Month: May 2013

Jenna Krajeski looks at how the Syrian conflict has bled into Turkey:

It has cost Turkey seven hundred and fifty million dollars to host the [Syrian] refugees, with about one hundred million more coming in from outside sources. Members of Syria’s opposition—both armed and not—consider Turkey their base, and the Turkish government’s support for them has made the country an opponent of the Assad regime in more than just words. The border is being knocked down piece by piece—whether by journalists and soldiers crossing back and forth or shells falling on Turkish towns. In a report issued this April called “Blurring the Borders: Syrian Spillover Risk for Turkey,” the International Crisis Group says that that Turkey “now has an uncontrollable, fractured, radicalized no-man’s-land on its doorstep.” The two car bombs that exploded in Reyhanli last Saturday were like two deadly exclamation points at the end of that sentence.

Julia Ioffe captures Russia’s perspective:

“Moscow understands that something has to be done because the war has been going on for two years and it has to stop,” [Maxim Yusin, the deputy foreign affairs editor of the Russian newspaper Kommersant] explains. “But if Assad’s opponents win, there will be a bloodbath. Shiites and Alawites will be slaughtered.” Moreover, he adds, echoing the official Russian position, that the successors to Assad will likely be the ones flying the black flag of jihad and sponsoring terrorism outside Syria’s borders. Lukyanov points out that Syria has long been home to those displaced by the upheavals in the Caucasus, which has become a hotbed of terrorism and Islamist insurrection. “Getting rid of a dictatorial but secular regime, and replacing it with an Islamist regime creates yet another support network for the terrorists in our backyard,” Lukyanov explains. Yusin makes a starker analogy. “Assad does not want to target America, but these guys do,” he says. “These are thousands of potential Tsarnaevs, and France and Britain want to arm them!”

Meanwhile, Nikolas Gvosdev tries to parse American views on Syria from both sides of the aisle:

It was often said that the first Gulf War in 1990-91 exorcised the ghost of Vietnam. Today, the ghost of Iraq is alive and well, prowling the halls and counsels of government. Some want that ghost to be heeded and for the United States to stay out of Syria. Others argue that decisive action is needed to banish that apparition once and for all. How this plays out in the coming weeks remains to be seen.

Daniel Larison takes a less charitable view of those calling for intervention:

While their goals of regime change and opposition victory may be very ambitious, Syria hawks seem to have little interest in the positive transformation of Syria. Their principal concern seems to be the destruction of the current regime, and just as in Iraq there is little or no attention paid to what would be done to reconstruct a working Syrian government once this is achieved. … For many Syria hawks, the reason to intervene in Syria is not to promote a more liberal or democratic political order. Indeed, some Syria hawks may understand that any post-Assad regime will be illiberal and majoritarian, but this doesn’t stop them from wanting to bring it to power.

No, the reason most Syria hawks want to overthrow Assad is to reduce Iranian influence, and there’s not much more to it than that.

Michael Totten hazards a guess:

Lebanon is an interesting case and could be held up as a partial example for post-Assad Syria. It has never been unified. It never had a homegrown dictatorship. It never went through a socialist phase. Lebanon never wanted those things, never tried. It has a weak central state by design. That way, no one group can seize power and rule over the others. If anyone does seize power like Hezbollah recently did, it hardly makes any difference because the state’s teeth are so few and so small. Aside from Lebanon’s foreign policy shift, hardly anything changed after Hezbollah took over the government. Lebanon is still just as freewheeling and decadent as it was before. …

We shouldn’t forget that Syria’s borders were drawn not by Syrians, but by French imperialists.

The Alawites wanted a state of their own north of Lebanon and south of Turkey in the green part of Syria between the Mediterranean and the an-Nusayriyah Mountains. They actually had a semi-autonomous Free Alawite State, complete with their own flag, before the French forced them back into a merger with the inland Sunni Arab region. The Kurds in the north and northeast likewise never wanted to be part of Syria. They wanted, and still want, an independent Kurdistan of their own. If the people of Syria had drawn their own borders, the country would be smaller and more cohesive than it currently is. It has only been held together thus far because it has been ruled by a totalitarian terrorist state.

“Look,” [Lebanon MP Amine Gemayel] said, “you have to understand something. There is no multicultural country in the world that can survive without some kind of a composite state. All multicultural nations are federate states. Belgium, Switzerland, Canada are all federal states. Spain doesn’t like to be called a federal state, but it is in fact a federal state. Multicultural states that don’t go to federalism go to partition like Yugoslavia. It’s very difficult without federalism. You’re asking people who are very different, who have different attachments to the region around them, to rule the country together. It’s impossible.”

Davy Bry pans the recent spate of memoirs about fatherhood:

While most genre memoirs seek to explain a specific and unique experience, shared by some but not by many, the fatherhood memoir is a study of a common phenomenon. And there’s a too frequent problem with studies of this common experience. It has to do with a thing that lots of people learn when they have a kid and so find themselves sitting around with other parents talking about their kids a lot: No one is ever going to think the way your kid mispronounces words when he or she is learning to talk is as cute as you think it is. (No one except the kid’s grandparents.) So when Magary repeatedly quotes his son saying “oat-kay” instead of “okay” (“Deddy, are woo oat-kay?”) and when Price, throughout the book, has his sons refer to each other as “brudda” (“It’s OK, Big Brudda is here!”), it’s like listening to the parents on the next table over at Chuck E. Cheese’s coo babytalk and pet names at children you don’t know. Such pitfalls makes an author’s job harder—the more mundane a story a book tells, the more exceptional the telling must be. Magary endured the premature birth of a child, and a serious health crisis that followed. But neither he nor Price can claim access to parental experience that falls very far outside of the norm.

Siddhartha Mitter takes issue with Max Fisher’s map of racism by country:

[T]he biggest problem, of course, is that “race” is impossible to operationalize in a cross-national comparison. Whereas a homosexual, or an Evangelical Christian, or a heavy drinker, or a person with a criminal record, means more or less the same thing country to country, a person being of “another race” depends on constructs that vary widely, in both nature and level of perceived importance, country to country, and indeed, person to person. In other words, out of all of the many traits of difference for which the [World Values Survey] surveyed respondents’ tolerance, the Swedish economists – and Fisher, in their wake – managed to select for comparison the single most useless one.

Mitter thinks this is representative of broader problems in the blogosphere:

The specialty of foreign-affairs blogging is explaining to a supposedly uninformed public the complexities of the outside world. Because blogging isn’t reporting, nor is it subject to much editing (let alone peer review), posts like Fisher’s are particularly vulnerable to their author’s blind spots and risk endogenizing, instead of detecting and flushing out, the bullshit in their source material. What is presented as education is very likely to turn out, in reality, obfuscation.

This is an endemic problem across the massive middlebrow “Ideas” industry that has overwhelmed the Internet, taking over from more expensive activities like research and reporting. In that respect, Fisher’s work is a symptom, not a cause.

Dan Drezner disagrees:

[I]n this instance, the primary fault lies not with foreign policy bloggers, but with academics.

It’s not like Fisher commissioned a bogus survey and then wrote up the findings in a misleading manner.  Rather, he relied on a survey that goes back three decades and has been cited pretty widely in the academic literature.  He got to that survey via an academic article that got through the peer-review process.  Almost all journalists not in possession of a Ph.D., going through that route, would have taken the data as gospel.  … I’m all for better education in the ways of statistics and social science methodology in the foreign affairs community, but methinks Mitter is setting the bar extraordinarily high here.

Second, the blog ecosystem “worked” in this particular case.  Fisher posted something, a bunch of social scientists looked at the post and found something problematic, and lo and behold, errors in the data were discovered and publicized.  As I’ve opined before, one of the signal purposes of blogging is to critique those higher up in the intellectual food chain.  I understand that Mitter would prefer that the original error never take place.  By its very nature, however, the peer review process for blogging takes place after publication — not before.

Drezner updates:

Mitter has responded in part here, and at more length in a constructive comment to this post.  Both are well worth reading, and put some more context into his original post.  He’s getting to some interesting tensions about the nature of expertise and “publicity” in a changing media landscape that are worth mulling over before responding.