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Sunday, January 10, 2016

Some scattered links this week, mostly about that perennial favorite, war in the Middle East -- nothing on the Oregon standoff (aside from this link to Josh Marshall, who describes it as "white privilege performance art"). Also, in honor of the five 4.0 or higher earthquakes that hit just northwest of Enid, Oklahoma, here's Crowson's cartoon:

You'd think anyone worried that much about the price of gas would take an interest in the wars disrupting the world's largest oil producing region, but, well, Kansas isn't lacking for "stone-age brains" (see below). So back to the wars:

• Thomas E Ricks: What are the Saudis up to with those executions? Regional dominance: Actually, this column appears to have been subcontracted to Sarah Kaiser-Cross, no great loss since Ricks has never impressed us as a deep thinker. The argument:

  Saudi Arabia had a difficult year. Despite Saudi Arabia's best efforts at restoring order in neighboring Yemen, the Kingdom's efforts to pummel its way to peace have largely failed. Near Saudi Arabia's northern borders, Syria and Iraq continue to struggle through maddening states of chaos and civil war. Internally, Saudi Arabia is battling domestic terror cells, ISIS recruiters, and Shiite protesters. Finally, its American partner, in Saudi Arabia's eyes, all but abandoned the Kingdom by signing the nuclear deal that resulted in greater economic and political power for its long time rival, Iran.

  Saudi Arabia's recent executions and the subsequent tension with its rival, Iran, were calculated moves, designed to send a clear message to opponents at home and abroad that Saudi Arabia remains in control. Simultaneously, the executions forced Iran to engage in a no longer subtle political battle for regional dominance.

  Power (and hubris) in Saudi Arabia has long been based on two things: the world's largest and most profitable oil reserves, and possession of the "holy cities" of Mecca and Medina. Even in the 1960s the Saudis thought they could take on the rising tide of pan-Arab nationalism in a proxy war against Egypt in Yemen. Oil provided the money to advance their ambitions, and much of that went into propaganda as they pushed their rigid, backward-looking version of Islam throughout the region. Through the 1970s, that seemed to be working out, with oil prices on the rise and the Nixon-Kissinger policy of bolstering regional allies (Iran and Saudi Arabia). However, in 1979 there were two crises: one was the revolt in Mecca that seized the Grand Mosque; the other was the revolution in Iran which, among other things, presented a new claimant for leadership of the Islamic world. The Saudis struggled through the depressed oil market of the 1980s, doubling down on their proselytizing -- conveniently tied to the US-sponsored jihad against the infidel Soviets in Afghanistan -- and helping finance Iraq's ambitious and brutal war against Iran. That led to a new crisis in 1989-90, when Iraq, ending its bloody stalemate with Iran, turned on Kuwait and threatened the rest of the Persian Gulf. The Americans saved Kuwait then, at the expense of compromising the sovereignty of the Saudi Kingdom -- at least in the eyes of its salafist followers. Meanwhile, Iran carefully cultivated ties to Shiite Muslims, aided by the increasingly virulent anti-Shiite behavior of the salafists. Then the US finally returned to "finish the job" in Iraq in 2003, igniting a full-bore Sunni-Shiite civil war that eventually spread into Syria, and erupted elsewhere where order had broken down (mostly due to the sort of interventionism Saudi Arabia has so long engaged in). The net result is that the Saudis find themselves facing opposition from the increasingly restless Shiites living in the Kingdom's eastern parts (i.e., where the oil is), from the increasingly militant salafists who resent the Kingdom's cozy relationship with the US, and from the ever-present pressures to liberalize -- iconically represented by efforts to overturn the Kingdom's ban on women driving, although the prospect of the people voting for their own leaders is surely more disconcerting. And, well, bummer about those low oil prices, which has plunged the government into deficits for the first time in many decades.

  This situation has been deteriorating for some time, but has gotten much worse in the past year -- especially after King Abdullah's death, which brought to power a new king and a much more aggressive coterie of bureaucrats. It suits this power elite to see every turn against them as having been orchestrated by archenemies in Tehran, much as it suited American cold warriors to see every peasant revolt and strike as the handiwork of devious manipulators in Moscow. Hence, the mostly Shiite Houthis in Yemen were viewed as Iranian proxies when they had more likely emerged as an indigenous alternative to the complete mess that pro- and anti-Saudi Sunnis had made of the country. (Much the same happened with Hezbollah in Lebanon, although the fracturing and the level of foreign manipulation there was much more complex.)

  So, sure, Ricks (Kaiser-Cross) is right that the mass executions were KSA's way of showing who's in charge, and that the consequences of rebellion will be severe. (And thankfully they didn't throw in a couple of women drivers to round out their demonology.) But they've also demonstrated to the world that their ridiculous regime rests on little more than sheer brutality, with even its usual trappings of piety looking shamefully tattered. Thankfully, the Iranians reacted crudely as usual: if they had any sense, they'd stop chanting "death to . . . ," issue a fatwa that capital punishment is un-Islamic, and curtail their own efforts to force a return to medieval religion. It would, after all, be easier to counter anti-Muslim hysteria in the west if the self-appointed leaders of the Islamic world can't control their bloodlust.

  For more on the paranoia and madness underlying Saudi aggression, see Kenneth M Pollack: Fear and Loathing in Saudi Arabia. I found the following paragraphs particularly amusing:

Finally, the Saudis feel frustrated and abandoned by the United States. Many Saudis and other Gulf Arabs consider President Barack Obama deeply ignorant, if not outright foolish, about the world and the Middle East. They evince out-and-out contempt for him and his policies. From their perspective, the United States has turned its back on its traditional allies in the Middle East. Washington is doing the least it can in Iraq, and effectively nothing in Libya and Syria, with the result that none of those conflicts is getting better. If anything, they are actually getting worse. Moreover, Saudi Arabia seems to differ over whether Obama is using the new nuclear deal with Tehran to deliberately try to shift the United States from the Saudi side to the Iranian side in the grand, regional struggle or if he is allowing it to happen unintentionally. The more charitable Saudi position is the former, because that suggests that Obama at least understands what he is doing, even if they think it a mistake and a betrayal. The latter view, for Saudis, sees him as a virtual imbecile who is destroying the Middle East without any understanding or recognition.

The depth of Saudi anger and contempt for the current American leadership is important to understand because it is another critical element of their worldview and policies, as best we can understand them. With the Middle East coming apart at the seams (in Saudi Arabia's view), the United States -- the traditional regional hegemon -- is doing nothing to stop it and even encouraging Iran to widen the fissures. Since the United States can't or won't do anything, someone else has to, and that someone can only be Saudi Arabia. The dramatic increase in Riyadh's willingness to intervene abroad, with both financial and military power, has been driven by its sense that dramatic action is required to prevent the region from melting down altogether and taking the kingdom down with it.

This view of Obama correlates with reading too much Chales Krauthammer, a certifiable form of dementia. The fact is that US interests have never aligned very well with Saudi interests, but the US humored the theocratic despots because they helped recycle a lot of money back to the US, and the Saudis had a way of dismissing what they didn't like (especially US support for Israel) because alignment with the US let them pursue their real interests -- pre-eminence in the Islamic world -- relatively freely. Along the way they (like Israel) learned that they could push America's buttons by opposing Iran, so they wound up blaming everything on Iran. American enmity toward Iran has been irrational (and counterproductive) ever since the 1980 Hostage Crisis. Obama wasn't ignorant in realizing that, although he was perhaps foolish in not admitting as much, and in not pursuing a more constructive relationship with Iran -- one that would defuse much of the hostility in the region, not least by undermining the rationales for Saudi (and Israeli) aggression. Pollack's next paragraph almost admits that the Saudis have a cockeyed view of everything:

That is why the Saudis have been consistently overreacting to events in Washington's eyes. We look at Bahrain and see an oppressed Shiite majority looking for some degree of political participation and economic benefit from the minority Sunni regime. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed mass uprising that could spread to the kingdom if it were to succeed -- which is why the Iranians are helping it do so. We look at the Yemeni civil war and see a quagmire with only a minor Iranian role and little likelihood of destabilizing Saudi Arabia. The Saudis see an Iranian bid to stealthily undermine the kingdom. We see a popular Saudi Shiite cleric who would become a martyr if he is executed. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed firebrand stoking revolution in their country's oil-producing regions. In the Syrian peace talks, we see a need to bring the Iranians in because of their critical support for Bashar al-Assad's regime. The Saudis see the United States legitimizing both a Shiite/Persian/Iranian influence in a majority Sunni Arab state and the murderous, minority Shiite regime. The list goes on.

Pollack then suggests that the Saudis are right and the the US is abandoning its traditional ally in favor of its enemy. Actually, Obama's real shortcoming is his failure to criticize nominal allies like Saudi Arabia when they are dead wrong (and Iraq and Egypt and Turkey and most of all, in case you're wondering where this cowardice comes from, Israel). But then his failure to criticize is symptomatic of a deeper problem, which is the lack of constructive principle behind US foreign policy -- a legacy of the cold war when America routinely favored pro-business despotism over popular democracy -- and the naive faith that a sufficient show of force solves every problem.

• Stephen M Walt: Give Peace a Chance (And why none of the current presidential candidates want to talk about it): As a "realist" Walt admits "one could argue that the United States benefited from war in the past." I won't let myself be sucked into that one, even though one of his examples -- "the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s" -- cries out for correction. The thing about being a "realist" is that you can excuse anything if it furthers your "national interest" -- whatever that means. For a long time American foreign policy was nothing but service to American business interests: mainly supporting "open trade" (as in the "opening" of Japan), allowing American banks and business to make loans and investments abroad. Then came WWII and the US started building bases around the world, evolving into the capital vs. labor class struggle known as the Cold War. Business (and not just American business) obviously gained from this shift, but along with foreign bases and alliances came a cult of power for its own sake. When you go down a list of the world's countries, America's view is that the "good guys" are the ones largely subservient to US power, and the "bad guys" are the ones that chafe and resent us, or worse still go their own way. (The closest to exceptions here are Israel and Saudi Arabia, which profess alliance but go their own way, showing that one of the traits we most appreciate in a foreign country is hypocrisy.)

  Walt lays out four reasons why promoting peace should be considered part of the national interest, and therefore a goal of our government:

  1. "When a country is on top of the pyramid, the last thing it should want is anything that might dislodge it." The US is the richest country in the world, so why risk that through the risk and uncertainty of war? Especially since the US hasn't been very successful at war lately (like since WWII). Or, as Walt puts it, "as we learned to our sorrow in Iraq, what looks like a smashing success at first can easily turn into a costly quagmire."
  2. "Second, peace is good business." Sure, there are a few businesses that sell arms, but they are "a small and declining fraction of America's $17 trillion economy." He adds, "peace encourages economic interdependence and thus global growth and welfare. . . . If you think globalization is a good thing, in short, promoting peace should be a key part of your agenda."
  3. "Third, peace privileges people who are good at promoting human welfare, whether in the form of cool new products, better health care, improved government services, inspiring books, art, and music, and all the other things that bring us joy. War, by contrast, elevates people who are good at using violence and who profit from collective hatred: rebel leaders, warlords, terrorists, revolutionaries, xenophobes, etc."
  4. "Last, but not least, peace is morally preferable. There's an enormous amount of human suffering in any war, and our basic moral instincts tell us that the alleviation of that suffering is intrinsically desirable."

  Still, every Republican presidential candidate dwells on how much more tougher he'd (or she'd) be than any Democrat, and every Democrat (including Sanders) takes pains to show how high a hurdle that would be to clear. So why isn't anyone even giving lip service to peace? Walt offers some reasons, including the excess adulation for "the troops" that practically everyone feels obliged to buy into. Let me add a few more:

  • We've become highly compartmentalized, so very few people (voters) in America have any conscious stake in foreign policy, or indeed in the rest of the world. If the US overthrows a democratic government in Iran or Chile, that may be big news there but it means nothing here. As such, the few people who really care about foreign policy are like a special interest group, and virtually all of them are economically bound to the current system. That only gives a practical politician one option for a campaign pitch. And it's even worse when you win and find yourself stuck in an unmovable system.
  • The title of "commander in chief" has become baked into the job description of President of the United States, and indeed has come to tower over the position's other responsibilities (like respecting and protecting the constitution). Maybe it has something to do with the idea that chief executives delegate tasks but commanders lead. Politicians certainly prefer the latter image. (Indeed, we came to wonder whether Bush thought the job entailed anything else.)
  • People readily accept the assertion that "we're engaged in a war" even though the alleged war is almost totally disconnected from their everyday lives. Selecting a president is one of the few war-related acts anyone has to do -- an appeal that the media readily subscribes to. This is especially attractive to Republican candidates, who have nothing else of substance to offer (their economic programs are all geared to the donor class).
  • It is widely thought that leading the nation in a time of war is a higher calling than leading it during peace. Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, broke tradition and ran for a third term because war loomed and he wanted to be the man who ran it. Both Bushes started wars to recast themselves as glorious commanders (although one failed to pick fights he could claim to win).
  • Indeed, the US has a long history of electing former generals to become president: Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, the other Harrison, but only Eisenhower in the last 120 years. Theodore Roosevelt was famous for his Rough Riders stunt. Truman in WWI, and Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, and the first Bush in WWII, and Carter post-WWII all made a big point about their service (if not their rank; Reagan was in the US Army Reserve, where he "narrated pre-flight training films").

  Walt also revisits Syria, asking Could We Have Stopped This Tragedy? It's a fair question, and after a fair review he concludes "no" -- vindicating his initial suspicions. Still, his "realism" trips him up, leading him to imagine counterfactuals whereas simply listing what the US in fact did should have sufficed to show that no variation could have worked. He touches on that here:

  To be sure, the Obama administration has not handled Syria well at all.

  President Barack Obama erred when he jumped the gun in 2011 and insisted "Assad must go," locking the United States into a maximalist position and foreclosing potential diplomatic solutions that might have saved thousands of lives. Second, Obama's 2012 off-the-cuff remark about chemical weapons and "red lines" was a self-inflicted wound that didn't help the situation and gave opponents a sound bite to use against him. The president wisely backed away from that position, however, and (with Russian help) eventually devised an arrangement that got rid of Assad's chemical arsenal. This was no small achievement in itself, but the whole episode did not exactly inspire confidence. The administration eventually agreed to start a training program for anti-Assad forces, but did so with neither enthusiasm nor competence.

  And consider what has happened since then. More than 200,000 people are now dead -- that's approaching 100 times as many victims as 9/11 -- and numerous towns, cities, and villages have been badly damaged, if not destroyed. There are reportedly some 11 million displaced people either internally or out of the country, about half Syria's original population. A flood of refugees and migrants has landed in Europe, provoking a new challenge to the European Union's delicate political cohesion and raising the specter of a sharp increase in right-wing xenophobia. The carnage in Syria has also helped fuel the emergence and consolidation of the so-called Islamic State, intensified the Sunni-Shiite split within Islam, and put additional strain on Syria's other neighbors.

  Obama's failures here largely stem from his blanket acceptance of the main tenets of American foreign policy. The only thing he's rejected has been the Bush (Cheney/Bremer/but probably not Rumsfeld) notion that US troops can occupy and rebuild a Middle East nation like Iraq -- a tenet that no one in the security establishment still believes. But he still accepts: that the US has vital interests in the region; that the main thing there is to credibly project power such that the nations' leaders defer to American directives; that the US should have a free hand to intervene destructively anywhere we are challenged (or evidently just for the hell of it); and that the people in those nations don't matter at all. Thus the US instinctively saw the uprising in Syria as an opportunity to get rid of the insufficiently servile Assad regime. They just couldn't figure out a way to make that happen once a direct command failed. Even now, there is no "humanitarian" option: all they can do is destroy, so all they can do is to add ISIS (and Al-Nusra and who knows what else) to their enemies list. The result is that the US is actively engaging in attacking both sides of the civil war. It's as if the US had decided to fight WWII by bombing both German and Russian forces on the Eastern Front, hoping that they'd be able to recruit some Free Poles once everyone was killed.

  Until the US realizes that the lives and welfare of ordinary people matter more than the fickle allegiances of a handful of corrupt elites, the US will have nothing constructive to offer the region (or the world). And if they did, they'd realize that the brutal force they so worship is the problem, not part of the solution. Of course, it's hard to imagine the US changing to improve the lives of people abroad when Republicans here are working so hard to reduce the livelihoods of most Americans here. (Similarly, Democrats need to realize that they cannot help their voters here unless they start to respect people abroad, which means they have to start to unwind America's imperial tentacles, and return to the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt envisioned as the New Deal of the postwar order. You'd think that Sanders, at least, would figure that out.)

• Rick Shenkman: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing: Lest you think that my comments above about how Americans react to problems with brute, unthinking force, without any care for the human lives affected, here's a case example: when Sen. Ted Cruz promised to "carpet bomb" ISIS, his poll numbers went up.

  While many factors can affect a candidate's polling numbers, one uncomfortable conclusion can't be overlooked when it comes to reactions to Cruz's comments: by and large, Americans don't think or care much about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition backed by the United States "carried out at least six apparently unlawful airstrikes in residential areas of the [Yemeni] capital," Sana'a. The attacks resulted in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about no one in the United States took notice, nor was it given significant media coverage. More than likely, this is the first time you've heard about the HRW findings.

  Shenkman has a theory on this, something to do with what he calls "our stone-age brain" -- in fact, he has a whole book on the subject (Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics). In particular, we fail to recognize the victims of our bombs as human, let alone as people much like us. Distance has much to do with this, as do the various grouping words we use to sort people. I tend to think of it as a failure of imagination: in particular, the ability to imagine the situation reversed, as almost any interaction can be. (The Golden Rule, in its numerous variations, is an attempt to formulate this logically. When you hear someone talk like Cruz, you should realize that he lacks the most basic skill needed to live in society.) Shenkman emphasizes the value of storytelling as a means of restoring humanity to the people our warriors target.

  Shenkman suggests that this "stone-age brain" may have had some Darwinian advantage, but you don't have to buy that. What you do need to recognize is that we're no longer living in stone-age tribes. We live in a complex society where we routinely confront strangers, and indeed depend on their good will for our own survival. In this world, the instinct to rally behind a charismatic strongman is overrated and quite possibly disastrous, even though it still seems to be the bread and butter of American politics -- at least it's second nature to politicians with a natural knack for appealing to our basest instincts. But it's not uniquely American: people all around the world think the same thing. The difference is in who has the power to "carpet bomb" other countries. In that regard, the US is most potent and dangerous, but probably not unique -- despite neocon fantasies of a unipolar world.

• Paul Woodward: How to lose the propaganda war with ISIS: Big announcement Friday was that the Obama administration is launching a new propaganda ministry to counter ISIS's mastery of social media (see New York Times article). After all, nothing can be more potent than their lies except for our lies. Woodward comments (emphasis original):

  Picture the many meetings that must have taken place over recent months in which policymakers repeatedly said: in order to stop ISIS we need to improve the image of the West.

  This proposition should have been met with howls of scorn and yet instead, multiple teams of straight-faced bureaucrats from multiple agencies nodded their heads in agreement.

  At the same time, I greatly doubt anyone believes this kind of PR exercise will have any value whatsoever and yet the consensus of support derives from one fact: no one has come up with a better idea.

  Better to do something worthless than to do nothing at all -- so the thinking goes.

  The term radicalization has been pathologized, thereby divorcing it from its psychological meaning. It's viewed as a disease, with the implication that if the right steps are taken, the contagion can be controlled.

  But to be radicalized is to rebel and anyone who has taken up such a position of defiance has, in the case of ISIS, already reached a conclusion about the West. Indeed, they have most likely reflected more deeply on the West than the majority of their generational counterparts who, being less likely to engage in cultural critiques of any kind, don't have a particularly coherent view of the West -- good or bad.

  Woodward's critique is right but the problem is worse than that. The one group of people most likely to swallow the propaganda whole is the one that creates. It amounts to a process of self-delusion, where constant reiteration drums the talking points deep into the psyche. As such, it moves the argument away from reality and into the fantasy world of the propagandist, where logic turns self-fulfilling. It's already hard to think of any war the US entered more thoughtlessly than the war against ISIS, and the propagation of this propaganda is likely to cement current delusions (e.g., about our righteousness and their evil). If, that is, it works at all, which I guess isn't a given.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

• Nu'man Abd al-Wahid: How Zionism helped create the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Delicious lede:

  The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British imperialism. The problem is the study of British imperialism has very few students. . . . but if you would like to delve into how and why the British Empire waged war on mankind for almost four hundred years you're practically on your own in this endeavor. One must admit, that from the British establishment's perspective, this is a formidable and remarkable achievement.

  The Saud family took over Hijaz in 1925 after the British switched sides against their former "Arab revolt" client, Sharif Hussain -- the main disagreement between the latter and the British was the Zionist colony in Palestine. Thus Saudi Arabia became a Beitish (and later American) client state.

• Justin Fox: Why Economists Took So Long to Focus on Inequality. Income of the top 1% started to grow cancerously in the 1980s, but few economists noticed let alone studied it, at least until Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez came along and made the data impossible to ignore. Fox has some ideas, but they aren't very convincing. Paul Krugman has a comment here.

• Olivier Roy: France's Oedipal Islamist Complex: Roy is a French expert on militant Islam -- has written several books on the subject. He points out that French jihadists are either recent converts, which he sees as radicalized youth who turned to Islam to formalize their revolt, or second generation Muslims, similarly radicalized from their experiences. On the other hand, he notes that there are no jihadis among first-generation immigrants or the more thoroughly integrated third-generation. That seems roughly right for the US as well.

  Why Islam? For members of the second generation, it's obvious: They are reclaiming, on their own terms, an identity that, in their eyes, their parents have debased. They are "more Muslim than the Muslims" and, in particular, than their parents. The energy that they put into reconverting their parents (in vain) is significant, but it shows to what extent they are on another planet (all the parents have a story to tell about these exchanges). As for the converts, they choose Islam because it's the only thing on the market of radical rebellion. Joining the Islamic State offers the certainty of terrorizing.

• Omid Safi: Ten Ways on How Not to Think About the Iran/Saudi Conflict: All are worth considering, including "we in the United States should do some long and hard looking into our own culpability" -- and not just for the two points Safi mentions (selling arms to Saudi Arabia and overlooking Saudi human rights violations) -- for starters, I recall how we did the same things when Iran was controlled by a despotic monarchy, how much we resent Iran's rejection of us, and how we've let Israel and Saudi Arabia manipulate our loathing of the Iranian government to hurt the Iranian people. Also noteworthy is oil: Saudi Arabia is already suffering from low oil prices; once we let Iranian oil flood the world market, Saudi Arabia will be hurting even more. The history of the waxing and waning of Shi'ism is fascinating, but that's the sort of fact that opportunists can parlay into an excuse for war and repression, as we've seen, e.g., in America's attempts to pit Shi'a against Sunni since 1990 (not that Iran didn't try something similar after Iraq attacked in the 1980s).

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