Author: Jonah Shepp

On Behalf Of Israel’s Foul-Weather Fans …

by Jonah Shepp

In a response to the repeated assertions by the likes of Jonathan Chait, Ezra Klein, and Peter Beinart that Israel’s actions are making it harder for liberal Zionists like themselves to defend their positions, Shmuel Rosner accuses these writers of being “fair-weather fans” of the Jewish state:

Sometimes it feels as if liberal Zionist critics are trying to ensure that Israel’s deeds do not rub off on them. At other times, it feels as if they’re trying to clear their conscience of something for which they feel partially responsible. They seem to believe that the implied threat that Israel might lose Jewish supporters abroad will somehow convince the government to alter its policies. This is a self-aggrandizing fantasy and reveals a poor grasp of the way Israel operates. To put it bluntly: These Jews are very important, but not nearly important enough to make Israelis pursue policies that put Israeli lives at risk.

Let me be clear: I believe Israel’s relations with Jews around the world are crucially important. Indeed, I’ve devoted a great deal of my career to thinking and writing about this topic. I often find myself preaching to Israelis about the need to be more considerate of more liberal Jewish views on issues ranging from religious conversion to women’s prayer at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. But I would never expect Israelis to gamble on our security and our lives for the sake of accommodating the political sensitivities of people who live far away.

Rosner is clearly letting his passions get in the way of his reasoning here. We Jews who criticize Israel aren’t asking Israelis to “gamble on their security”; indeed, the point liberal Zionists have been trying to get across for decades now is that the policy of complete disregard for Palestinian rights and grievances that Israel has adopted is, in fact, gambling on the security of Israelis and Jews everywhere by calling the Zionist project’s long-term sustainability into question. We’re not asking Israel to be less heavy-handed and more conciliatory out of concern for our own consciences, but rather out of recognition that Israel cannot be secure as a Jewish homeland if it continues to lash out reactively at Palestinian resistance rather than honestly and justly addressing the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians as a result of its creation and the ongoing suffering that engenders that resistance. Chait hits back at Rosner, who he says mischaracterizes his argument entirely by conflating feelings with opinions:

My Zionism — that is, my belief that the Jewish people, like other people, deserve a homeland where they can live free of persecution — is immutable. My disposition as a defender of Israel depends on the character of the Israeli state. A decade ago, I’d argue, it was a fair reading of the facts to view Israel as a state that mostly desired peace and whose use of force was mostly justifiable. I think that argument has weakened substantially in the intervening years.

To provide a corresponding example, right now I’d describe myself as pro-Ukraine — my analysis is that Ukraine is mostly within its rights, and that the cause of its current conflict lies mostly in the aggressive intentions of Russia. It is possible the world will change in such a way that I no longer regard this as true. Now, I lack the sort of personal and cultural attachment to Ukraine that I have to Israel. But the emotional component is not all that matters.

Responding to John Podhoretz, who applauds Rosner’s piece, Larison finds the line of thinking that Rosner and Podhoretz advance disturbing:

I have often cited the Russian proverb that Solzhenitsyn used, “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” … The main mistake that Rosner and Podhoretz make, unsurprisingly, is that they consider otherwise sympathetic critics to be “fair-weather” friends when these are potentially some of the best friends that Israelis have precisely because they don’t simply back whatever the Israeli government happens to do. Considering the stifling of dissent inside Israel that has been taking place lately, that would seem to be all the more valuable. But then one would have to understand the value of dissent against reckless and hawkish policies to appreciate that, and naturally Podhoretz doesn’t.

The odd thing about these complaints is that there is less sympathy for Israel around the world now than at almost any time that I can remember in the last twenty years. One would think that “pro-Israel” hawkish Americans and Israelis would be more appreciative of the sympathizers that Israel does have, including the critical ones, but instead the latter are treated dismissively and berated for having the temerity to express their concern. As this rate, there will continue to be fewer sympathizers as it becomes clear that friendly criticism is just falling on deaf ears.

My fear is that Larison is absolutely right about this, and that the Israeli state and its polity have both become so convinced of their categorical righteousness that legitimate criticism becomes impossible to imagine. This sensitivity speaks to the existential paranoia that underpins Zionism, and while that paranoia is understandable given what we Jews have been through, it leaves Israel operating in an alternate reality in which all criticism of Israel is anti-Zionism, all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and thus anti-Semitism becomes the sole and sufficient cause of all criticism of Israel, even from Jews!

Not only is this perception incorrect, it’s also self-destructive. There’s no point pretending that Israel does no wrong, has no hard choices to make, and faces no uncertainty in its future. And that’s why, like Chait, Klein, and Beinart, I criticize Israel for the same reason Israel gives for doing the things I criticize: out of concern for my safety as a Jew on this earth.

Why Intervene In Iraq And Not Syria? Ctd

by Jonah Shepp

Aki Peritz believes that ISIS poses a genuine terrorist threat to the US, and on that basis, suspects that Obama will eventually see fit to target the group in Syria as well as Iraq:

It is well and good that the president said he won’t “rule out anything,” but the reality is that multiple jihadist groups already have a permanent foothold in Syria. … Will ISIL, or another Syria-based jihadi group, try to strike American targets before Obama leaves office in January 2017? If past actions predict future behavior, then the answer is probably yes. Would the administration respond to a terror attack on America or Americans with airstrikes—or perhaps more—of its own? That too is likely in the cards, given that the United States just bombed Islamic State positions to help our Kurdish allies.

Hopefully, America’s airstrikes near Irbil will prove to be the high-water mark for ISIL’s ability to export its fanatical ideology. But the group has shown itself to be an adaptable, ruthless foe bent on destroying its enemies—including the United States. Since that’s the case, it’s only a matter of time before this White House decides that America must strike Syria as well.

And maybe it will, but the argument that it should fails on two levels. First, if ISIS wants to attack Americans, deploying more American soldiers in its areas of operation makes the targeting of Americans more likely, not less (and creates a justification for it, at least in the militants’ own view). And second, if ISIS wants to carry out an attack on US soil, it won’t do so with the soldiers and materiel in Syria that Peritz would have us bomb. Rather, that threat would likely take the form of a few fanatics with American or European passports, and I don’t see how airstrikes would address that, short of killing every single ISIS member and sympathizer in Syria and Iraq (and not only there – Peritz might want to start ginning up support for airstrikes on London and New Jersey as well).

No, this conflict is not ultimately about US homeland security; it remains, first and foremost, a regional power struggle. Certainly, some of the Syrian rebels would like us to get involved:

Moderate Syrian rebels argue that, in order to challenge ISIS in Iraq, it would be necessary to tackle them in Syria too. “To protect [the Iraqi city of] Irbil from ISIS, you need to hit ISIS hard in the Euphrates river valley in Syria,” said Oubai Shahbandar, spokesman for the opposition Syrian National Coalition. “Stopping ISIS expansion requires a ground game. U.S. needs to coordinate with the tribes and the Free Syrian Army that have been fighting ISIS since January.”

“Airstrikes won’t deny ISIS territorial gain,” Shahbandar said. “U.S. needs to support those forces like FSA and tribes in Syria already on the ground fighting ISIS.”

But others, Hassan Hassan reports, appear to have joined forces with the jihadists:

According to Samer al-Ani, an opposition media activist from Deir Ezzor, several fighting groups affiliated to the western-backed Military Council worked discreetly with Isis, even before the group’s latest offensive. Liwa al-Ansar and Liwa Jund al-Aziz, he said, pledged allegiance to Isis in secret, with reports that Isis is using them to put down a revolt by the Sha’itat tribe near the Iraqi border.

He warned that money being sent through members of the National Coalition to rebels in Deir Ezzor risks going to Isis. Another source from Deir Ezzor said that these groups pledged loyalty to Isis four months ago, so this was not forced as a result of Isis’s latest push, as happened elsewhere. Such collaboration was key to the takeover of Deir Ezzor in recent weeks, especially in areas where Isis could not defeat the local forces so easily.

This complication reveals how facile and ignorant the neo-neocon case for intervention in Syria is. Simply sussing out who our friends and enemies are within the fragmented rebel “coalition” has always been a much more daunting task than the hawks were willing to admit. We don’t have the intelligence to conduct such an intervention, well, intelligently, and there’s just no getting it now. Compare that to Iraq: it’s a mess, sure, but at least our friends (Kurds), enemies (ISIS), and liabilities (Baghdad) are much more clearly defined. That’s why Michael Totten finds the question in the headline of this post sort of boring:

The Kurds of Iraq are our best friends in the entire Muslim world. Not even an instinctive pacifist and non-interventionist like Barack Obama can stand aside and let them get slaughtered by lunatics so extreme than even Al Qaeda disowns them. There is no alternate universe where that’s going to happen. Iraqi Kurdistan is a friendly, civilized, high-functioning place. It’s the one part of Iraq that actually works and has a bright future ahead of it. Refusing to defend it would be like refusing to defend Poland, Taiwan, or Japan. We have no such obligation toward Syria.

That’s it. That’s the entire answer. Washington is following the first and oldest rule of foreign policy—reward your friends and punish your enemies.

In any case, ISIS’s positions in eastern Syria are already being bombed by the Assad regime, with much collateral damage:

Militants from the Al-Qaeda splinter group are fighting on a multitude of fronts in Syria’s complex civil war – against an array of rebel groups, regime forces, and the Kurdish YPG militia – while also being targeted by locals in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor. When ISIS entered Deir al-Zor last month, it seized a number of towns and villages along the Euphrates River, often by making agreements with locals. Since then, attacks have been staged against the jihadists, who have been accused of breaking their word and detaining residents of the area. Regime forces have only recently begun targeting ISIS positions in several provinces, while anti-regime activists say the strikes have led mainly to civilian casualties.

That’s another reason why, I suspect, Obama remains set against getting involved. A war of attrition between Assad and ISIS is very bad news for the Syrian people, but as soon as American bombs begin to fall, those civilian deaths accrue to us, and those terror attacks on Americans that Peritz fears start looking like a much more attractive option for ISIS and its allies.

Rescuing The Yazidis

by Jonah Shepp

More than half of the 40,000 Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar by ISIS militants have managed to escape through a safe passage opened by Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish militias, but many still remain in danger:

The refugees, all members of the Yazidi sect, began streaming back into Iraqi Kurdistan on Sunday after a perilous journey past Islamic State militants who had vowed to kill them and had surrounded their hideout on Mount Sinjar after storming the area. The day-long trek took them first over a mountain range into Syria, then through the Peshkhabour crossing three hours north-west of Irbil, where Kurdish officials were rushing to provide food and shelter.

Fleeing Yazidis said their escape had been aided by the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish rebel faction, and by US air strikes on Islamic State (Isis) positions which had forced the jihadists to withdraw for around six hours on Saturday. Their retreat gave a window for thousands of Yazidis, all desperately low on food and water, to begin streaming down the mile-high mountain and north across the Nineveh plains, which have been an ancient homeland of Iraqi minorities.

It’s important to remember that “rescuing” the Yazidis means, for now, sending them to save havens far from home. They are refugees, part of a massive wave of displacement, and will require consistent support while in exile and at some point (hopefully) in returning to their homes. I stress this because refugees have a tendency to get buried in our consciousness of protracted conflicts, especially in the Middle East. Esther Yu-Hsi Lee tallies the Iraqis displaced in the current conflict, who number over 1 million:

Just this week alone, the rapid advance of ISIL forces in several cities of Iraq has forced the internal displacement of about 195,000 refugees, including adherents of the religious Yazidi sect, Palestinians, and Turkmen living in Iraq — a move that has sent neighboring countries and international agencies scrambling to accommodate the refugee crisis within Iraq. …

Overall, nearly 200,000 internally displaced people have fled away from major cities, like Qaraqosh, the largest Christian city captured by ISIL this week, with the greatest concentration of people fleeing towards the northern provinces of Dahuk, Erbil, and Kirkuk, and Sulaymaniyah, near Turkey. Between January and July, there were at least 1.2 million displaced refugees within Iraq. And in June, the United Nations upgraded Iraq’s crisis to a level 3 humanitarian disaster — the most severe rating it has.

There’s really no overstating how catastrophic this situation is. Hundreds of thousands of refugees is one thing; hundreds of thousands more refugees, on top of multiple, unresolved refugee crises involving millions of people, is quite another. The sheer scale of the displacement is hard for us as Americans to comprehend, which makes it equally hard to appreciate the outsized role refugees have played in the history of the modern Middle East and the conflicts playing out there today. Some Arab communities, particularly the Palestinians, have suffered the trauma of being shuffled from one conflict zone to another over the course of three generations. That has to take a toll on one’s psychological wellbeing as well as one’s worldview: it’s really no shocker that people in such an intractable predicament are prone to radicalization and have a hard time building democratic states and civil societies.

Arming The Kurds

by Jonah Shepp

The US has begun providing weapons directly to Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, in a break with our longstanding policy of only selling arms to the government in Baghdad:

The officials wouldn’t say which U.S. agency is providing the arms or what weapons are being sent, but one official said it isn’t the Pentagon. The CIA has historically done similar quiet arming operations. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation publicly. The move to directly aid the Kurds underscores the level of U.S. concern about the Islamic State militants’ gains in the north, and reflects the persistent administration view that the Iraqis must take the necessary steps to solve their own security problems. A senior State Department official would only say that the Kurds are “getting arms from various sources. They are being rearmed.”

This move is typical of Obama’s decisions in Iraq so far: sensible, realist, but a bit late. Imagine if we had decided to arm the Kurds months ago, when ISIS was merely threatening to completely destabilize Iraq, as opposed to today when it has already done so. On the other hand, of course, these decisions are not made in a vacuum, and it may have been politically impossible to do so at the time, even if Obama had wanted to. Now, with Iraq’s government in a state of total chaos, dealing with Kurdistan as an effectively independent entity makes even more sense, and it doesn’t really matter anymore if we upset Maliki. And if this really is Kurdistan’s moment, why stand in the way of the inevitable? So three cheers to the peshmerga, and let’s hope this works. Cale Salih also thinks it’s about time we threw our full weight behind the Kurds:

Obama needs the Kurds, and he knows it. They are largely secular and pro-Western, but also maintain dynamic ties to both Iran and Turkey. They offer a potential base from which the US can stage counterterrorism operations against Isis. Iraqi Kurdish parties have links to Kurdish groups in Syria, and Kurdistan Worker’s Party-affiliated Syrian Kurds have been one of the only militias able to effectively fight Isis there. Kurdistan is a much-needed safe haven for refugees from Syria, and internally displaced people from other parts of Iraq. It offers a stable, economically prosperous buffer zone right at the intersection of several regional conflicts. A weak, unstable Kurdistan would allow Isis and other militants to more easily move between Iraq and Syria.

Spencer Ackerman saw this coming days ago, when he called the claim that the US intervention was intended to protect American personnel in Erbil “a convenient elision”, allowing us “to avoid, or at least defer, explicit preferential treatment for the Kurds”:

Conspicuously, the US has yet to attack the Isis positions threatening Iraqi Yazidis at Mount Sinjar, whose dire conditions ostensibly prompted Obama’s first step toward making the Iraq crisis an American one. On the ground by Irbil, these distinctions are less meaningful. The F/A-18s might not have explicitly provided close air support for the Peshmerga – that would require coordination between the Peshmerga and the US Navy pilots – but the strikes nevertheless provide the Peshmerga with a measure of air cover, an advantage over the better-armored Isis fighters. It rhymes with close air support, at least: the Kurds get a chance to fortify the defense of Irbil.

Judis, meanwhile, suspects that our interest in Kurdistan has a lot to do with its oil:

If the Islamic State were to take over Erbil, they would endanger Iraq’s oil production and, by extension, global access to oil. Prices would surge at a time when Europe, which buys oil from Iraq, has still not escaped the global recession. Oil prices have already risen in response to the Islamic State’s threat to Erbil, and on Thursday, American oil companies Chevron and Exxon Mobile began evacuating their personnel from Kurdistan. … The United States should worry about the global oil supply. It is important for global economic and political stability. And having a significant chunk of it fall into the hands of a group like the Islamic State should certainly be a concern. But if Obama is worried about the world’s oil supply, then he should say so forthrightly and not leave himself in a position where he will be unable to justify or explain further intervention after the airdrops to the Yazidis are completed.

Well, an intervention can be both humanitarian and strategic, and I don’t think anyone really doubts that this is both. Judis is right to warn Obama against underselling the strategic angle of what he’s doing in Iraq (others have made the same point), and it would be lovely if an American president would acknowledge the degree to which petro-politics really influences our foreign policy, but my fear is that if the anti-war left ends up spinning this intervention as another sacrifice of blood and treasure to Big Oil, that would obscure much more than it would illuminate. Judis compares the situation to Libya:

If the Obama administration wanted to prevent the world’s peoples from brutal dictators and repressive regimes or from takeovers by terrorist groups, there are other countries besides Libya and Iraq where it could intervene. What distinguishes these two countries is that they are major oil producers.

It’s not the only thing that distinguishes them, though.

The Case For Killing Awlaki Is [REDACTED]

Anwar Al-Awlaki

David Barron’s Office of Legal Counsel memo making the case for the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011 has been released, with lots of redactions of course. The memo touches on the major controversies surrounding the operation, including Awlaki’s due process rights, the risk of killing innocent civilians, and the CIA’s involvement. Scott Shackford provides the tl;dr version of what the release does and doesn’t tell us:

The Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that gave us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave the administration permission to pursue and capture or kill members of Al Qaeda; Al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda; therefore, killing was legal. Al-Awlaki’s Fourth Amendment right to due process is brought up toward the end. The Justice Department argues here that capturing Al-Awlaki was infeasible, yet he presented a threat to the United States as “continued” and “imminent,” therefore lethal force was justified.

What sort of continued and imminent threat did Al-Awlaki present from Yemen? Don’t know. That part is all redacted. The justification of why the CIA pursued this course of action is also almost entirely redacted. Even with the memo, we actually don’t learn anything new from a leak of a similar memo NBC published last year. We don’t know why Al-Awlaki was considered to be an imminent threat and why this drone strike was the only way the Obama administration believed it needed to deal with him.

Benjamin Wittes combs through the argument in more detail, but the redactions, as Wittes observes and as Serwer highlights here, leave some key points to the imagination:

The portion of the memo dealing with potential Fifth Amendment objections to targeting al-Awlaki remains heavily redacted, though the portion dealing with the Fourth Amendment is largely readable. Attorney General Eric Holder has argued publicly that ”The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process,” an argument later mocked by comedian Stephen Colbert, who deadpanned in response, “due process just means there’s a process that you do.”

“To my mind, the most controversial argument we’ve heard from the Administration was Attorney General Holder’s suggestion that due process is not a requirement of judicial process,” said Stephen Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. “Presumably, that argument turns on the rigor and thoroughness of the internal Executive Branch decision-making that goes into ensuring that the target may legally be attacked, and that we’re absolutely sure the target is who we think it is. But the version of the memo disclosed today offers vanishingly little insight into these critical questions–leaving most of the presumably critical analysis blacked out behind redactions.”

Conor is particularly spooked at Barron’s contention that “a decision-maker could reasonably decide that the threat posed by al-Awlaki’s activities to United States persons is ‘continued’ and ‘imminent.’”:

This passage is alarming for two reasons:

1) It asserts that the executive branch can kill Americans in secret under the standard, “a decision-maker could reasonably decide…” Dick Cheney was “a decision-maker.” So was J. Edgar Hoover. Are we prepared to accept that 5th Amendment protections are null based on a relativistic standard as interpreted in secret by men like them?

2) The memo treats the representation that al-Awlaki posed an “imminent” threat as important. But unless it is hidden in a redaction, the memo does not address how “imminent” is defined, and there is good reason to believe that the Obama Administration has defined it so dubiously as to render the term meaningless. I explored this problem at greater length back on February 5, 2013, when Michael Isikoff published another memo that dealt with extrajudicial killings. It set, as a precondition of such killings, “an imminent threat of violent attack.”

David Kravets focuses on how the memo addresses the question of collateral damage:

“DoD has represented to us that it would make every effort to minimize civilian casualties and that the officer who launches the ordnance would be required to abort a strike if he or she concludes that civilian casualties would be disproportionate or that such a strike will in any other respect violate the laws of war,” according to the “memorandum for the attorney general.”

But that didn’t sit well with [Pardiss] Kebriaei. In a telephone interview, the Center For Constitutional Rights attorney said that “if you accept the idea of a global war and you can follow a target wherever he goes, there is a significant risk of harm to civilians in the area precisely because the laws of war do allow some collateral harm. It’s basically a huge risk of harm to ordinary people and civilians if you accept this premise which can be invoked by other countries.”

And Kevin Jon Heller picks apart the justification for letting the CIA carry out the assassination:

Is it really the case that the CIA is no less entitled to invoke the [public authority justification] than the DoD? There is at least one obvious difference between the two: because international law entitles only the members of a state’s regular armed forces to participate in hostilities, the CIA had no authority under international law to use armed force against al-Awlaki. The CIA is not part of the US’s regular armed forces. …

[T]he AUMF specifically authorizes the President to use the “United States Armed Forces” against AQ; it says nothing about the CIA using force. And, of course, the War Powers Resolution, which the AUMF specifically references, applies only to “the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities.” How, then, can the AUMF provide the domestic authorization necessary for the PAJ to apply to the CIA? Nor is that all. The memo’s own cites strongly suggest that the PAJ applies only to the “lawful conduct of war” by the US’s regular armed forces

This doesn’t quite settle the matter for Drum, whose beef with the Awlaki affair was never the strike itself, “but with the fact that the targeting was based on such a flimsy legal pretext”. He blames Congress for not fixing the AUMF:

The AUMF is now more than a dozen years old, and it’s long past time for Congress to emerge from its fetal crouch and write a new law specifically designed for our present circumstances. Among other things, it should address the president’s ability to target American citizens for killing. If Congress wants to give the president that power, it should debate and pass a law and the courts should rule on its constitutionality. That’s the rule of law. And regardless of whether I liked the law, I’d accept it if Congress passed it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court declared it constitutional. Instead, as usual, Congress prefers to do nothing. This leaves them free to kibitz if they don’t like what the president is doing, or to simply avoid having to take a stand at all. It’s shameful.

On that, I think, we can all agree. And not just on this question either.

(Photo: Anwar Al-Awlaki at Dar al Hijrah Mosque on October 4 2001 in Falls Church, VA. By Tracy Woodward/The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

Don’t Get Too Excited, Neocons …

Obama is deploying troops to Iraq, but only 275 of them, to reinforce security at the embassy. Beauchamp breaks down the move:

[T]his doesn’t mean the US is going to war in Iraq again, or even helping the Iraqis fight theirs. It does, however, say that the US wants some of its embassy personnel out of Baghdad. The reasons why could be safety, or they could be something more subtle (say, to liaise more effectively with the Kurdish authorities). According to the Press Secretary statement, “the US embassy in Baghdad remains open, and a substantial majority of the US Embassy presence in Iraq will remain in place if the embassy will be fully equipped to carry out its national security mission.”

Per this useful Q&A from the AP, the 100 troops currently guarding the embassy are the only US service members in the country. We might also send in Special Forces to help train Iraqi soldiers to fight ISIS. Allahpundit doesn’t see how we’d advance our objectives any other way:

If you want trustworthy intelligence inside Iraq, your only option is American troops. The Special Forces team is probably there mainly for surveillance, to pick up tips on ISIS movements and relay them to American air assets. And of course there’s a third possibility in honor of the McCain/Graham spat, that U.S. troops are on the ground to coordinate with Iranian military elements that are already inside the country and, maybe, to provide a U.S. counterweight to Iran in influencing Maliki’s maneuvering. And if worse comes to worst and ISIS ends up overrunning Baghdad anyway, hey — you’ll have 100 of the best troops in the world right there to help get everyone out of the embassy before the barbarians run wild and start chopping off heads.

Why Take Vacations?

by Jonah Shepp

Pointing to the abundance of research showing that “people who take vacations aren’t any happier, or are only barely so, than those who [don’t],” Jennifer Senior asks the obvious question:

Several reasons: First of all, our happiness often increases before vacations too, and that’s no small thing—never underestimate the hedonic power of anticipation. The positive memories from vacation also seem to occupy disproportionately large tracts of real estate in our minds, even if we weren’t enjoying our holidays at every moment in real time—and who are we, if not the sum of our most cherished memories?

But perhaps more to the point, our bodies appear to crave a respite from real life. While on vacation, we sleep more (about three quarters of an hour extra per night) and better; there’s also good evidence that they reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease and generally improve our long-term health. As de Bloom and her co-authors say in their 2013 paper, “Asking why we should keep going on vacations is therefore comparable to asking why we should go to sleep considering the fact that we get tired again.” Our bodies need them, simple as that.

Upwardly Immobile

by Jonah Shepp

Gentrification may be the talk of the town (no matter which town), but Richard Florida highlights new research showing that most urban neighborhoods that were poor 40 years ago are still poor today. The study “compared neighborhood-level poverty rates in the country’s 51 largest metro areas in 1970 and 2010.” It found that “very few high-poverty neighborhoods in 1970 dramatically reversed their fortunes over the next four decades”:

Entrenched poverty was just about the most constant thing about these neighborhoods. By 2010, fully two-thirds of these poor neighborhoods, 750 tracts in all, were still beset by chronic and concentrated poverty in 2010. Overall, their populations shrunk 40 percent over those forty years, as many of those who were able to move out did. On the other hand, only a small fraction of neighborhoods had turned around in a way that approximates what we call gentrification. Just 105 tracts, or about 10 percent, saw their poverty rates fall below 15 percent, meaning a smaller proportion of their residents lived in poverty than in the nation as a whole. The populations of these tracts grew by about 30 percent over this same period.

But wait, it gets worse:

The authors traced the fate of what they call “fallen star” neighborhoods – tracts that had below-average poverty rates in 1970 (less than 15 percent), but more than 30 percent of their residents living below the poverty line by 2010. More than 1,200 of these tracts shifted from low to high poverty during this time, contributing to an overall increase in the number of neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Today, 10.7 million Americans live in 3,100 extremely poor neighborhoods in and around America’s largest city centers.

In other words, for every single gentrified neighborhood, 12 once-stable neighborhoods have slipped into concentrated disadvantage.

“Big Hummus” Goes To Washington

by Jonah Shepp

Hummus

Sabra, the company you may know but not necessarily love for their prepackaged hummus, is asking the government to create a standard definition of their signature product:

The Food and Drug Administration already does this with some other products like cream cheese (which must be 33 percent milk fat for manufacturers to market it as cream cheese). Sabra argues the hummus market has run amok; its time for Uncle Sam to step in. “Some products labeled as ‘hummus’ are made entirely from legumes other than chickpeas,” Sabra wrote in its filing with the Food and Drug Administration. “Because these products substitute other legumes, the marketing of these products as “hummus” undermines honesty and fair dealing.”

As a traditional Middle Eastern dip, hummus has two crucial ingredients: chickpeas and tahini (the latter being a paste made from ground sesame seeds). Sabra has surveyed the market and, in documents submitted to the FDA, finds these two ingredients decidedly lacking in many purported hummus products today. … “The marketing of a ‘hummus’ product made from legumes other than chickpeas is akin to the marketing of guacamole made with fruit other than avocados,” Sabra argues.

Strictly on the merits, they are correct here—the word “hummus” actually means chickpeas—though I find some irony in a company founded by Israelis demanding that the American government standardize the definition of an Arabic word. Of course, this move has nothing to do with the merits and everything to do with regulating competitors out of existence. Tim Cavanaugh sees right through it:

If Sabra wants to sell a chipotle hummus, more power to them. Consumers have spent millions of dollars on the company’s dry, bland, plastic-tasting product, and nobody was forcing them. But this FDA petition is about hobbling rivals, not helping restore the consumer’s “confidence in the food supply.” Only the excellent Tablet magazine even hints at the possibility that Sabra, which has about 60 percent of this rapidly growing market, might be looking to lock out competitors.

The phenomenon is called “regulatory capture,” and the reason you almost never hear about it is because the public and the media have fully internalized the language of good government. When big companies exert political influence, they are not trying to end regulation of their industries: They’re trying to create it so that competitors have a harder time completing. Notice how no company ever agitates for stronger regulations before it becomes the dominant player.

(Image: A screenshot from Sabra’s petition.)

For All The Sea In China

by Jonah Shepp

Ali Wyne reviews Robert Kaplan’s new book, Asia’s Cauldron, which explains the South China Sea’s centrality to Pacific politics:

He emphasizes three points. First, Chinese primacy in the South China Sea “would go a long way toward making China more than merely the first among equals of Eastern Hemispheric powers.” Second, the principal risk for China’s smaller neighbors is not invasion, but “Finlandization.” The growing gravitational pull of China’s economy doubles as a carrot—your economy will continue to flourish if you keep yourself open to our exports and investments—and a stick—you will endanger an increasingly important component of your economy if you take actions that undermine our national interests. Behind that dual-use instrument is an increasingly capable People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Given its aspiration of achieving a peaceful rise, China would prefer that its smaller neighbors accommodate themselves to its perspectives on the territorial disputes that are roiling the region (essentially, Kaplan explains, “give in without violence”). Third, the US “must be prepared to allow, in some measure, for a rising Chinese navy to assume its rightful position, as the representative of the region’s largest indigenous power.”

Posner analyzes China’s escalating disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines over maritime borders and islands in the sea:

One question that arises is why China and its neighbors are suddenly having so many conflicts that are violent or near-violent. The conflicting territorial claims have existed for decades but violence has been sporadic until recently (aside from the China-Vietnam War).

M. Taylor Fravel argues that China seeks to “consolidate” its claims by keeping other countries out of disputed areas. That would explain why China reacts aggressively–by sending in ships and planes–typically after the neighbors pass some law or take other actions that make clear that they consider their claims valid. But why are those countries provoking China in this way, and why now?

As Fravel suggests, China’s strategy is one of delay while claiming that the disputes are unresolved. The neighbors, by contrast, claim that there is no dispute and their claims are valid. China’s strategy thus seems more passive. And the reason is surely that time is on China’s side. China has grown more rapidly than all of its neighbors and looks likely to continue to do so for the near future, at least. As it becomes more dominant–both economically and militarily–its neighbors will be in a worse position to counter its claims in their shared waters.

Hugh White suspects that Beijing’s recent aggressiveness is also meant to limit American influence:

By using direct armed pressure in these disputes, China makes its neighbours more eager for US military support, and at the same time makes America less willing to give it, because of the clear risk of a direct US-China clash. In other words, by confronting America’s friends with force, China confronts America with the choice between deserting its friends and fighting China. Beijing is betting that, faced with this choice, America will back off and leave its allies and friends unsupported. This will weaken America’s alliances and partnerships, undermine US power in Asia, and enhance China’s power.

This view of China’s motives explains its recent conduct.