The Best Of The Dish Today

At a speech the other night, I was asked a direct question: “Are you an isolationist?” I’ve never been asked that question before and I found myself wanting to say yes, just to stir shit up. But in a moment of restraint, I did say yes in the current case, but not always. I’m against isolationism if there is something we can do that actually works. But no amount of moral outrage at outright evil makes any sense if there’s nothing we can really do to stop it. Or indeed if our intervention will actually make things worse. As it has in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Readers have asked me what I would do if I were president in this case. My answer is nothing. I would tell the country that this is a consequence of the Iraq War, and that if we could not really quell a Sunni insurgency with a hundred thousands troops on the ground for nearly a decade, then air-strikes are not going to do a thing now. I’d insist that the neighboring Sunni states will have to deal with this themselves – or allow Iran to handle it. If a regional Sunni-Shi’a war is the result, we can always hope that both sides will lose. Invading Iraq was not Obama’s responsibility; his responsibility was to get us out and to stay out. Once Syria’s WMDs had been taken out of the country, it would be a regional conflagration – like the Syrian civil war that has already cost 200,000 lives, or the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Yes, we should tighten our defenses; yes, we should deal firmly with any Americans who are going to fight there; yes, we should perhaps intervene from a distance if one side seemed to be gaining the upper hand too much. (Our real interest is in bolstering the one stable power in the region, which is Iran.) But basically: leave these insane, foul, sectarian conflagrations to those who fight them. Above all, do not make this a war between Islam and the West. Let it be what it is: a war of Islam against itself.

The alternative was outlined by George W Bush today. His view is that we should be patient and baby-sit “Iraqi” “democracy” for an indefinite period of time with residual troops. We are now doing that in Afghanistan. The alternative, in other words, is an endless pseudo-empire in failed states to achieve “democracy” where such a thing makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s a form of welfare with no cut-off, creating hatred for the US and thereby anti-Western terror for the foreseeable future and beyond.

We elected Obama precisely to be calm and sane enough to be able to resist what he has now done. He betrayed us. His policy, such as it is, is utterly incoherent and as free from any sane fiscal footing as his predecessor’s. He has launched a war against an entity that even the CIA says poses no threat to the US. And his party will be eviscerated in the coming November elections as a result. If you voted twice for Obama to end these unwinnable, bankrupting, open-ended wars, why on earth would you vote Democrat to enable another one? Yes, the polls show support for the new war right now. But just watch. The easy part is over. The civilian casualties will mount, ISIS and al Qaeda are uniting again, the narrative of Islam against the West is back in the foreground, the completely farcical idea of arming “moderate Syrians” will go nowhere, and the terror risk at home will escalate. There will be no victories. Except for the Republicans.

Today, I took note of how Fox News is seizing on the politics of fear that Obama has now legitimized; we reviewed Marilynne Robinson’s latest installment in her stunning Gilead trilogy; we noted how Hobby Lobby is beginning to prove Ruth Bader Ginsburg right; and noted how our only real allies in Syria now hate us. Plus: more on spanking. And a cat that loves being vacuumed.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. Another reader quotes me regarding what’s quickly becoming our email of the month – a first-person account of child abuse:

“What has long struck me about this almost unique aspect of the Dish is not just the fact that readers feel safe to write us, knowing that their identities will be absolutely confidential, but that the quality of the writing is so high.” I have no doubt that your readership is smarter than the average publication’s (and we’re all damned good-looking, too). But my hunch is that your decision not to have an open comments section also drives up the quality of the emails you get. Every smart email you publish sets the bar that much higher for the rest of us. We know there’s no point in emailing you something half-assed, so we write, rewrite, edit, and re-edit our emails.

And then we throw in a line praising (or trashing) the Pet Shop Boys before we hit send.

What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?

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See you in the morning.

France And Jews, Then And Now

James McAuley interviews Anne Sinclair, who recalls a challenge when renewing her French identity card in 2010:

The bureaucrat that day… demanded that she prove her citizenship in the following way: “Are your four grandparents French?” he asked. In New York this week, Sinclair told me that this was precisely the moment she decided to write My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War. “As you know,” she said, “this question is particularly … tricky.”

Sinclair’s grandfather was none other than Paul Rosenberg, the legendary Parisian art dealer who was among the first to showcase masterpieces by Braque, Léger, Matisse, and Picasso in the 1920s and 1930s. In June 1940, during the German invasion, Rosenberg and his family—Jews who dealt in what the Nazis had dubbed entartete Kunst, “degenerate art”—fled for New York, and were subsequently “denationalized” by the Vichy government. Their beloved Galerie Rosenberg at 21, rue la Boétie would be sequestered by the Nazis and transformed into the Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives, a virulently anti-Semitic propaganda organization. The gallery’s walls—which had once bravely displayed a seminal transition in twentieth-century art—were then made to bear witness to the organization of “Le Juif et La France,” the infamous 1941 Palais Berlitz exhibition that encouraged viewers to “identify the Jew and protect themselves against his actions.”

Sinclair also gives her thoughts on the current status of French Jewry:

[M]ore French Jews are making aliyah to Israel in 2014 than ever before. The reasons for their departure, of course, are complex, and not easily explained by the desire to escape an anti-Semitic environment. But the fact remains that more than 2,000 Jews have left France, compared with only 580 from the same period last year. “There’s been a lot of fuss everywhere about that,” says Sinclair, “and it’s not always accurate. … I’m concerned, of course, by the anti-Semitic revival. There is one. Not only in France, in Europe, everywhere.”

“And,” she adds, “there’s a new anti-Semitism, which is not one of the ’30s or the ’40s, which is more related to the conflict in the Middle East. In some suburbs in France you have people coming even in the third generation from the Maghreb, who are living in very bad conditions, and they feel they are rejected, well, by the whole community. … This sense of being rejected is a social despair, which can mutate into anti-Semitism when they want to protest for something.”

“But don’t believe that the French Jews are fleeing—it’s absolutely untrue,” she said, emphasizing the complicated nature of the statistics often used in the reports. French Jews may be leaving France in greater numbers than before, but so have many other French citizens, seeking friendlier business climates and lower tax rates overseas.

A Poem For Thursday

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“Night” by Jean Valentine:

From this night on God let me eat
like that blind child on the train
touching her yogurt as I’d touch a spiderweb
the first morning in the country—sky red—

holding the carton and spoon to her mouth
with all her eyeless body, and then
orientally resting, the whole time smiling
a little to one side of straight ahead.

(From Door in the Mountain: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2003 © 2004 by Jean Valentine. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Photo by Jennie Downing)

Arabs And Democracy: It’s Complicated

Lindsay Benstead takes a second look at poll data from the Arab world showing widespread support for democratic governance:

According to polls from 2006 to 2008, at least 80 percent of residents in Yemen, the Palestinian territories, Algeria and Jordan agreed or strongly agreed that, “Democracy may have its problems, but it is the best form of government.” This figure exceeded 90 percent in Morocco and Lebanon.

Yet, in a recent article published in “Democratization,” I revisited these Arab Barometer data and found that support for democracy is not as widespread as received wisdom suggests. I found that 27 percent of citizens of six countries surveyed by the Arab Barometer believed that democracy is best but unsuitable for their country. The reasons citizens saw democracy as unsuitable stem not from religion or economic modernization – the focus of many studies of Arab public opinion – but from concerns about economic problems and political instability that could accompany free elections.

Why this matters:

First, scholars have long suggested that public support for democracy is a key driver of democratization. So, it is important for the long-term development of democracy that citizens have confidence in democracy as the best way to achieve a better life. Second, the conditions that appear to threaten public confidence in democracy in the Arab world – instability, violence and upheaval – are an unfortunate byproduct of the transitions taking place in the region. And, this appears to be hampering citizen confidence in democracy.

On a related subject, Steven Cook puzzles over the Egyptian “liberals” who now back the coup government of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi:

We have all come to believe in the alleged axiom of Egyptian politics: Faced with a choice between democratically elected Islamists and the authoritarianism of the military, the liberals will choose the officers, revealing themselves to be not so liberal after all. That seems self-evident, but liberal supporters of the post-July 2013 political process argue that the coup and their support for it were actually quintessentially liberal. To them, the military’s intervention precluded Egypt’s slide into a new authoritarianism of a particular religious bent from which there could be no hope for the survival of liberalism. These folks also make the case that their (mostly Western) critics mistakenly fuse liberal principles and democracy, failing to recognize that democracy can bring about both its own demise as well as that of liberalism.

Moreover, the first concern of many of those Egyptian intellectuals who opposed Mubarak but support Sisi is preserving and advancing liberal ideals, which is more important—for now—than the ballot box. It’s an interesting and informed argument, steeped as it is in John Locke. Yet the argument seems like a leap of faith. It is hard to imagine that as Egypt’s authorities go about re-engineering the political institutions of the state to ensure that something like the January 25 uprising never happens again that they are simultaneously creating an environment where liberalism can not only be sustained, but also thrive.

Against Mindless Automation

In an excerpt from his new book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, Nicholas Carr tackles the increasing automation of our society:

Glass CageMachines are cold and mindless, and in their obedience to scripted routines we see an image of society’s darker possibilities. If machines bring something human to the alien cosmos, they also bring some­thing alien to the human world. The mathematician and philoso­pher Bertrand Russell put it succinctly in a 1924 essay: “Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.”

The tension reflected in Russell’s description of automated machines—they’d either destroy us or redeem us, liber­ate us or enslave us—has a long history. The same tension has run through popular reactions to factory machinery since the start of the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago. While many of our forebears celebrated the arrival of mechanized production, seeing it as a symbol of progress and a guarantor of prosperity, others wor­ried that machines would steal their jobs and even their souls. Ever since, the story of technology has been one of rapid, often disorient­ing change. Thanks to the ingenuity of our inventors and entrepre­neurs, hardly a decade has passed without the arrival of new, more elaborate, and more capable machinery. Yet our ambivalence toward these fabulous creations, creations of our own hands and minds, has remained a constant. It’s almost as if in looking at a machine we see, if only dimly, something about ourselves that we don’t quite trust.

In another excerpt, Carr fears that automation is damaging the labor market:

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once asked, “Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded?”

In the business world at least, no stability in the division of work between human and computer seems in the offing. The prevailing methods of computerized communication and coordination pretty much ensure that the role of people will go on shrinking. We’ve designed a system that discards us. If unemployment worsens in the years ahead, it may be more a result of our new, subterranean infrastructure of automation than of any particular installation of robots in factories or software applications in offices. The robots and applications are the visible flora of automation’s deep, extensive, and invasive root system.

Nick Romeo lays out some of the book’s primary arguments:

We are increasingly encaged, [Carr] argues, but the invisibility of our high-tech snares gives us the illusion of freedom. As evidence, he cites the case of Inuit hunters in northern Canada. Older generations could track caribou through the tundra with astonishing precision by noticing subtle changes in winds, snowdrift patterns, stars, and animal behavior. Once younger hunters began using snowmobiles and GPS units, their navigational prowess declined. They began trusting the GPS devices so completely that they ignored blatant dangers, speeding over cliffs or onto thin ice. And when a GPS unit broke or its batteries froze, young hunters who had not developed and practiced the wayfinding skills of their elders were uniquely vulnerable.

Carr includes other case studies: He describes doctors who become so reliant on decision-assistance software that they overlook subtle signals from patients or dismiss improbable but accurate diagnoses. He interviews architects whose drawing skills decay as they transition to digital platforms. And he recounts frightening instances when commercial airline pilots fail to perform simple corrections in emergencies because they are so used to trusting the autopilot system. Carr is quick to acknowledge that these technologies often do enhance and assist human skills. But he makes a compelling case that our relationship with them is not as positive as we might think.

But, after reading the book, Josh Dzieza remains unafraid of such technologies:

Carr takes a broad approach to automation, so any technological abbreviation of a task would qualify. Google’s auto-completing searches automates inquiry, Carr says, while legal software automates research, discovery, and even the drafting of contracts. CAD automates architectural sketching. Thanks to an explosion in computing power, more and more things are getting automated, and Carr worries that it’s all combining to degrade our skills and insulate us from the world. “When automation distances us from our work,” Carr writes, “when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.”

I think Carr is probably right about much of this, but I have a hard time mustering his concern. I too am nostalgic for the romance of early flight, when pilots were intuitively attuned to their surroundings through the shuddering of their plane’s throttles and levers; but as Carr himself notes, a great many of those early pilots died in crashes, and personally I’m glad my captain isn’t flying by unaided gut feeling. Pilots might be less manually skilled now, but flying is far safer. For my part, I’m probably less engaged with my surroundings because of Google Maps, but it also allows me to explore more new places without getting lost. Every tool, automated or not, opens new possibilities and closes others, fosters new skills and lets others lapse. Most of the problems Carr points to either seem like good trade-offs or fixable shortcomings. He even suggests some possible design solutions, including taking cues from game makers and designing tools that are always slightly challenging to use.

A Gun Restraining Order

Jacob Sullum disapproves of a new California law, according to which a cop or family member “can seek a ‘gun violence restraining order’ that prohibits an individual from possessing firearms and authorizes police to seize any he currently owns”:

If the applicant is a cop, he must have “reasonable cause” to believe “the subject of the petition poses an immediate and present danger of causing personal injury” to himself or someone else. If the applicant is a relative or roommate, he must show there is a “substantial likelihood” that “the subject of the petition poses a significant danger, in the near future, of personal injury” to himself or someone else. Either standard suffices to take away someone’s right to arms for three weeks, after which he has an opportunity for a hearing where the petitioner has to show by “clear and convincing evidence” that he “poses a significant danger of personal injury” to himself or others. If the judge decides that test has been met, he issues a one-year restraining order than can be renewed annually.

Bloomberg View’s editors, meanwhile, welcome the reform:

The law enables people to temporarily prevent mentally disturbed family members from possessing or purchasing guns. A so-called gun-violence restraining order, akin to the one used to obtain restraining orders in domestic violence cases, will allow police to search for and seize firearms.

The impetus for the law, which also allows law-enforcement officials to ask for a restraining order, was the shooting in May in which a mentally disturbed man killed six and wounded a dozen near the University of California at Santa Barbara. Although the killer’s parents had expressed grave concerns about his mental state, nothing prevented him from purchasing guns.

But Sullum doubts the law would have prevented that shooting:

[A]s far as I know no one in his family was aware that he owned guns. In a case with different facts, of course, it is conceivable that one of these new restraining orders might stop a would-be mass murderer. But it’s more likely this law will become a tool of meddling and harassment that mostly affects people with no homicidal intent.

Patrick Kulp compares the law to others across the country:

Under current California law, officers are only allowed to confiscate weapons if their owner has been convicted of a violent crime, deemed mentally unstable or is subject to a restraining order for domestic violence. Connecticut, Indiana and Texas all have laws in place that allow police to seize firearms with a judge’s order, but California is the first state to extend this right to immediate family members.

 

Turkey’s Stake In The ISIS War

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As expected, Turkey’s parliament today authorized the government to take military action against jihadists in both Syria and Iraq, but Ankara has yet to say what, if anything, that action will be. With ISIS on its border, though, we might find out soon:

Kurdish fighters backed by US-led air strikes were locked in fierce fighting Wednesday to prevent the besieged border town of Ain al-Arab from falling to the Islamic State group fighters. “There are real fears that the IS may be able to advance into the town… very soon,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights warned, with the jihadists within three kilometres (two miles) of the strategic town.

Or an attack on the tomb of Suleiman Shah, a Turkish enclave in northern Syria, might be what finally draws Ankara into the war:

Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said Tuesday that the militants were advancing on the white stone mausoleum, guarded by several dozen Turkish soldiers and perched on a manicured lawn under a Turkish flag on the banks of the Euphrates. The tomb was made Turkish under a treaty signed with France in 1921, when France ruled Syria. Ankara regards it as sovereign territory and has made clear that it will defend the mausoleum if it is attacked.

Jamie Dettmer relays the suspicions of diplomats in Ankara that “Turkey will limit its military role—doing a bare minimum as a NATO member to avoid embarrassing the Western alliance but not enough to undermine the anti-Western narrative that thrills Erdogan’s Islamist supporters and other religious conservatives in the country”:

“As much as Turkey enjoys the protection of NATO’s Patriot missiles against the Syrian regime, Ankara is perhaps not willing to appear an active member of a war operation against what was initially a Sunni insurgency movement in Syria,” according to Marc Pierini, a former ambassador of the European Union in Ankara. “Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has never wanted to appear to be aligning itself with Western policies.”

Erdogan’s domestic critics say he has to some degree helped the rise of ISIS, as well as other Islamic militants. At the very least Turkey has turned a blind eye to them as they emerged in the Syrian civil war and increasingly formed the vanguard in the fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. Some critics argue that Turkey’s intelligence agencies have gone farther and actively channeled arms supplies to the jihadists.

Koplow also explores how the spillover effects of the conflict in Syria stand to influence Turkey’s domestic politics. For one thing, the government’s non-response is alienating the country’s Kurdish population, threatening to undo what had been a fairly successful rapprochement:

Many Kurds blame Ankara for allowing ISIS to fester and even for empowering the group through its previous see-no-evil-hear-no-evil border policy. The more half-hearted the Turkish government has been about getting rid of ISIS, the harder it is to successfully conclude the Kurdish peace process. In southeastern Turkey, funerals for Kurdish fighters who have been killed fighting ISIS across the border are a regular occurrence, and they contribute to growing discord between a naturally restive population and the Turkish government. The ongoing battle between ISIS and Kurdish fighters for the town of Kobane on the Syria-Turkey border — and Turkey’s apparent reluctance to get involved for fear of empowering Kurdish militants in Turkey — is inflaming passions and contributing to antigovernment rhetoric in ways that will reverberate well beyond this particular fight. …

An economy burdened by refugees, renewed unrest among Turkish Kurds, resurgent nationalism, and policy run by unaccountable intelligence services makes for an unstable brew. ISIS has presented the United States and the entire Middle East with a new set of problems, but its immediate legacy may be an end to what has been a remarkable period of Turkish domestic stability.

(Photo: A Turkish soldier stands on a hill in Suruc, Turkey on October 2, 2014, facing the Islamic State (IS) fighters’ new position, 10km west of the Syrian city of Ain al-Arab (Kobani). By Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

Ripples From Kowloon Bay?

As Beijing worries over the Hong Kong protests emboldening democrats and separatists in the hotspots of China’s periphery, Isaac Stone Fish interviews a leading Uighur independence activist about how she views the past week’s events:

According to Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled leader of the movement for Uighur rights, the ideals of the Hong Kong movement are already influencing the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang. “Because of the brutality and wrongfulness of the Chinese government, the Uighur people have concluded that their only option is independence,” she said in a Sept. 30 interview with Foreign Policy. The protests in Hong Kong “are very inspiring” to Xinjiang, she said. Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group who make up roughly 43 percent of the population in Xinjiang, think that “if Hong Kong wins, it will benefit Uighurs as well, and then the Uighurs can strengthen their own movement.” …

“I saw what happened in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” she said, referring to protests in Taipei this spring, and “I wished” that Xinjiang could also have Western journalists reporting there. “Our people can’t do what the Hong Kong people are doing because they’re getting killed by the Chinese government,” and there are no outsiders to observe it.

Alexa Olesen looks to Macau, the former Portuguese colony and current gambling mecca just up the coast from Hong Kong with a somewhat similar governing arrangement. For now, at least, a battle for democracy doesn’t seem to be in the cards there:

[O]ver the past year or so, Macau has seen the emergence of an aggressive labor movement fond of protests and strikes and the stirrings of a political opposition with democratic ambitions. It remains to be seen how Hong Kong’s experience — massive protests over many days that police have tried to beat back with pepper spray and tear gas — will color those developments. What’s clear is that Macau is watching intently. …

Is Macau ripe for a Hong Kong-style Umbrella Revolution? Alex Choi, an assistant professor in public administration at the University of Macao, told FP that while the territory’s labor movement gathered steam, he doesn’t expect them to shift their focus from better wages to universal suffrage any time soon. Choi said it would be “a big jump” to go from labor issues to “a fight for democracy and against Beijing.” So far, he said, the labor movement hasn’t appeared eager to take that leap.

Taiwan, of course, is not part of China, but Beijing would like it to be, and so Taipei is also keeping a watchful eye on the Hong Kong standoff. Taiwanese activist Lin Fei-Fan explains why:

The main goal of the “one country, two systems” policy by which China governs Hong Kong is to provide a template for Taiwan, but the developments of recent years clearly show China placing increasingly tight restrictions on Hong Kong’s self-governance. It’s not just that China has reneged on its promise that Hong Kong’s system would remain “unchanged for 50 years.” A more serious problem is that conflicts within Hong Kong society have proliferated. The wealth disparity there cannot be solved via existing structures, and the huge influx of mainland tourists, as well as mainlanders who become Hong Kong residents, have also created even more social problems. Taiwan faces similar concerns. We have seen that Taiwan and the Chinese government have signed a number of trade agreements exposing Taiwan to industrial outsourcing, falling salaries, increases in the disparity between rich and poor, national security risks, and other crises.