Matt Steinglass identifies a big problem with the way the US conducts foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Namely, we always seem to be looking for an ethically sound position that often doesn’t exist:
Over and over in the wars America conducts we attempt to create political entities that meet our ideological criteria, but have no natural constituency in the countries themselves. Maliki, Karzai, Diem: we become infuriated at the leaders we install when they fail to carry out our vision of progress. We are the world’s biggest Hegelians, analysing every conflict as a clash between two opposing principles that need to be resolved, and then trying to create that synthesis.
We have the same longing in domestic politics, for that matter. If only some great moderate could bridge the gap between the two parties, and bring us all together towards the reasonable consensus! We cannot seem to understand that if there were a constituency for that middle position, someone would be occupying that space; if there is no one in that space, it is because the middle position has no constituency. We keep trying to create a third force that does not exist. We need to stop it. The forces on the ground are the forces on the ground. If we support one side, we should back that side, and if not, not. If the two sides want peace, we can help them reach peace. If they want to fight, they will.
That’s a bit of a stretch from Hegel, but I take the point. We constantly seem to forget that the supremely smart and moral choices today can become deeply problematic tomorrow. So the CIA’s coup in Iran in 1953 seemed like a good idea at the time – until you realize the astonishing cost over the long run. Funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan as a gambit against the Soviets also seemed like an inspired way to win the Cold War without risking a global nuclear clash. But there’s a straight line from that decision to September 11, 2001.
What we don’t seem to be able to grasp is that there are realities in the world we cannot change, and some of them are not going to be completely beneficial for the United States or the West. But that doesn’t mean we have to fix them or indeed can fix them. We might try as an alternative to live with them, until they sometimes resolve themselves. It seems to me, for example, as if the West’s interventions in the Middle East – often well-intentioned – have done very little but slow or scramble that region’s natural historical development. Leaving alone, while guarding our own security, may lead to occasional bad results. But constant meddling only guarantees them – in an endless, fruitless and draining cycle.
Along those line, Chase Carter makes the case against continuing to support any Syrian rebels against Bashar al-Assad:
American idealism frequently clouds the judgment of our policy makers. We want to promote democracy everywhere, and we have a seemingly nonnegotiable aversion to dictators. But sometimes there simply isn’t a better alternative—toppling a despotic regime often creates more problems than it solves.
The United States is certainly creating more problems for itself in Syria by working against Assad. Obama said the United States needs to support moderates in Syria because they are fighting terrorists “who find safe haven in the chaos,” but arming the opposition to topple Assad is only prolonging the chaotic power vacuum that allows those terrorists to thrive.
Pointing to Pew’s most recent survey of the Middle East, Bruce Stokes adds that such meddling is not well received, even among those who would like to see Assad go:
[D]espite their fear of extremism spreading and their distaste for Assad, Middle Eastern publics voice no support for aiding those attempting to oust the Assad government. People in the region have seen the results of Western intervention in Iraq. And they may not relish the idea of other Arab states acquiring a taste for interfering in the domestic affairs of their neighbors. There was little support for aid to anti-government forces battling the Damascus regime in 2013, and there is even less backing in 2014.
Roughly three-quarters of Lebanese (78 percent), Tunisians (77 percent), and Turks (73 percent) are against Western nations sending arms and military supplies to the insurgents. (Respondents were not asked to differentiate between rebel groups.) And about two-thirds of Palestinians (68 percent), Egyptians (67 percent), and Jordanians (66 percent) agree.
In a press conference yesterday, Obama announced a limited American response to the Iraq crisis, including the deployment of additional intelligence assets and a team of up to 300 military advisers to help train the country’s security forces:
The troops, drawn from US special operations forces, will assist the Iraqi military to develop and execute a counter-offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis). Their mission is likely to spread to the selection of targets for any future air strikes, but Obama stopped short of accepting a plea from Baghdad to order US air power into the skies over Iraq immediately. Instead, Obama said the option of air strikes would be held in reserve. Any such strikes would be “targeted” and “precise”, Obama said, warning that the fate of the country “hangs in the balance”. …
Obama said the US had “significantly increased” its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in areas of Iraq taken by Isis. However, his decision not to authorise immediate air strikes will disappoint the Iraqi government, which has formally requested that the US provide Iraq with the air power it lacks. The Obama administration has said military involvement by US forces would not involve combat troops, and would be contingent on the Iraqi government making a concerted effort to bridge the sectarian divides threatening the breakup of the country.
It gives the United States the kind of direct contact with Iraqi forces that allows them to judge their strengths and weaknesses, and act as a check on sectarian abuses, as well as help funnel U.S. aid to the units that will use it against ISIL and other extremist forces, rather than encourage sectarian attacks and Civil war. It keeps up the right kind of pressure on Maliki and any successor, and still helps Iraq deal with an all too real threat of extremism. With the right kind of quiet dialogue, it will also assure Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE that the United States is not giving Maliki a blank check.
What emerges from Obama’s remarks is a portrait of cold-blood realism. He thinks our invasion was reckless. He thinks we gave too many lives and spent too much money. He sees ISIS as a threat to regional stability, our oil supply, and our security from terrorism. He’s willing to use force, but only to the extent necessary to quash that threat. Beyond that, he’ll leave the restoration of Iraq to Iraqis. And if that means replacing Maliki, Obama won’t shed any tears.
He also saw Obama’s speech as a strong rebuke to the neocons:
Obama isn’t going to tolerate [the narrative that he has squandered Bush’s victory]. His view is that the neocons wrecked Iraq and that the latest crisis is just another mess he has to clean up. And he’s increasingly willing to say so, now that polls show strong public opposition to the war.
The trick is to do this without saying Americans died in vain. During the Q&A, Obama said one of his goals is “vindicating the enormous effort and sacrifice that was made by our troops in giving [Iraq] an opportunity to build a stable, inclusive society.” So he accepts some responsibility to protect the war’s gains. But he barely concealed his contempt for the decision to invade. He even implied that Iran ought to learn from our mistake: If the Iranians go into Iraq, he suggested, “they could find themselves fighting in a whole lot of places, and that’s probably not good for the Iranian economy or the Iranian people over the longer term, either.”
But Max Boot worries that Obama is treating the sovereign government of Iraq too much like, well, a sovereign government:
Sending in 300 military personnel to work with the Iraqi Security Forces will enhance American awareness of Iraqi military operations and could potentially help honest officers to resist sectarian orders from Nouri al-Maliki’s henchmen. But there is a danger in embedding U.S. forces only with the Iraqi military when it has become so heavily politicized by Shiite operatives. It is vital that the U.S. not be seen as taking a side in this sectarian conflict and that we not become an enabler of Maliki’s sectarian agenda.
For this reason it is imperative that U.S. personnel work closely not only with the Iraqi military but also with the Kurdish peshmerga and whatever anti-ISIS forces can be cobbled together among the Sunnis–call it the Son of the Sons of Iraq (as the Anbar Awakening militia was known). Moreover, it is imperative that the U.S. not forget about the “S”–Syria”–in ISIS. We need to hit ISIS on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border, which will require doing much more to train and equip the Free Syrian Army and possibly support their operations with air power.
Juan Cole believes that airstrikes, which he expects will be carried out by drones, are a mistake if their end purpose is to prop up Maliki:
To the extent that Obama is likely paving the way to US drone strikes on ISIS in Iraq, he is mysteriously failing to take his own advice. He has already admitted that the Iraq crisis is political and not military, and said that there are no military solutions. The Sunni Iraqis of Mosul, Tikrit and other towns of the west and north of the country have risen up and thrown off the government and the army of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The uprising was coordinated with ISIS, but was made up of many groups and to some extent was the spontaneous act of townspeople. Droning some ISIS commanders to death isn’t going to change the situation in Mosul, a city of 2 million that is done out with the Maliki government.
For Obama to associate himself with an attempt to crush this uprising in favor the the highly sectarian ruling Da’wa Party (Shiite ‘Call’ or ‘Mission’), which is allied with Iran is most unwise. If it had to be done, it should have been done as a covert operation and never spoken of publicly.
Daniel Byman also hopes we don’t go ahead with airstrikes:
If the Iraqi Army withers and runs when attacked, limited airstrikes will ultimately do little to push ISIS back. Air power can’t conquer territory by itself. Even in the best circumstances, airstrikes must be sustained to have a strategic effect. And strikes must work in tandem with advances on the ground, so Iraqi forces can move in and occupy any territory from which ISIS withdraws. If strikes are limited in duration, ISIS can simply lie low, camouflaging its forces among the civilian population and avoiding the offensive until the spotlight moves off Iraq, as it inevitably will. If its forces are hit in one area, it can simply reoccupy the territory when the bombing ends. The United States must be prepared to strike often and repeatedly if it is going to play a major role in pushing ISIS back. This could take months even if all goes well.
Davidson thinks that focusing on military tactics is misguided:
[T]he idea that local forces who engaged in intractable battles just need to learn how to fight properly can be a trap. Mass desertion, of the sort that led to the fall of Mosul, is a political question, not a matter of learning how to drill. Training can sometimes mean telling the Army you’re working with not to engage in abuses; the proper verb, then, might be restraining, which some have argued is America’s proper job when it comes to Iraq, and why we ought to have left a residual force there. Under this theory, we should give the Shiite-dominated Maliki government guns, and then stand by them, because if we don’t they will point the guns at the wrong people—at members of the Sunni community. How does a mission like that end?
Judis feels for Obama, noting the thorny position he’s in and that he doesn’t really have any good options:
He is suffering from political cross pressures. On the one hand, there is next to zero public support for any military intervention in Iraq or anywhere else. In an April NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 47 percent thought the United States should become “less active” in world affairs; only 19 percent thought it should become “more active.” At the same time, when the press reports chaos overseas, and when the President’s opponents in Washington accuse him of being weak for not ending the chaos, public support for the president plummets. In this month’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 37 percent of the public approved and 57 percent disapproved of the President’s handling of foreign policy. That’s an all time low for Obama.
Charges of weakness from McCain or The Weekly Standard are often reinforced by hyped reporting meant to keep viewers from switching channels. Waiting for Obama to speak today, I heard Christiane Amanpour saying on CNN that ISIL represented a “dire and existential threat” to the United States. Then CNN’s Jake Tapper described ISIL as “approaching closer to Baghdad.” I don’t think either of these statements were true, but I think the reporters were merely trying to create drama around the President’s speech. They weren’t trying to pressure him for action, but statements like these have exactly that effect and probably led to the president advancing measures today that make it look like he is doing something to hold Iraq together, but that are unlikely, on their own, to succeed.
Amanpour has also described ISIS as a branch of al Qaeda. There seem to be few hyperboles she will not advance to promote the cause of American military intervention in the Middle East. Previous Dish on the possibility of US airstrikes here, here, and here. My own take on the CIA’s ambitions is here.
It’s in the blood, you know. Growing up, the year 1966 almost had the same resonance as 1940 in Britain. That was the year we really beat the Germans – in the World Cup, rather than the World War. The event shaped all of us – I was three at the time. And ever since, the fragile possibility of re-living that moment has always haunted the country. It still does:
After my post yesterday on the crudely imperialist assumptions embedded in David Ignatius’ latest column, a couple of sentences were changed. A reader caught them:
Your excerpt: “President Obama sensibly appears to be leaning toward an alternative policy that would replace Maliki with a less sectarian and polarizing prime minister — and then begin using U.S. military power on behalf of this more broadly based government. The White House is already mulling a list of alternative prime ministers.”
His piece now reads: Obama has concluded that Iraq faces all-out civil war and partition unless it replaces Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with a less sectarian and polarizing leader. U.S. diplomats are floating the names of alternative candidates in Baghdad. Meanwhile, Obama is sending up to 300 military advisers to assess if the Iraqi army can be salvaged after it collapsed in Anbar province, Mosul and Tikrit.
Which, assuming the correction came from the administration, is good news. I was probably hyper-ventilating yesterday and not for the first time. Obama is likely not going to do something stupid in Iraq. But the tone of Ignatius’ piece was gob-smacking.
The British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp that was sold at Sotheby’s in New York Tuesday fetched a world-record price for the fourth time in its long life. It went under the hammer at $7.9 million – $9.48 million if the 20-percent buyer’s premium is included – to an anonymous private bidder. This makes it the most expensive item in the world by weight and size, according to the auction house.
Laurel Dalrymple shares some of its colorful backstory:
Just one copy of the One-Cent is known to exist, and it has not been seen in public for 30 years. … The stamp’s first owner was a Scottish boy named Vernon Vaughan who found it in 1873 among his family’s letters. He sold it to a local collector for 6 shillings (The Washington Post says that was about $1.50 back then). From there, the stamp passed through the hands of many philatelists, including Philipp von Ferrary, one of the world’s greatest stamp collectors. It also spent some time in a Berlin museum and in the hands of the French as World War I reparations.
The stamp nearly ended up in the hands of King George V, but he underbid. It is the one major piece absent from the Royal Family’s heirloom collection of stamps, said David Beech, recently retired curator of stamps at the British Library.
On a less charming note, The Economistobserves that the stamp – which, Sotheby’s was quick to point out, sold for nearly 1 billion times its face value – is just the latest example of gross excess brought to you by income inequality:
Why have prices for very rare stamps risen so high? The broad reason is that number of extremely wealthy people in the world has soared in recent years. The Hurun Global Rich List, published in February, counted 1,867 dollar-billionaires, an increase of 414 on the previous year. That means ever higher premiums are paid for the most covetable items over those that are merely good – from world-famous works of art, to the finest wines, to one-of-a-kind stamps. One estimate suggests that really rare stamps have risen in value by 11 percent annually for the past four decades; meanwhile the value of good-but-not-extraordinary collections has slumped.
Kelsey McKinney interviews novelist Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, about her time answering the reclusive writer’s fan mail:
JR:I answered such a high volume that they fell into these categories for me. There were letters from people who I called in my head the crazies,” which ranged from people who seemed totally bonkers to weird stalker Unabomber people in love with Salinger. These letters often would be written in pencil, or pen but with blotches of ink smudged all over the paper. There was something really repulsive about it, almost as if they were like, “here are my bodily fluids on the page.” There were those people, and I was told that if anything seemed particularly crazy, I was supposed to report it to my boss’s second in command.
Then there were adolescents and people in their early 20s who would write in the voice of Holden or in the voice of Salinger, and those letters were hilarious. “Dear Jerry you old bastard. Me and my crumbund were thinking about how phony everyone in the world is. You’re the only person who totally gets us.”
KM: You didn’t read Salinger’s books until you were already working for the agency. What was it like reading his work while reading these fan letters?
JR: A lot of the reason I ultimately read him was seeing the impact he had made on these people’s lives. Somehow, for to this vast swath of the world’s population, he was able to make them feel less alone. They wrote these letters to him that were so intimate. They conflated Salinger with Holden, and what I got from that was that his work had such an intimacy of voice, and the stakes were so high in his work that somehow these readers were able to enter into these works as if they were kind of part of a texture of their own lives instead of a work of fiction. Which is ultimately what the best fiction does.
In a consideration of commercial architecture, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan nominates the data center as the 21st-century successor to the factory:
It’s hard not to see the parallels… Each type of building is designed for very specific commercial activities, and each has to adhere to strict budgets and schedules. They are both perfectly utilitarian. … As [architect Marco] Magarelli explained to me, these are far from normal buildings: Some data centers use more than 100 times the power of a typical office building. They need to be ultra-secure and ultra-stable against hackers, natural disasters, and all kinds of environmental ills. These are the buildings that hold the world’s data – if they go, so does our Internet.
(Photo: Filters that are part of a cooling system line a room inside the Facebook Inc. Prineville Data Center in Prineville, Oregon, on April 28, 2014. By Meg Roussos/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Illinois recently became the first state to ban microbeads – those little plastic bits of grit found in some personal hygiene products. Katherine Martinko explains the environmental rationale:
Microbeads give facial and body scrubs a grainy texture for exfoliation, but they are an ecological nightmare. Because they range in size from 0.0004 to 1.24 millimeters, they are too small to be filtered out by water treatment plants. They get flushed into waterways, ending up in lakes where they float, absorb toxins, and get eaten by marine animals because they resemble fish eggs. It takes a freshwater mussel 47 days to flush out ingested microbeads.
Martinko shows how the decision has repercussions far beyond the Land of Lincoln:
Illinois’s ban is important, but one more statewide ban is desperately needed, since that would create a “distribution nightmare” for companies and force them to come up with alternatives. The CBC quoted 5 Gyres associate director Stiv Wilson: “Effectively by winning two states, you win the entire North American region.” New York, Ohio, and California all have anti-microbead legislation in the works.
Meanwhile, researchers are working to develop eco-friendly alternatives to the plastic beads. Alexa Kurzius considers the prospects of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a “bioplastic” made with fermented bacteria:
[T]he majority of microplastics tend to float, which means they move readily from your shower drain, through wastewater treatment plants, and into waterways. “It’s like the saying from Finding Nemo,” explains [researcher Kirk] Havens. “All drains lead to the ocean.”
PHA, on the other hand, is denser than water, and thus sinks to the bottom. When it sinks, it’s buried with other sediment or consumed by salt or freshwater bacteria. This is an improvement over synthetic microplastics, which are more likely to be eaten by microorganisms that mistake the tiny pellets for food. But if bacteria consume PHA, they break the substance down into water, carbon dioxide, biomass, and naturally occurring small molecules after a few months. These substances are relatively harmless compared to longer-living man-made plastics like polyethylene.
Update from a reader:
Just wanted make a slight correction to the quote you provide from Martinko. Microbeads can be removed by water treatment plants. Coagulation/flocculation removes particles down to 0.01 microns and granulation media filtration removes particles down to 0.5 um. So, microbeads wouldn’t end up in your drinking water.
Wastewater treatment plants, however, do not have the same emphasis on particle removal so, yes, microbeads do end up in receiving water ways.
Hannah Newman takes stock of the burgeoning “invasivore” movement:
Norman’s Cay is currently the only American restaurant north of South Carolina serving lionfish, but that’s likely to change soon, thanks to a fast-spreading trend seeking to use our appetites as a way to control the vast numbers of plants and animals colonizing new habitats and destroying native species.
Yet as the second lionfish taco quickly disappeared from my plate, I couldn’t help but wonder: Can we really take down invasives with knives and forks? If more of us eat lionfish, wild boar tenderloin, Asian carp fritters, or garlic mustard pesto, will it make a difference?
Experts are skeptical, pointing out that once a foreign species has entrenched itself in a new place – such as the Indo-Pacific lionfish that has now virtually taken over the waters of the Western Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico – eradication is almost impossible. Critics argue that encouraging consumption might have the unintended effect of spreading harmful species even more widely. But the invasivores are undeterred, noting that their campaign is not only selling books and changing restaurant menus; it’s also spreading awareness of a crippling environmental problem that is rapidly homogenizing the world’s ecosystems and costing over $130 billion a year in the United States alone.
(Photo: The red lionfish [Pterois volitans] is one of two species of lionfish to colonize the the east coast of North America and the Caribbean. It’s pictured above its native habitat in Indonesia. By Jens Petersen)
Mulling over the link between “time poverty” and economic want, Konnikova contends that “in the case of someone who isn’t otherwise poor, poverty of time is an unpleasant inconvenience. But for someone whose lack of time is just one of many pressing concerns, the effects compound quickly”:
We make a mistake when we look at poverty as simply a question of financial constraint. Take what happened with my request for an extension. It was granted, and the immediate time pressure was relieved. But even though I met the new deadline (barely), I’m still struggling to dig myself out from the rest of the work that accumulated in the meantime. New deadlines that are about to whoosh by, a growing list of ignored errands, a rent check and insurance payment that I just realized I haven’t mailed. And no sign of that promised light at the end of the tunnel.
My experience is the time equivalent of a high-interest loan cycle, except instead of money, I borrow time. But this kind of borrowing comes with an interest rate of its own: By focusing on one immediate deadline, I neglect not only future deadlines but the mundane tasks of daily life that would normally take up next to no time or mental energy. It’s the same type of problem poor people encounter every day, multiple times: The demands of the moment override the demands of the future, making that future harder to reach.
to carry out our vision of progress. We are the world’s biggest Hegelians, analysing every conflict as a clash between two opposing principles that need to be resolved, and then trying to create that synthesis.
The Dish 
