CHUCK TODD:
All right, let me ask you a couple of quick questions. I want to play for you an interesting clip of you 20 years ago about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Take a look.
DICK CHENEY (ON TAPE):
That's a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of Eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds. And the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-transcript-...
To give backers of the war the benefit of the doubt, a whole lot of shit changed after that video. Hindsight is 20/20 and we can't back test strategies like the stock market. It would be nice if we could.
The initial "Shock and Awe" campaign in Baghdad killed an estimated 6,600+ civilians. [1]
It's stated purpose was to "impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on ... [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels."
That is to say, it was terrorism. And what's even more disgusting is that Americans watched it on TV like fireworks.
Someone else running for president this year has pledged that the first act of her address would be removing Assad.
Which brings us back at the beginning of stupid actions.
We would have to create infrastructure for AC-based indoor living in the entire region and beyond on a grand scale, or only for some and see the rest of the population live in a vegetative state during much of the year. If climate change and the predictions are real anything less is futile. Basically, the entire region is becoming Arizona - without AC for most people, much higher humidity directly at the Gulf, with even less freshwater and many more people who also are much poorer.
Just a dark thought: Maybe there simply is no solution. The climate problem is independent of all the human problems, so solving them, already seemingly impossible, would not even help much with this new issue growing stronger.
War is not beautiful. The invasion was a revolting, unnecessary horror from conception to now, where it still has not ended and shows no sign of an end.
As far as Bush not listening to generals, etc. I don't believe Bush was anything more than a figurehead. Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. were the decision makers. They knew what they were doing, and they didn't have an exit strategy because exiting was never their goal.
I agree that the invasion was stupid, but it was not "likely illegal," it _was_ illegal.
The interesting thing is that, when they were successful in 2007 (more troupes) it was completely accidental. They had no idea why it worked at first, and it took them a while to figure it out.
As everybody know, the US could not stay their with this much troupes forever and thus they could never credibly commit to long term stability and peace between the different sections. If you can not stay somewhere for 1-2 generations, don't go there in the first place.
But the real problems occurred in the disastrous power vacuum and complete lack of a plan that occurred after the war was won. That's what tore Iraq and the Middle East apart. I don't think the NYTimes has any responsibility for that.
I can't recommend this Frontline piece highly enough - "Losing Iraq". Its practically a case book study on the missteps that took place under the leadership of Paul Bremmer a Kissinger associate and who was chosen to lead the CPA - Coalition Provisional Authority(the transition government) after the US took Baghdad. Bremmer knew nothing of Iraqi politics and was only briefed on them on the flight to Baghdad. The largest mistake was his decision to dissolve the Iraqi Army, followed closely by the de-Baathification of the government in country that only has a single political party - the Baath Party. Bremmer had near autonomy in his decision making. This is perhaps one of the best pieces I have seen on the subject:
No, the real problem was invading a country that posed no threat to us. That was the real crime. The power vacuum could not have happened without that illegal invasion.
Except for never mentioning the fact or investigating what the consequences of the war they were propagandizing were likely to be.
This piece may be fun to get through your flight, but it should offer a holistic perspective.
Is that how you view the political movements happening in the Arabic-speaking majority world - Sorry for the pedantry - from 2011 onward that we're consumed by resentment toward the West?
It's gotta be about you, right?
> "The arab world has always been far too divided to able to draw clear borders around their states"
I had no idea that these political movements and the resulting turmoil were about border disputes between states, and not primarily domestic political issues. The more you know ...
> "Until then, tyranny worked."
Could this explain your theory the perceived resentment in the Arabic speaking world towards the West?
At least now, it would be warranted and well earned since you wish on other people harm, maybe you should get paid for this in kind.
The US is likely to be able to dodge the Trump bullet and skirt falling into a populist authoritarian rule coming November but this doesn't preclude this from happening in the future.
Maybe you should get some taste for how tyranny can turn your life upside down and experience it firsthand before you could wish it onto others.
Anyhow, I still don't wish harm on innocent people but if they're full of hate toward others to the point of blinding them to fall into a trap this big and this wide, I wouldn't help them to avert it or save them.
I m not american. This is a cynical view from Europe. Believe it or not it's closer to the truth rather than believing that having elections suddenly would fix all the problems in countries like egypt, libya, syria.
In general, the Arabs were happy subjects of the Ottoman Empire until around 1900-1914, when the CUP's political program attempted to marginalize the Arabs; even then, the Arab Revolt was a very narrow revolt with support almost exclusively from the Hejaz (western Saudi Arabia in modern terms) Prior to that, the Ottoman Empire was generally very supportive of the Arab cultural expression. While the governors of the Syrian and Egyptian provinces tended to be problematic from the point of view of the Sultan, the populations of those provinces were far less prone to revolt than Anatolia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
We'll stop meddling and making things worse. The leaders of those countries won't be able to substitute oil wealth for popular support or funnel money into pushing Wahhabism.
It's the best thing that could happen to them.
It was made a mess before and after WW2 and it never was allowed to self correct. If anything the powers that be kept trying to keep it bottled up until a few set pieces fell and the house came tumbling down. This isn't to say that going into Iraq didn't cause part of the problem, that simply revealed just how force the Saddam regime was applying to keep it all together.
Letting Libya fall like everyone did was likely the real issue. That whole country went without anyone trying to step in and allowed groups to assemble. Then the misguided interference with Syria by the US just sent the whole region to hell. You would have thought Libya would have given the administration a hint what would go wrong, let alone an Administration so hell bent on reminding people of Iraq repeated that mess twice if not worse.
The region has to reshape itself. What the West must do is try to minimize the civilian cost. This does not mean going in a setting new borders, but mostly protecting those who get out and making sure they have safe exit points.
Even with the fault of European colonialism, they were doing just fine until we decided to get rid of Saddam.
Yes, it's ~43000 words and at 250wpm, it would be a 3 hour read!
I think I'll wait to collect some more opinions/tldrs like yours before reading it myself. Three hours would be a terrible waste of time on a substandard article. Open question: Are there better articles on the topic that use that would use that finite reading time better?
I tried Safari's 'Export as PDF' but the formatting is too mangled. Safari can also save as a single 'web archive' file but I can't get that file to open on my ipad.
Firefox has a save option of 'Web page, complete', but you end up with lots of files, impractical to move around to other devices. Printing as a PDF also mangles the format.
I'm guessing those who lost their families and homes at gunpoint would disagree with that being "right". Each intervention creates more victims, it's just that some are more easily written out of history.
One nit:
" Much as the United States Army and white settlers did with Indian tribes in the conquest of the American West, so the British and French and Italians proved adept at pitting these groups against one another, bestowing favors — weapons or food or sinecures — to one faction in return for fighting another. The great difference, of course, is that in the American West, the settlers stayed and the tribal system was essentially destroyed."
I think it's a mistake to only back up to the end up WWI and start running the tape there. The Arab world has a rich and nuanced history full of the exact kinds of tribal tensions we see now going back hundreds of years. There's a reason the Ottomans were the way they were -- and it has nothing to do with Colonialism. There are also great parallels between what's happening with the Arab spring and what happened when other great powers consolidated their hold over the Arabs and then left. Just citing one example seems like a tremendous disservice to the history. Also the meme of "It was the Sykes–Picot Agreement" has some truth but is extremely easy to lean too much on. With this amount of verbiage being produced, I'm expecting some alternative lines of reasoning to be explored.
Looking forward to more of the series!
(Apologies -- looks like the entire thing is here? Wow! I've heard of long-format writing before, but this is kindle material. Tremendous amount of work here.)
More likely a better explanation lies in the importation of the Western idea of a nation-state (that a country should be coterminus with cultural boundaries), which tends to strongly reject the idea that countries can have multiple countries, combined with the failure of the Ottoman Empire to synthesize a durable Ottoman culture. The latter failure is arguably due in large part to, you guessed it, European meddling: the Ottoman state had largely functioned, and kept peace among fractious religious sects, by keeping its Islamic nature as a core of its identity (basically being a dual Turkish-Arab state). One aspect of this was the basis that most obligations of civic duty (particularly military duty) was borne solely by Muslims, with the non-Muslims (predominantly Christians) paying an extra tax, an arrangement generally accepted by both groups. European powers considered this intolerant [1], and forced a series of capitulations on the Ottomans in part to guarantee the security of Christians (which basically leads to the Armenian Genocide).
With the idea of a state centered on Islamic identity increasingly a failure, the Young Turks instead focused on a narrow, Turkish-based state, which alienated pretty much all minorities (including the Arabs) save the Kurds (their bid for nationalism started mostly post-WWI). After the Armenian Genocide, many Arabs suspected that similar treatment awaited them, but they largely kept to showing support for the regime during the exigencies of WWI. The Iraqis in occupied Mesopotamia didn't cooperate with the British (not that it saved them from retribution), for example. The Bedouin did offer support to both sides, but they were not reliable allies to either side. Only the Hashemites (who controlled Mecca and Medina) revolted, successful only due to the aid of the British, who gave them Jordan and Iraq as victory spoils (their original Kingdom of the Hejaz was conquered by the Saudis, another British ally, in the interwar period).
[1] Side note: the Ottomans generally forbade the Muslims from proselytizing to the Christian groups, whereas the capitulations generally forced the Ottomans to accept Christian missionaries attempting to convert Muslims.
This rabbit hole goes down deep. Too much for HN. There's a lot of ground to cover: gates of Vienna, and the fall of Constantinople, the Second Crusade, and so on.
As one can imagine, depending on where you choose to focus, you can fall back on western meddling or not. Sadly, this is the case for most arguments in the Mideast. Some things never change.
Suffice it to say that we could continue. For some time. It's a mixed bag, and nobody is either entirely innocent or entirely culpable. Simplifications -- even those in comment threads like ours -- invariably give the wrong impression.
Also NY Times has so much *to answer for in their coverage of the events that it kind of make sense that they are avoiding any real analysis of the issues.
1) People are fucking poor and hungry (extreme wealth inequalities) 2) Salafi/Wahhabi (Saudi) funding of islamism 3) Antediluvian hatred between people (it goes, way, way, way farther back than Sykes-Picot)
> According to a 2008 survey of such studies by Alan Krueger of Princeton University, they have found little evidence that the typical terrorist is unusually poor or badly schooled
Compared to the US, where political actions are sorely based on facts and the bible and religion are completely irrelevant. /s
It's not really an issue only in Islam, people make a lot of actions because of an even older book - the bible - as well.
I fail to see how prayer affects anyone's potential in a negative way.
Ah huh.
Furthermore, I think maximizing for "human potential" is a red herring -- the inevitable end-result is exercising control over a given population to exploit their human potential and TBH that sounds revolting. We should be given the freedom to live our lives out regardless of someone else's small and personal ambitions, including dedicating our lives to practicing Islam.
It was surprising.
From what I've read, people living for a long time in dictatorships are quite intolerant and hateful. (There were quite a bit of intolerance in East Germany after 1989, too. And examples from Eastern Europe are well known.)
If/when the Arab world get rid of the dictators controlling the media and education gets better, they should become more "normal".
Or maybe I am too liberal in assuming every culture will walk the same path as us. I doubt it. Until someone comes up with something that works better, liberal [edit: and ~ capitalist] democracy is the least bad alternative.
When will the West do that ?
many of the dictators are either dead or crippled, and the world is awash in more terrorism than ever before.
Besides that, it is a regime, and really, a nation, that is entirely predicated on petro-dollars. They have been fighting a price war against US/Canadian oil production, burning foreign currency reserves, in the hopes of setting back the clock. Unfortunately, the break-even point in the North Dakota and shale oil fields keeps going down[1].
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2016/02/29/the-break-eve...
http://www.energybc.ca/images/profiles/oil/reserves.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
The West needs much more energy that what they have. They have industry and without energy their society will collapse.
Anything else is secondary. Most of those places are desert, and have not enough technology to protect themselves from Western (or Eastern)plundering.
Those countries can only life in peace as protectorates from powerful industrialized countries, like Saudi Arabia(de facto protectorate of USA, its oil can only be paid in USD), or Iran(protectorate of Russia and China) or Syria(Russia).
Libya itself had a lot of Chinese civilian presence, but not military. So UK, USA and France thought it was going to be easy to take the country by force, like they did.
They also tried with Syria, but Russia had an army there. They tried hard, remember Assad having chemical weapons so the West needed to "save" and "free" the country? Putin reacted fast to that. The need of creating a fly exclusion zone(prior to the invasion, like in Libya), again Putin reacted faster sending his own airplanes.
Your reduction of the middle east countries as simple 'protectorates' is also completely false. These are countries with their own opinions and politics and they are far, far more then just outposts of the more powerful nations. Seeing everything as a global power struggle will not lead to understanding of the situations.
> The West needs much more energy that what they have. They have industry and without energy their society will collapse.
Thats also completely false. Any analysis of this will show that even in a worst case of a huge war in the middle east, the changes in oil prices would not collapse the first world. It might cause a slight slowdown in growth, and that only in the short term.
There is a great relationship between having huge resources and war, violence and crime.
The countries in Africa with less resources are the richest ones, because they had peace for a long time. War destroys any wealth people have and give it to a few guys. It also destroys al civilization and social structures.
Don't see any of them in a rush to give up their 'curse'.
Though not required by the syntax of any language, paragraphs are usually an expected part of formal writing, used to organize longer prose.
The 'Arab World' was never together. Ever.
All of the 'Anti-American Imperialism' kids here should remember that the bulk of the 'Arab World' is 'Arab By The Sword'.
Arabic is spoken across North Africa, in particular because of Arab Colonialism of the 9th-12th centuries.
Not since then has the 'Arab World' been anything resembling 'together'.
The Turks kept them (and there was not much of them) under the thumb, after that the Europeans tried to maintain some degree of balance, now the Americans.
The most recent and damaging decision by the US was Obama's withdrawl of troops in Iraq. Of course, invading in the first place - but Obama simply by virtue of having 10K soldiers sitting on a base 'behind the wire' doing nothing, could have kept forcing Malaki to play nice with the Sunnis. The moment Obama withdrew, Malaki purged Iraq of Sunnis, and the Sunni tribes decided that ISIS was 'less worse' than their own government and there you have it.
As far as Syria ... this is a function of the 'Arab Spring' more than anything, and I don't think anyone can say anyone else is directly responsible for that. Other than the standard: Assad, Saudis, Iran etc...
Once things stabilize in Syria, maybe things can start to settle down.
That said, I agree, the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a huge mistake. The horrible handling of the early occupation was a total disaster. I also agree that the withdrawal of the last troupes was a problem, however its understandable because the population in the US wanted out, and its not clear for how many more years they would have to stay, possible a 1-2 generations.
As far as Syria, its true that the 'Arab Spring' was the initiator but its also true that the insertion of ISIS into Syria made the hole conflict a hole lot more complicated (and ISIS could only exist in post Saddam world). Syria is now the most complicated war I have ever seen, you have multiple local, regional and global powers all actively fighting against some other party that is also fighting.
With regards to Syria their is absolutely no change of some kind of resolution, except if some side manages to carry the field militarily. I fear that the war just has to burn itself out. This process will radically change the middle east. I would not be surprised if the Kurds had their own state in the end.
OT, but do you see this happening soon? The only way it seems that Syria can stabilize is for the regime to retake control. That's beginning to look like the most likely outcome. Could there ever be a path back to pre-Spring peace? Anything is better than what they have now :(
I think they also would do, what they did to the "arab world" to Russia or China if they could.
The parts of the world that advance faster can dictate more rules, so everyone needs to get ahead. One way to ensure that this is the case is to slow other parts down.
The instability we see is definitely not a function of design. If you have studied any of it you will quickly realise that this is situation that has many actors that act based on their own interest and absolutely nobody has control over it. Those that attempt to control it usually end up creating a hole host of unintended consequences even if they sometimes manage to achieve their main goal.
Its however true, that in some limited cases, creating more chaos can potentially help you. Such cases definitely exist but they are not the majority of strategies used. Syria releasing of Jihadist to split the rebels is a interesting example of such a strategy. It usually is a strategy of the weak, not the strong. The strong prefer control, not chaos.
The idea that it would be best to throw everything in chaos is completely wrong and even the leaders of the super powers understand that. Only if you assume that their is some sinister conspiracy that has completely different values thats operating under our institutions, could such a policy be explained. I see 0 evidence for such a conspiracy.
Clicking "Simplify Page" on the google chrome printing dialog makes this a fantastic formatted PDF. I'm impressed (be it Chrome's doing or NYT's).
There was once briefly a concept of Pan-Arabism but that died when Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970.
Does a Muslim Arabic speaker from Morocco really have any sense of kinship with an Arabic Christian(a Coptic) from Egypt? I am going to say probably not. Probably not any more than two Slavic language speakers in different parts of Europe do. Have the Saudis taken in any Arab refugee "brothers" from Syria and Iraq? No. Have the Arab Emirates? Again no.
So what is this "Arab World" that the NYTimes and the rest of the media are so fond of using as a point of reference? Countries carved up as part of the Sykes Picot agreement? Can they not come up with a more meaningful distinction? This matters.
Arabs (Arabic: عرب, ‘arab) are a panethnicity of peoples native to the Arab world.
They primarily inhabit Western Asia, North Africa, and parts of the Horn of Africa.
In modern usage Arab refers to a heterogeneous collection of Arabic-speaking peoples
in Western Asia and North Africa. The ties that bind Arabs are linguistic,
cultural, political, and ethnic, with Arabized Arabs displaying genetic admixture
from the Arabian peninsula as well as indigenous elements.
As such, Arab identity is based on one or more of genealogical, linguistic or
cultural grounds, although with competing identities often taking a more prominent
role, based on considerations including regional, national, clan, kin, sect,
and tribe affiliations and relationships. Not all people who could be considered
Arab identify as such. If the Arab pan-ethnicity is regarded as a single
population, then it constitutes the world's second largest group of people
after the Han Chinese.
Every single country profiled in the piece is majority Arab (ethnically), majority Arab (linguistically), and majority Muslim (religiously).
what more meaningful distinction would you make that clarifies things? "Middle Eastern countries currently on fire"? They are certainly all countries that can be fairly described as Arab.
And no you can't just say "Middle Eastern counties, the countries of the Mahgreb are "on fire" and they are not geographically part of the Middle East.
So according to you the meaningful distinction is that its "currently on fire"? What happens if its not on fire or stabilizes politically? Does its status change?
How about Mauritania, the Comoros, and Morocco. Majority Arab and Muslim and generally not front page news.
Why does this matter? Because it's incredibly reductionist. There are tribal dynamics at work in all of the countries mentioned in this article that extremely difficult for a casual observer to understand. These are tribal affiliations that predate Islam. And there is no analog for them in the Western world from which the term "Arab World" springs. It's very hand wavy to just say "The Arab World" and this propagation of an Arab singularity is itself a source of problems.
The main reason the US kept on Saddam was his stated intention of Pan-Arabia
>'We don't look on this piece of land here in Iraq as the ultimate limit of our struggle,'' he told a group of visiting Iraqi ambassadors in 1975. ''It is part of a larger area and broader aims: the area of the Arab homeland and the aims of the Arab struggle.''
After a coup attempt against him five years later, he called Iraq's political struggle a ''revolution which aims to destroy the bases of imperialism, to shine over the whole Arab world to make it a new power on the world scene.''
And only a few months before Mr. Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, Mr. Hussein unveiled an ambitious pan-Arab charter for the decade, rejecting any superpower military presence in the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian Ocean and charting a course of regional nonalignment. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/05/international/05HUSS.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/1991/0802/02011.html >In their view a confrontation with the West - at least a political one - was unavoidable, in light of Saddam's attempt to lead the Arab world. Saddam's pan-Arab ambitions have been clear since the late 1970s, when Iraq led the so-called rejectionist front against Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Iraq also controlled many Baathist organizations in Arab countries and saw itself as the capital of Arab revolution against "pro-Western reactionary regimes." But the war with Iran forced Iraq to seek money and political support from Arab nations and put a stop to supporting opposition parties in other states. After the war, however, the Iraqi leadership renewed its bid to lead the Arab world.
Nasser was a credible leader and Pan-Arabism was a state policy under him . This is not the same thing as a delusional dictator invoking Pan-Arabism and invading his Arab neighbors. Quadafi also invoked Pan-Arabism at time, that did not make alive and well or a credible movement either. It was just a convenient ruse for another delusional dictator. These are not the same as Nasser at all.
Pan-Arabism largely lost momentum after 1967 Six Day War with Israel in which Egypt was defeated. Nasser died a few years later which is why I said it died with him. Anwar Sadat made no mention of it subsequently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arab_Mind
I will nevertheless read it.
Funny thing - given how easy it is to get an "racist" label these days, I'd treat this as a signal that the book may be touching on some controversial topics or reaching unpopular conclusions.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/24/worlddispatch....
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/middleeast...
For some more resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)#Criticism
Real life is far more complex than your average geopolitical wannabe-strategist gives the slightest credit for.