Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

05.16.16
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Syria, The New York Times Middle East Map, and the Length of History

On Saturday, the New York Times published a neat little article by Nick Danforth about different ways the Middle East- mostly the Levant and Iraq- could have been divided up after WWI.  There were several plans, including the original Sykes-Picot, and one from King Faisal, which at least had the benefit of being drawn up by an Arab. While there is the discomfort in thinking about conquering Westerners deciding what will be done in the region (based almost entirely on how it would serve their own interests), there are a couple times where one senses a frisson of missed opportunity and possibility, an alternative history that wouldn’t have ended with the agony in Syria and Iraq (not to mention Lebanon). A French plan for an Alawite state makes one think this could have all been avoided- the Asads would have been the king of a tiny zone, if at all, and wouldn’t have to hold on with such grim and bloody determination. Independent states around Damascus and Aleppo allow one to envision the latter city still standing, and the two countries at peace, somehow.

 

Alawite State hugging the Mediterranean. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Image from New York Times

 

 

Of course, any of these drawings would have carried with them their own problems, and their own internal contradictions, such as what to “do” about the Kurdish issue, Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq, and of course the eventual Zionist issue. Every state would have its own religious and ethnic minorities, as the lines would have to be drawn with infinite angel hairs to give everyone national determination or to make “pure” states, if such a thing were even possible, not to say desirable. And humans being humans, there would always be cause for war.  There was no real solution, perhaps.

That’s really the nut of the matter. The modern Middle East and the Balkans were both born of the same historic moment: when the rise of the nation-state coincided with the death throes of an ancient empire- the Ottomans. They aren’t exactly the same, of course. The Balkans went through a brief Austro-Hungarian phase, but that was due to the long-running collapse of the Ottomans, the Sick Man of Europe.

It’s hard to think about now, but these were places that had a political system in place for hundreds and hundreds of years (the Ottomans began to dominate in the 14th and 15th century). It was a multi-ethnic and ever-shifting empire, with central power waxing and waning, but never disappearing. When it died in the aftermath of WWI, it was suddenly due to be replaced by modern states.

We don’t really recognize that this is a long and uncertain process, but think of it like this: pretend you are reading a history book in the year 3500, or about 1500 years from now. I know there probably won’t be books at that point, but you’re going to be dead by then anyway, so just use your imagination, ok?

You’d read of the 500 years of Ottoman domination, and then the tumult of the 20th century. The Balkans were briefly dominated by the Soviets and Tito’s 3rd-wayism, and the Middle East by colonialism, followed by nationalism and tyranny, followed by religious fanaticism, until it all collapsed, slowly and then suddenly, starting in around 2003. But the thing is, that section wouldn’t be long.

We’re fewer than 100 years since the Ottoman’s collapsed, and while a lot has happened, it always seems like a lot happens when you’re living through it. But we’re still in the last rigor-mortis flicker, the dying tail of that millennial empire. The Soviets mutated the direction of the Balkans, but they were just a blip, a large factor in determining what would happen in the post-Ottoman Balkans, but still a mere factor in that longer story. Everything that has happened in the Middle East is part of that same tale. The mutations of colonialism, nationalism, and religion are just playing a role.

This isn’t historical determinism. No one’s fate was written by the Ottomans. But if we want to look to the future of the region, after the wars and after ISIS, we have to be able to look at the longer story, a region that moved from stagnant empire to the vortex of the modern nationalistic politics in the span of a few scant decades. No matter how the maps were drawn it would take decades or longer to shake out. Understanding this process, and understanding that what comes next won’t look like what came before, can help us avoid the mistakes of the past, the ones that have led to the ruin and pain of the suddenly modern Middle East.

05.13.16
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After ISIS Massacre of Real Madrid Fans, Muslim Lives (Briefly) Matter

 

ISIS kill 14 Real Madrid fans at supporters club

Horrible story, from Vice. 

According to AS, a Real Madrid fan club in Iraq was targeted by Islamic terrorists during a meeting, with 16 people being killed, and 20 more injured. The attack occurred in the town of Balad, about 75 miles north of Baghdad, where at least 93 people were killed in three car bombings yesterday. Gunmen wielding AK-47s entered the cafe where about 50 club members were meeting and began firing, leaving a grisly, blood-soaked scene.

The president of the group, Ziad Subhan, told AS that the Islamic terrorists “don’t like football, they think it’s anti-Muslim. They just carry out attacks like this. This is a terrible tragedy.”

That ISIS are the kind of guys who think everything that makes life even slightly worth living is anti-Muslim is as wretched as it is, at this point, axiomatic. It’s a blinkered and blood-soaked worldview that makes the simple act of watching soccer one of almost unimaginable bravery. It makes the world as parched as the land. But the story also has this.

Real Madrid is aware of the attack and released a statement expressing condolences for the victims and their families. The team will wear black armbands during tomorrow’s match against Deportivo.

Is this the first time that Muslim victims of ISIS have received international support and sympathy on the sporting level? The sympathy gap was made obvious to everyone after the back-to-back attacks on Beirut and Paris in November, which The Atlantic more accurately called “the empathy gap.” There is of course the idea that simply by being Muslims, they have brought it on themselves, and are victims, sure, but somehow also culpable. But more than that, a feeling that those lives are disposable. Partly because they are Muslim, but also because we assume that they are going to die, just from living over there. It’s an unspoken and unexamined feeling that they don’t feel pain, or that their losses aren’t as wrenching as ours. (TNC talked about this with the lives of black men in Between the World and Me).

So it is easy to be cynical and say “ok, so their lives matter only because of sports, right?” But if it is a shared love of sports that lets people recognize a shared humanity, then all the better for sports. Let’s just hope we remember this when people who aren’t cheering for a team are slaughtered.

05.12.16
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“Until we find out what’s going on” Continues To Be Official Trump Policy

 

Pictured: John Kerry?

Remember when John Kerry was permanently labeled a “flip-flopper” thanks to a smart Bush team and an enabling press, who, with few exceptions, loved the label, adopted it, and breathlessly discussed it? It was fine to discuss his positions and character, of course, but any normal political act was instantly labeled another “flip-flop” by a press almost sexually enamored of a swaggering war President.

That’s normally how things work. Labels get stuck because the press is lazy and people easily accept quick caricatures in place of actual characterization. Bush was dumb (instead of arrogantly incurious), Gore was boring and a liar (instead of neither), McCain was grouchy (true!), Obama was aloof and arrogant (kind of true), etc. That’s the way it usually works.

That’s why one of the more genuinely frightening things about this election is that it has revealed, once and for all, the power of pure thuggishness in the face of any rationality. It’s why no labels have really stuck on Donald Trump. The rage he channels is enough to flatten the incredible contradictions, reversals, and sheer ignorance that underpins his campaign, like a boiling river leveling a hapless and god-beseeching floodplain town. His position on terrorism, or rather “terrorism”, makes this clear.

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04.25.16
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The Churchill Bust “Scandal” Was Peak Rightwing Dumbshow

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Inspiring, in a “melted lush” sort of way.  (Image from The Independent)

Boris Johnson, the weird-haired and meaningless Mayor of London with a certain oddball Tory charm (he did have the best description of the 2012 Olympics: As I write these words there are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball in the middle of the Horse Guards Parade immortalised by Canaletto. They are glistening like wet otters and the water is plashing off the brims of the spectators’ sou’westers. The whole thing is magnificent and bonkers.), helpfully revived one of the dumbest single controversies of the whole Obama Administration: the Bust of Churchill. To recap, George W. Bush, for whom Churchill ranked as the finest British leader (though if he could name any beyond Thatcher and Blair, I’d be stunned), was gifted a bust of Winston Churchill early in his Presidency, and he kept it on his desk for inspiration. Obama gave it back, or moved it, or something: the point was, he didn’t keep it on his desk. We finally got to the bottom of it this week.

What’s nice is that it reminded us of how ludicrous the opposition to Obama has been, and how ungrounded in reality the bulk of it is. In retrospect, it set the template for all the idiocy regarding his Presidency.

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04.22.16
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Ecuador’s Radical Proposal: The Poor Shouldn’t Be Destroyed By A Moving Earth

Almost 600 are dead in the desperately poor nation of Ecuador, which has billions of dollars of damage from an enormous earthquake. President Correa?

Among the measures he announced in a televised address late on Wednesday:

  • The sales tax is to be increased from 12% to 14% for one year only;

  • People with more than $1m in assets is to pay a one-time sum equivalent to 0.9% of their wealth;

  • Anyone who earns more than $1,000 a month is to pay the equivalent of one day’s pay; anyone getting more than $2,000 pays two days and so on, up to $5,000 a month and five days’ worth

  • Unspecified state assets to be sold

Although I can’t comment on the specifics, this seems to be fundamentally fair. It seems, in fact, to be the basis of society. These measures aren’t going to bankrupt anyone, but they will help a country rebuild itself, and help protect the people who are most affected by the devastation.

That’s the thing about natural disasters: we do like to say they are the great equalizer, and it is true that the earth, sliding its enormity under our feet, is wholly unconcerned with checkbooks. A millionaire will die in a collapsed building just as much as a poor man.

But it isn’t really equitable. Someone with assets can withstand the destruction of their house. They won’t have lost everything. They won’t go hungry in the streets. They won’t have their world suddenly torn away by these ancient rumblings. If they survive the initial disaster, they’ll be fine.

And that’s good! But that’s exactly the point: no one should have all their hope ripped away by something like this. A poor person who has lost everything in a warren of collapsed brick and ragged steel is just as faultless as the person who is doing fine. Society is built around protecting everyone from the random cruelty of fate. A society where the vulnerable can be shattered and the rich entirely cosseted is, strictly, elementally unfair. That’s why what Correa is doing is both radical and needed. It’s how a society pays for itself. It’s inarguably just.

This is going to be more and more of a big deal, as the ravages of climate change become more and more apparent, and the storms and droughts fiercer. It’s the poor who will pay first. The people who benefitted from the Industrial Age will be the most protected (I include myself in that). And this wasn’t an earthquake; it’s an own goal. When we talk about the economic costs of combatting climate change, the question we are asking isn’t “how much should we spend” but “do we believe in justice, or just the rule of money?” Correa has provided a template, one that simply and radically insists we’re all in this together.

 

04.21.16
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Burundi, Cockroaches, And The Terrible Power of Language

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Hassan Ngeze was a touch and hyper-verbal little criminal in Rwanda, one of those guys who is too smart for his station, but clinically unable to be anything but a criminal. It was his instinct. He insinuated himself with the clan surrounding Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana; or, more specifically, the cruel inner circle of the First Lady, Madame Agathe, the circle out of which Hutu Power spread. It’s a cliche to say that the Madame and her family were the real power, both political and intellectual, behind the throne, but it is nonetheless true.

This is the circle to which Ngeze was drawn, and his skills made themselves valuable. He was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Kangura, a pro-government newspaper whose name roughly translates as “Wake Them Up!” It was there he really hit his stride. The most famous publication under him was the “Hutu 10 Commandments“. This list jumped around between assaults on Tutsi women (the main target), bureaucratic racism against Tutsis, buried in the middle, #8: “Hutus must cease having pity for the Tutsi.”

It worked. Kangura, along with Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines, helped create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia and violence that helped spur murderous insanity of the genocide. Ngeze stepped up his role during the killing, passing out names of targets, but in a way those were his secondary crimes. Ngeze, along with RTLMC’s Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, were put on trial for inciting genocide, and convicted for their role. These were the first propagandists to be convicted of war crimes since Julius Streicher, the violently anti-Semitic publisher of Der Sturmer, the clear antecedent to Kangura. 

Read more for Burundi and America…

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04.19.16
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A Death in Cameroon: Samantha Power And The Terrible Contradictions of US Power

The child was only seven, rushing to see the excitement. A US convoy was rolling through a Cameroonian village, led by Samantha Power, who was bravely going to meet with victims of the rapacious cruelty of Boko Haram. She was showing the soft face of US power. But the convoy was rushing, as convoys have to do when there are enemies all around, and the child was distracted, or over-excited, and the drivers sure had their eyes peeled for attacks, not for children. There was a collision, and a 7-yr-old was dead.

This was not intentional. This was not because the child was mistaken for a terrorist. There was grief and pain throughout the convoy, especially for Samantha Power, who had to balance the knowledge that the child would be alive if it weren’t for her visit; but then, who knows if her visit could make things better, including the life of that child, if it only weren’t for that hideous moment, that instant where fate forced the action, that terrible collision of plated steel and fragile flesh. Maybe if they were a little further to the side of the road, or someone had grabbed the child, or if the convoy wasn’t forced to rush through dangerous territory, the child would have remembered that day as the one where life started to get better, because America finally lifted itself to help the fight against violent militants. Maybe this would have been a day she talked about for generations.

That’s the horrible contradiction of American power in a changing world. The conflicts that we try to solve can’t be solved merely with the military, even if that is our default. But even when showing the soft face, we have to always be on the lookout for danger, and have to act as both the powerful and the persued, the rifle-toting hunstman and the quivering prey. We stumble with some good intentions, and some ill, into conflicts we barely understand, and leave pain as well as medicine and food and hope.

The problem is, that might be the inevitable outcome of being the last real traditional power in a changing world. Conflicts are both local and international, driven by internal ideologies and transnational ideas. They are old ideas being revived by new technologies, and mostly are a product of a global system that is slowly being replaced. The nation-state is no longer the primary actor. What we’re seeing is the final stages of collapse by the old empires, who created transnational conglomerations that broke up into nation states, and now are chafing under that. We see that in the Caucuses, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Canada and Latin America, and even in the American southwest. Some areas, like Western Europe, have been trying to go the other way, but even that is showing strain.

This isn’t to say we live in uniquely perilous times. Everyone wants to think they are in the most dangerous and interesting and hopefully end times (it lessens the agony of death if you think everyone is going with you). But we are in a very long period of transition, and it is doubtful that an old-school power like the US, especially one that has such a messy and possibly unworkable democracy, can handle it. Certainly not the way we are now. We’re too big, and too unwieldly. We carry too much baggage, and we don’t know which has clothes and which one has the bomb.

Samantha Power is a good person trying to make sense out of a dangerous world. She doesn’t deserve the guilt she must feel over this tragic death. But that is also the price we pay. When trying to impose and old order on a world where that order is decaying, there will be collateral damage. It’s the inveitable price of empire, but, as always, the cost is never borne by the empire itself. Whether or not we can sustain being one is a question that our leaders have to ask. It’s unfortunate very few have the courage to do so. Until that happens, we’re a blind convoy, hurtling through unknown jungles, and praying we get out without trampling over those we propose to save.

04.12.16
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AQAP Still Has Eyes On The Future

On Friday, Yara Bayoumy, Noah Browning and Mohammed Ghobari filed an amazing Reuters investigative report about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and how they were erecting a true mini-state in the south of Yemen: keeping the peace, collecting taxes, doing the roadwork, punishing the rich for stealing from generations of the poor, and so forth. They were levying tributes from ships, much like a real country. It’s a tremendous read, and a powerful look at how smart terrorist organizations work

AQAP has flown under the radar since the terrifying rise of ISIS, and have even been relegated to the back of Yemeni news thanks to the Huthi rise and the Saudi invasion. But they have never stopped organizing, and most importantly, have never stopped learning lessons.

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Image from Reuters.

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03.29.16
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EgyptAir Hijacking and Our Weird Formulation on Terrorism

 

A man believed to be the hijacker of the EgyptAir Airbus A-32

Pictured: Not a terrorist. Image from AFP-Getty via BBC

 

Thankfully, the EgyptAir hijacking turned out to just be a guy with a fake suicide vest who may or may not have been distraught about a woman. This was handled with what I can only believe to be typical Cypriot humor.

Earlier, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades had responded to a reporter’s question about whether the hijacker was motivated by romance, by laughing and saying: “Always there is a woman involved.”

That aside, and the “troubling questions” about security we’re told the incident begs, there has been a strange formulation floating around all day. I first saw it in a Times “Morning Briefing”, but you’ve undoubtedly seen something similar. “A hijacker told the pilot he had explosives and threatened to detonate them, officials said, but he may have been motivated by personal factors, not terrorism.”

That’s an odd way to put it, and revealing. Yes, there were no political motivations, which of course means it isn’t terrorism. If he blew himself up, of course, it wouldn’t have mattered to anyone involved. Being killed is being killed. It’s the same kind of excuse we have in this country for being solemn for a few minutes after a mass shooting, telling each other that to talk about guns is to “politicize” it, and then going on our way- unless the shooter screams “Allah!” while pulling the trigger.

The San Bernardino shooters had no real connection to ISIS, no more than I do. They just were inspired by them, but there are a million factors that go into why someone decides to kill. They do it for any reasons, whether they are a recruit from Belgium or Adam Lanza or just someone who wants to pick a wolf costume and chooses ISIS, because it just happens to fit perfectly.

That’s why it is strange to say “motivated by personal factors”, and not terrorism. People join terrorist groups for personal factors, because they are angry or lost or feel small, and can be pushed over the edge from despair into inhuman violence by skilled recruiters and peer pressure. Some, yes, are just sociopaths or criminals, and a handful are true believers- but even among them, it is “personal factors”.

We treat terrorism as a free-floating evil, capitalizing the theological construct and applying it to humans, which weirdly robs people of their agency. We don’t see terrorism as an earthly phenomenon with earthly reasons, born from the same violent impluses that have led men to be wolf to men since they first realized that pain wasn’t something that was just felt- it could be inflicted.

Until we decide that we have to treat this as an actual human event, and not a mythological evil, there is no way to minimize its destructive power, or to lead people away. Saying “it’s not terrorism; it must just be a combination of sickness and desperation” is a perfect exercise in missing the point entiely.

03.28.16
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Palmyra in the Past and Present

 

 

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The “Arab Castle” looms over Palmyra, recently recaptured from ISIS by Asad’s army. Image from CNN.com

I reached Palmyra, those many years ago, after a long trip of minibuses and thumbed rides from belching diesel trucks, conversing minorly in my barely-there Arabic and the unlimited patience of the people who picked me up. The ruins loomed up in the desert, a sun-baked mix of different eras and styles, from distant pagan antiquity to near history, seemingly disconnected from the world, a testament to both the length and the relative insignificance of our history.

Hitchhiking through Syria was neither dangerous nor was it romantic, though I certainly tried to romanticize it. It was a safe time, in the spring of 2000. Hafez al-Asad was still ruling, and while his undertaker pallor still loomed oppressively in thousands of hagiographic portraits, there was a sense of an ending. The oldest son, Basil, who seemed like he was born with a chest full of unearned medals and a dictator’s toothy grin, had been killed in a car wreck a few years before, and the other son, Bashar, was being groomed. He had been living in England- an ophthalmologist, right? – and there was optimism that he would be different. He couldn’t be worse than his brutal old man. Right?

So long ago. The destruction he has levied on his country is enough to make him one of the great criminals of our time. His brutality is compounded by the vacuum it created, the chaos in which (combined with the destruction of Iraq) ISIS found its strength, galloping on blood-stained horses from a medieval nightmare.

Their bloodlust doesn’t need to be recounted here. This is about Palmyra, which was the scene of horror when ISIS took it over. Public mass executions in ancient amphitheaters, the destruction of ancient, pre-Roman temples, the desecration of a shared human heritage. People reacted in horror at the thought of these illiterate goons wantonly destroying ancient ruins. When the Syrian army retook it over the weekend, there was relief that the destruction wasn’t as bad as was feared– though it was still plenty bad, and the murdered would never come back. For many reasons, Palmyra resonated more than the story of 1000 dead.

For many reasons, Palmyra resonated more than the story of 1000 dead. The formulation that I saw was that the theater was the scene of executions, not that executions took place, and it happened to be in an ancient theater. The inflection was on the smearing of a tourist place, a place of antique wonder. This is understandable, if a little grotesque. After all, people die all the time, right?

Yes, of course they do. People die horribly, in mute and screaming terror, in Pakistan or Belgium or Syria or Chicago or Yemen, every day. We’re ripped from this earth by the gory animalism of ideology, whether that is radical fundamentalism or the nihilism of post-capital gang life or rampant jingoism or other ancient horrors. It was always this way- I don’t know the whole history of the Palmyra amphitheater, but through the years, the city, which was taken and retaken, in which different beliefs smashed into each other, was the scene of horror and agony, over and over.

It’s horror that has been dulled by the years, baked into the stones and sanctified by admission. It belonged to people in the past, who didn’t feel pain the same way we do, much how people in other countries don’t weep and moan and bleed and die unless we force ourselves to truly imagine it.

That’s one of the reasons why Palmyra was important. That a goof like 21-yr-old me, with stupid hair and the fake profundity of an adolescent poet, was allowed to go there, in a country that was “supposed” to hate Americans, is why places like that matter. I sat in the old Arab Castle, in solitude, overlooking the ruins, the vast expanse of lives that went into building them, and living in them. It was a castle built for war, that now existed for tourists to connect with the past.

It’s optimistic. ISIS will not last forever. Even Bashar al-Asad will one day fall. This is a generational catastrophe, one that will reverberate for decades, remaking the Middle East. But as the reaction to Palmyra shows- as the existence of Palmyra proves- there is more a sense of shared humanity now than ever. It’s just a matter of overcoming our superstitions and ideologies and small-mindedness, and truly using the empathy of imagination. It’s a matter of recognizing that while we live in the flicker, we don’t have to put out the light just yet.