Month: October 2013

Juan Cole is puzzled by Saudi Arabia’s rejection of a UN Security Council seat:

It is hard to know what to make of the Saudi action, which has never occurred before in the history of the UN. Perhaps King Abdullah believes that his country would get more concessions from Russia regarding Syria this way than it would without the histrionics. There are three possibilities going forward. The Saudis could rethink their reluctance, and could finally join before January 1, when their term begins. The UNSC could on the other had have a special election to replace them. Third, the UNSC could limp along with 14 members for a couple of years.

How Pillar understands the news:

A different and credible way to look at the Saudi move is as simple pique, less a matter of any calculation than of emotion and frustration at high levels, probably the level of the king. In this respect it is the result of a flawed policy-making system that does not do a good job of weeding out high-level emotion.

Maya Gebeily’s take is similar:

Somehow, I have some serious doubts that the Saudi government suddenly cares about the idea of equal representation … More likely, they’re throwing a hissy-fit about things clearly not going their way in the Middle East: rapprochement with Iran, diplomatic progress on Syria, the US dropping support for Egypt’s military, etc.

Erik Voeten floats a different theory:

Any time the council deals with a major crisis, any non-permanent member is forced to publicly take a position. This often presents a problem, especially for states  who depend on the U.S. even though the U.S. is unpopular domestically or regionally. Or, simply because the U.S. has different foreign policy interests. As the map below shows (see explanation here), Saudi Arabia often votes against the U.S. on U.N. General Assembly resolutions. But those are symbolic resolutions. It can sometimes be very convenient to remain ambiguous when things really matter. Saudi Arabia depends heavily on the U.S. for military equipment. Why upset the U.S. if there is little to gain from a seat on the Security Council? Indeed, Saudi Arabia has never before been a member of the UN Security Council!

Meanwhile, Joshua Keating argues that the Saudis would benefit little from a seat:

Other countries often covet the Council’s rotating seats both for the international prestige they confer and for the goodies—often in the foreign aid—that come with having a vote. In some cases, the benefits of council membership can even act as a kind of resource curse, encouraging irresponsible and anti-democratic behavior from governments. These factors don’t really come into play with Saudi Arabia, which isn’t exactly in need of foreign aid.

Destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons continues to run on schedule. Fisher welcomes the news:

Complying with the inspectors may well be in Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s interest, which is also a good explanation for why it’s succeeding. Sarin gas will not win or lose him the war; military support from Iran and diplomatic cover from Russia are far more important. So is keeping out the United States. Working with the U.N. inspectors accomplishes all of this for Assad, even if it means he has to give up his chemical weapons.

In this sense, yes, the deal probably helps Assad stay in power. But it also makes it far less likely, and perhaps someday soon makes it impossible, for him to use chemical weapons against his own people. That’s good for Syrians, although ending the war would be better. More to the point of both the deal and of the initial U.S. plan to strike Syria, it helps uphold the international norm against the use of chemical weapons. That, and not ending the war, was Obama’s clearly stated mission all along. That’s not a mission that does a whole lot to help Syrians, or much of anything to resolve Syria’s civil war, but it does at least appear to be so far achievable. And that’s something.

But security is still tenuous:

Syria is now the most dangerous country in the world for reporters:

According to the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, at least 114 journalists have died there since the spring of 2011. Among the dead are seasoned correspondents like the American Marie Colvin, who was killed in Homs in 2012, and freelancers like the Frenchman Olivier Voisin, who was wounded in February near Idlib and later died in Turkey. Meanwhile, 16 foreign journalists are officially missing, along with an untold number of fixers and translators. Because of voluntary media blackouts—enforced to avoid encouraging would-be kidnappers—the real number is almost certainly higher.

As the conflict continues, Syria is becoming more dangerous still. By one estimate, there are now more than 1,000 rebel groups operating in the country, some secular and some—such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS—decidedly jihadist. Regime forces have pushed back the rebels in key areas, and the Free Syrian Army, or FSA, is often unable to protect reporters as it once did, or ensure safe passage through rebel-held areas. These days, most foreign journalists do only short stints inside Syria—“get in under the radar, get what you need, and get the fuck out before you get kidnapped” is how one photographer put it.

One reporter in the region is Joshua Hersh, who has this dispatch on the Alawite community:

What motivates the staunch Alawite support for the regime remains poorly understood, but it is typically characterized in monolithic and myopic terms: the Alawites, it is said, back the regime because they are the regime; its demise would be their own. But the Alawites’ support for Assad is much more complex—and harder to break. … “When we talk about the Alawites, the first thing we naturally think of is the regime, and that Bashar Assad is an Alawite, and so the fight must be about solidarity with the regime,” Aziz Nakkash, a Syrian researcher who recently published a paper about the Alawites for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, told me when we spoke in Beirut. “But when you look inside the community, what you see is a series of personal choices. People fight because they lost a family member, or because they need the money, or—even if they don’t like fighting or the regime—because they are afraid for their own survival. It’s all about survival—for themselves and for their family, not for the sect.”

Alyssa Rosenberg has written an atypically brutal and ad hominem take-down of Jimenez’s The Book Of Matt. She focuses on the reliability of his anonymous sources:

[T]he sourcing gets particularly weak when Jimenez tries to make the leap from suggesting that Shepard used methamphetamine to suggesting that he was dealing on a large scale. A paragraph like this one would only be remotely credible if Jimenez had done an impressive job of establishing his reportorial bona fides earlier in the book:

I recalled that a friend of Matthew from the Denver circle had said Aaron and Matthew reported to different “co-captains,” and that both young men were at risk because of what they knew about the meth trade in Wyoming — and beyond. But my own investigation suggests there were more than two co-captains operating in Laramie at the time Matthew was killed, and that these rival operators weren’t always competitors and adversaries; they cooperated when it was in their interest to do so. According to former dealing cohorts of Aaron, his Laramie-based suppliers and the “top dogs” in Matthew’s Denver circle were well acquainted and, in some instances, were friends.

But instead, given the available evidence, it comes across as demanding a laughable level of trust. And it certainly doesn’t help that Jimenez never explains what his investigation consisted of, who his sources were, and how credible they were, or make any sort of link between a potential relationship and a motivation for silencing Aaron McKinney. Is Jimenez relying on the testimony of long-term meth users, reporting on their recollections from a distance? Is he talking to dealers who might want to make themselves seem like more significant players than they are? Is he relying on court documents?

And a paragraph like this implies the structure of an organization as well as motivation for a cover-up, but in the hands of a more experienced reporter, it would only the beginning of a longer and more detailed explanation, which would be sourced to people who were at least given basic descriptions, if not pseudonyms. Savvy reporters know that a paragraph like this invites questions. Jimenez seems to regard it as a decisive conclusion. There’s no question that methamphetamine’s a big and dangerous business. But if Jimenez has the goods, he’s not even close to delivering them here.

I was struck by the anger in Alyssa’s review, especially compared with the dispassionate manner of Steve’s explanations of his reporting. But she’s right to press on this point. I too was concerned about anonymous sourcing, which is why I insisted that Steve answer the charges in our own interview series with him. He did here:

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Make your own mind up given the two sources or, better still, read the book. I found much of it convincing, but perhaps my own cognitive bias against the whole issue of hate crimes affected my judgment.

But two critical parts of the Matthew Shepard myth are demolished in the book, even if you do not buy the idea that Shepard was active in selling drugs. The myth posits that McKinney and Henderson picked a stranger, Shepard, out at a bar in order to bash a gay guy. But Jimenez’s books shows very convincingly that McKinney and Shepard had known each other well before that night, shared a meth habit, and may even have had a sexual encounter. Now meth-heads do crazy things – and the notion that meth had nothing to do with the savagery of the murder, when McKinney had been on the drug for days before the crime, seems somewhat crude and counter-intuitive to me.

And there’s another myth about the book that is not true. It does not say that homophobia had nothing to do with the crime, as Alyssa falsely writes. It suggests it was indeed part of the motive, but that the case was more complicated than that. It gave us an early insight into the meth epidemic among gay men that was about to become a massive issue in the years ahead and that gay leaders were gingerly about addressing. But more importantly: the fact that this crime may have been more complicated than some felt was politically useful at the time does not detract from the fact that it was in part a homophobic attack and a horrendous crime, as more thoughtful reviews, like Aaron Hicklin’s in Out, or JoAnn Wypijewski’s in The Nation – hardly a rightwing rag. Check out Amazon readers’ reviews too, because they are not beholden to gay establishment interests. The book gets a 4.2 rating. These readers clearly don’t share Alyssa’s contempt for the book. I’m with them. But you should make up your own mind.

Last week, Jacob Sullum worried that cannabis taxes will be too high to quash the black market. Kleiman, on the other hand, fears that pot will be too cheap:

Now that the federal government has made it clear that state-licensed production in Washington and Colorado will mostly get a pass from federal law enforcement, and now that Washington has decided to allow outdoor growing, avoiding the production bottleneck that might have resulted from the lags in local land-use approval for growing facilities, I’d expect to see much lower-than-current prices in Washington State’s commercial stores no later than next fall.

Why this could be a problem:

If cannabis prices are allowed to fall to something like their free-market levels, a very large increase in heavy use would be the likely result. Preventing that will require heavy specific-excise taxation (perhaps on a per-milligram-of-THC basis) and enough enforcement to prevent the evasion of that tax.

In other cannabis commentary, Kelley Vlahdos looks at the experiences of different towns in Colorado, which have the choice to allow or ban marijuana sales within their jurisdictions:

[W]hile many places—including other major Colorado cities, like Thorton, Westminster, and Centennial—have revolted against so-called “cannabisiness,” plenty of towns and counties are not just resigned to the new reality, but are actually embracing the “weed friendly” label. In fact, officials like Sal Pace, commissioner of Pueblo County, which plans to move forward with commercial sales, say they are happy to get the spillover business from smokeless neighbors like Colorado Springs. “Every time one of our neighbors bans it, we cheer,” Pace told the Denver Post. His people tell TAC that Pueblo is courting marijuana testing facilities and other marijuana-related commerce, and is serious about pot serving as a long-term economic driver

Eliza Gray notes that California will be keeping tabs on CO and WA:

This week, the American Civil Liberties Union announced a new panel, headed by California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, to draft a possible 2016 ballot measure to legalize pot in the Golden State, where an earlier attempt failed in 2010. The panel will study the implementation of Washington and Colorado’s laws to see how they might serve as a model for California, according to member and ACLU attorney, Alison Holcomb.

 

[Update: See correction below]

The Fix considers whether the GOP will heed Mitch McConnell’s advice:

McConnell’s advocacy for a sort of Republican realpolitik is, quite clearly, the right approach for his party in Congress.  The shutdown was, by any measure, a political disaster for Republicans and one that they simply cannot afford to repeat again. (We mean that literally. If Republicans forced another government shutdown over President Obama’s health-care law, it would almost certainly negate their chances of winning the Senate back in 2014 and might also jeopardize their chances of holding the House next November.) At some point, principle must give way to practicality, and now is that time for Republicans.

Of course I agree, but I still find it passing strange that McConnell is now viewed as some kind of moderate realist. I’m a little tired of bestowing the laurels of moderation on all those who only actually worked toward sanity in the very last hours before default. Many appeased insanity until that very point, which, given the economic catastrophe over the horizon, is not moderation at all.

The GOP is full of cowards – congressmen scared of primaries, leaders scared of Ted Cruz, everyone scared of Rush Limbaugh. It’s a party riven by fear, exploiting fear, and creating fear.

And McConnell is absolutely a part of that. Which is perhaps why Pareene supports the Tea Party’s efforts to oust McConnell – to heighten the contradictions and bring on the nadir we need:

The campaign to take down Mitch McConnell is insane, from a conservative perspective. McConnell is the single most effective legislator Republicans have, and he’s used his power to advance the interests of the conservative movement. … All McConnell has done is undermine and block Obama’s agenda with ruthless efficiency for five years. And he’s done so without becoming the sort of angry laughingstock Republican that normal Americans hate (and movement conservatives love). What has Ted Cruz done? What have Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan done? Rand Paul is trying to actually be the effective version of Ted Cruz, and what has he done?

So, yes, fund a primary campaign against Mitch McConnell. Definitely do this, conservatives. It will work out great. Even if Bevin beats McConnell and wins the seat, Republicans will have traded their best parliamentary weapon for another Mike Lee. Good strategy, everyone.

[Correction: In the original version of this post, I cited a quote from Mitch McConnell about Charlie Sheen from the New Yorker’s Paul Slansky’s quiz. The quote was from Rand Paul, not McConnell. The answers to the quiz were upside down and I read a b) as d). I removed the quote. Apologies for the mix-up.]

(Photo: A Mitch McConnell look-alike in Britain’s Conservative Party Conference last month. By Getty Images.)