Category Archives: Uncategorized

08.30.16
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Congress Finally Steps Up on Yemen, Saudi Arm Sales

 

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A Saudi airstrike in Yemen. Image from mintpressnews.com

 

 

Far from the ISIS-inspired headlines of Syria, Saudi Arabia has pretty calmly and easily been engaged in an endless series of war crimes in Yemen. Its policy had always been to keep Yemen weak, but not in total chaos. A kind of war madness has led them to abandon the second part of that. They are far from the only antagonists in the horrific dissolve of the nation, but they are the most powerful, and they are flexing that power in terrible ways.

And they are doing it with arms and support from the US. It is US-made planes dropping US-made bombs on hospitals and schools, with a ferocity that has led a normally-placid UN to try to stop them. From raw self-interest, this is a terrible policy for the US. From a human level, it is a nightmare.

Finally, nearly 60 congresspeople are trying to at least slow down the arms funnel, as Foreign Policy reports.

In  a sign that frustration is growing in Congress over Saudi Arabia, a bipartisan group of 60 lawmakers have signed a letter seeking to delay the Obama administration’s planned sale of $1.15 billion in arms and military equipment to Riyadh.

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The proposed sale, approved by the State Department on Aug. 9, includes up to 153 tanks, ammunition, hundreds of machine guns, and sundry other military equipment. Congress has 30 days to block the sale, but the lawmakers appear irritated that the notification of the sale came in the middle of Congress’s summer recess.

“Any decision to sell more arms to Saudi Arabia should be given adequate time for full deliberation by Congress,” wrote the lawmakers. “We are concerned, however, that the timing of this notification during the August congressional recess could be interpreted to mean that Congress has little time to consider the arms deal when it returns from recess within the 30 day window established by law.”

Part of this is territorial and bureaucratic, of course: Congress is angry about being bypassed. But they absolutely should be. The loss of Congressional prerogative in foreign policy has been a slow-rolling disaster for the US, as it allows enormously important decisions to be shaped, essentially, by the will of one branch, which in turn is shaped by the will of one person. Even when I trust the POTUS, and respect their judgment, having the lives of millions come down to one “decided” is monstrous. Leaving everyone else to deal with the ramifications of those decisions is essentially undemocratic.

So there should be more letters like this, both for the sake of our democracy, and to help the people who are being brutalized and pummeled into dust with our munitions. Slowing down the flow of arms into the Middle East, and particularly to the combatants in Yemen, is never a bad policy.

08.30.16
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Colson Whitehead’s Slavery Novel “The Underground Railroad”: A Ferocious History of the Present

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If you want to read a really insightful and incisive review of Colson Whitehead’s deeply disturbing and sneakily-complex new novel, The Underground Railroad, you could do a lot worse than reading Adam Gopnik’s review of a new book on the Attica uprising in last week’s New Yorker. In talking about the slaughter that ensued when the state police, national guard and (tellingly) other prison guards took back the jail from the nearly all-black inmates, Gopnik writes:

In a curious way, the psychology of the (almost exclusively white) troopers and guards, more than the ideology of the inmates, seems most haunting now, as part of the permanent picture of American fixations. The inmates were doing what anyone would do in their situation: having seen a protest turn unexpectedly into a revolt that was sure to be short-lived, they desperately improvised a way to keep their dignity and be heard, to avoid the worst punishment and get some small reforms. Their occasionally overblown rhetoric was the act of men who, stripped of dignity, try to reclaim it. But the troopers and guards retaking the prison were indulging an orgy of racist violence neither ordered nor wholly explicable. There was no need for them to conduct a massacre to reassert their authority. They had all the firepower; the prisoners were armed only with homemade knives; the guards had control of the yard within minutes. Nor were they, so far as anyone can detect, under direct commands to kill. In an American tale already known fully to Mark Twain, a white ethnic proletariat could distinguish itself as superior only by its ability to be brutal to a still more subordinate class of color. When its members were denied their exercise of this “right,” they turned crazy and violent.

If you want to learn more about the novel, look at any Blue Lives Matter Facebook group, flip to a Trump rally, or read some hot takes on Colin Kaepernick. These will tell you as much about Whitehead’s book as any discussion of the past, because, while it is meticulously detailed, and unflinching in its cruelty, Whitehead is describing an American obsession with race, with oppression, and with the assertion of might. The novel isn’t a metaphor for today– it isn’t secretly about Michael Brown or Garfield Park– but it is all the more harrowing because of that. It doesn’t need to be. The story barely changes.

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08.25.16
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Does Syrian Sovereignty Exist?

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August 12th map, from Wikipedia, most recent I can find. How is a state supposed to come back from this?

BBC: Syrian rebels, backed by the Turkish military and US air cover, say they have taken the town of Jarablus from jihadists of so-called Islamic State.

The assault began at dawn when Turkish warplanes, tanks and special forces personnel crossed the nearby border.

 

Reuters:  Turkey sent more tanks into northern Syria on Thursday and demanded Kurdish militia fighters retreat within a week as it seeks to secure the border region and drive back Islamic State with its first major incursion into its neighbor.

There is a lot– a lot– to unpack here. Obviously, Turkey is interested in stopping ISIS, but more so, as the Soufan Group points out, in making sure that the Kurdish Syrian rebels don’t have a swatch of territory that is contiguous with Turkey, for fear of linkage with Turkey’s own Kurdish population.

The Turkish incursion is a significant event in the conflict, as it highlights the lengths that Turkey will go to prevent an autonomous Kurdish region along its southern border. Perhaps more significantly, the assault also made clear the limits of U.S. support for the Kurdish rebel forces that have been the most effective ground troops in the fight against the Islamic State. Calling the operation to retake Jarablus ‘Euphrates Shield,’ Turkey’s stated goal was to push back the Islamic State as well as the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD); Ankara views the latter, along with Turkish Kurdish groups, as a far greater threat than the Islamic State.

So, then: Turkey has sent troops and tanks and planes into Syria in order to dictate the future of the local Kurdish population in a post-ISIS region, which puts it in conflict with US designs, all of which will complicate Iraq (and its Kurds). Meanwhile, Turkey is playing around with Russia, which had been bombing Syria from Iran until that relationship went pear-shaped.

All of this is to ask a question this blog has been asking all year: what is Syria, anymore? Does it actually exist, or is it just a name on a map, lines that we all know so we still vaguely recognize? Does it actually have any sovereignty, and if so, who is in stewardship of that sovereignty? Is it Asad? That seems unlikely. Is it any of the rebel groups, including ISIS? What does it mean to own territory? What, ultimately, does it mean to be a nation when the nation has fallen apart, been vivisected, torn up, divided? And what does that mean for the future of the nation, and of the region?

I don’t have answers to these, but they are what we need to explore. As we’ve argued here before, the map is being rearranged. I don’t think there will be a recognizable “Syria” coming out of this in five, ten years. It’s the end of a long historical process starting with the fall of the Ottoman Empire (or at least the end of this phase, if there is one thing history teaches us, it is that eras never truly definitively end, and it is foolish to make predictions). I don’t think we’re really reckoning with what is going to come next, and what a possibly stateless future means. But as Turkey shows, there are many games being played here with future borders and future ideas of sovereignty, whether it is a UN-recognized map or the Iraq-like de facto states of ferocious Kurdish independence. I feel that until we come to terms with the sure and certain knowledge that what comes next is going to be very different than what came before, we won’t be able to encourage even least-bad outcomes.

08.25.16
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Sins of the Fathers: East Chicago’s Poisoned Water and The Weight of History

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East Chicago, 1972, around when the present began to crumble. Image from blog.hemmings.com

East Chicago is one of those strange places that most of us only glimpse while driving past it, along its southern end, on a road trip that takes us through the rundown broken-factory grime of northwestern Indiana. If we’re going toward Chicago, it’s the last in a string of scary and polluted cities before you approach the rusted majesty of the Skyway, looming at imposing and strange angles, like a bridge out of Hell. More recently, East Chicago is the home of a booming casino. You get off 90 to get there, on what is essentially a designated highway, skirting the town itself. East Chicago just exists as a string of industrial lights and smoke glowing through the darkness.

It isn’t that, of course. It is a real city, where people live. It’s still a fairly-thriving Lake Michigan port, a beneficiary of this vast body of water, so crucial to the American experiment. It’s proximity to the lake, and to the Calumet and Chicago rivers, gave East Chicago some prominence in the steel industry, and its factories provided jobs and a living, even if a dirty and difficult one. Other industries bloomed in the area, in the days where Gary was a town to behold. But that legacy crumbled, leaving poison in its wake. This poison is metaphorical, but also terribly literal: East Chicago is facing a massive crisis in its drinking water, the weight of the past seeping into the present and darkening the future. It’s a reckoning with which we all have to deal.

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08.23.16
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A Brief Note on Gabby Giffords Endorsing Kirk and Toomey, and the Myth Of Encouragement

Politico: Americans for Responsible Solutions, the anti-gun violence PAC founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, on Monday endorsed two Republican senators for their 2013 vote following the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre.

“In the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, Republican Sens. Pat Toomey and Mark Kirk broke from the gun lobby and supported a bill to help prevent felons, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill from obtaining firearms at gun shows and online,” Giffords and Kelly wrote in aCNN op-ed. “This week, they are earning our organization’s endorsement.”

We just talked about Kirk, and his attempt to keep Republican votes while not losing everyone in Illinois who hates Trump, which is most people. Part of his (deserved) political reputation comes from things like bucking the NRA, even briefly, which is how he gets endorsements from groups like Giffords. But while, like anyone with a heart, I love Gabby Giffords, this endorsement is nonsense.

I get the instinct. If you “reward” Republicans with your endorsement in exchange for behaving like reasonable human beings on guns, you’ll get more support. That’s the theory. The other calculation is that Americans for Responsible Solutions can’t only endorse Democrats, because then they are seen as partisan actors. It’s a tough situation, to be sure.

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08.23.16
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Mark Kirk Dips His Toes In Trumpy Waters

It’s almost easy to feel bad for Mark Kirk. He’s probably the closest thing there is to a reasonable Republican Senator right now, what with hating neither the gays nor the Mexicans. Because of that, he’s never really been trusted by the far right, but that’s suited him well in Illinois. The deep south of Illinois is culturally Kentucky (indeed, where Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky meet is one of the most rabidly conservative regions in the country). The farmlands that make up most of the state are very Republican, and have been growing more far-right over the last few decades, but still have a lot of Combine machine-type politics which rarely demand the “Warrior for Christ” you see in a lot of other states. Kirk is perfectly suited to get their votes, since he has an “R” after his name, and can win a lot of the not-crazy but still conservative voters in the collar counties and near the Iowa border.

But being a reasonable Republican still means being a Republican, and that’s not going to cut it for him in Illinois this year. It’s far from a done deal, but it looks likely that Tammy Duckworth is going to end his Senate career this year. A Democratic Presidential candidate hasn’t won here since George HW Bush*, and Illinois is going Hillary in a landslide. The fundamentals were already stacked against him, which is why he made the choice to “un-endorse” Trump, saying he “Cannot and will not” support him. It’s was really his only choice: despite pockets of cultural support in Chicago’s ethnic and coppish neighborhoods, and the southern parts of the state, Trump is deeply unpopular here. He’s not a collar county sort of candidate.

All that being said, he can’t completely disappoint people who vote Republican, which is why he has to make the occasional dip into the waves of racial hatred Trump stirred up. His discussion of the Obama administration’s payment to Iran (money we owed legally) is a perfect example of this.

“We can’t have the president of the United States acting like the drug dealer in chief,” Kirk said, “giving clean packs of money to a … state sponsor of terror. Those 500-euro notes will pop up across the Middle East. … We’re going to see problems in multiple (countries) because of that money given to them.”

Now, the interesting thing here, you will note, is that “giving clean packs of money to a state sponsor of terror” is not a thing drug dealers tend to do. There is a complicated nexus between organized crime, narcotics, and terrorism, to be sure, and it is true that drugs tend to be a cash business, but this is not a straight line here. It’s nothing more than racial imagery to try to make sure that his voters know he’s still one of them.

This, to me, is why Republicans have to lose, and badly. It’s why the idea of a “moderate Republican” is little more than wish-flogging at this point. Kirk himself might be instinctually moderate. Heck, he got an endorsement from Gabby Giffords for being anti-NRA-ish. But at the end of the day, he has to appeal to the sort of people who would vote for Donald Trump to be President. And when you have to do that, you abdicate any claims of being a responsible and reasonable politician. Mark Kirk isn’t a moderate: he’s a member of the party of Trump, his voters, regardless of his sweaty triangulations, are Trump voters, and that’s literally all ye need to know.

*Earlier version said “since Reagan”, but that was wrong. I forgot about 1988. In my defense, I think most people have. 

08.22.16
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Saleh Blesses Russian Intervention, Confirms Russia’s Lack of Strategy

 

I like what this Putin guy is doing. He’s got the right ideas! 

 

A big argument, popular among the right, but also among serious foreign policy thinkers, is how effective Russia’s effective new foreign policy is. After all, they seem to be doing very well in Syria, bending the civil war to their will, and have all of Europe on high alert after annexing Crimea. Military exercises near the border are making people tense about the possibility of further assaults on Ukranian sovereignty. An alliance with Iran makes for a powerful new axis.

While it is clear there is serious danger in a belligerent and over-confident Russia, I argued last week that this was more a sign of weakness, a desperate attempt to project strength, because in international relations, if you’re perceived as strong, in a way you actually are strong. I argued, as have many others, that “(i)t’s a series of moves, not a coherent strategy to make the country stronger in the long term. It’ll catch up.” Here’s a few data points to back that up.

  1. Iran is already angry at Russia for announcing their use of Iranian air force bases, and now that privilege has been revoked. Russia is like the high schooler who brags about getting to second base with Suzy Cheerleader, the confusingly-named captain of the volleyball team, and so never gets to get near her again.
  2. Crimeans aren’t exactly happy with the lack of resources that Russia is putting into the region, as they are plagued with blackouts and a lack of infrastructure. Russia was more interested in taking it over to get that victory that in doing anything with it. This is how discontent forms. Russia “saved” the people of Crimea from a government that neglected them (which was a legitimate complaint), only to neglect them even more. This isn’t how a country that has its act together actually does things.

But the most telling sign comes from Yemen, where former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who hasn’t quite left the scene, and it still maneuvering, has said that he’d welcome Russian help in “fighting terrorism.”

A newly-formed governing council in Yemen could work with Russia to “fight terrorism” by allowing Moscow use of the war-torn country’s military bases, Yemen’s former president said on Sunday.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former counter-terrorism ally of the U.S. who was toppled by mass protests in 2011, told state-owned channel Russia 24 that Yemen was ready to grant Moscow access to air and naval bases.

“In the fight against terrorism we reach out and offer all facilities. Our airports, our ports… We are ready to provide this to the Russian Federation,” Saleh said in an interview in Sanaa.

The ex-strongman may lack the clout to implement such an offer. But officials from the party he heads now run a political council that controls much of the country along with the Houthi movement allied to Iran.

This is actually pretty perfect. It’s a scary thought– that would put Russia directly against the Saudis, and in turn, the US– but it is a perfect wedding of like-minds. Saleh is the king of short-term strategy, playing sides to buy time, making a series of desperate moves to stave off the nearest enemy, kicking the can down the road and hoping to make things better then. By necessity, and by temperament, he’s always been a “live today no matter what, and deal with the ramifications of today’s actions some other time.” He’s a genius at it, and is genuinely talented at survival, but not at solving any problems except the ones immediately in front of him. He never seemed to grasp that doing so creates even bigger monsters.

So his seeming approval of Russian strategy and desire for their help kind of confirms that they are playing the same game.

 

08.17.16
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Is Russia Winning In The Middle East?

 

Never quite as strategic as people think. 

 

So, Russia is now using Iranian air bases to launch pro-Asad strikes in Syria, creating a triangle within which I can’t imagine Turkey is particularly pleased to be. This seems to be a solidification of an ad hoc alliance that has been growing tighter, even as Russia agreed to be part of the Obama-led sanctions which crumpled Iranian nuclear resistance. Russia is now firmly part of the Iran/Syria axis, which could be extended to include the Houthis in Yemen and of course Hezbollah in Iraq. This is like every nightmare enemy of the last 50 years, even if they are opposed to our other nightmare enemies of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

There is a lot to discuss about the Middle East, and the ramifications in that, but I think there is an important question to ask. The Soufan Group’s IntelBrief hints at it: “While there is clear military value in the use of an Iranian airbase to launch strikes in Syria, the real gain for Russia is further solidifying its increasing role in the region.”

This is cause, in some circles, for palpitations and hyperventilations. Russia is playing maybe the leading role in the region now, certainly in Syria, and is forcing the action in favor of Asad. So are they winning? And what does winning mean?

I think this is lunacy, honestly. This is madness for Russia. What is going to happen if they “win”? What does that even look like? Asad in power, and what, all the rebel groups agreeing to lay down arms? A stable and secure Syria where both ISIS and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham are gone? Is that even possible?

There can be no long-term good for Russia to get deeper and deeper into Syria, and into its endless war, and into the collapse of the modern Middle East. This transformation is just starting. Russia, which wanted to show strength to cover up fundamental weaknesses, has had success, but it is of the short-term variety. It is expanding its war involvement against any and all of the enemies of its new allies, which are literally everyone else in the region, in some combination or another. This is not going to play well within its own Muslim population. The borders of Russia are not settled and secure either. It could have dozens of its own little Syrias.

The idea that Russia is somehow winning in the Middle East is absurd. It’s flying right into turbulence, possibly of the historic, country-reshaping kind.  The “great power” conflict between the US and Russia in the Middle East should be between who can do the most good without tying themselves in too much. You can argue that Obama has steered too close to the latter benchmark while largely avoiding the first one. I think it is silly to say that is weakness, or that it has cost us esteem, especially when there is just loss of esteem within the very same region from which he is trying to extricate us from. (It’s like being kicked out of a bar toward whose exit you’re strolling.) Russia isn’t playing that game at all: neither doing good, nor staying out of getting involved. It’s a series of moves, not a coherent strategy to make the country stronger in the long term. It’ll catch up. Russia, a country whose internal contradictions have never been resolved, is tying itself up in a century-long process of dissolution, one that could easily spread to that most impossible of nations.

 

08.17.16
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The Duties of the Press in a Truthless Campaign

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You don’t actually need a paradox to understand Trump’s lies.

In an essay yesterday for The Atlantic, Connor Friedersdorf tackles the question of media bias against Trump, particularly in light of his “Obama founded ISIS” claims. The thrust is that some people are upset that the media was deliberately twisting his words to be their most literal, and therefore their most easily disprovable. I’ll readily admit that when I saw the headline last week during a brief moment of internet connectivity, I rolled my eyes a bit, assuming (oddly, I know) that this was an obvious bit of rhetoric and the palpitations were of the clickbait variety.

Friedersdorf does a good job demolishing that, showing how Trump doubled and tripled down on it, and, most importantly, how he’ll say anything at any given time, to inflame some audiences and then claim he was doing no such thing, and it’s frankly disgusting of you to think otherwise, ok? The basic thrust is that Trump says so many outrageous and insane things (Ted Cruz’s loathsome father killed JFK) that the media has to evaluate everything like a policy statement, and debunk it as such.

It’s an interesting question about the role of the press, and to dig into it, I think it is helpful to look at Chicago politics in the 60s and 70s, at another straight-shooting authoritarian who frequently made no sense: Da Mare, Richard Daley.

Earl Bush, the long-serving press secretary for Richard J. Daley, wasn’t like most of the people surrounding the old man. He wasn’t a Bridgeport crony brought up in the rough-and-tumble world of South Side Irish politics, where loyalty and cunning were prized over book smarts. He was well-educated, and was considered to be “Daley’s translator.” He’s probably best remembered for chiding reporters who covered the mayor to play fair, in a way: “Don’t print what he said. Print what he meant.”

It is a line that’s easy to mock, but it actually raises some interesting questions. Daley was far from dumb, and was himself educated (putting himself through law school while climbing the machine ranks and raising a brood), but he had a tortured relationship with the language. What he meant to say often came out garbled, and nonsensical. So, for reporters covering him, what was there to do? On the one hand, they had a duty to convey the policies and politics of City Hall, and not just get a cheap laugh over a syntactical slip, the kind we all make when speaking, some more so than others. Reading the unedited transcript of nearly anyone can be cringeworthy. On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service.

On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service. We get to see how their minds work, or don’t, and how much they struggle to connect their talking points with any actual thought (think Marco Rubio here). Sometimes, you get a great quote out of it, one that seems more Freudian than Kinseyian. The best example of this is when Daley said of reports of police brutality in the city: “The policeman is not here to create disorder; he’s here to preserve disorder.” That seemed to encapsulate the role of the police in the racial powderkegs of the 1960s.

On the other hand…you know what he meant. Should reporters gleefully transcribe something that is the opposite of what he meant? The above quote seems to reveal a hidden truth, but that is metaphorical, and not legalistic. If Daley had said “I ordered the police to beat the hell out of the Negro” and then Earl Bush said “no no- he clearly meant to say ‘treat them well, the Negro'”, you print the former, for sure. But when it is just a slipup?  Is making it clear what a subject means a distortion, or is it observance of the truth?

I personally think it is the duty of any reporter to make sure that they print what is meant, even if they report what is said. But what happens when you have a man like Trump? To say he’s a liar is far too faint. All politicians lie (especially when they say they will never lie to you). It’s part of the job. By definition, you have to please far too many competing constituencies to always tell the truth 100% of the time. It’s impossible. And to an extent, we all know that’s acceptable.

But with Trump is is a different thing altogether. He isn’t so much lying as running an entirely 100% truthless campaign. The entire campaign is a fake, of course, an attempt to make someone who couldn’t pass a basic civics test and who can’t be bothered to learn anything about the world into a President. He himself is entirely truthless, as he sees everything in the world in relationship to himself, and interprets it to how it will benefit him and how he can use it as self-aggrandizement. That’s why he can’t go two sentences without bringing it back to himself; his own empty ego is the sole basis of his knowledge.

So the media should do what Connor was getting at: print what he says, and ignore what he pretends to mean. Or, report that too, and show how it is in direct contradiction with what he just said, and repeated. Trump is a man who thinks that being rich alchemizes his idiot proclamations into truth, so run with that. If he says “Obama probably killed MLK”, investigate it, and show how wrong and idiotic Donald Trump is. Don’t let him get away with saying “I never said that, and anyway, when I said it, it was a joke, ok, but I never said it.”  He thinks his off-the-cuff lies are correct when he says them (because he says them) as much as he believes it is correct when he later claims to have never said anything. He gets away with this because he’s been surrounded by flunkies his entire adult life. Every statement is timeless and unalterable truth, until he decides to alter it, and then it was never said. Evaluate them like that. Don’t give him any room. Don’t treat this like normal. Print everything the way it was meant.

 

 

 

08.03.16
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Programming Note: Out on The Road

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I’ll be traveling the next week and a half, with almost no internet (and virtually none after Saturday). There won’t be any posts tomorrow or Friday, but I have some scheduled for next week. These are longer (how?), more big-picture posts on American fascism, Constitutional crises, AQAP vs ISIS, and more. Hope you enjoy. Try not to let Trump take the lead, ok?

Bold prediction: by the time I’m blogging again on the 15th Trump will have said something stupid. You can take it to the bank. The money bank!

Selah,

brian