February 13, 2015--Best of Behind: The Middle East? Hands Off

This seemed pertinent in June 2014 when it originally appeared and feels even more so today as President Obama is asking Congress to retrospectively authorize military strikes against ISIS Islamists and many in the House and Senate are pushing back against what some feel is the next step to our getting more directly involved in Syria and northern Iraq where ISIS poses an existential threat--

As President Obama feels the pressure to provide military assistance to the collapsing regime in Iraq, he and we should step back and review the last 2,500 years of history. Just a few pertinent highlights!

The major lesson is that no outside power, from Alexander the Great of Macedonia to the French and British imperialists, from the Soviet Union and now the United States, no one has been able to impose their will on the region.

All interventions, all attempts to subjugate proud and defiant peoples have failed. And worse--have reverberated back disastrously on the invaders, colonizers, and occupiers.

After 330 BC Alexander never recovered; the British and French colonial powers after the First World War never recovered; the Soviet Union collapsed and never recovered; and the United States lost treasure, power, and influence in the region and I suspect will also not recover.

So what to do now?

The right answer is nothing.

We should get out of the way and allow the people living there figure out their own futures, very much including their own borders.

If we could impose a sane and just plan of our own that would endure, I would consider supporting it. But the long reach of history teaches that any attempt to do so is doomed to fail and, worse, will only make things worse.

Look at the current situation in Iraq. The Sunni jihadists have already overrun a third of the country, a country that was arbitrarily constructed at the end of WW I. From the videos showing ISIS's triumphant advance, while the so-called Iraqi army discards its uniforms and attempts to blend in with the benighted civilian population, we see the invaders already in possession of American military equipment that also was abandoned by the Iraqi army.

This was reminiscent of the experience in Afghanistan where the U.S., still entangled in the Cold War, armed the Mujahideen who were fighting the invading Soviets and, after defeating them (which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union), morphed into the Taliban which proceeded to overthrow the Afghan government and then turned its weapons, the ones we supplied, on us when we invaded at the end of 2001. And does anyone doubt that as soon as we finish leaving Afghanistan the Taliban will once again take over?

Sounds like current-day Iraq to me.

Seven years ago, presidential candidate Joe Biden was ridiculed when he said that Iraq should be allowed to devolve into three countries--Shiite in the south, Sunni in the middle, and Turkistan in the north.

He was right.

In fact, he could have advocated similar things for the rest of the region, from at least Tunisia in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east.

Few of the countries in that geographic span have cultural borders--Iran (formerly Persia) and Egypt are perhaps the exceptions--but rather ones drawn for them by various conquerers and occupiers.

For centuries, for their own strategic and economic purposes, dominant Western powers have attempted to contain and control the essentially tribal people who live in this vast region. Since the end of the Second World War, country-by-country this has been unraveling. And at an accelerated pace for the past four or five years. Recall the Arab Spring of 2010.

The emergence of jihadist and terrorist groups--ISIS is just the most recent example--feels especially threatening to our national interest. But it may be more dangerous to attempt to continue to contain these aspirations and energies than let to them play out.

The genie of various forms of liberation cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. It is much too late for that.

It may be less risky to step back and allow these contesting forces to work things out. We may not like this idea or the potential outcomes; but, in reality, do we realistically have the ability and resources to impose an alternative scenario?

Do we see ourselves intervening on the side of the Shia-dominated government in Iraq allied with Iran's Revolutionary Guard? As unlikely, even as preposterous as this may sound, it is being seriously discussed.

Frightening as that prospect is--very much including the blow to our national ego--it represents another reason to back off. If there is to be fighting, and of course there is and will be, at least it will be focused within the region, internecine, and less directed toward us. That could be truly in our national interest.

October 29, 2104--Catching Up With the Times

Is it just me, or is it true that the news of the world these days is unusually, relentlessly grim?

Maybe it's always dire, but take the headiness from a couple of pages in last Saturday's New York Times--

"Islamist Party in Tunisia Appears Set to Rebound" It turns out that this in fact didn't happen but the Saturday piece saw a strong likelihood that the Islamist Ennahda Party, in the country where the Arab Spring began, would win a plurality of votes, defeating the more secular parties who now control the caretaker government.

"In French Port, 'Psychosis' Over Migrants From Middle East and Africa" Faced with ever-increasing numbers of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, the French government, in response to civic anxiety, is sending police reinforcements to the port of Calais to control the unruly situation.

"With Guile and Tiny Torah, Women Hold a Bat Mitzvah at the Western Wall" Calling for equal rights for women at the holy Western Wall of the biblical Jewish Temple, defying religious authorities and the police, women smuggled a miniature Torah to the Wall and conduced a Bat Mitzvah of a 13-year-old girl. The ceremony was broken up by the police and many participants were arrested. The orthodox insist that only men be allowed to conduct religious ceremonies there.

"Putin Lashes Out at U.S. for Backing 'Neo-Fascists' and 'Islamic Radicals'" In his strongest diatribe yet, Putin claimed that the United States fomented most of the world's recent crises. From Syria to Ukraine.

"31 Egyptian Soldiers Are Killed as Militants Attack in Sinai" Two coordinated attacks in the Sinai by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood led to the deaths of 31 and the wounding of at least 28 others.

"Hong Kong Stars Who Back Protests Are Losing Work and Fans in Mainland" Chinese actors, musicians, and other celebrities who have supported protests in support of more open government are being stigmatized and boycotted on the Mainland.

"Pro-Beijing Lawmaker Urges Hong Kong Leader to Consider Quitting" A pro-business party leader in Hong Kong is pressing the city's chief executive to resign.

"Ottawa Gunman's Islamic Radicalism Deepened as His Life Began to Crumble" The young man who ran over and killed a Canadian soldier last week in Montreal turned to militant Islam as he felt his life's chances diminishing.

"Sunni Militants Draw Iraqi Forces Into Intense Battles on Several Fronts" A report about ISIS or ISIL's progress in attacking Shia and Kurdish strongholds. Another article two days later revealed that ISIS fighters are now equipped with sophisticated Chinese shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles, making it difficult for the Iraqi and American air forces to attack their positions. I continue to wonder why ISIS militants are so adept at warfare while the Iraqi army, that we trained for years, can't shot straight.

"Poland Appeals Ruling on Transfer of Terror Suspects" The Polish government is appealing a court ruling that claims it transferred two terrorism suspects to "black sites" in northern Poland run by the CIA.

"Israeli Troops Kill Palestinian Teenagers in West Bank, the 2nd in 8 Days" Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian teenager who allegedly threw a fire-bomb onto a main road in the West Bank often used by Israeli soldiers.

All the News That's Fit to Print indeed.

June 16, 2014--The Middle East? Hands Off

As President Obama feels the pressure to provide military assistance to the collapsing regime in Iraq, he and we should step back and review the last 2,500 years of history. Just a few pertinent highlights!

The major lesson is that no outside power, from Alexander the Great of Macedonia to the French and British imperialists, from the Soviet Union and now the United States, no one has been able to impose their will on the region.

All interventions, all attempts to subjugate proud and defiant peoples have failed. And worse--have reverberated back disastrously on the invaders, colonizers, and occupiers.

After 330 BC Alexander never recovered; the British and French colonial powers after the First World War never recovered; the Soviet Union collapsed and never recovered; and the United States lost treasure, power, and influence in the region and I suspect will also not recover.

So what to do now?

The right answer is nothing.

We should get out of the way and allow the people living there figure out their own futures, very much including their own borders.

If we could impose a sane and just plan of our own that would endure, I would consider supporting it. But the long reach of history teaches that any attempt to do so is doomed to fail and, worse, will only make things worse.

Look at the current situation in Iraq. The Sunni jihadists have already overrun a third of the country, a country that was arbitrarily constructed at the end of WW I. From the videos showing ISIS's triumphant advance, while the so-called Iraqi army discards its uniforms and attempts to blend in with the benighted civilian population, we see the invaders already in possession of American military equipment that also was abandoned by the Iraqi army.

This was evocative of the experience in Afghanistan where the U.S., still entangled in the Cold War, armed the Mujahideen who were fighting the invading Soviets and, after defeating them (which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union), morphed into the Taliban which proceeded to overthrow the Afghan government and then turned its weapons, the ones we supplied, on us when we invaded at the end of 2001. And does anyone doubt that as soon as we finish leaving Afghanistan the Taliban will once again take over?

Sounds like current-day Iraq to me.

Seven years ago, presidential candidate Joe Biden was ridiculed when he said that Iraq should be allowed to devolve into three countries--Shiite in the south, Sunni in the middle, and Turkistan in the north.

He was right.

In fact, he could have advocated similar things for the rest of the region, from at least Tunisia in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east.

Few of the countries in that geographic span have cultural borders--Iran (formerly Persia) and Egypt are perhaps the exceptions--but rather ones drawn for them by various conquerers and occupiers.

For centuries, for their own strategic and economic purposes, dominant Western powers have attempted to contain and control the essentially tribal people who live in this vast region. Since the end of the Second World War, country-by-country this has been unraveling. And at an accelerated pace for the past four or five years. Recall the Arab Spring of 2010.

The emergence of jihadist and terrorist groups--ISIS is just the most recent example--feels especially threatening to our national interest. But it may be more dangerous to attempt to continue to contain these aspirations and energies than let to them play out.

The genie of various forms of liberation cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. It is much too late for that.

It may be less risky to step back and allow these contesting forces to work things out. We may not like this idea or the potential outcomes; but, in reality, do we realistically have the ability and resources to impose an alternative scenario?

Do we see ourselves intervening on the side of the Shia-dominated government in Iraq allied with Iran's Revolutionary Guard? As unlikely, even as preposterous as this may sound, it is being seriously discussed.

Frightening as that prospect is--very much including the blow to our national ego--it represents another reason to back off. If there is to be fighting, and of course there is and will be, at least it will be focused within the region, internecine, and less directed toward us. That could be truly in our national interest.

September 5, 2013--Smart Piece From a Good Friend

I asked a good friend what he would do about Syria if he were commander-in-chief. As always with him, I got much more than I asked for. And, as usual, it was very smart--

I'm a little light on answers here. I think it is much more complicated now by Obama's red line that it was before. I'm also trying to sort out how to approach this. 

If you look at it from where we are right now, where we have a lot of involvement in the Middle East behind us, even with a lot of shaky results, the choices -- bomb or not -- look one way, within that framework. But if you think that such a level of involvement is too much or otherwise ineffective or ill advised, then you get different questions. What exactly should the US be doing outside its borders, anyway? As far into Middle Eastern affairs as we are now, it is harder to take a step back, much harder than it would have been even 10 years ago. I think Obama has produced a situation surrounding Syria with no really good options. 

My own preferences have long been running toward a much more modest role for the US in world affairs, and I'm very skeptical whether an attack has any real strategic effect in this environment. Chemical weapons are horrible, but I think more and more that we're better served leaving other countries to their own devices and horrors, rather than trying to intervene in conflicts where we can't even identify the players and issues. It's hard to watch a government kill its civilians -- this all started with peaceful, Cairo-style Arab Spring demonstrations -- but I don't feel comfortable with an intervention. Obama hasn't made a strong case for the strategic benefits of intervening or even that it would change anything in Syria. 

Another part of this whole development over many decades of involvement via the Executive branch is the terrible effect this has had on democracy in America. The Executive has seized a lot of power over a long period, and Congress has given away its prerogatives to the Executive with both hands. It can't seem to surrender its powers fast enough, even as many there rattle on and on about the sacred and perfect Constitution we are supposed to have. 

We seem to have built a national security state of huge proportions, capable of wiping out any and all parts of the Bill of Rights without even a challenge, taking us into wars on its own motion. The security/terrorism threat -- back to the Middle East -- has been the basis for changing how this country really works. Start adding some of the developments coming from corporate influence in politics and elsewhere into the mix, and the country starts to look way different from what we want to think. 

The security state has been bankrupting us, hurting the economy, damaging political freedom at home, and now has us trying to figure out whether another Middle East intervention is essential or not. Less empire, more focus on international trade and investment systems, standards issues, resolution of conflict, a better model for social justice at home -- that all seems more productive to me.

September 4, 2013--Cброс (Reset)

As President Obama departs for St. Petersburg for the G-20 summit, the New York Times ran a long piece about the fractious state of U.S.-Russian relations.

As evidence of this, though Obama will be in Russia, there will be no on-on-one with Vladimir Putin because Obama petulantly canceled their meeting after Russia granted temporary asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowdon.

Talk about diplomatic bumbling.

Early in Obama's first term, with Putin constitutionally not allowed to run for a third consecutive term, he turned the presidency over to the malleable Dmitri Medvedev. To anyone paying even a little attention (and that included me), it was obvious that Putin would be the power behind the presidency during Medvedev's four years, essentially telling him what to say and do.

Obama, probably happy not to have to deal directly with Putin all that much--former KGB operative and unrepentant grumpy cold warrior that he is--thought there was an opportunity to reset the big-powers' relationship through a friendship with Medvedev. They were both lawyers, they were of a post-Cold War generation, and Obama thought that if they managed to hit it off personally they could get a few disarmament agreements signed and the U.S.-Russian relationship, which had cooled down during Putin's first presidency would be reset (in Russian, cброс).

Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was skeptical about things getting better as the result of a warm relationship between Obama and Medvedev, was dispatched to Russia to meet with Medvedev and Putin. To make note of the reseting agenda, she brought along buttons for the two Russian leaders with "reset" embossed on them, except that she didn't get the Russian quite right--there was a typo. I think it read Coрос But, in any case, all things being equal, it was a fun idea.

But all things were not equal. With Putin returned to the presidency there was no avoiding him, and from their first presidential  encounters things went from bad to worse.

Putin was obsessed with the Arab Spring and his feeling that it was all a plot promulgated by the United States to see long-standing dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi toppled and even killed with new governments installed that would replicate Western democracies. All of this chaos, Putin perceived, right on Russia's doorsteps, in their one remaining geopolitical sphere of influence.

No one in the Obama administration seemed to realize that from Putin's perspective there was a lot to be upset about. In the North Caucuses Putin and Russia have their own problems with Muslim fundamentalists. Chechnya, for example, has for decades been in violent rebellion. Ever since the break up of the Soviet Union.

Additionally Putin himself was under attack by many from the new Russian technocratic middle class. There were unprecedented street demonstrations in Moscow and elsewhere of a size and force not seen in Russia since the last days of the Czar.

And, closer to the point, czar-like Putin himself was undoubtedly feeling threatened. Perhaps, he claimed, with U.S encouragement (and he blamed America and somehow specifically Hillary Clinton for the street demonstrations) Russia would have it own version of the Arab Spring and Putin would wind up in prison like Hosni Mubarak.

So should it have been any wonder to Barak Obama that Putin would be more interested in potentially saving his own skin than agreeing to another nuclear weapons treaty?

Is it, should it have been a surprise to Obama and his foreign policy team that Putin would ask every time he met with a U.S. official, including the secretary of state and the president himself, that he would insist on asking when America was going to bomb Syria?

U.S officials assured him that we wouldn't be doing that. That with our reset Russian friends we had no intention of getting involved militarily with their ally, Syria.

Oh really.

So we're back to a version of the Cold War and according to wise heads such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, things in Syria are looking ominously like Eastern Europe in 1914.

Zbig may be right; he may be overreacting. But I know that if he were a member of the Obama team (and it's too bad he isn't) we wouldn't be conducting foreign policy with Cброс buttons.

August 16, 2013--Arab Winter

Fridays in August should be times for languor and light spiritedness. Pass by this then if you want to protect your tranquility, but I cannot resist saying a few words about the escalating crises in the Middle East.

With a state of emergency declared in Egypt--after hundreds there were slaughtered by the military in an attempt to take the country back from the democratically-elected leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood--with continued unrest in Bahrain; democracy under threat in Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, and possibly even Turkey; and an all-out civil war raging in Syria, what ever became of the hope engendered by the Arab Spring that commenced in Tunisia more than two years ago?  The hope that authoritarian leaders from Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt would topple one-by-one and liberal democracies would take their places?

Isn't this what Barack Obama early in his presidency in a speech in Cairo saw to be the strategic opportunity in the region? And wasn't it for this that he was awarded a preemptive Nobel Peace Prize?

But now we have this--a tectonic nightmare of old authoritarian regimes overthrown and supplanted by radical leaders, many of whom either have ties to al Qaeda or tolerate their presence. Who foresaw that this would be the last gasp of 19th century colonialism and the dawn of a complicated new day in the Muslim world? 

Actually, many did who knew anything about the history of the Arab lands and the contesting forces active in every country throughout the region.

Does anyone doubt that events in Egypt will lead to a civil war there at least as ugly as the one underway in Syria? With the military government so casual about murdering hundreds of protesters isn't it inevitable that this will not suppress the opponents of military rule but motivate and inspire them to become more aggressive, ultimately take up arms, and prevail?

Is there any doubt that at some point in the not distant future we will see similar situations in Jordan and even Saudi Arabia where corrupt monarchies currently rule?

Then what we will have? A region in full turmoil with access to oil severely restricted. What will then be the consequences for the global economy? 

The ideals espoused by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in historical perspective look naive. 

Not everyone wants a government similar to ours (in fact, a majority of Americans themselves aren't too happy with the state of our own current government), not every country (especially those with arbitrary borders drawn up by the West after the First World War) is culturally set up to embrace democracy. And when they do fight for and achieve the right to vote--with our endorsement--they elect leaders from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. 

This is just another sad example of unintended consequences, of the danger of getting what one wishes for.