Category: The Dish

Can NATO Stop Putin?

by Jonah Shepp

Michael Peck doubts the new rapid response force NATO is proposing to establish in Eastern Europe would be much of a deterrent to Russian aggression:

[A] NATO quick-reaction force is unlikely to actually deter Russia. For starters, a deterrent is only as effective as it is credible. And military credibility is what the new force will lack. Prepositioning mechanized units in Eastern Europe is a possibility. But as U.S. troops discovered when moving from Germany to Bosnia in 1995, it’s hard moving tracked armor long distances. Harder when you have to move fast. It seems more likely that the new force will include light infantry, wheeled armor and special forces—all easier to move by air or road than heavy tanks. While these light troops might have a fighting chance against irregular troops such as Ukraine’s eastern rebels, they wouldn’t stand a chance against a Russian tank regiment. To say nothing of Russian warplanes.

Judy Dempsey also suspects that the new strategy won’t pose much of a challenge to Putin, and that the real threat comes from elsewhere:

NATO strategy still leaves Eastern Europe highly vulnerable. The last thing that Poland, Sweden, Finland and the Baltics want is for Eastern Europe to be turned into a new cordon sanitaire. It would, in fact, create a new, divided and highly unstable Europe, which is why these countries are determined that the EU prevent this from happening. …

What could deter him is his own combustible southern flank and Islamic State, which Russia would be very unwise to ignore. It is these threats that are far, far more dangerous to Russia than NATO’s limited intentions in Poland and the Baltic states. These threats are also more dangerous than the EU, whose openness has hugely profited Russian companies and ordinary Russian citizens. If Putin thinks NATO and the EU are his big threats, competitors and enemies, he hasn’t seen anything yet.

Dempsey alludes to something important here regarding the relationship between the Russia-Ukraine and Iraq-Syria conflicts, and I wish her article explored it in greater depth. ISIS may be a threat to Europe, and even to the US, but it threatens Russia more directly. Could that threat be leveraged to talk Putin down from his war horse? I don’t know, but it will be interesting to see whether the NATO summit touches on it. These crises don’t exist in bubbles. The War on Terror divided NATO, but John Cassidy argues that Putin is helping the alliance overcome its post-9/11 sclerosis:

American officials charged that the Europeans weren’t carrying their weight. (Alliance members are supposed to spend two per cent of their G.D.P. on defense, but few of them do.) European officials muttered about the United States using its hegemony to destabilize things rather than calm them down. Looking ahead, the future of the alliance seemed increasingly uncertain. A 2013 brief from the Atlantic Council warned, “The world is changing rapidly, and if NATO does not adapt with foresight for this new era, then it will very likely disintegrate.” Then, along came the reëlected Putin, singlehandedly providing the NATO members with what all allies need: a common threat. And not only a common one but a familiar one, too: a Russia itching to expand its power and influence.

Meanwhile, Eli Lake highlights some new American sanctions legislation that “would amount to an economic nuclear bomb against the Russian federation” (My goodness. Phrasing!):

The Daily Beast has obtained a draft of proposed legislation from Sen. Mark Kirk, the Republican lawmaker who co-authored the crippling sanctions against Iran. In short, Kirk proposes to do to Russia what he and his Democratic colleague, Sen. Robert Menendez, did to Iran: make it all-but-impossible for any Western bank to do business with the state. If passed, the draft legislation would essentially make Moscow a pariah economy. Specifically, Kirk’s legislation, still circulating among his colleagues, would impose strict limits on any bank that does business with Russia’s central bank to participating in the U.S. banking system. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Kirk also said he supported moves to compel President Obama to support kicking Russian banks out of the SWIFT interbank payment system, a move that would stymie the ability of Russian businesses to efficiently pay foreign companies for goods and services.

Harder sanctions on Russia make sense, and might even be more effective than beefing up the NATO presence in the Baltic countries. My fear, though, is that we will end up with another “all stick, no carrot” approach that does a lot of economic damage without offering the Kremlin a way out. Coercive diplomacy is all well and good, but putting pressure on an aggressive state only goes so far when that state doesn’t see any benefit to behaving more responsibly. After all, we still don’t know for sure that the sanctions we imposed on Iran worked, and every time the nuclear talks have broken down it’s been because the Iranians didn’t think we were serious about lifting the sanctions if they played nice. Rewarding a bad actor for being less bad isn’t exactly justice, but war is much worse.

Modernism’s Not Dead

by Dish Staff

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen lauds this year’s Venice Biennale for its nuanced take on the architectural movement:

In architecture, [Modernism] is commonly understood to have produced a more or less deplorable “international style” that made every office building, elementary school, town hall, and housing 
project into something resembling a taller or shorter flat-roofed factory. Modernism’s trajectory from the 1920s to the 1980s is held to be one in which 
misguided architects cluelessly ambled down this technology-smitten path to its inevitable dead end, when architecture, reinvigorated in part by the Historic Preservation movement, remade itself in an efflorescence of eclectic post-modernism. …

The Biennale’s national pavilions offer a completely different and far more accurate account of recent architectural history. Whether we look at Italy, Finland, or Brazil, we find that modernism was never – 
not in its earliest days in Europe, not in the many countries around the globe to which it eventually spread – an arid, landless, technology-smitten movement that privileged steel frames and concrete connections over the particularities of local 
geographies, cultural traditions, and human needs. Instead, modernism in architecture was akin to classicism: a highly malleable practice that over time produced a wide range of family-resemblance-type styles.

(Photo: Brasília’s Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida (1970) via Wikimedia Commons)

Coming Out Is (Still) Hard To Do

by Dish Staff

Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart, who “started coming out” in high school, has trouble telling people about her wife:

“So, what are you doing here in Knoxville?” asks every single person in Tennessee immediately after meeting me. (Apparently my presence here is in need of some sort of explanation.) And, since it’s the truth, there’s really nothing for it but for me to tell them, honestly, that my w-w-w-wife is here for grad school. My, uh, uh, my w-w-wife. My—ulp—w-wife, Cassie. Because, try as I might, I can’t quite say it without stuttering. … Since I believe that my marriage ought not to be more controversial or upsetting than these other topics, I’ve attempted to rid myself of these telltale signs of nervousness. I’ve tried giving myself little pep talks about how no one cares these days, and I’ve even tried practicing the line in front of a mirror. But when those moments come, I just can’t seem to lose the stutter.

A Generational Split Personality

by Dish Staff

Jesse Walker pans Millennials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss:

A generation, Strauss and Howe wrote, is “a society-wide peer group, born over a period roughly the same length as the passage from youth to adulthood (in today’s America, around twenty or twenty-one years), who collectively possess a common persona.” They accepted the existence of exceptions and edge cases, but they insisted a core persona is there.

Contrast that with Karl Mannheim’s “The Problem of Generations,” a 1923 essay that has become a touchstone for sociologists studying generational change. Like Strauss and Howe, Mannheim defined a generation not just by when its members were born but by the events that shaped their worldviews in their youth. Unlike Strauss and Howe, Mannheim did not write as though those events shape an entire generation the same way. Instead he wrote of different “generation units” with different reactions to their formative experiences. The Napoleonic wars, he elaborated, produced “two contrasting groups” in Germany, “one that became more and more conservative as time went on, as against a youth group tending to become rationalistic and liberal.” (For a more recent example, consider the ways different American boomers reacted to the upheavals of the 1960s.)

For Mannheim, those opposing units still belong to the same social cohort: “they are oriented toward each other, even though only in the sense of fighting one another.” But they did not have the “common persona” that Strauss and Howe imagined.

Old School

by Dish Staff

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Elizabeth Green contends that the US lags behind educational powerhouses such as Finland and South Korea in part because “our school system is earlier”:

It dates back to the 19th century, and in many ways the one-room schoolhouse is the model of our system, where an adult is working alone. One adult. Japan, South Korea, Finland – these were systems that were completely reformed after World War II. There is a lot more modern or contemporary thinking that has gone into these systems. We are still living with the legacy of an early 19th century education system.

Decentralization is another factor:

Those countries also have very strong national governments, so they set standards for the schools and have a much greater power at the level of implementation. Our federal government only controls 13 percent of local school funding. Through incentive programs, the Obama administration has actually been very successful at getting local schools to do things because they want every last dollar they can get. And yet once they promise to do something like evaluate teachers in new ways, there’s actually nobody watching at the implementation level to make sure they do it in a smart, strategic way. We have these top-down reform priorities and the federal government is successful in getting schools to adopt them, but there’s no quality check on that process. That’s fundamentally different than other nations.

Another fundamental difference: the US population is 2.5 times larger than Japan’s, 6 times larger than South Korea’s and a whopping 58 times larger than Finland’s, with far more regional diversity than all three. That vastness certainly makes educational reform more difficult for the US than other national governments.

(Photo: Teacher and children in front of sod one-room schoolhouse in Woods County, Oklahoma Territories, ca. 1895 via National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia Commons)

Weed Growers Of The Corn

by Dish Staff

Several years ago, while inspecting a cornfield,  Kaitlin Stack Whitney discovered five marijuana plants “each standing about eight feet tall, in the middle of our survey plot and bursting with buds ready to harvest.” Apparently, this isn’t unusual:

Once a corn field is planted and herbicide applied, many farmers don’t return to a given field until harvest time. The biotechnological and labor-saving innovations that have reduced costs for corn farmers mean that literally no one walks into the average corn field during the growing season. Which presents a major opportunity for marijuana growers. Indeed, entire Internet forums devoted to sharing tips for growing marijuana in other people’s corn fields have sprouted. …

Growing marijuana in cornfields keeps it better hidden than growing in remote forests, albeit in plain sight. Helicopters and thermal imaging are only able to detect large patches of marijuana by color difference. So marijuana growers use GIS technology and handheld GPS devices to spread out their growing into distributed networks of small patches, like the one I stumbled across. This tactic also reduces the risk of losing one’s marijuana crop: If one patch is found and destroyed, the rest of the plants are in other locations, known only to the GPS and the marijuana grower. Man-made patterns in natural areas are a telltale sign of marijuana to enforcement agencies; growing it in corn renders that giveaway moot, as everything is in rows. The growing conditions for marijuana are also better in cornfields than remote forested land: Every input that corn farmers carefully measure and apply to maximize their crop growth—fertilizer, herbicide, irrigation—benefits the marijuana plants, too.

Putting Women In A Light Box

by Dish Staff

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Alex Heimbach suggests that books such as Women Photographers: From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman perpetuate a “gender ghetto”:

The book collects the work of 55 practitioners, from pioneers of the form to contemporary photojournalists. [Author Boris] Friedwald also includes short bios of each artist as part of his goal to present “the variety and diversity of women who took – and take – photographs. Their life stories, their way of looking at things, and their pictures.” Sounds admirable enough. Yet it’s impossible to imagine an equivalent book titled Men Photographers: From Eugène Atget to Jeff Wall. Male photographers, like male painters, male writers, and male politicians, are the default. The implication, intentional or not, is that no matter how talented, female photographers are women first and artists second.

Ideally, endeavors like Friedwald’s serve to illuminate lesser-known artists, who may have been discounted because of their gender (or race or sexual orientation or class). But more often such exercises become a form of de facto segregation, whether it’s a BuzzFeed quiz on how many of the “Greatest Books by Women” you’ve read or a Wikipedia editor isolating female novelists in their own category. These projects are often undertaken in a spirit of celebration, but their thoughtlessness generally renders them pointless at best and misogynistic at worst.

(Photo: Julia Jackson by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867, via Wikimedia Commons) Update from a reader:

Lovely post.  What your readers may not know is that Julia Jackson was the mother of Virginia Woolf, one of four children from her second marriage.  Julia died in 1895 at the age of 49, when Woolf was 13, precipitating the first of Woolf’s terrible battles with what was probably a severe a bipolar disorder.  Before she became the perfect “angel in the house” Victorian wife to two husbands and the mother of seven, Julia was famous for her beauty and frequently photographed by her illustrious and pioneering aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron.  Needless to say, Woolf, author of A Room of One’s Own, would have been the first to object to relegating the work of women to a separate (but equal?) category.

Writing Tip: Don’t Write

by Dish Staff

Overcoming writer’s block took years for Bill Hayes, who advises that “not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer” (NYT):

Then I woke one day, and a line came to me. It didn’t slip away this time but stayed put. I followed it, like a path. It led to another, then another. Soon, pieces started lining up in my head, like cabs idling curbside, ready to go where I wanted to take them. But it wasn’t so much that pages started getting written that made me realize that my not-writing period had come to an end. Instead, my perspective had shifted.

Writing is not measured in page counts, I now believe, any more than a writer is defined by publication credits. To be a writer is to make a commitment to the long haul, as one does (especially as one gets older) to keeping fit and healthy for as long a run as possible. For me, this means staying active physically and creatively, switching it up, remaining curious and interested in learning new skills (upon finishing this piece, for instance, I’m going on my final open-water dive to become a certified scuba diver), and of course giving myself ample periods of rest, days or even weeks off. I know that the writer in me, like the lifelong fitness devotee, will be better off.

Stop Saying “Officer-Involved Shootings”

by Alex Pareene

SLUG: ME-Ammo DATE: August 23, 2007 CREDIT: James M. Threshe

Let’s talk about “officer-involved shootings.” That is the formal term, used by seemingly all American local news broadcasts, for when a cop shoots someone. Instead of saying “‘Cops’ crew member killed by police officer,” the headline is, “‘Cops’ crew-member killed after officer-involved shooting.” (It just sort of happened, after that shooting.) There is also “police involved shooting,” a term I first noticed being used by the local New York evening news team last May.

These terms are terrible and journalists should not use them. They are cop-speak. Local news reporters love nothing more than adopting cop-speak, because local news is built on manufacturing fear of crime and venerating of police officers, but both of these terms fail the crucial test of actually being coherent explanations of what happened. Of course police would invent an obfuscatory euphemism for when they shoot people – they would be fools not to try to come up with a nice way of saying “we killed someone” – but the press’ job is supposed to be to translate those euphemisms into plain English.

“Officer-involved shooting” absolves the person who actually pulled the trigger of responsibility, turning the shooting into an apparently inevitable act. The officer was just involved! As Natasha Lennard at Vice News puts it:

The phrase “police-involved shooting” is a careful construction, which, like the criminal justice system more broadly, tends to point blame away from cops. It is code for “the cops shot someone.”

To a reporter, “officer-involved shooting” should sound as grating to the ear as “bear-involved large mammal attack.”

The two terms, now ubiquitous, appear to be very successful modern coinages. Neither phrase seems to have been in usage at all before the 1970s. Usage of “officer involved shooting” soared during the 1980s and 1990s, with “police involved shooting” not catching on until the 2000s.

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Where did the term come from? The LAPD has, for years, produced an annual “Officer Involved Shooting” report (NYT) and has had an “officer involved shooting unit” since 1987 or earlier. I wouldn’t be surprised if the phrase made its way into the press’ lexicon via former LAPD chief (and racist paramilitary policing pioneer) Daryl Gates, a man who rarely shied from television cameras. (If anyone knows the actual origin of the phrase, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com)

The International Association of Chiefs of Police, by the way, publishes “Officer-Involved Shooting guidelines” (pdf). The guidelines aren’t about how not to shoot someone, but more about what to do once you have shot someone. The entire document is sort of incredible in its careful consideration of the emotional and mental state of the officer, and its complete silence on the status of the person the officer actually shot. For example:

Following a shooting incident, officers often feel vulnerable if unarmed. If an officer’s firearm has been taken as evidence or simply pursuant to departmental policy, a replacement weapon should be immediately provided as a sign of support, confidence, and trust unless there is an articulable basis for deviating from this procedure. Officers should be kept informed of when their weapon is likely to be returned. Care should be taken to process and collect evidence from the officer as soon as practicable to provide an opportunity to change into civilian clothing.

It is vital that you give the officer his gun back as soon as possible, or else he might feel bad, about shooting someone.

I can’t say this definitively, because, as we’ve learned this month, there is no national database of police shootings, but American cops seem to shoot other people far more often than people shoot cops. The number of police killed by firearms peaked in the early 1970s, and has steadily declined since. It hasn’t cracked 100 officers in any year over the last decade. Meanwhile, around 400 people a year are killed in “justifiable police homicides,” according to the only official numbers available for police homicides. (And that report doesn’t even pretend to be a complete account of everyone killed by police officers.) “Police involved shooting” may not be quite as obfuscatory a phrase as it was designed to be, simply because the majority of American shootings “involving” cops seem to be shootings by cops.

(Photo: Montgomery County police officers qualifying at their indoor shooting range in Rockville, Maryland on August 23, 2007. For story on ammunition rationing due to the war in Iraq. By James M. Thresher/The Washington Post/Getty Images.)

The Death Rattle Of Islamism?

by Jonah Shepp

Graeme Wood isn’t the first writer to touch on the significance of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration of a “caliphate”, but his substantial exploration of the meaning of the term gets to why it’s so weird that Baghdadi has chosen it to describe his so-called Islamic State when other radical Islamist groups have steered clear of such declarations:

Mostly … caliphate declarations have been rare because they are outrageously out of sync with history. The word conjures the majesty of bygone eras and of states that straddle continents. For a wandering group of hunted men like Al Qaeda to declare a caliphate would have been Pythonesque in its deluded grandeur, as if a few dozen Neo-Nazis or Italian fascists declared themselves the Holy Roman Empire or dressed up like Augustus Caesar. “Anybody who actively wishes to reestablish a caliphate must be deeply committed to a backward-looking view of Islam,” says [University of Chicago historian Fred] Donner. “The caliphate hasn’t been a functioning institution for over a thousand years.”

And it isn’t now, either. The designation of the ISIS “caliphate” still smacks of delusional grandiosity more than anything else. There is no downplaying its brutality or denying that it would do great violence to the West if given the chance, but the Islamic State is no superpower: more than anything else, its sudden rise owes mainly to the fact that Syria and Iraq are fragile states, and its savagery has alerted the sleepwalking states of the Arab world to the threat of jihadism like never before. The enemies it is making on all sides, especially among other Muslims, would seem to suggest that ISIS may burn out nearly as quickly as it caught fire. Could the madness of ISIS be the final fever of a dying ideology?

What seems most promising to me in the backlash against ISIS is the extent to which that backlash relies on the genuine principles of Islam itself. We know that some of the fighters traveling from the West to fight alongside ISIS know next to nothing about the religion. We have evidence that jihadist movements like Boko Haram and the Taliban are widely despised in their spheres of influence. Here, Dean Obeidallah takes a look at how leaders of Muslim countries and communities are more or less unanimously condemning the false Islam of the jihadists:

The religious and government leaders in Muslim-dominated countries have swiftly and unequivocally denounced ISIS as being un-Islamic. For example, in Malaysia, a nation with 20 million Muslims, the prime minister denounced ISIS as “appalling” and going against the teachings of Islam(only about 50 have joined ISIS from there). In Indonesia, Muslim leaders not only publicly condemned ISIS, the government criminalized support for the group. And while some allege that certain Saudi individuals are financially supporting ISIS, the Saudi government officially declared ISIS a terrorist group back in March and is arresting suspected  ISIS recruiters. This can be a helpful guide to other nations in deterring ISIS from recruiting.  A joint strategy of working with Muslim leaders in denouncing ISIS and criminalizing any support appears to be working. And to that end, on Monday, British Muslim leaders issued a fatwa (religious edict) condemning ISIS and announcing Muslims were religiously prohibited from joining ISIS.

This all has me wondering if ISIS, the reductio ad absurdum of radical Islamism, doesn’t herald the downfall of that ideology altogether. Bear in mind that political Islam hasn’t always been exclusively reactionary: the first avowedly Islamic politics of the modern era, first articulated before the Muslim Brotherhood’s founders were even born, was the Islamic Modernism of Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Here were pious Muslims arguing that Islam was fully compatible with rationalism and making arguments for universal literacy and women’s rights from the same Muslim revivalist standpoint from which Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb would later espouse a more conservative vision of Islamic politics in modernity.

The illiberal strain of Arab Islamism, its Iranian counterpart, and the more radical jihadist movements that grew out of these movements (or alongside them, depending on which historian you ask) have been the major representatives of political Islam in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There’s no reason, however, to believe that this condition is permanent or that a less reactionary form of Islamic political thought, or even an Islamic liberalism after the model of the Modernists, could not take hold in the Muslim world given the right set of circumstances. Islamism, particularly in its more extreme varieties, has long articulated an Islamic state operating under a “pure” interpretation of Islamic law as a utopian vision. Now, here is an Islamic State, a “caliphate” no less, that claims to do just that, and the outcome is rather dystopian. Torture, gang rape, slave brides, beheadings, crucifixions, and child soldiers are not what most Muslims have in mind when they imagine the ideal Islamic society. I would wager that these horrors will turn more Muslims against radical Islamism than toward it.

This is all by way of saying, as a reminder, that “Caliph Ibrahim” (Baghdadi) represents Muslims about as thoroughly as Tony Alamo represents Christians. The fact that he has attracted enough funding and followers to run roughshod over northern Iraq and eastern Syria is nothing to brush off, but it’s not winning him any friends, and it doesn’t make his ideology any less ridiculous. It’s certainly not “Islam”, at least not as any Muslim I know practices it. That’s why I suspect it will fail, like most grandiose visions of world domination do. And by radicalizing the Islamic heartland against radicalism, as it were, perhaps ISIS will take the entire edifice of radical Islamism down with it.