Category: The Dish

Even Forgotten History Matters

Slogging his way through Norman Davies’ two-volume history of Poland, Dale Favier wonders if it’s really worth it, given how many of the book’s details he’ll forget. Why he answers in the affirmative:

When I was young and foolish, I thought I could learn all of history and have it all available in my head, or at least a lot of European history, or at least a lot of English history. Now I know that almost all this stuff will fall right back out of my head again. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth doing. There is another kind of knowledge building up, a synoptic sense of what people have done and will do, what sorts of organizations have succeeded, what sorts have failed, and some of the common notions of why. It’s all terribly vague and unsatisfactory, and the more you read the more you realize how variable and subjective the notions are, but as it accumulates I find that I’m far less likely to be fooled by the demagogues and politicians of the moment. I’m no better at predicting the future than anyone else, but I recognize the rashness of betting on my predictions better than most. History has a way of wriggling out of what people expect.

And there is a sense one gets for the fullness, depth, complexity of any one place and its people. It’s like looking at pond water under a microscope: suddenly you become aware of the incredible richness and diversity referred to — but also concealed — by a name like “water” or “Poland.” … That, too, is worth knowing: and you gradually obtain the conviction that the parts of the world that have not yet been given thousand-page histories by an Oxford or Harvard don are every bit as diverse and complex. You may not have looked at them yet through the microscope; you don’t know what’s there; but you know that if you did, they would resolve into new worlds and new constellations of sub-worlds. That, I guess, is what you really gain by reading these fat narrative histories: a sense for just how large the human universe is.

A New Iraqi Refugee Crisis, Ctd

iraq-idps-province-638x683

Hayes Brown provides an update on the escalating emergency:

[T]he United Nations on Wednesday upgraded Iraq’s crisis to a level 3 humanitarian disaster — the most severe rating it has. “Now we’re focused on delivering water, food and essential items,” Colin MacInnes, deputy head of UNICEF in Iraq, told the Washington Post. “Iraq already has a level 3 polio disaster,” MacInnes continued, and as Syria across the border is also in the midst of a level 3 disaster, “that means we have currently three level 3 disasters that are affecting the country.”

“At the present moment, we have a very serious confrontation and we have meaningful levels of internal displacement. We are not yet witnessing a massive refugee outflow and I think it will depend on whether this crisis can be addressed effectively in the near future or whether it will be a protracted conflict,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres at a press briefing on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, for neighboring countries like Jordan, refugees from the original Syrian conflict remain a huge burden:

Tensions between Syrians and Jordanians are still a worry. Eighty percent of Syrian refugees live in Jordan’s cities and towns, where, since they are banned from working, they take black market jobs for low wages. The government says this has pushed down pay for Jordanians too. “The potential seeds of conflict are really there,” says Musa Shteiwi, who heads the University of Jordan’s Centre for Strategic Studies. A poll he ran late last year found that 73% of respondents were against hosting more refugees—up from 64% in 2012.

Jordan is asking donors to give it the $1 billion it says it will spend on additional security over the next three years thanks to the refugee influx—about as much as it has asked for education and health services for the refugees. It may also like to see a larger proportion of Syrians in controlled areas such as Azraq. Plans are already underway for a third refugee camp. Current urban dwellers are unlikely to be moved, but newcomers will find it harder to leave the camps.

This Fight Is About More Than ISIS

Marc Lynch explores how Arab supporters of Syria’s rebels see the conflict in Iraq:

The popular Al Jazeera personality Faisal al-Qasim recently observed to his 1.5 million Twitter followers that the Syrian and Iraqi revolutions were examples of “dressing up a popular revolution in terrorist clothes, demonizing it and opening fire on it.” Former Kuwaiti member of parliament Walid al-Tabtabaie, for instance, supports the “Iraqi revolution” while warning that ISIS “has some good people but is penetrated by Iran” and that “the corrupt in Syria can’t be in the interest of Iraq… they will stab you in the back.”

ISIS is a real threat, without question, a savvy and experienced fighting organization with a clear ideology, significant financial resources and a proven ability to attract foreign fighters to its cause. But this Arab counter-narrative shouldn’t be ignored.

The sharp divide between an American debate that focuses exclusively on ISIS and an Arab debate that focuses on a broad Sunni rebellion starkly evokes the similarly skewed discourse in the first few years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. From 2003 to 2006, U.S. officials and media often reduced the Iraqi insurgency to “al-Qaeda” and regime dead-enders, thus vastly exaggerating the importance of al-Qaeda in Iraq, delegitimating the political grievances of the Sunni community and missing opportunities to divide the insurgency. Heavy-handed, indiscriminate military responses informed by these views helped to fuel the insurgency.

Another major reason this matters:

These Arab narratives about what’s happening in Iraq shouldn’t be taken at face value, but listening carefully to them might help to avoid a counterproductive American foray back into Iraq. Inside Iraq, a broadly based Sunni insurgency, which commands the support of non-ISIS tribes and armed factions, would reinforce the case for why pushing Maliki for serious political accommodation before providing military aid is the right policy (Petraeus, for what it’s worth, agrees).

True, getting rid of him might not solve Iraq’s problems, but the crisis won’t be overcome without significant changes, which he seems highly unlikely to make (and nobody would trust his promises to do so after the crisis has passed). The point is not to appease ISIS, which could care less about such things, but to break the alliance between ISIS and some of its current Iraqi Sunni allies by giving them a reason to opt back into a political system in which they have largely lost faith. On their own, airstrikes and military support of Maliki without the prior delivery of real political change are likely to only push the various strands of the insurgency closer to ISIS. Political reform isn’t a luxury item that can be postponed until the real business of military action has been conducted – it is the key to once again dividing ISIS from those larger and more powerful Sunni forces.

Ali Kheder’s list of “the players actively fighting across Iraq today” further illustrates the folly of viewing the recent bloodshed as merely a fight between the Iraqi government and ISIS.

Does Israel “Pinkwash?” Ctd

ISRAEL-GAY-PRIDE-PARADE

Tyler Lopez is dismayed that Palestinian activists still accuse Israel of “pinkwashing” – i.e., using its mostly positive gay rights record to distract from its human rights abuses in the occupied territories – and are discouraging gay tourism to Israel during pride month:

Pinkwashing advocates are trapped in their own gender studies/international relations fantasyland. Legitimately concerned with human rights abuses in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, they have created an entire academic language in order to hype up a concept that draws an unrealistic correlation between their cause and the gay rights movement. Because of this, any LGBTQ person traveling to take part in a gay rights demonstration is a homonationalist, unwittingly part of the pinkwashing agenda. It’s no longer appropriate to label any city as “gay-friendly” or “homophobic,” because, according to pinkwashing activists, pro-gay legislation and LGBTQ visibility aren’t the appropriate barometers with which to measure social change. Gays, perhaps it’s time to book your tickets to Saudi Arabia. (Don’t worry about finding a hotel; if you’re openly gay, the Saudi government will be happy to provide accommodations.)

Of course, LGBTQ rights aren’t the only marker of social change or human rights. But suggesting that they’re separate from any other universal human right is dangerous. An accusation of pinkwashing presumes that gay human rights causes are less salient than Palestinian human rights causes, when in fact they’re all equal.

I rendered a similar verdict on “pinkwashing” way back in 2011. I see no reason to change my mind. It is perfectly possible to decry the brutal occupation and the relentless settlement building of the Israeli government in the West Bank while also celebrating Israel’s amazing commitment to gay freedom. In its region, Israel isn’t just an exception; it truly is a shining city on a hill. The tragedy of Israel is that so much of its democratic energy has been diverted into the oppression of another people. I favor engagement, not disengagement; argument, not sanctions.

(Photo: Russian tourists attend the annual gay pride parade in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv on June 13, 2014. By Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images.)

About That Iraqi Democracy: Forget About It

One might be forgiven for thinking that the catastrophic war in Iraq was designed to bring democracy and sovereignty to that nation after a brutal, foul dictatorship. That, after all, was what we were told from the get-go, along with the alleged threat of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Many service-members died to bring that democracy about; almost 200,000 Iraqis died in the bloody transition. And they elected a prime minister; and re-elected him in fair elections. And yet now, courtesy of the CIA’s unofficial spokesman, David Ignatius, we hear that Maliki is nonetheless going to be deposed by the US:

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.

So the whole pretext of Iraqi democracy was a sham, and we now know this without a shadow of a doubt. The next leader of Iraq will be IRAQ-UNREST-VOLUNTEERSpicked in Washington, and not by the people of that country. And the right of an elected government to choose its own policies and direct its own governance – for good or ill – has been effectively rendered null and void. There’s never any welfare reform with imperial welfare. They are to be dependents for ever. And, of course, the CIA’s previous regime changes in the Middle East – Iran, anyone? – do not even merit a mention. Just because they have screwed it up every single time doesn’t mean they don’t have the absolute right to screw it up again. Because the residue of their own disasters can be used to justify yet more ones. Just ask Fred Hiatt.

As with most imperial projects – and what other word can be used to describe the embedded assumptions in Ignatius’s column? –  Washington will use local power-brokers to implement its designs. Ignatius is perfectly candid about the rawness of the imperialism involved:

The people who will pull the plug on Maliki are Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and other Iraqi kingmakers. The United States should push them to signal unmistakably that Maliki is finished. And they must do so in coordination with Iran, which will effectively have a veto on the next Iraqi prime minister, whether we like it or not.

Notice the lack of any subjunctive. The Kurdish leader will do what he is told; the Sunni tribes must cooperate with Iran. This is the mindset of the CIA, a beyond-the-rule-of-law organization that has done more damage to this country’s interests and values than any other organ of state. The contempt of these imperialists (who brought torture into the American bloodstream) for the autonomy of any other country is a striking as their contempt for American values.

So Ignatius admits that this illegal intervention needs “political cover”from other interested parties in the region (all of whom have ulterior motives and almost all of whom have contributed to this burgeoning sectarian warfare). And the goal now is to intervene simultaneously in Syria’s civil war, to the tune of training up to 10,000 “Syrian moderates” (try not to laugh out loud or burst simultaneously into tears).

And the entire point of this exercise is to get another war up and running – and soon – in Syria and Iraq:

Targeting ISIS perhaps could begin with its safe havens and infiltration routes along the Syria-Iraq border, where there’s less chance of hitting Sunni tribesmen. “We know where their base camps and training camps are, which is where we can start — and it’s important to start,” says U.S. Central Command adviser Derek Harvey.

Yes, “it’s important to start”. Sure, we don’t know where any of this could lead – but the one thing we have learned this past decade and a half is to launch a war first and figure out those questions later. Intervening in two sectarian countries just adds to the challenge, I guess. It’s so good to know someone advising Central Command has absorbed the lessons of the past so well.

I’m distressed by the news out of DC and alarmed by Obama’s presser, but I haven’t given up on the president yet.

Ignatius is voicing the CIA’s agenda, as usual, not necessarily the president’s. In his presser today,

Mr. Obama insisted that the United States would not press for Mr. Maliki’s replacement by a new leader. “It’s not our job to choose Iraq’s leaders,” he said. But he added, “Right now, there’s too much suspicion, there’s too much mistrust.”

And yet 300 military “advisers” and the possibility of air-strikes is how wars start. And the president has been woefully supine when it comes to confronting the lawless incompetence of the CIA for the past six years; and once military strikes begin, we’re back to square one, trying to control a country we do not understand and cannot master, taking the bait of all sorts of interested parties, who will use us as they have used us in the past to promote their own agendas. The president also signaled he is leery of Ignatius’ utopian notion of 10,000 “Syrian moderates”:

He cited the difficulties in deciding whether to arm members of the opposition. “If you have former farmers or teachers or pharmacists who now are taking up opposition against a battle-hardened regime,” he said, “how quickly can you get them trained?”

And how do you know that after they’ve been trained and equipped, they won’t turn around on a dime like the Iraqi army just did? This is the Arab Middle East. There is no trust there. And there are no reliable allies.

In my view, this is not a conflict in which you can half-intervene. By some miracle, we extricated ourselves at great loss. And yet the breezy tone in Ignatius’s column and the decision by Obama to send Special Forces advisers to Iraq suggest something more ominous still. So let me reiterate something: in my view, the one thing Obama pledged never to do he must never do. For me, re-entering the Iraq war – which is what US-targeted airstrikes with Special Forces on the ground against ISIS would do – is a deal-breaker. In one move, it could obliterate Obama’s entire foreign policy legacy of deleveraging the empire and effectively treat the American people as irrelevant. It would also instantly make the United States a prime target for these religious fanatics.

So this is truly a test of the president’s mettle. Will he stand up for the American people and follow his own instincts or cave to the CIA and the hyperventilating Beltway? His presser today both reassured but also worried me. I worry because I have learned the hard way that the elites in Washington like to treat the world as a garden to tend, they have never seen a crisis they don’t think they can solve, and they love to imagine themselves in the vanguard of the good and the true, even if all their recent interventions have led to mass murder and lies. This goes for Democrats as well as Republicans. And when the imperial complex sees a new opportunity to enlarge its power and money and relevance, they tend to have their way. Because they always have their way, and until we elect someone with the spine to rescue us from this eternal, corrosive, imperial quicksand, they always will.

 

UPDATE: A couple of sentences in Ignatius’ piece have been changed. Details here.

Terror Winning War On Terror

Terror Chart

Ian Bremmer captions the above chart from RAND (pdf):

Since 2007, the number of attacks by al Qaeda and its affiliates has risen nearly tenfold, with violence levels highest in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Somalia. Unlike a decade ago, core al Qaeda has been involved in very few plots, but its branches have more than made up the difference. Between 2012 and 2013, both al Qaeda in Iraq and the Syria-Civil-War-born Jabhat al-Nusra quadrupled their attacks.

This war is real and metastasizing, as the Arab world continues on its rough road to what might be modernity. And I should reiterate one lesson I draw from this. Our previous tactics – invasion, occupation and torture – clearly failed. Drones have become a two-edged sword in terms of fomenting as much terror as they might destroy. We’re left with domestic security, which means to say the NSA. I worry almost as much as some others about the potential for abuse in this country’s vast intelligence and spying networks. But they exist for a reason; and they are primarily defensive. They exploit our core advantage over Islamist mass-murderers: our technological superiority. In this long war, which will wax and wane as the Arab and Muslim world grows and adapts, a better-monitored and better safe-guarded NSA is our friend and not our enemy.

Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd

In a shrewd and worried column, Clive Crook thinks Americans’ left/right social and geographic isolation has made productive ideological debate close to impossible and poisonous partisan discourse even worse. He cites a Stanford study that goes even further:

Using data from a variety of sources, we demonstrate that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents.

We also find that partisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes. The more plausible account lies in the nature of political campaigns; exposure to messages attacking the out-group reinforces partisans’ biased views of their opponents.

This makes a bunch of sense when you think about it. What is the primary form of communication to low-information voters? Political ads. What do they do? Intensify contempt for various candidates along stereotypical partisan lines. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam, and cut yourself off from anyone with a different viewpoint, and you have our gridlocked society. And all the Supreme Court seems to do is usher in yet more money to finance yet more of this poison; and all the media seems able to do is reach for ratings by exploiting these emotions.

“The Most Discriminatory Law In The Land”

That’s what Jamelle Bouie calls family cap laws, which prevent parents on welfare from receiving additional benefits when they have another child:

Of course, the policy was based on a myth, the idea of the sexually irresponsible “welfare queen.” In 1990, just 10 percent of households that received Aid to Families with Dependent Children—the precursor to today’s federal welfare program—had three or more children (most had two or fewer). Those figures were down from the 1960s, when 32.5 percent of such families had four or more children. In 2013, the Bureau for Labor Statistics noted that “average family size was the same, whether or not a family received assistance.” Public perception notwithstanding, there’s no difference in family size between those that collect welfare and that those that don’t.

So what are the results of these misguided policies?

There’s little evidence that family caps work as advertised. What is unquestionably true is that they make poor families poorer.

A 2006 report from the Urban Institute found that family caps increase the “deep poverty” rate of single mothers by 12.5 percent, and increase the deep poverty rate of children by 13.1 percent. It’s easy to see how this works. In Maryland, a state without family caps, the average benefit for a single-parent family of three is $574. If, while receiving that benefit, the parent had another child, it would rise to $695, a 17 percent increase. By contrast, in Virginia—where the benefit for a family of three is $389—it would stay the same (as opposed to growing to $451). And when you consider the generally low benefit levels of family cap states—in Georgia, the average monthly benefit for a three-person household is $280, in Mississippi it’s $170—what you have is a recipe for greater poverty.

Colorblind Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action

The Economist flags an Israeli study on it:

The researchers concluded that the programme works. It has increased the diversity of the student bodies at top universities by helping the poor without increasing the risk of admitting unqualified applicants. Students admitted through the programme “are not falling behind academically, even at the most selective majors,” the authors found.

Israel is a unique—and uniquely small—country with its own social complications, and there is no guarantee that a programme that works there would work in America. But the study offers some hope for those who seek to create more diverse student bodies and perhaps improve social mobility without explicitly privileging groups based on race.

Leonhardt, who provides the above chart, contends that traditional affirmative action is on the way out:

[H]ere’s the paradox for defenders of today’s affirmative action: Their best hope of salvaging some form of it is to make race secondary and class primary.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the Supreme Court, has signaled some openness to letting institutions consider race, so long as race doesn’t dominate their decisions. And in today’s version of affirmative action, race dominates. The standard way that colleges judge any potential alternative is to ask whether it results in precisely the same amount of racial diversity, rather than acknowledging that other forms of diversity also matter.

An affirmative action based mostly on class, and using race in narrowly tailored ways, is one much more likely to win approval from Justice Kennedy when the issue inevitably returns to the court.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, editor of The Future of Affirmative Action, supports a class-based system:

Shifting from racial considerations would substantially increase socioeconomic diversity. While those in the bottom socioeconomic half currently enjoy access to just 14 percent of seats at selective colleges, that would rise to 46 percent under socioeconomic affirmative action, 31 percent under a top-10-percent plan, and 53 percent under a program combining the two.

Achieving racial diversity by such alternative means is a matter of fairness and equity: While race matters in allocating opportunity, class is an even more significant barrier to success. Although the achievement gap by race used to be twice as large as the achievement gap by income, today the reverse is true.