an extremely positive if overdue development. I remain deeply concerned that Uganda's public policy is based on the "curing" homosexuals rubric, but that sure is better than executing them. The Ugandan bill should be abandoned. And Warren's call on pastors to disown the bill is a real step forward.

[...]

What I think is most significant is that Warren called this bill "extreme, unjust and unchristian towards homosexuals". It is absolutely and unequivocally unchristian to demonize a whole group of people and to threaten them with execution simply because of their sexual orientation and their need for love and sex and intimacy and companionship like every other human being. And for Warren to deploy Christian arguments in defense of the dignity of homosexual persons is a big step forward in this debate. I am grateful to him for staying true to the Gospels.

A hellfire sandwich

2009-12-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

Recall the new Ugandan bill that will render homosexuality, or harboring, supporting, or not reporting homosexual Ugandans, punishable by death. It might even lead to the execution of HIV-positive people.

Well:

Some observers have wondered if Purpose Driven Life author and mega-evangelist Rick Warren has had a role in the globally controversial bill, especially because of Warren's close association with Ugandan anti-gay activist Martin Ssempa and, more broadly, because Warren has refused to denounce the anti-gay bill. To little notice, a charismatic network overseen by Warren's doctoral dissertation advisor, C. Peter Wagner, has played a major role in politically organizing and inspiring the Ugandan legislators who have spearheaded the anti-gay bill.

Someone please explain to me why Warren, Wagner, etc. cannot or should not be prosecuted for murder should this bill be implemented.

Sigh. The answer is that there is no institution or judicial body capable of doing so. The US, conveniently, is not a signatory to the ICC, and even if we were I doubt much would happen. If we can't even prosecute our war criminals--war being the form of international interaction most robustly understood and governed on a global and juridical level (commerce is an issue for another time)--we sure as hell aren't going to get anything done about rampantly homophobic pastors indirectly killing hundreds, thousands--I don't even know--of poor Africans.

The Talk to Action piece I linked above is further interesting for the following pieces of information:

Both Wagner and Warren have designed elaborate infrastructures for blurring the lines between church and state. Wagner describes his movement as the “New Apostolic Reformation” and openly espouses his goals of reorganizing and mobilizing the church to take Christian “dominion” over government and society. Warren’s movement is described as a “second reformation”...

Wagner is the Convening Apostle in a movement of charismatic "relational networks" which has extended its reach from the United States to Uganda, and worldwide. Under its umbrella of authority are virulently anti-gay apostles in the United States and Uganda including Lou Engle of TheCall, who led thousands of young people in a twelve hour November 1, 2008 stadium rally in support of California's anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight. The San Diego event closed with Engle, a member of Wagner's inner circle of "prophets," calling for Christian martyrs. [...]

In C. Peter Wagner's 2008 book "Dominion", he describes the process through which this brand of Christianity can take dominion over government and society, and claims that this can be accomplished within a democratic framework. Wagner clearly states that Rick Warren's global P.E.A.C.E. Plan is an example of "stage one":

"I think the P.E.A.C.E. plan fits most comfortably into Phase One, the "social action" phase of strategies for obeying God's cultural mandate. The Phase Two emphases on strategic-level spiritual warfare and associated activities have not been placed front and center. And crucial to Phase Three, as I am defining it, are such things as apostolic/prophetic government of the Church, the Church (including apostles) in the workplace, the great transfer of wealth, dominion theology and the 7-M mandate."

If Rick Warren is "phase one," what do Wagner's stages two and three entail ?

The "7-M" or Reclaiming the Seven Mountains mandate encourages believers to take over key societal sectors such as government, and a leading Ugandan spokesperson for the theocratic 7-M paradigm has played a major role organizing and inspiring politicians behind Uganda's Anti Homosexuality legislation.

There's much, much more in the piece (including all the in-text links that I got too lazy to reproduce). It's very much worth reading.

What I now want to know is how these people are any different from Wahhabi or Salafi Islamic fundamentalists seeking to take over various Muslim countries and impose an atavistic reading of sharia law, other than in their remarkable success at seeing their goals enacted in countries to which they have no real connection. Who in Uganda elected Peter Wagner?

I'm truly disgusted. I'm having a hard time viewing the success differentiating Warren/Wagner from the Taliban as due to much of anything other than that the Ws are rich white men working from the global center to impose their views on the periphery, and Islamic extremists are poor brown men working from the periphery toward the center.

So we're sandwiched. With a little luck, eventually we can all look forward to living in a hell modeled on someone's holy book.

Speechless

2009-12-07T10:48:00.000-08:00

Greenwald:

On the night of June 10, 2006, three Guantanamo detainees were found dead in their individual cells. Without any autopsy or investigation, U.S. military officials proclaimed "suicide by hanging" as the cause of each death, and immediately sought to exploit the episode as proof of the evil of the detainees. Admiral Harry Harris, the camp's commander, said it showed "they have no regard for life" and that the suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare aimed at us here at Guantanamo"; another official anonymously said that the suicides showed the victims were "committed jihadists [who] will do anything they can to advance their cause," while another sneered that "it was a good PR move to draw attention."

The military ordered all press off the island, prevented all lawyers from seeing their clients, prevented any outside investigation, and declared its own investigation, to be publicly released. Two years later, it was indeed released (in heavily redacted form), and failed to satisfactorily answer any of the relevant questions. How did three heavily supervised and separated detainees commit coordinated suicide? Why did none of the guards notice something was happening, and why were none of the guards on duty that night disciplined? Why and how did the detainees stuff rags down their own throats? Why was one of them missing his internal organs at autopsy? (I wish I were making this up.)

Seton Hall University's Law school has released a report [PDF] on the events which is not making my stomach sit any easier about this.

According to the report (and thanks to TalkLeft for highlighting this):

Accepting the military investigation findings as true and complete, in order to commit suicide by hanging, the detainees must have:

* Braided a noose by tearing up their sheets and/or clothing
* Made mannequins of themselves so it would appear to the guards that they were asleep in their cells
* Hung sheets to block the view into the cells, a violation of SOPs
* Tied their feet together
* Tied their hands together
* Shoved rags in their mouths and down their throats
* Hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling
* Climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around their necks and released their weight, resulting in death by strangulation
* Hung dead for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards

SOPs [Standard Operating Procedures] required guards to note movement or to see the detainee‘s skin while walking the block. This raises many questions as to how three detainees on the same cell block, on the same side of the block, were able to complete the aforementioned acts without any Alpha guards noticing.

And just so we're clear how truly bizarre this whole situation is, here's Scott Horton interviewing Seton Hall professor Mark Denbeaux, who supervised the report:

Q: One of the prisoners, Yassar Talal Al Zahrani, had been seized as a minor and survived the prison riot that occurred at the Qali Jangi Prison near Mazar-i-Sharif. When his body was turned over for burial, an independent medical examination was arranged which found that the heart, kidneys and throat had all been removed from his corpse. The medical examiner noted that the removal of the throat in particular was highly irregular, and made an independent assessment impossible. Do you have any sense why U.S. military pathologists removed his internal organs and throat? Is this discussed in the report?

A: No.

The most innocent explanation I can come up with that comports with all the facts is that this is Gitmo meets The Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment: no one really cares about the rules. Even in that reading, the NCIS investigation is a cover-up of a gross dereliction of duty for which nobody was disciplined, leading to the deaths of three men. The fact that NCIS did not address these issues is inexplicable and very troubling.

That's the bizarre part, the twisted part. But here comes the shameful, really scary part:

There is one way that a meaningful investigation could be conducted into what happened to these three detainees: a lawsuit filed in federal court by the parents of two of the detainees against various Bush officials for the torture and deaths of their sons -- who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any wrongdoing (indeed, one had been cleared for release). By itself, discovery in that lawsuit would shed critical light on what was done to these detainees and what caused their deaths.

The problem, however, is that the Obama DOJ has been using every Bush tactic -- and inventing whole new ones -- to block the lawsuit from proceeding.

[...]

All of this is depressingly consistent with multiple other cases in which the Obama DOJ is attempting aggressively to shield even the most illegal and allegedly discontinued Bush programs from judicial review. Time and again, the most radical Bush claims of executive power, immunity and secrecy (ones Democrats and even Obama frequently condemned) are invoked to insist that federal courts have no right to adjudicate claims that the Government violated the Constitution and the law. As Harper's Scott Horton documented over the weekend, a new filing by the Obama DOJ in defense of John Yoo is "seeking to make absolute the immunity granted Justice Department lawyers who counsel torture, disappearings, and other crimes against humanity."

I don't have anything brilliant to say about this. It's very, very bad, I wish it weren't this way, I consider it a betrayal by Obama of the base, the country, and his own campaign, I really want to know where that poor man's internal organs went, and I would do a lot to live in a world where people were actually prosecuted for this sort of thing.

I'm just going to leave you with this.

As Harper's Scott Horton documented over the weekend, a new filing by the Obama DOJ in defense of John Yoo is "seeking to make absolute the immunity granted Justice Department lawyers who counsel torture, disappearings, and other crimes against humanity." In other words, as we lecture the world about the need for them to apply the rule of law and hold war criminals accountable, we simultaneously proclaim about ourselves:

We can kidnap your sons from anywhere in the world, far away from any "battlefield," ship them thousands of miles away to an island-prison, abuse and torture them mercilessly, and when we either drive them to suicide or kill them, you have no right to any legal remedy or even any recourse to find out what happened.

As Horton writes, the claim that government officials enjoy a virtually impenetrable shield of immunity even in the commission of war crimes "has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations." Indeed, that is the common strain of virtually every act undertaken by the Obama DOJ with regard to our government's war crimes and other felonies, from torture to renditions to illegal eavesdropping.

World wide web not looking so fun now

2009-12-06T09:29:00.000-08:00

This new Iranian development is stunning:

The regime has been cracking down hard at home. And now, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows, it is extending that crackdown to Iranians abroad as well.

In recent months, Iran has been conducting a campaign of harassing and intimidating members of its diaspora world-wide -- not just prominent dissidents -- who criticize the regime, according to former Iranian lawmakers and former members of Iran's elite security force, the Revolutionary Guard, with knowledge of the program.

Part of the effort involves tracking the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube activity of Iranians around the world, and identifying them at opposition protests abroad, these people say.

Interviews with roughly 90 ordinary Iranians abroad -- college students, housewives, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople -- in New York, London, Dubai, Sweden, Los Angeles and other places indicate that people who criticize Iran's regime online or in public demonstrations are facing threats intended to silence them.

For example:

His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.

Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.

"When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke," said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used.

First of all, that's just scary. That is 1984 gone global.

It's also interesting, for two reasons. One is the way it actually works. It used to be that if a terrifying totalitarian regime wanted to reach outside its borders, it needed soldiers, spies, or double agents. Maybe satellites. The nice thing is that all of those things cost money--a fair amount of it--and good ones cost a lot of money.

Now, basically any regime with computers and a little know-how has a built-in web (no pun intended) of information and, it seems, even influence around the world. This has never happened on such a non-elite scale before.

Secondly, it's interesting in the context of the continuing process of reframing the idea of nations and territory that's been going on for the past couple of decades. Developments like multi-national corporations, the return of private military companies, and cyclical labor patterns that have people frequently moving between countries have done a lot to muddle the fairly fundamental (if never fully realized) notion of a one-to-one correspondence between state, territory, and nation (i.e. people, ethnic group, what have you).

Let's just say that this development does not make the situation any clearer. A few years ago it was in vogue to predict or announce the impending obsolescence of the nation-state. We were all going to be metropolitan now, or local, or global, or, well, something else.

That has not happened, and it doesn't seem likely. Rather, the nation-state is simply undergoing a process of repurposing and reformation. Where that will lead is hard to say in terms of the nation state; I'm confident that we'll see the sphere of global governance, mostly empty since the end of the Cold War (the U.S. all by itself does not count. It has influence over its allies. The Cold War presented an imperative and a set of incentives that came much closer to in some sense governing the whole world via arbitration by each side) begin to be filled in, whether by some other set of superpowers (unlikely, IMO) or by a true set of global institutions (also unlikely), or by something I haven't thought of (quite likely).

If and when that happens, I'm pretty sure this sort of behavior by any nation-state government will be unacceptable. Hopefully. Yeah.

Schwoa

2009-12-04T17:07:00.000-08:00

The Vatican released a 12-song playlist for its MySpace page (The Vatican has a MySpace page?! How was this not breaking news on its own?), and, well:

Among selections from Mozart, Muse and Dame Shirley Bassey is the slain rapper's [Tupac Shakur] song "Changes," which was released two years after his shooting death on a greatest hits album in 1998.

That's right. The Vatican has embraced Pac.

I don't have anything insightful to say about this, other than I LOVE IT.

The Vatican commented:

"The genres are very different from each other, but all these artists share the aim to reach the heart of good minded people," the Vatican wrote on its official MySpace Music page.

I also want to point out that the list includes Muse and Fleet Foxes as well. Amazing. Apparently Father Giulio Neroni's got the 411.

About that

2009-11-30T20:50:00.000-08:00

Regarding the most recent post:

I suspect that what we will see in the future is a church basing itself in the developing world, and adopting more African views on the subjugation of women, criminalization of homosexuality, and the evils of Western liberal capitalism. Europe will remain the enemy, Islam a useful ally and America's Republican Party Christianists a source of money and power as the Western flock shrinks to the rump that Benedict devoutly wishes for.

This is about the Catholic, not any Protestant, Church, but it could be interpreted as an interesting sort of reversal of the dynamic I was trying to describe in that post. I would say I need to think about this more, but I don't have anything like the time. Alas.

Family knows best?

2009-11-29T12:55:00.000-08:00

Sitting in Logan airport using Google's free holiday wi-fi (thanks, Google!), I came across the following:

With their reported $13 billion tax-exempt financial empire, the Mormons may be the wealthiest cult in America — and Scientology may be the big thing among the rich and powerful in Hollywood — but when it comes to political power neither of those sects holds a candle to the Family, the Christian extremist political group that operates the now infamous C Street house on Capitol Hill in Washington.

[...]

But what many people may find surprising is that the Family has branches around the world. In fact, yesterday, Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” reported on NPR’s “Fresh Air” that it was a Family member in the Ugandan parliament who introduced a bill that would increase the punishment for homosexuality from life imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence today, to death:

SHARLET: [The] new legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.

And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study and the export of a lot of American largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end.

[...]

[The] legislator that introduces the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of the Family. He appears to be a core member of the Family. He works, he organizes their Uganda National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which the Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda…

So who are the members of Congress who belong to the Family and tolerate, if not encourage, this sort of extremism overseas? According to Jeff Sharlet, while most cult members are Republicans, members of both parties are welcomed. “Jesus didn’t come to take sides,” the members are fond of saying. “He came to take over.”

Now check this:

The mainstream media avoids referring to the Family as a cult, but check out this description of the group’s belief system from Jeff Sharlet and decide for yourself:

They have a very unusual theology in the sense that they think that Christ had one message for an inner circle and then a kind of different message for a sort of slightly more outer circle. And then the rest of us, Christ told us little stories because, frankly, we couldn’t handle the truth. And the core members are those they think are getting the real deal.

He didn't come to take sides, he came to take over. It makes me shiver.

But what makes me shiver more than the Family/cult/power network stuff is the overarching dynamic. A lot of gay people in Uganda are going to die, or live in misery. A lot of their friends and family will, too. And they will go through this directly because of globalized Evangelical Christianity.

I was just reading about a much different, milder, nicer version of this in a book about the Full Gospel community in Trinidad. Protestantism plus colonialism in Trinidad, at least, has rendered the local and the native identical to the carnal and the primitive, while the nonlocal (North America in particular) is identified with the spiritual and pure. This gets played out in choices of music appropriate for worship services, but that's not the point here. In Trinidad, at least, sects are concerned with the "global church" (largely Pentecostalist and Evangelical) as a way of defining for themselves what is proper religious practice and what is appropriate for someone living a religious life.

I admit that I don't know much about Uganda, and I am very ready to be wrong. But as we know, a little information is a dangerous thing, and so armed with my one book about Trinidad I see a bit of a parallel here of a global (read: American) church having a strong influence on congregations far from the global center--peripheral nations like Trinidad and Uganda. And especially in the case of particular issues, like abortion and birth control, this flow of influence has been strengthened and backed by explicit U.S. policies.

That makes me shiver, too. In a much less titillating fashion.

What I'm doing with myself

2009-11-22T01:51:00.000-08:00

Today (yesterday) I had to write and send in a 6-page (double-spaced) statement about what my B.A. thesis will be. I was pretty happy with it and figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here. So without further ado:

I intend to examine Hamas and Hizballah from a perspective much different from that prevailing in political and journalistic discussions of these organizations. It is my view that the existing literature on political organizations does not account for the particular forms of power and violent tactics practiced by Hamas and Hizbollah. While these two are probably not the only organizations to employ such practices, my intention is to begin to build a framework for understanding their particular roles, capabilities, and structures as political organizations that could be applied more broadly to other cases.

I will show that Hamas and Hizballah are an unusual type of political organization, which I will term parallel or alternative government. Both Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories have been in the process of building a strong, democratic state for decades, but both have been hamstrung by a lack of agreement among their respective populations on questions that are fundamental to the statebuilding project. They have consequently been unable to build the robust institutions that would begin to constitute a state. In Lebanon, the question of a quota system in government institutions—whether one should exist, and whether the existing one is correct, just, and so on—is still contested; the current system has weakened the government to the point of paralysis, while the disagreement still existing over this structure has sapped the government’s authority and legitimacy. In the Palestinian Territories, the population is riven over the proper methods of “resistance” to Israel; the existing Palestinian institutions were created in negotiations with Israel and as such are inherently illegitimate to those Palestinians who reject negotiation and rather favor violent resistance. In both cases, the government structure represents a “side” of this fundamental question and so is inherently politicized, illegitimate to a significant segment of its population. Rather than serving as the location of policy, institutions themselves are policy. Finally, structural factors in the military, economic, and international political spheres have served to further weaken these regimes’ abilities to project power, deliver services, and command loyalty.

This weakness and the political divisions at its root have created a political space in both polities for a second, parallel government to spring up with the support of those factions which are in opposition to the “side” represented by the existing political structure. These parallel governments perform many functions of a governing institution: service delivery, security, national defense (as perceived by their supporters), and political representation. They are parallel rather than rival in that they do not seek simply to control the institutions of the existing regime, nor do they attempt to create a separate state; rather, they build their own institutions to further their preferred outcomes while remaining committed to a united Lebanon or a free Palestine. Rather than attempting to secure the reforms and policy shifts they want within a system that is too weak and dysfunctional to produce the desired outcomes, these constituencies have chosen simply to build the state they want.

Hamas’ and Hizballah’s use of violence has been one of the primary factors agitating the international discourse about them. I will examine the particular ways in which these groups deploy violence—when they use it, when they do not, against whom and employing what techniques—in order to show that their violent methods also distinguish them from most other political organizations. They are neither states, nor insurgents, nor guerrillas, nor decentralized terrorist networks; and they do not use violence in the same way as any of these. I will attempt to link their unique employment of violence to their status as parallel governments and to elucidate the relationship, if any, between their particular forms of violence and their particular forms of political power.

Both Hamas and Hizballah have used a variety of violent tactics, borrowing methods from a variety of forms of political organization. Hamas, in particular, has taken on statelike functions in terms of controlling violence. The group has done more to secure Gaza than the PA had ever accomplished: it integrated its police forces into the Gazan security forces (Crisis Group 2006: 9), secured the interior of Gaza against clan warfare for the first time, and made a credible attempt at controlling the inflow of weapons through the tunnels to Egypt (Crisis Group 8) as well as their display and sale within Gaza (Crisis Group 2003: 10). The Qassam Brigades were converted into an external security force and set to patrolling Gaza’s borders—a strong statement in the context of their longstanding domination by Israeli forces. Hamas also did its best to coordinate and control military resistance to Israel for the first time (Crisis Group 2003: 8), though this effort was not fully successful.

At the same time, Hamas has continued to use violence against Israel in ways that do not reflect the behavior of a state; rather than deploying an army, invading, or attacking Israel’s military capabilities, Hamas has continued to fire rockets into Israel, a tactic widely described as terrorist since the rockets largely impact civilian life. However, rather than mounting spectacular exhibitions of violence connected to high civilian deathcounts in connection with specific demands, Hamas has more often used its rockets as a reminder of its continued presence and resistance: the rockets are often aimed to avoid harming anyone, and do not have the sophisticated technology that would allow them to target specific Israeli buildings, persons, or resources. Hamas’s rocket fire is curiously ambivalent: it constitutes neither full-on war nor straightforward terrorism. Rather, it is a legitimacy-seeking exercise: Hamas is simultaneously able to demonstrate its commitment to the cause by being seen to be doing something and to declare its existence, defiance, and relevance to Israel and to the international community. Through rocket fire, Hamas carries out its mission of resistance and refuses to allow itself—and by extension Palestine—to be forgotten.

Hizballah, meanwhile, emerged from “a loose coalition” of Shi‘a groups who were radicalized by U.S. and Israeli interference in the Lebanese civil war (GlobalSecurity.orgb 2008), and originally most resembled a militia, drawing its soldiers from ordinary people in villages as needed. Its first major accomplishment was Israel’s ignominious withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and the group employed classic insurgency tactics in this struggle. Hizballah sought to secure the IDF’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon, including the Security Zone, and made its point with missiles, attacks, and suicide bombings. Their efforts lasted up through the 1990s, when the civil war officially ended (Morris 2001: 558), and have continued sporadically since. Suicide bombing was not a common tactic at the time, and it proved to be a crucial innovation on Hizbollah’s part in terms of making its name as well has having a clear impact on American and Israeli forces in Lebanon.

But Hizballah, too, has taken on statelike military functions. The Lebanese Army disintegrated more than once under internal and external pressures during the civil war, and Hizballah’s military wing was far more effective, disciplined, and cohesive. Its military no longer consists of The group has, essentially, taken on the task of national defense and border security against Israel, without regard for the policies of the official Lebanese government but with the approval of its constituency (primarily, but not exclusively, Shi’a in the south of Lebanon). Hizballah de facto rules several areas of Lebanon, including the northeast and, of course, the South, and one is more likely to find a Hizballah member or supporter than a government policeman in these areas.

These are a few of the variety of tactics Hamas and Hizballah have adopted as part of their repertoire of violence. While their individual practices or campaigns can be described using existing terms—insurgency, state-within-a-state, terrorism—the combination of them all within single, coherent organizations has so far gone unnamed in political science literature, just as the political function of these groups remains undescribed. What remains to be seen is whether there is a connection between the groups’ idiosyncratic uses of violence and their anomalous political status. How do Hamas and Hizballah view themselves as acting? What effect do these views have on Hamas’s and Hizballah’s parallel statebuilding projects, and on their countries’ statebuilding projects more generally?

Both Hamas and Hizballah not only practice violence but have constructed strong ideological links between their exercise of violence and their political identity. Hizballah has declared, “our military apparatus is not separate from our overall social fabric. Each of us is a fighting soldier” (Hizballah 1988: 1). Hamas’s mission is connected to violence at the most basic level: it exists for the purpose of violent resistance to Israel. In parallel with Hizballah, it argues that “It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront [sic] the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters” (Covenant: Article 15). Furthermore, both have asserted their independence from their supposed governments through maintaining their violent practices and capabilities against these regimes’ wishes. Alone of all the militias that sprang up in the civil war, Hizballah has refused the state’s injunction to disarm; it has also resisted political pressure to integrate its military wing into the Lebanese national army (Jamail 2006). Prior to its electoral victory in Gaza, Hamas maintained the operations of its military forces (Boudreaux 2007; Crisis Group 2008: 6) despite the orders of the Palestinian Authority and later took over government of Gaza through a violent coup.

These facts are suggestive of several links. The first, and simplest, is between the groups’ violent tactics and their political constituency: after all, their basic mission is violent resistance to Israeli dominance and to Western interference. Second, they seem to understand themselves and their operations—including nonviolent undertakings—in terms of war, as shown by their rhetoric. Even a worker in a Hizballah-run hospital is in some sense a soldier, just as a Hamas member who guards the tunnels through which necessary goods are smuggled from Egypt correctly understands himself to be committing an act of war against Israel. The role of religion and religious history in this understanding is important and bears further exploration, not only in terms of teachings regarding jihad but also because another aspect in which the groups are metaphorically fighting is for particular practices of Islamic life in their respective territories.

Third, violence and control of violence has been used by both groups in constructing their parallel governments, often directly in opposition to the regimes that ostensibly rule (or ruled) Gaza and Lebanon. One of the basic definitions of a state is a political entity that monopolizes violence within a bounded territory; by exercising and controlling violence, Hamas and Hizballah have concretely removed territory from the states in which they live and constructed separate zones of domination—yet they have managed to do so without seceding or attempting to partition the territory in question. Through a delicate balance of both internally and externally directed violence, service delivery, construction of parallel institutions, and participation in existing political institutions, Hamas and Hizballah have successfully built their parallel states.

Depressing realities

2009-11-22T01:28:00.000-08:00

So I'm in that delightful stage of one's fourth year of college where one attempts to decide "what to do" after graduation.

I decided at least a year ago that I don't want to go to grad school right away, but rather after two or three years. UChicago has burned me out pretty well, for one thing, but for another my degree is highly interdisciplinary and as a result I'm not even sure what departments I would want to apply to (though lately a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies seems more and more likely). More importantly, though, I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of making a living off of theorizing human beings without ever knowing them or doing any concrete work with them toward improving their circumstances. It's not right.

So I decided at around the same time that I want to work in probably an NGO for a while in a fairly concrete capacity--not desk work and not theory stuff. I don't need an organization that's promising transformational change, largely because I'm too cynical to believe in such promises--I'd rather just do some good work that maybe helps some people just a little in their actual lives for a while, without yammering about civil society development or investing in the change of tomorrow and so on.

The problem, right, is that it's very hard to find out what organizations of this sort exist because most of the ones with web presence are large and/or more think-tank or diplomacy oriented. This isn't a path I've ruled out, but it's not what I'm ideally looking for.

So last week I got an email from the International Studies listhost about government and NGO jobs which included a link to a website that serves as a hub for professionals and organizations in "international development, global health and humanitarian aid." I did a simple search for "Middle East" under "Companies & NGOs" and my god, it is discouraging.

It's discouraging for the following reason: probably 90% of the results I scrolled through that day (haven't had time to continue) were consultancies of one sort or another, usually concerned with economic development. I'm profoundly skeptical of such organizations: I don't think they necessarily do much good, and most often they serve to make consultants rich off the needs of poor people without having much other effect. This is precisely the antithesis of what I want to spend the next couple years doing.

I don't have any deep thoughts right now about that fact that aren't deeply obvious, in part because it's very late at night and I spent the evening at a Girl Talk show followed by watching 10 Things I Hate About You (incidentally, one of my favorite movies of all time) and drinking beer. But the basic fact of it is depressing to me, and I wish it weren't so.

Too good

2009-11-17T11:57:00.001-08:00

For once, Reuters was entirely correct in filing a story under "Oddly Enough": Women Disappointed by Gaddafi 'Party' is a pretty odd story.

Basically, it seems Qaddafi was in Rome on diplomatic business (whatever that means when you're Muammar Qaddafi) and put out an ad through some sort of agency saying the following:

"Seeking 500 attractive girls between 18 and 35 years old, at least 1.70 meters (5 foot, 7 inches) tall, well-dressed but not in mini-skirts or low cut dresses."

And then roughly 200 women actually showed up to what they thought was going to be some sort of VIP party but was actually a two-hour lecture on Islam and the role of women in Islam, topped off with an exhortation to convert and a free Qur'an!

This whole thing is hilarious to me on a number of levels. First of all, everything Qaddafi does is amazing. Secondly, while I personally cannot comprehend responding to any ad that is seeking women based on their appearance, I can well imagine that a woman who might do so a) might not know what she was getting into if it involved Qaddafi, and/or b) might have good reason to expect a fancy party at the other end. The image of all these gorgeous Italian women all done up and expecting a party having to sit through two hours of Qaddafi telling them that Jesus was not, in fact, crucified--it was a stunt double, apparently--is just incredible.

Finally, the fact that Qaddafi could be under the impression that all that's standing between Italian women and the light of Islam is a lecture from him is just beautiful. Of course, the poor dears have just never thought about it before! And who better to open their minds than Qaddafi--the leader of Libya since 1969, whose little Green Book is taught in schools, and who is clearly the greatest advocate for Islam since, um, whenever.

The cherry on top is that he wants to make sure his Italian converts are hot. Just raising the Ummah's average attractiveness one lecture at a time, eh, Qaddafi?

Qifa Nakbi makes many funnies

2009-11-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

The Qnion is totally my new favorite thing. It's like the biggest inside joke ever (in that people who don't follow the Middle East wouldn't find most of it funny, but if you do it's brilliant).

From a recent post from Alex at Syria Comment:

“The Syrians knew that the Israelis were following their official in the U.K,” says retired Russian intelligence specialist Vladimir Balakhoff. “So they loaded all of these false photographs of nuclear reactors, diagrams, and documents in North Korean onto his computer. And the Israelis fell for it.”

“Why do you think that no one in Israel made a big deal out of the bombing?” asks Egyptian political affairs expert Gamal Galagala. “Once they realized that they’d been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they tried to sweep it under the carpet, but that’s hard to do when the milk’s already been spilled. If you catch my drift.”

High-level Syrian sources are now confirming that the laptop decoy was intended to veil a much more sophisticated security project, one with the potential to change the strategic balance of power in the region.

This project, known as the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), is headquartered in another remote town, Hassake, not far from the site of the fake nuclear power plant. It boasts three desktop computers – two IBM compatibles with 486 processors and an iMac G3 – and a 14.4 kbit/s dial-up modem.

The project’s director, Dr. Samir Mahdoum, suggested that Syria could use these advanced machines to spy on Israel, thereby denying their arch-enemy the element of surprise. “Using Google Maps Satellite View, we see all of Israel,” said Dr. Mahdoum, stroking an albino hamster. “Their troop movements, their weapons, everything!”

Regional specificity be damned, it was the albino hamster that really did me in.

Thank goodness for footnotes

2009-11-03T00:57:00.000-08:00

"Civil right is personal freedom; political right is a right over others as well as oneself." --Alfred Fouillée, cited in Robert Michels' "Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy."

Damn, apparently I need to read some Fouillée. This remark opens a lot of doors, potentially, particularly when you consider the struggles over "social issues" that tend to dominate contemporary American politics.

Mixology

2009-10-21T03:02:00.000-07:00

This would be a truly delightful piece on the current renaissance of cocktail culture if it didn't keep straying into smug misogyny. Perhaps the simplest way of explaining it is this:

The new cocktail lounges are all about preserving a comfortable atmosphere for drinks and conversation. (Milk & Honey in New York, one of the best spots in America for the classic cocktail drinker, has a famous set of rules, including the wonderful instruction to its female patrons, "If a man you don't know speaks to you, please lift your chin slightly and ignore him."...)

I don't need to be told how to handle strange men, thank you. Nor do I appreciate the extremely gendered way Messenger looks at different kinds of liquor and drinks (women splashing pink liquor [Cosmos] on their dates while men are "getting into" rye, since god knows women a) only drink when with men and b) can't handle their liquor). I happen to love very complex, fragrant, but strong cocktails that would probably defy strict gender assignment best (though not because of gender politics), but after that it's man-liquor all the way--whiskey and gin. We deal with enough gender difficulties in life as it is; is it so much to ask that I, as a lover of liquor and of cocktails, be allowed to enjoy the drinks I like without being perceived as manly or out of my depth? And why is it that men are apparently capable of enjoying Mai Tais while women couldn't possibly be interested in a Sidecar?

It's not frequent that the article actually says what it means in this regard, though I'd estimate it happened at least five times (in two pages). But something about the way it's written makes it very clear that this is one for the boys, as it were.

Okay, so the world kind of really is flat

2009-10-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

The Taliban have a YouTube channel, called Istiqlal Media (istiqlal means "movement," in the sense of a political movement).

Setting aside the obvious ironies of the Taliban using technology invented in the US--which currently supports all manner of content they oppose--this is interesting. It's interesting in a bajillion ways: how does this dovetail with fundamentalist attitudes? What videos will YouTube take down vs. allow to stay up? How much will it help them?

Also, it's a confirmation of what David Rohde has been reporting about the Taliban's ambitions outside of Afghanistan:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

It's hard to imagine another motivation for the Taliban's starting a YouTube channel--it's not as though most Afghans have access to broadband.

YouTube so far seems to have taken down most of the videos but left the account up. It'll be interesting to see this ideological cyberbattle (between the YouTube terms of service and, well, the Taliban) play out.

Well, looka there

2009-10-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

Ehud Olmert, former PM of Israel, came to give a lecture at the Harris School of Public Policy at my university a few days ago. I passed the protesters outside, but I didn't realize there were disruptions inside the lecture hall as well:

Detailed coverage from Electronic Intifada here.

I was really surprised by this, frankly, as well as by the size of the anti-Olmert protest. UChicago, at least in its more visible aspects, tends to be a pretty politically conservative institution and very pro-Israel. On the other hand, of course Mearsheimer does teach here, and our Center for Middle East Studies is fantastic academically and politically much more varied--if anything it probably would lean toward the Palestinian end of things.

The student body, particularly the undergraduates, tends to be much more liberal than the school's reputation, but for the most part the pro-Israel students tend to be much louder and more visible than the other side. Partly it has to do with the very large contingent of fairly conservative Jews here: while by no means are all Jews pro-Israel, I've met many more people here who have spent extended time in Israel or have direct family connections to it than I ever have before in my life (though I'd say the proportion of Jews in the University population is about the same as the area I grew up in).

Partly, it seems from the EI coverage that the protest was augmented by area activists and students from other universities, but nevertheless it was an unusual and, frankly, welcome display of the other side of the debate. It gets tiring sometimes only seeing one side represented.

According to EI, this is the latest in a series of protests across the US, which is an interesting data point in terms of how Americans view Israel's actions of the last few years. It confirms the prevailing notion that Americans in general have lost some patience and goodwill toward Israel, something that has been generally felt among people I've talked to but usually unconfirmed by any real data. (Not that this is the equivalent of a major study with, you know, statistics, but it's still a data point.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the level of disruption of Olmert's actual speech. I'm sure I would have been massively uncomfortable had I been there, but that's sort of the point, isn't it? I don't know. As always with this issue, I remain divided and able to see both sides of it.

Shoddy work

2009-10-16T17:36:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein has a great takedown of Stephen Levitt's new book.

It's terrifically shoddy statistical work. You'd get dinged for this in a college class. But it's in a book written by a celebrated economist and a leading journalist. Moreover, the topic isn't whether people prefer chocolate or vanilla, but whether people should drive drunk. It is shoddy statistical work, in other words, that allows people to conclude that respected authorities believe it is safer for them to drive home drunk than walk home drunk. It's shoddy statistical work that could literally kill somebody. That makes it more than bad statistics. It makes it irresponsible.

But hey, it makes for a fun and unexpected opener.

Levitt teaches at my school and I can't say as I've ever heard anything good about him. His reputation is that he's full of himself, a bit of a jackass, and--much, much worse--a bad teacher. You'd be hard-pressed to find a big-name prof at this school, especially in econ, who isn't a bit full of himself and a bit of a jackass, but that's what we expect from big-name profs here. It's all part of the schtick. It works for them because they're legitimately great scholars and effective, enjoyable teachers. Copping the attitude and not delivering the pedagogy is really just not okay.

It's pretty typical economist fare to go for the cheap thrill or the controversy rather than the staid-but-valuable contribution to the field, and I'm not saying Levitt is obliged to aim for a Nobel rather than NYT-blog fame--but your cool stories have to at least make sense if it's going to be a good kind of pop culture fame. Ezra's take was satisfying to read as a longtime anti-fan of Levitt; God knows every time I've ever taken the time to read his blog entries I've finished them angry, sardonic, and unimpressed.

Gulliver travels

2009-10-16T02:27:00.000-07:00

Here is a letter from an Andrew Sullivan reader.

Critics of non-intervention tend to accuse their opponents of cynicism, cruelty, and brutality, as did your most recent correspondent in his caricature of John Derbyshire. But foreign policy realism is essentially grounded in three deeply conservative concepts: first, we do not really know what makes societies successful, second, we do not know how to make these things happen, and, third, as a result we prefer some kind of stability as opposed to chaos; because conservatives will always prefer the orderly known to the disorderly unknown.

The invasion of Iraq was a profoundly anti-conservative project, since the purpose of the invasion -- aside from disarming Iraq from weapons it did not have -- was a revolutionary project meant to rebuild a nation from scratch. At the time, supporters of the effort pointed to the examples of Germany and Japan after World War Two, ignoring the fact that both nations had evolved into fairly cohesive and democratic market economies well before we showed up. Over time it has been shown that the neoconservative perspective -- which is really a revolutionary perspective -- has failed.

Now the argument is being applied to Afghanistan.

We hold elections, we chase guerillas, we destroy opium crops: we expect the Afghanis to calm down and be nice little democrats. No, that isn't going to work, it never works. The only thing we accomplish by invading other countries is provide an easy target to natives who resent our presence, because as any good conservative knows the easiest way to get someone to hate you is to try to force someone to do something they are not ready to do.

At this point the counter-argument is reduced to a querulous "What do you expect then? That we do nothing?" Well, there is one alternative. In historic times, when states fail, they breed chaos which spills over into other states and causes problems. At that point, the more stable state simply takes over the failed state, either as a protectorate, a colony, or via annexation. (I would point to numerous historical examples but that would offend many nationalists.) We could therefore simply take over any number of Arab or Muslim or otherwise failed states, because it is clearly in our national interest to do so, however, to do so, we would have to abide by strict rules of occupation, and not attempt to force a people to be what they are not yet, and not building settlements on their land, and so on. And our mission should be simply for keeping the peace, nothing more, and nothing less, and reducing the exposure of our people to violence.

The problem is that the United States nor any other country in the developed world is prepared to such a project. Our manpower resources are stretched thin as it is -- don't ask me where we're going to get the troops for Afghanistan -- our financial resources are even thinner, the American people have no interest in national sacrifice in terms of a military draft, increased taxes, rationing, or any of the other associations of a broad national effort, and therefore we have to recognize that the project of colonization or quasi-colonization is simply not going to happen.

However, if that's the case, there's really no more reason for us to be in either Afghanistan OR Iraq, because, again, in terms of history, these things work themselves out on their own scale. The best we can do is support dialog, communication, trade, and other benign forms of interaction. Anything more will simply kill people -- theirs and ours -- and will advance the evolution of these societies not one iota.

I agree with this completely except for one and a half things. First, the half; while I am mostly sure that this reader is using the colonization option as the sort of theoretically possible but realistically unacceptable option I would consider it, it's not a hundred percent clear from his tone or phrasing. So let me say that I would have presented the same alternative, but mostly as a means of showing what a limited set of options we have within the realm of acceptable behavior.

The complete thing is that I am so bloody sick of the notion of societies' "advancing" or evolving in a teleological sense that presupposes a goal that the last sentence of the letter comes awfully close to making me want to throw the whole, otherwise well-put, thing in the bin.

I'm not sure why I seem to have adopted a British lexicon in the previous paragraph--probably because I couldn't think of a more American way of avoiding much worse profanity--but that's all I have to say about that.

Holy what the mother of bleeping what alert

2009-10-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

Via TPM:

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

[...] Bardwell told the Daily Star of Hammond that he was not a racist.

"I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children."

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."

Rumblings from Jordan

2009-10-15T02:39:00.000-07:00

Just a snippet from this Marc Lynch column on Jordanian frustrations with the U.S. and Israel. Since my thesis will be at least half on Hamas and I've been interested in the group for about a year now, this was the bit that caught my eye:

There was also little optimism about a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation (and this was before the public exchange between Abbas and Meshaal which Daniel Levy wrote about for me this morning). Nobody thought that the profound gap in interests between the two parties could be bridged, particularly after the devastating impact of the PA's deferral of the Goldstone report on Abbas's popularity. Beyond that, with no meaningful peace talks in sight there was little reason for either side to make the painful concessions necessary -- whether on elections, on security sector reform, or on the existential issues of identity and commitment to negotiations.

Indeed, what I heard from a number of the more hawkish Muslim Brotherhood leaders suggests that at least some in Hamas see a greater interest in staying out. They generally admitted that Hamas faced tough conditions, with the blockade of Gaza and the escalating PA repression of its cadres in the West Bank. But that was secondary. The PA, by their argument, is in a death spiral. Talks with Netanyahu will inevitably fail, at which point Abu Mazen and the PA will no longer be able to keep up pretences. Signing on to such a PA would only compromise their own legitimacy and viability, alienating the vast mainstream of the Palestinian people without any commensurate benefits. Rather than be associated with the impending failure, they suggested, better to stay outside and wait for the fruits of that failure to fall into their lap.

I'm too tired right now to go into why exactly this is important information from my perspective--it's 5 am, I've been doing Arabic reading comprehension and a reading response on Weber's theories of charismatic authority vs. bureaucracy and discipline for four hours, and I chaired a 1.5 hour meeting today--but someday I hope all shall become clear.

Regardless, for most people this is probably the important takeaway:

Jordanian officials and the public alike are deeply, profoundly worried about the course of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Worried whispering about (or eager anticipation of) the outbreak of a new Intifada was everywhere. Confidence in Obama's ability to deliver, especially with regard to Israel, has collapsed. But most still hope that it's not too late for Obama to reverse course. His words at the UN General Assembly rallied their spirits briefly. But it won't last absent clear progress towards resuming the talks based on a clear, mutually acceptable framework for negotiations. If that doesn't happen by the end of the year, then we could be staring at the abyss.

Don't say I never did anything for you.

Gaza is cracking open

2009-10-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday, Hamas and a group of Al-Qaeda loyalists clashed violently in Gaza.

What I find most interesting about this is the following: that both sides were from the same clan. This means that within one notable family we had essentially a splinter group of Salafi Al Qaeda supporters, despite the obvious benefits of sticking with Hamas when one lives in Gaza. Why is this? True Salafi religious fervor? (To be honest, I doubt it.) Perhaps the notion that Al Qaeda could get more done against the Israelis? A power struggle within the family? It couldn't have been a simple attempt to overthrow Hamas--or if it was, it was one of the stupidest things I think I've ever heard.

Hamas has managed more than any other recent governing authority in Gaza to break down clan power as well as dominate and control the other violent organizations present in Gaza. Clearly, they won this one, so nothing has changed too much--but why did this happen in the first place? What did "the sheikh" think he had to gain by declaring loyalty to Al Qaeda?

This Daniel Levy piece from 2007 has a lot to say on the subject. A sample:

There is a battle, both ideological and physical, taking place within the world of political Islam. Hamas have been targetted and criticized by Al-Qaeda. Most notably AQ number two, Ayman al-Zawahri, went after Hamas after it agreed to participate in Palestinian parliamentary elections and again after the Unity Government deal with Fatah. On both occassions Hamas were rejected as apostates and their actions as kufr - an abomination to Islam, they had sold out to the 'Zionists and the Great Satan'. All this does not automatically make Hamas a partner, but it certainly begs the question and demands a serious exploration of the alternatives. AQ is a franchise and any Gazan mutation if it gains a foothold, will threaten Palestinian and Israeli society alike.

He was commenting on the excellent piece "Jihadist Groups Fill a Palestinian Power Vacuum", which suggests that Hamas's control over Gaza has been weakening for some time. What is so ironic about the whole thing is that the deteriorating situation in Gaza is a result of the unrelenting embargo. The embargo was intended to weaken Hamas, but weakening Hamas is not actually, and never was, the most important goal. Without Hamas, no one rules Gaza, and no one can stop these groups. And yet even last year the American administration failed to understand this:

Bush administration officials say they are increasingly concerned that Hamas and even more radical groups may be hijacking the Palestinian movement. [...]

Mr. Taha’s fears are remarkable because of who he is: not a secular campaigner or a Fatah apparatchik, but a senior member of Hamas. In the violent underground of the militias, men like him have become unlikely moderates, calling for calm and seeking to build bonds with the other militias and the government.

Except that their status as moderates is neither unlikely nor surprising: it is obvious and to be expected. They have always had an interest in governing--and, of course, in maintaining their power--and so equilibrium, calm, and a controlled monopoly of violence has always been in their interest. Why this is so impossible for the West to understand is beyond me at times.

So it seems that the sheikh threw his lot in with the radical trend. Unfortunately for him, he misjudged the situation; Hamas still controls Gaza enough to take out someone like him, particularly when he makes rash statements and particularly when he is a member of a Hamas-loyal family, to which he was essentially a traitor.

A last note: the comments on the Ynet article are unpleasant. Should you click through, you've been warned.

Well said, sir

2009-10-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

"America cares about the fact that you can get all the health care you need as long as you don't need any."
--Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL)

If this isn't the healthcare reform soundbite the Dems have been looking for, I don't know what is.

Now someone get that man a white shirt and a better tie.

Support the troops

2009-10-11T22:39:00.000-07:00

H/t Digby we have this travesty:

A California company wants to convert an empty facility formerly used as nursing home into a trauma assistance center for as many as 88 female veterans, including those who have been sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers.

But some Taylor residents say they don't want the facility in their town.

"It would put veterans in a situation where they are going to a town that doesn't want them," said Cherri Wolbrueck, co-owner of a Taylor bookstore. She talked about her opposition after attending a zoning board meeting where representatives of the company — Center Point Inc., based in San Rafael, Calif. — spoke.

Wolbrueck lives across the street from the proposed facility where veterans would live. She said she fears that veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder might attack residents in the Buttermilk Hill neighborhood.

"They can have an episode where a flashback transports them back into a combat situation, and they can perceive anyone as a threat: an elderly person taking a walk around the neighborhood, or a child on a bike," she said.

Seriously? Seriously? I have never heard of PTSD resulting in violence. If such a phenomenon has been documented, I would love to hear about it.

Colbert: 1 Beck: 0

2009-10-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

Amazing.

(Blogger didn't like the embed code, I don't know why. Alas.)

Going in circles

2009-10-07T15:51:00.001-07:00

Ta-Nehisi keeps the Willingham story alive. If you missed it, here is the New Yorker story that started all of this. In essence, a man was executed for a crime he almost certainly did not commit--as certain as science can make it.

Ta-Nehisi writes:

Texas justice is essentially sorcery, and there will be people who say that we can perfect it, that we can close the loop-holes. They're wrong. The problem isn't with loopholes--it's with us. We are fallible. Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that--it undergirds their entire philosophy. They don't think government can perfect much of anything. What makes them think we can perfect murder? I'd have a lot more respect if they just came out and said, "Yeah, it isn't perfect, but it's a price we should be willing to pay."

At first blush, I didn't have anything to say about this other than "Amen." But then, of course, I read the comments, and we all know what happens when we read comments.

The first:

Oddly enough I have been thinking about just this lately, but I have seen it from the exactly opposite perspective: Conservatives appear to believe that humans are, in fact, perfectable, but too often choose not to be perfected -- that if only people would chose better, if only we force better choices on the people who do not choose by our lights, humanity could be perfected.

Whereas liberals appear to have twigged that, no, actually, humans are walking piles of contradictions and misunderstandings, fallible at each and every moment. So let's create a system that guards against that, and allows us the room to pick ourselves up and make better choices, if it turns out that we've made bad ones.

This sort of thing drives me absolutely batty. I have seen arguments structured exactly like this from both sides and it's bullshit every time. It's bullshit for one really simple reason: Conservatism and Liberalism/Progressivism are just different takes on the exact same philosophy. They both come out of the broader liberal political tradition (I'm sorry, that's what it's called in academic circles. Reagan, epistemologically speaking, comes out of a liberal tradition no matter how right-wing he is, because he's descended from Adam Smith and Rousseau. Deal with it.) So when one side or the other sets out to prove how Conservatives have this particular take on the human condition and Liberals have another and this is why one is so much more reasonable or realistic than the other, to continue that same comment:

All of which makes the angry conservative make much more sense to me -- if you believe that human falliblity can be stamped out but people are choosing not to, you probably have a lot less patience for it, not to mention fury when other people's fuck-ups mess up your own Glory-bound life.

And yes, it is very frightening that people of this mindset make life and death decisions. Because they often don't understand human reality.

It just makes me crazy. You could just as easily say that "forc[ing] better choices on the people who do not choose by our lights" is what Liberal government programs do, and "a system that guards against that, and allows us the room to pick ourselves up and make better choices, if it turns out that we've made bad ones" is exactly what conservatives want in a free market. This kind of quasi-theoretical assignment of one thing to this camp and another to that is almost always just an exercise in proving why your team is better, but in what sounds like philosophical terms. If we want to argue policy, I say let's get into it. That's an actual discussion about actual differences (in some arenas, anyway). But this kind of "well my team has THIS take on perfectability which is SO much more realistic than your team's" thing goes nowhere.

A near-perfect example from later in the comments:

The line that chilled me was when Fogg said, "Science does not matter." He stands by his gut, what he calls "living in the real world."

I can't help but connect his thinking to the anti-science attitude of the religious right. In an effort to defend creationism, they've made it okay--even heroic--to spurn fact, testing, and reason.

The "science doesn't matter" attitude is not limited to the religious right or to creationists (as we know them today). It reminds me mightily of some of the proto-fascist writings of Carl Schmitt and some of the ideology in existence under Mussolini.

I know I sound like a winger right now, blathering about fascists and Italian dictators, but honestly fascists aren't the point--I'm not out to make anybody in this situation the political pariah that wingers are usually invoking when they say "fascist." What I care about is that there is a preexisting tradition in liberal politics (again, I'm referring to the intellectual tradition, not a political coalition) of privileging emotion, gut, and "my experience" over science or formalized knowledge. It gets down to different criteria for what's real or makes something real, and how one knows something or does not know it.

If you read the original New Yorker article, these fire experts talk about fire like a spirit that talks to them. There is no scientific way to discuss fire like that--they're operating out of a totally different framework. Now on the one hand, we could sit back and say, well, it's pro-death-penalty Southerners (easy code among many for right-wingers--Lord knows I'd be surprised if these guys voted Obama) now, and it was fascists last time--sounds like a right-wing problem! Lefties, pat yourselves on the back.

But that, too, would be bullshit. Because how many times has the right wing criticized the left for overprivileging individual experience and worldview? What is moral relativism--with which I generally agree, for the record--if not the assertion that at least some important aspects of our reality are created by emotion, experience, and culture, and not by science or natural law?

The political coalitions we know today as Liberal and Conservative are not on a spectrum from one extreme to another. They're one iteration of many possible Venn diagrams, or cluster pairs, or arrangements around a circle--whatever image you prefer--that use all the same ingredients. Every failing of the right's can be found to be a virtue of the left's, and vice versa.

Which is why I hate it when people get into this thing about who understands human nature better. We all pretty much understand human nature the same. It's what we think that understanding means later that matters, and unless we're talking practical applications I don't want to hear about which party is better. They're the same. They're fraternal twins: all the same DNA, slightly different appearances. Use the same DNA a couple other times and you'll get other, slightly different appearances. On a genetic level, those differences are insignificant. On a practical level, it's how we tell the twins apart.

And that's all I really care about. Unless one of these two parties is currently proposing to abolish the death penalty, what good could it possibly do to debate which coalition better understands human nature or whose fault the Willingham travesty is? Neither party is doing anything about it; it's both of their fault, then. There's work to do, so let's quit yammering about Conservative vs. Liberal understandings of human nature and start trying to end executions of the innocent. People who want to sit there and yammer about the above are guilty of what gjeffries describes:

A man was put to death by us, as a society, under nothing more than character conjecture and those responsible for doing so merely shrug their shoulders and justify their actions? That's what affects me. It's not about the bias or ignorance; it's about the lack of reflection, lack of recognition of a higher purpose. It's not about them, it's about us. We can't let this happen.

If we were to reflect on it properly, we might come to a more productive conclusion about what's happening here:

mixedupfiles

I'd have a lot more respect if they just came out and said, "Yeah, it isn't perfect, but it's a price we should be willing to pay.

I think the subtext of so much of the behavior of the people responsible for Willingham's execution, at least as depicted in the New Yorker article, was a more chilling version of this. Killing him, whether or not he was guilty of the crime with which he was charged, WAS a price they were willing to pay. To them, Cameron Willingham was nothing but trash. Even if he wasn't guilty of murdering his three children in cold blood, he was guilty of being poor and distasteful to respectable white Texan society. Their world was better off without him cluttering it up, so why bother taking the necessary pains to provide him with justice under the law?

Doctor Jay

...we can't expect the people that perpetrated this to recant. They did what they did in good faith, believing that they were the instruments of justice, acting on behalf of the best interests of the community. And they made a terrible mistake. We do need to fix things, and get them out of the loop.

For starters, let's hope this goes somewhere.

Magical realism

2009-10-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

“There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

--U.S. interrogator to Fouad al-Rabiah at Guantanamo Bay. H/t Andrew Sullivan.

BAMF

2009-09-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Muammar Qaddafi is such a BAMF.

It's incontrovertible.

Here there be magical thinking

2009-09-28T03:43:00.000-07:00

Through a bunch of web-hopping (I think from The American Scene to Postmodern Conservative to Front Porch Republic to De Rogno Christi), I've spent the last hour reading a bunch of very abstracted conservative thought with a lot of roots in critical theory as well as theology and probably a bunch of stuff I wouldn't recognize, coming as I do from a completely different direction. I wouldn't say I agree with all or probably even half of what I've read, but I definitely have found it an interesting hour. Anyway, I wanted to reproduce this from Caleb Stegall at De Rogno Christi:

Anglo-catholics like Lewis, Tolkein, Chesterton, Eliot, etc., all understood the Church as a crypt in which the essential and primary blood and soil paganism of Europe was embalmed and allowed to stare up at us out of the waters. Think Tolkien’s ghostly undead kings of the past coming back to help the heroes/true church at its time of need. I don’t know exactly what Tolkien meant by that, but they are a cursed and unfriendly lot. This isn’t really redemption but a lingering paganism that speaks to this not entirely appropriate collaboration and amalgamation between Christianity and paganism in the west, which Protestantism/enlightenment/modernity has tried to efface and now has completely forgotten. This forgetting has caused all kinds of problems which was the most basic point of Tolkein’s books. The foremost problem is that Christianity as a depaganized political religion is Liberalism, radicalized and out of whack with reality in which one must at times do evil and even commit mortal sins for temporal goods that are the charge of those with political power. And then seek absolution in the magical appeasement of the gods. The medieval church allows, or found a way to admit and cope with this. It is a deal with paganism. Take it away and you get a devolution from Protestantism into liberalism. You get the new American personal faith Christianity (evangelicalism) with the magical thinking of overbought homes on ARMS and credit cards and daycare and building democracy in Iraq and all the other delusional magical thinking of late-modernity in the capitalist-state. And you get a whole new class of materialist therapeutic witchdoctors rising up to give the newest incantations: ‘your best life now!’ ‘your purpose driven life!’ or whatever.

So now we see American Christianity “emerging” more and more into universalism. It is in the water. All roads lead to ruin as Eliot knew. And for those who see this, the desire for “tradition” or whatever you call that which is largely lost and haunting us is a partly sick desire to unearth the dead.

We are at a dangerous crossroads. Messing with the dead is dangerous stuff. But it must be done. But like Tolkein understood, it can only be done by the “true King,” by the church, and even this is not without debilitating and compromises. This is connected to what I have been arguing about being able, at least occasionally, to admit that the narratives of tradition and church history are to an extent myths that legitimize what I would call the “mojo” … or the magic … the authority of the church. The simple yet profound truth that at the very bottom, we have very little to go on other than “because the church says so.” So this is in part what I mean by repaganizing … that our churchmen need a hint of witchdoctor in them, or if you prefer, a touch of Gandalf or Merlin. They have “powers” as my kids would say. This is completely flattened out in a rationalistic modernizing deracinated disenchanted liberalizing protestant culture. And the inchoate need for magic and appeasement of the gods gets shifted in very unhealthy materialist directions which can be exploited by those who understand the psychology.

(I know that was long. But come on, it was interesting.) This is fascinating stuff for me for a few reasons. First let me say that I don't really agree with the idea that a depaganized or sanitized church is the same thing as liberalism, largely because I don't agree with what he seems to think about liberalism. Possibly this is because he is using the word in a different sense than any I can think of, and if I were to ask him what he meant maybe that section would become clearer to me in the form of something I with which could agree to disagree.

That said, I find it interesting because I think the general point that a sort of paganism or a magical thinking is endemic to being human is completely true. We all like fairy tales, we are all superstitious to some degree, we all have our rituals and our sense, however vestigial, of some kind of cosmic justice ("What did I do to deserve this?"). For me, as an atheist, this has always been completely decoupled from any sort of intermingling with religion; and as a rationalist with a lot of economic privilege I've had what is probably the luxury of avoiding magical thinking in the sense of lottery tickets, a purpose-driven life, et. al. But it's obvious to me that we have witch doctors in our society, whether they are televangelists, Alan Greenspan, therapists or dieticians. Last year I wrote this:

Current discussions of economics and the economy contain a bizarre contradiction: On the one hand, the Free Market Rulz OK because the economy is too complex, diverse, and fast-moving to be comprehended sufficiently by any planner or regulator. It is, to a certain degree, unknowable and all-powerful, if benevolent. This idea is roughly analogous to ABVC's description of a puppeteer with no will--"the laws of cause and effect. You have a will, but it is not free, it is the effect of lots of causes." [...]

On the other hand, we flatter ourselves that with enough math, studies, models, and theorizations we can understand how these things work.... This effort is roughly analogous to the notion of "seeing the strings", or trying to.

We understand the economy as both a reflection and the driver of our entire world.... This is a bizarre combination of The Economy's being by and of us while simultaneously being completely alien to us. We do things to it, we figure it out and profit off it, we game it, we live in it, but occasionally it completely swamps us. It's a force of nature--it is to us as the sea is to fishermen, or the Euphrates was to Mesopotamian farmers (floods are a central mythic trope in ancient Mesopotamian religion).

Furthermore, even when I come out of my academic funk enough to take the crisis at face value, the degree to which nobody has any idea what is going on or what is to be done about it, and the degree to which any one opinion can be convincingly argued against, certainly suggests that while the phenomena at hand are real, our understanding of them is merely a comforting fiction.

[...] But we persist in believing, very firmly, that policymaking and many other arguably more quantitative fields are rational processes of improvement, whose wildly unpredictable results are owed more to the complexity and difficulty of the problems or questions these disciplines engage than they are to the complete disconnect between what we think we are doing and what is actually going on.

This, of course, is the joke. We think we see the strings, but they are far too long for us to comprehend them as such.... The punchline is that we don't actually understand the economic forces around us, nor do we understand our interactions with them. It's all fooled by randomness with a healthy dose of storytelling and myth. A form of paganism, if you like--believing that human actions affect natural phenomena. (Thank god we burned a Yule log this year, or the sun might not have come up in January either.)

I stand by that. And in my own rationalist, atheistic life, I have still harbored a fascination with the pagan or the mythic. For as long as I can remember I was fascinated by mythological traditions--Norse, Irish, and Anglo particularly--and I've read a few theoretical unpackings of fairy stories (notably Diane Purkiss's At The Bottom of the Garden) that have left me convinced that fairies are the things we fill in in liminal spaces: life changes (from childhood to adulthood, maidenhood to motherhood, prince to king, maturity to old age) and events (birth, death, loss of virginity, quest fulfillment); literally liminal spaces and moments like threshholds, twilights, and borders; unknown areas like forests, the bottoms of ponds, mountain fastnesses.

We still have fascinations with these liminalities, and we still have ceremonies surrounding them. Boomer fascinations with pre-birth rituals like reading baby books and carrying eggs around and such are basically magical rituals intended to make birth and becoming parents easier, to ensure it goes well. We still have sweet sixteens and graduation parties and the insane coming of age ritual known as applying to college (which is a process chock-full of magical thinking). The old magical rituals are basically the same as our current endeavors because they both represent attempts to colonize and control these spaces. Leaving offerings for fairies before, during, or after birth is not that different from, say, insisting that your boyfriend light candles and strew the bed with rose petals when you plan to lose your virginity. Neither will have much effect on how this completely scary and unknowable (till it happens) event goes off, but hey, at least we tried, right? There may not be fairies in the forest these days, but we still make movies about giant octopi preserved in glaciers since the Cretaceous (or whenever) at the bottom of the ocean. Even the notion of extraterrestrial beings who sweep you up in their ships and do weird things to you maps almost perfectly onto the fairy kingdom under the hill.

And of course this kind of pagan ritualism has its analogues in religion. What else is a Confirmation or a Bat Mitzvah? Christmas is famously full of old English pagan rituals.

My point is that even without a personal connection to what one might call a paganized church, and even without what I would call a spiritual identity, I get what he's saying (for the most part) and I find the discussion interesting from the point of view of my own interest in paganism, mythology, and their persistence in a supposedly rationalist contemporary world.

And it's become clear to me that I really need to read more T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis.

Hamas does not understand PR

2009-09-27T03:38:00.000-07:00

Or at least, not outside of Gaza. MotherJones has a photo essay about a summer camp for Palestinian youth that Hamas has been running. The blurb reads:

A kinder, more moderate Hamas? That's the image Gaza's ruling militant group is hoping to sell, in any case. Having scaled back the rocket attacks on Southern Israel that prompted Israel to strike back last December and invade Gaza in a conflict that lasted three weeks, Hamas has refocused on public relations. "Armed resistance is still important and legitimate," Hamas leader Ayman Taha told the New York Times in July. "But we have a new emphasis on cultural resistance."

The new emphasis includes state support for films, television, art shows, and poetic works that portray Gaza residents struggling under Israeli policies. It also includes countless government-run summer camps....

Cool, right? But.

But what, you ask? Well, these pictures show lots of young, skinny, Palestinian boys lying in the dirt pretending to shoot wooden guns, doing sit-ups and other training-looking exercises, and perhaps worst of all, doing the iconic terrorist monkey bars:

Let's revisit that blurb now, shall we?

The new emphasis includes state support for films, television, art shows, and poetic works that portray Gaza residents struggling under Israeli policies. It also includes countless government-run summer camps, which Israel has criticized as ideological training grounds where kids learn how to use weapons.

Now, Israel would say that even if they were fingerpainting and planting trees all day, but that doesn't change the fact that when you look at these pictures you have to concede that Israel might have a point here.

Look, I'm not about to start going all Chicken Little about these camps. I don't think they are likely to do much one way or the other in terms of turning the next generation of Palestinian men into potential terrorists when you consider the larger context of being from Gaza and having had Israel and the U.S. & Co. basically directly ruin your entire life--and on top of that having nothing to do and no outlets. Whether or not a given young man in this situation went to a kind of iffy summer camp run by Hamas when he was twelve doesn't seem likely to be that big a deal when you consider that.

But if Hamas is trying to moderate its image (which impression, to be fair, I got from the MoJo blurb and not from anywhere else), this is probably not the best way to do it. At least not on the Internet.

Exactly

2009-09-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

I'm just lifting this post from David Kurtz at TPM in its entirety:

Culture of Dependency

Tea partiers complain that the DC subway system wasn't prepared for last weekend's rally and that some protesters were forced to rely on free market solutions (i.e., taxis) to get to the demonstration.

About What You Would Expect Update: The congressman complaining about the DC Metro voted against the stimulus package that boosted funding for the subway.

This is what drives me so nuts about small government starve the beast bullshit.

Quote of the day

2009-09-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

"Interesting that we have jurisdiction over a teenage Somali pirate but not an American contractor working for the CIA."

--Jeralyn at TalkLeft on investigation of detainee abuse.

Nationalizing an army

2009-09-18T16:38:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan highlighted this excerpt from Tom Ricks a few days ago:

Stories like this from the Associated Press drive me nuts. The Afghan army is "hard to train." Why? Because the soldiers are illiterate. Pop quiz: How many of the Spartans at Thermopalye were literate? [...] The average private soldier in Afghanistan does not need to be literate. Nor does he need diversity training, by the way. (FWIW, he probably has a lot more liberated attitude toward gays than does the average Marine recruit.) He only needs the sort of literacy classes described in the AP article if his American trainers lack the imagination and historical knowledge to train him to be an Afghan, instead of an imitation American, soldier. If we are going to make any progress in dealing with failed states, we are going to have to learn to train across cultures.

Thereafter, he received the following reader email:

I'm not sure what the point of your post quoting Tom Ricks was. His arguments that literacy is not a necessary skill for soldiers are ludicrous. He says "the average soldier in Afghanistan does not need to be literate" citing as authority Spartan soldiers at Thermopalye, who were apparently illiterate. However, I doubt that the Spartan soldiers had to operate and repair trucks, tanks, canons [sic] and other mechanized equipment, or do any of the myriad tasks a modern functioning army is supposed to do.

I suppose Ricks believes the Afghan army could do away with intelligence reports, uniform written protocol and procedures, or anything else of the sort. Hell, get rid of maps, since the soldiers don't need to be able read them. It's just ridiculous. I can't tell what basis he has for disputing the Maj. Gen.'s assessment that the literacy rate is an impediment to training the Afghan army other than some romanticized notion of the Spartan soldier, who needed nothing more than a stout heart and a sharp sword to defeat his enemy.

I'm also not sure what Ricks is suggesting with respect to the "diversity training," but if that is his euphamism for training that is supposed to instil a respect for the rights of other ethnic groups and tribes, I don't think it should be dismissed as casually as Ricks does.

I think both sides are overstating the case somewhat when it comes to the necessity or non-necessity of literacy, but that's not actually what interests me here. What interests me is nation-building, which is supposedly what we're doing in Afghanistan (let's ignore the obvious flaws inherent in that strategy for now).

One of the few points of agreement, to my knowledge, in the theory of the rise of nation-states is the importance of national, citizen armies. (Knowing this highly contested literature, it's entirely possible that there's a school of thought that dismisses this factor, but I have never encountered it.) The idea is that the technical and bureaucratic requirements of creating, maintaining, updating, and deploying such a force contribute mightily to the state's growth in terms of capacity, revenue, and control over its territory; and, more important for my purposes here, that the common experiences, training, and contact among citizens from disparate parts of the territory serves an important role in homogenizing them and helping them to identify with the whole nation, rather than a region or ethnic group. In this sense the military's role is comparable to that of nationally standardized education and national newspapers.

So if what we're trying to do is build an Afghani nation to go along with the state bureaucracy we've instituted, then literacy training, diversity training, really just about ANY training that is universal across diverse forces drawn from diverse locations, is in fact vital. Literacy and diversity training are positive things in their own right, in general, but from a particular academic perspective they're not necessarily the point (though there's a strong academic case to be made for literacy as well).

I do wonder--diversity training, while teaching us that we're all equal and so on, can have the effect of reifying and institutionalizing the categories across which we're equal. If we're trying to build a pan-Afghan identity, it might be more effective to have a policy of equal treatment and let experience of enforcement and example from senior officers do the work: after all, I don't think the British army of old spent a lot of time talking about how people from Kent are just as good as people from Liverpool, or whatever, but rather treated them the same--as soldiers. However, this a) is based on my own speculation and b) requires a functioning, standardized, and authoritative military bureaucracy, which Afghanistan decidedly lacks at the moment.

Another important difference here is that, in my understanding, the French and British citizen armies that came into existence at the dawn of those nation-states fought primarily outside the state's existing territory of dominion. This serves two purposes: it provides an operational imperative for soldiers to get along and function the same, no matter their local, ethnic, or sectarian origins, without complicating these questions with interactions with those origins (for example, deployment to those localities, interactions with those ethnicities, etc); and it allows the military to function as a fairly closed system with a homogeneous culture. Afghanistan, while it does have an operational imperative for functioning, uniform soldiers, faces conflicts largely within its borders. This complicates the building of homogeneous loyalties and experiences, and it makes the building of a distinct military culture and experience that can trump or at least influence preceding experience and loyalties much more difficult.

The thing is, as long as we continue to try to instill these principles from outside the organization, it won't work. These things happened in the European nation-states because they were politically and militarily beneficial. Arguably, the reason no comprehensive nation-state system has emerged in Afghanistan so far is that there's no political imperative for it. The processes and incentives just don't seem to be there. Given that, it's hard (for me) to see how this project can ever be successful--but I said I wouldn't get into that.

Regardless, the significance of these kinds of training is based solely neither in the cost to the American taxpayer nor in the operational relevance or irrelevance of their content. Spartan soldiers, after all, were not just trained how to use a sword and that's it; they were trained how to fight in formations, how to fight alongside their fellow soldiers, and they were trained to care what happened to their fellow soldiers and to the fortunes of their city-state. Similarly, while literacy is useful in learning how to operate equipment, it's arguably easier to learn such things through being taught hands-on by someone who already knows. Almost more important, from a nation-building perspective, than the content or use of what one learns in the army is what happens when one leaves the army: one carries a common experience, body of knowledge, and bond home with one, and an army of ones disperses these commonalities throughout the territory. Over time, the effects of this phenomenon contribute a great deal to the formation of a common identity.

I had to

2009-09-15T15:13:00.001-07:00

This site is brilliantly inevitable.

Storytelling

2009-09-14T01:49:00.000-07:00

Coates:

I don't racialize those moments to take away anything, but to say this--I am fucking sick of hearing about black people in the 60s. At least I am sick of hearing about in the way we discuss, like only Abraham Lincoln happened before Martin Luther King, like everyone marched on Washington, or grew an Afro. I am just tired.

I want to hear about white people, now. Not their mythologizing and blind glamor, and not their cynical, infantile backlashing against that blind glamor (No more whining about how much the suburbs suck, please.) I want to hear something humble about a world I can't even envision, because here is the thing: If you tell me about that world, if you tell me something I don't know, and tell me about it in all its lush beauty, and rank hypocrisy, I will see myself in you. You don't have to show me my pedigree. Just show me yours. Don't try to be "inclusive." Just try to be human. Just tell me a story.

Culture shock is always fun.

2009-09-10T08:42:00.001-07:00

So I culture shocked real hard when I left Syria. This was to be expected and I sort of went through it in stages; one phase when I got to Beirut and they had (gasp) more than two kinds of restaurant and (gasp) tall buildings and (gasp) women wearing tank tops and (gasp) fashion and (gasp) Dunkin Donuts.

But I got over that pretty fast; it was still an Arab country and people still spoke Arabic and I could more or less make my way around as not-quite-a-tourist.

Then I got to Istanbul and the world sort of exploded around me. I did not speak the language, I could not find my way around, and I was definitely 100% a tourist. On top of this I was on my own; I left my travel companion in Beirut. I can't remember the last time I've been that disoriented.

It wasn't just the disorientation of being in a new place; it was the disorientation of a complete change of role. I had been very definitely Not A Tourist in Damascus and invested a fair amount of energy in making that clear: when you're Not A Tourist people don't rip you off as much, they treat you better, and it's much easier to fend off inquiring men. In Istanbul I had none of the necessary tools for Not A Tourist vibes and as a result became fair prey for everyone. To be frank, it was horrible. I clung to Arabic like a safety raft, constantly searching for Turkish cognates and on occasion replying to people who addressed me in Turkish (apparently I look potentially Turkish enough that people got confused a lot) in Arabic because I felt better about that than English. Somehow admitting to being an English speaker without language skills made me feel less safe, possibly because the first thing to do in an Arab country to get someone on your side is to show that you speak Arabic.

I did notice, in my defense, that I did have a much easier time if I spoke only Arabic and pretended not to speak or understand English, if only because many Turks speak English but none that I encountered spoke Arabic. This made it much easier to fend off shopkeepers, tourguides, and enquiring men (though some of their persistence in the face of apparent total noncomprehension was rather impressive).

Finally I got back to the States, where I continued to suffer from culture shock somewhat but got over it fairly fast--at least this place is familiar to me, just less recently.

But what I find interesting is that the longest-lingering aspect of culture shock so far has been my perception of my own appearance. In Damascus, there weren't a lot of mirrors around, diet culture is more or less nonexistent if you're me and hanging out with boys all the time, and we were all more or less equally scruffy and resigned to looking, well, like students abroad. I got back and all of a sudden realized how much weight I had gained, how completely not used to thinking about, oh, outfits and accessories and such I am, and how (seemingly) effortlessly everyone around me is in a completely different sartorial mentality--that is to say that they have one.

In reaction I basically feel like a sort of poor FOB and eternally, inescapably scruffy. This too, shall pass, of course, but of all things I did not expect beauty culture to be the last and in some ways most difficult hurdle.

Retrospect

2009-09-06T22:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm back.

I didn't update here nearly as much as I expected I would. There were some practical reasons: I didn't and couldn't go to the internet cafés as often as would have been required to keep the posts coming at regular speed, and when I did go I had to catch up with email; anything with the word "blog" in it is liable to be blocked in Syria, so I couldn't always access the blog even if I wanted to.

But more than that, as it was happening I just sort of decided to let it happen to me and not make such a project of every little thing. I disconnected from the Internet completely for a few weeks at one point before eventually coming back, but then only for the minimum, really. I feel okay about that.

It was a fantastic summer, the best in years. Whether or not I wrote, I definitely learned a lot.

I do have some thoughts worth posting (by my standards anyway), and I'm sure more will come to light as time goes on and I get some perspective. But for right now, I'm going to let them all wait.

It is good to be back. I think.

Huh

2009-08-15T08:20:00.000-07:00

So I just went to a christening. I got invited to this because my father's company is doing a project in Syria and my dad put me in touch with two of the people working here on it, and one of them--a Syrian-American--was christening his baby.

This ceremony was particularly interesting because the situation was rather fraught. The father comes from a Muslim family. His wife is from a Christian family. His family is rather conservative, parts of it, and in Islam baptizing a baby--essentially removing it from Islam (unless it should choose to convert later on)--is blasphemy.

I didn't see much of the evidence of the tension, just a smaller family presence than I would have expected. But what I did see was a family full of people who had no idea what you do at a christening ceremony. The godfather had to tell everyone what to do, his wife was running back and forth with towels and candles, and everyone was generally a bit lost.

Also, a bunch of totally random Syrian people just sort of crashed the ceremony. They came into the church, saw what was up, got themselves candles and joined the procession around the baptismal font. The craziest thing about this is that it's completely normal. Syrians are very open and very interested in sharing; they want to be a part of things. It's sweet, once you know what's going on.

I had the strange experience throughout this day (there was lunch afterward) of being the Most Knowledgeable Foreigner, which really brought into focus how long I've been here and how soon I'm leaving. The rather strong culture shock I was experiencing (I was listening to people speak about their very wealthy lifestyles back home in London/Greece/New York and all I wanted to do was go smoke a cigarette with the waiters and chat in Arabic) made me even more reluctant to leave.

Oh well. It is what it is.

Travel

2009-07-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything intellectual and fascinating to say about Syria, but for the sake of recollection here are things I've written to inquiring people:

Damascus does indeed stand; it's full of interesting people as well as crazy people. (Same as anywhere, to an extent, but just wait.) The foreigners here are almost uniformly awesome people, since I think you have to be a bit odd and thus a bit interesting to come here. I'm sitting next to a Portuguese woman who has been a poet and ballet dancer and is now a singer of Arab music and a Muslim convert; my best friends here are mostly American students, but I've also got a British Iraqi optometrist, an American who was once an I-banker in Dubai, sundry Brits, a German guy studying Turkish education, and on and on. It's a fun time.

The crazies are mostly Arab. When you make friends with a Syrian, they think it means you're best friends forever and they can immediately start calling you all the time and hanging out every day. I have a good friend who has actually started just hanging out at my house and my friends' houses whether I'm there or not. I rolled out of my room at like 8 last night after a nap and he was just sitting there in my courtyard. And he's one of the more chilled out ones. I have recieved a few insanely poetic text messages full of stars and moons from people (plural, yes) I have never expressed any romantic interest in. Another one complains every time I go somewhere without them that I never invite them anywhere, and I have been offered $20,000 for my hand in marriage. One of my male British friends has said that Syrian girls just say "I love you" to him on the street every five minutes. It's all a bit mad. (This is not to imply that all Syrians are nuts or anything; some of it is cultural difference, and, as anywhere, the crazies stand out.)

But nonetheless, it's fun. People here make friends quickly and easily, so every time you go out you never know what will happen. I met one of my best Syrian friends because he worked in a cafe I went to to study in. I met a Syrian girl because she was at the next table. I met a Greek guy at my Syrian friend's house and a couple Syrian guys at a club last night. Today I met two Syrians and a Moroccan who are starting an art collective and wanted me and my friends to come to their show August 10th.

That's the other thing: this city is full of art. A Syrian alcoholic painter moved into my house two days ago.

I don't really have a point, but that's what's up, I guess. I had my final yesterday and inshallah I passed enough to go on to the next level. (If they make me do level three again I may shoot myself in the face. It was boring enough the first time.) My Arabic has improved massively, hamdulillah (thank god), and hopefully by the end of my time here I'll be pretty good. I didn't expect to have come as far as I have already by this point.

I don't want to seem like I care about material things

2009-06-23T04:26:00.000-07:00

Like a social status...

But seriously. Animal Collective aside, last night I had a really sort of bizarre social experience.

The Old City is really varied: there are women going around in tight jeans and low-cut tops with their hair uncovered, women in the abaya, even women in full chador or niqab. There are men in traditional dress, men in shiny button-down shirts, men with beards, men who are clean-shaven. But there are a few constants. All women that I've seen, even if their clothes are tight, keep most of their skin covered; all men have short hair (nearly all women have long hair). Genders don't really interact on the street. You avoid eye contact; or if men or boys are staring at you (as a chick and all), you look away to avoid giving the appearance of being forward or "loose," as it were. If I need directions, I ask a woman unless a man offers, and even then I use my judgement.

I've gotten mostly used to this (obviously it's different if you're sitting at a cafe with a friend of yours), so last night was really odd. We went out to this small hotel in the New City, near the Cham Palace (biiiig hotel in the middle of town), where every night they have open mic poetry. Poetry, as I think most people know, is a huge deal in Arab culture. The experience was fascinating just on that level, but what was specifically weird about it was how gender was suddenly no longer an issue.

We were a large, almost entirely female group of foreigners, and rather than just staring from afar a good ten Arab young men came over and started chatting up a storm. The two older guys sitting near me were really nice, helped me understand some poetry a little better, and shared their bar snacks. The woman who brought us there--one of my friend Ben's housemates--was sitting there in a tank top (which already looks weird and overly naked to me) and just chatting with her male friends that she knows from going there every week. And for the first time I think an Arab guy was flirting with me. That has not happened at all--flirting is different from catcalling--and I just had no idea what to do with it. It was fine, he's a nice guy and he wasn't pushy or anything, but it was just so strange after the last week to have some guy in a smoky lounge setting just get up and buy me a beer because he wanted to.

Plus, for the first time I saw men--lots of them--with long hair, and women smoking cigarettes and wearing shorter sleeves. Obviously this was partly due to the fact that we were in the basement bar of a hotel in the New City. Some of the people there were pretty clearly higher class. But not all of them were, and I'm certain not all of them (or even most of them) were guests of the hotel. You could find a similar scene in the Old City, probably, but it would be composed of almost exclusively expats, not Arabs.

So I think what I'm trying to say is that clearly I need to explore the New City some more. It was interesting by contrast.

Syria on Iran

2009-06-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

I think this is something people have been curious about: how is the conflict in Iran playing in Syria? How is it presented? What are people saying? The answer is not as exciting as one might hope. Here are a couple paragraphs I just wrote to a friend, lightly edited in retrospect:

As for coverage: not really sure, frankly. I haven't heard much about it. I got one guy to talk about it, and he sort of talked generally about what he thinks of Ahmedinejad but not the situation. I haven't seen anything on the Syrian blog I read (I need moooooore) or even the Lebanese ones. It seems like it's mostly American intellectuals and journalists who are feverishly covering this; Arabs, I think, are sticking to their own issues and waiting to see what happens. Every Arab in America or Britain I've talked to is highly skeptical that anything will come of it, and it seems quite possible that that's the prevailing attitude around here. Nobody wants to be left high and dry with dicey political statements.

In fact, Syria was one of the first political entities to congratulate Ahmedinejad on his victory (along with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizballah, among others). Politics is a subject that most people avoid here or speak of in generalities; if the official position is "Congrats, Ahmadi Najad," I'd be surprised if people were running around with green armbands, you know?

I will add that at least on the TV in the hostel where I used to stay you can get Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera English as well as the BBC. Al Jazeera English has been covering it in a fashion that seems mostly neutral but occasionally seems to fall ever so subtly one way or the other. Sometimes they make prognoses for the revolutionaries that are perhaps a little more negative than they should be; sometimes, like when they were doing a history segment on the 1979 Iranian revolution, they show really unflattering pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini (not Khameini). My Arabic isn't good enough (YET) to understand straight up Al Jazeera.

That's all I got, really. Further bulletins as events warrant and all that.

ETA: Check out Citizen Tube for the latest videos coming out of Iran.

Travel notes

2009-06-22T02:30:00.001-07:00

Two days ago, I came back to the hostel at a reasonable hour for once and then got caught up in a conversation with two people staying there and Nora, my sometime roommate, for a really long time. Everyone had eventually gone to bed except for me and my friend Muhammad (or Mohammed, or any number of spellings--I don't know) when we heard the call to prayer (at about 3:45 am). We ended up going to the mosque, because he wanted to pray and I wanted to go.

We spent a long time being lost, and then we figured out where we were and got lost again, and then we found it. It was really...peaceful. I sat in the women's section, with mostly Iranian women swathed in black, and just watched and listened. There were birds flying in the rafters and they kept dropping small down feathers around me. I understood small parts of the sermon, but not most of it.

Eventually we walked back, got lost again, and finally made it home around 4:30 or 5.

The next day I moved into an apartment; the only housemates I've really met are two very studious but nice guys who are great about telling me words in Arabic and speaking slowly when I ask them to. They actually both speak good English but I've only really heard one of them speak: he says he has to speak English at work all day (he works at UNHCR) and doesn't like speaking it at home.

Yesterday was the first day I really got to use Arabic and by the end of it I felt like my brain had been stretched two sizes. I went to visit Nora at her apartment and made friends with several of her housemates--three Syrians, two with great English and one with almost none (though he does have a hookah, or arghileh as it's called here, named Shakira)--a Brit, who may be organizing some sort of local wine tasting for an article he wants to write, and a Belgian guy who's been here for two and a half years and is doing his Ph.D. in Arabic poetry. They all spoke lots of Arabic to me and got me to speak it. Then I spoke it at the cafe. Then I spoke it at Nora's house again. Then I spoke it when I got home.

I was doing pretty well by the end. I got told four times that my Arabic was good (granted, three of those by the same person) and once that my accent was good. It was a good feeling. I hardly remember any of the new words I was told, though. Oh, well. Progress by slow inches. I think I may have agreed to do a language exchange with Ahmed, one of Nora's housemates who's an Arabic teacher and is learning English.

Finally: I have gotten sick at last. Nora went first, with the typical traveler's sickness; then Merritt got some sort of horrible bug that made her throw up every 20 minutes for like two days; Ben got travel belly too; and finally, today, it's me. Woooo. I feel awful. At least I've been through this before.

I have pictures of my house and will post them as soon as I get around to putting them on my computer. EVERYONE STAY CALM.

Journalism in action

2009-06-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

Roger Cohen has an amazing piece up at the NYT. Even if, as is likely, the revolutionary sentiment isn't as widespread as some of us would like to believe, this is amazing stuff:

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

That part made me tear up. This part was something else:

Just off Revolution Street, I walked into a pall of tear gas. I’d lit a cigarette minutes before — not a habit but a need — and a young man collapsed into me shouting, “Blow smoke in my face.” Smoke dispels the effects of the gas to some degree.

I did what I could and he said, “We are with you” in English and with my colleague we tumbled into a dead end — Tehran is full of them — running from the searing gas and police. I gasped and fell through a door into an apartment building where somebody had lit a small fire in a dish to relieve the stinging. [...]

I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, “Islam is the religion of freedom.”

Also links

2009-06-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

Connectivity ftw:

Some people are crazy:

Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance -- No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review -- her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.

One of them is Pat Buchanan.

Really cool interactive word cloud of Iranian opposition on Twitter.

Sullivan on why Iran matters

Gotta go!