No Arming The Syrian Rebels Wouldn’t Have Fixed Everything

One of the more annoying threads in Washington foreign policy punditry as of late focuses on the idea that if Obama had only intervened in the Syrian Civil War earlier, everything would be okay. Former Iraq hawks like Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart are great examples of this, but you see it all over the place.

To be sure they are completely wrong. Marc Lynch recently pointed out in a great post on The Monkey Cage blog that the political science research is pretty conclusive that American intervention was highly unlikely to have made much of difference. Let alone replace the monstrous regimes of Assad and ISIS with a pleasant democracy.

And that’s just the beginning. As one expert put it on a War On The Rocks podcast, the whole idea of turning the Free Syrian Army into so guardian of liberal democracy was insane because it is, “neither free, nor Syrian, nor an Army.” Meanwhile the “moderate” rebels we were supposed to support are often Islamic extremists that just aren’t as extreme as ISIS or groups that styled themselves as western democrats but oftentimes cooperate with Islamic extremists. Oh and also the aid that was advocated was always pretty small compared to the mass quantities of money and weapons that have poured into Syria in the last three years from Russia, Iran, and the gulf.

Plus nobody ever talked about giving the Syrian rebels the types of weapons they’d need to really turn the tide of battle, that is sophisticated anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. And rightly so! You’d have to be insane, or possibly work for the Heritage Foundation, to advocate sending stinger missiles to Islamic extremists who style themselves as democrats to Jeff Goldberg.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see a nice article in The New York Times detailing a secret CIA report that outlined how poorly our attempts to arm various rebels have gone since the end of World War II:

The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.

The findings of the study, described in recent weeks by current and former American government officials, were presented in the White House Situation Room and led to deep skepticism among some senior Obama administration officials about the wisdom of arming and training members of a fractured Syrian opposition.

So yes, arming the Syrian rebels wouldn’t have fixed everything back when, and arming them now probably won’t either. Which isn’t to say Obama “was right” back then or is "wrong" now. Rather it’s to say that the Hawks that dominate foreign policy debates in our country don’t know what they are talking about.

The Feminism Post

(Warning, mansplaining ahead.)

I consider myself to be a student of politics and social movements. It's something I enjoy learning, thinking, and writing about and one thread of that I've been following recently is the on going battles inside the feminist movement over what feminism should mean and how it should go about trying to influence the world we live in.

I should probably state up front that while I'm sympathetic with the ideas that feminism espouses and it's goals, indeed I basically agree with them, I certainly don't consider myself a feminist and probably never will. If only because it seems to me that at least some feminists don't really want men to be part of their movement. And that's fine, to each her own (look at what I just did there! See feminists, I'm not totally awful!) This raise the interesting question of why some people want to be part of a social movement that doesn't seem to want them. But it also raises, for me at least, the bigger question of why a movement would decided to exclude 49 or so percent of the world's population up front from being part of the team.

Which brings me to the main point I want to make in this piece: feminism the social movement may be in the service of noble ideals and worthy goals, but it often uses methods that seem counterproductive, or at least may be questionable.

Recently The Guardian published a piece that seemed like a checklist of these sort of choices by Roxane Gay. Simply put Gay doesn't like the fact that the wrong people, that is to say celebrities, are also climbing on board the feminist bandwagon:

But it irks me that we more easily embrace feminism and feminist messages when delivered in the right package – one that generally includes youth, a particular kind of beauty, fame and/or self-deprecating humour. It frustrates me that the very idea of women enjoying the same inalienable rights as men is so unappealing that we require – even demand – that the person asking for these rights must embody the standards we’re supposedly trying to challenge. That we require brand ambassadors and celebrity endorsements to make the world a more equitable place is infuriating.

There's no nice way to say this, so let me just say it and if you'd like to call me a sexist jerk in the comments section feel free to: yes the world is filled with unfairness and awfulness of every kind. And yes the methods, compromises, and work necessary to enact social change can be infuriating. None the less, this is how social change works and this is the path your have chosen to take.

So yeah it's fine to be irked and infuriated and whatever by these sorts of things, but that's just part of the game. It's not clear to me about pointing these things out is going to help anyone. Gay goes on to explain the real problem with feminism, (after quoting none other than Taylor Swift, is she the type of feminist we're looking for? It's also not clear, but anyway):

This is the real problem feminism faces. Too many people are willfully ignorant about what the word means and what the movement aims to achieve. But when a pretty young woman has something to say about feminism, all of a sudden, that broad ignorance disappears or is set aside because, at last, we have a more tolerable voice proclaiming the very messages feminism has been trying to impart for so damn long.

Again, this is something I'd agree with, feminism has consistently been painted by powerful forces in a negative light since basically forever. But at the same time it's remarkable that Gay refuses to even contemplate feminists own agency in terms of why so many people might have negative opinions about it as a social movement. Or why the fact that the public is more open to the moderate and welcoming language that Swift deploys than language about why you, yes you, are "privileged".

Yes it's true that lots of people don't really know anything about feminism or feminist thought, but that's because lots of people don't pay attention to politics at all. Lots of people don't even follow what Congress is up to let alone open a JSTOR account and start pouring through articles about intersectionality. This isn't because they are bad people, rather it's because they are people. They live busy lives, they find academic writing (and people who use that style in blogs and articles) difficult if not impossible to access, and they are too occupied by the problems in their own life to add 50,000 years of men doing horrible things to women to the pile.

I'm not a stranger to these sorts of political problems. Reading about monetary policy and the Federal Reserve has really changed my opinion about economic policy, and in some ways politics in general, quite a bit. It turns out things like interests rates set by some obscure group called the Federal Open Market Committee influences how the economy is doing more than Congress passing some law or the President giving some speech. Which in turn influences things like who gets to be president. So yeah, it irks me that the media treats the Fed and monetary policy as some sort of technocratic topic that no normal person could possibly understand, it's infuriating that President Obama has been so slow at nominating people to be put on the Fed's board of governors, and I wish people weren't so "willfully ignorant" about monetary policy. But at the same time I am willing to allow that liberals and progressives and all us social-justicy-commies have done a terrible job of explaining these topics to people. Indeed liberals and progressives basically ignore them, instead we write lots of articles about celebrities.

Maybe part, just part, of the reason so many of the unwashed masses are "willfully ignorant" about feminist ideas is that feminists, like liberals who care about the economy, haven't been doing a very good job of explaining their ideas. I'm not a huge fan of Freddie deBoer, but he did write an excellent piece about how a lot of what he calls "online social liberalism" might be a bit off putting those of us who haven't been initiated into the higher mysteries of the faith:

If you are a young person who is still malleable and subject to having your mind changed, and you decide to engage with socially liberal politics online, what are you going to learn immediately? Everything that you like is problematic. Every musician you like is misogynist. Every movie you like is secretly racist. Every cherished public figure has some deeply disqualifying characteristics. All of your victories are the product of privilege. Everyone you know and love who does not yet speak with the specialized vocabulary of today’s social justice movement is a bad, bad person. That is no way to build a broader coalition, which we desperately need if we’re going to win.

This is an exaggeration, but is he really that far off? After all Gay tells us about, "...the all-too-often sexist music we listen to and the movies we watch that tell women’s stories horribly (if at all)..."

The interesting question for me is if these forms of communication make any sense in terms of building an effective social movement? It's true that historical and social factors can have profound impacts on our life outcomes, but does it make sense to tell people they are "privileged", even if they find that insulting? Especially when the whole thing can seem like a "personal insult posing as a social critique"? Are you going to convenience them to help you advance your goals or just make them mad? This is not mere cant, from my personal experience if you tell a tenured professor about how they are privileged because they basically have guaranteed employment for life they start ranting about how hard they worked to get here and how the deserve it.

That is they sounds like a CEO at a fundraiser for Mitt Romney.

Does it make sense to tell people who might disagree with you that they need to educate themselves before they can voice an opinion? Maybe, but maybe those people read some books about this stuff in college and still might write a blog post disagreeing with you. Does it really make sense to try and change culture by attacking TV shows and movies as being morally wrong and warping people's minds, like some people of a different political stripe did long ago? Or might a better strategy be to go out and make your own movies via a kickstarter that gives you the ability to tell stories, like a neo-noir set in backwoods Virgina, that Hollywood would never make in the first place?

I of course don't have the answers to these questions. And that's because nobody does. Social movements ultimately make their own choices and determine their own fates. That is to say they have the agency they chose to exercise and the purposes they chose to give to themselves. For all I know these strategies might be working, and leading to a better world. But it is still an interesting thing for me to watch. Personally I think when lefties focus on internal power struggles it doesn't go well, and might even strengthen the hand of their opponents. But then again that's just me.

Some Thoughts About ISIS

Or ISIL or IS or whatever you want to call it. A lot of other smart people out there can talk about this sort of stuff in a far more informed manner than me, but I still have some thoughts so lets go bullet point style:

• ISIS may seem to be in the military ascendency now, but that's largely because it's opponents on the ground are either unwilling (like Asad's regime in Damascus) or unable (like the Iraqi Government) to confront them. They failed to take Baghdad, and can't overrun Erbil (in no small part due to American air power) and so they've kind of reached their limit.
• They are basically screwed externally. Yes ISIS is a monster, from selling prepubescent girls into sexual slavery to massacring religious minorities to massacring everyone else they are like something out of a Clive Barker novel. But at the same time step back and look at a map. They are a landlocked wannabe state surrounded by enemies. They are armed to the teeth for now because of looting Syrian and later Iraqi military bases, but they have no means of resupply for the things like tanks, APCs, and artillery that have given them an edge so far. Every vehicle they lose is one they can't replace, especially now that Turkey has bellied up to the bar and is willing to confront this Frankenstein.
• Al-Qaeda is old news. According to some news reports I've read even the Bin-Laden Boys think ISIS is behaving in an immoral fashion. It shouldn't surprise us, after all Albert Spear was all for the Nazi Party, but when Hitler ordered him to destroy Germany because the Master Race hadn't lived up Hitler's expectations, well Spear balked at that. Hopefully this means Al-Qaeda will just sort of fade away, as ISIS is the new ticket to sign onto. That is if your some sort of lunatic Islamic extremist.
• The big political point everyone is missing here is that ISIS will never work in the long term. Their political ideology is at it's core fundamentally flawed. Basically they believe in a world of Islamic political ideals as a means of replacing our system of Democracy and individualism and respect for human rights. As Adam Curtis explained it, "It said that those who had become involved with western style politics and power had entered into a state of barbarism or "Jahiliyyah" and that this meant they were no longer Muslims. That, in turn, could be interpreted as meaning that they were impious, or "takfir" - and that meant you could kill them. The danger was that there was no objective way of defining who was impious or not."   
• And that's the problem right there right? If I can be grandiose this system of politics is doomed. The ideal, that is the pursuit of the perfect and rejection of anything that isn't the perfect, is not something that belongs in politics. And don't take my word for it, read Ardent, read Machiavelli, read Saint Thomas Aquinas, Read Plato. Hell watch Game of Thrones and tell me how Ned's focus on politics driver by a sense of personal honor ended up.
• In conclusion ISIS can style themselves all fancy right now, but it's not going to last. This isn't our nadir, this is the opposite. They are doomed, and it already appears to be slipping away from them. 

  Anyway, that's what I think.

The Falklands War Revisited

With the 2016 cycle approaching I think I need to step my foreign policy game up a little bit so I've been trying to read and write more about these sorts of things. It looks like Hillary is going to be the Democratic nominee so I guess if she wins we'll be in for a healthy dose of do-gooder interventionism. This isn't what I'd prefer (the great blog War On The Rocks made me recently discover that I'm a realist) oh well, I guess it can't be helped. But since war and peace are kind of important issues so I guess I should write about them in a broader context than why invading Iraq was a terrible idea.

These days there seems to be major disagreements in the GOP between Marco Rubio style militaristic lunacy, Rand Paul style isolationist lunacy, and plain old lunacy lunacy embodied in this sage piece of advice offered by Ted Cruz that could have been said by George Marshall:

You can point to two points on the spectrum, where Republicans lie. On one side you have the views of John McCain. The other end of the spectrum, you have the views of Rand Paul. Now, with respect, my views are very much the views of Ronald Reagan, which I would suggest is a third point on the triangle.

When all else fails either start whipping the horse's eyes or invoke Ronald Reagan. But that's the modern GOP right? When you're a post policy party turning the spectrum into a triangle and announcing, "I do not support arming the rebels in Syria, because the administration has presented no coherent plan for distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys." Makes as much sense as anything else right?

BUT ANYWAY, a few weeks ago Robert Farley wrote a nice piece about the legacy of the Falklands War. I've always thought of the Falklands war as being one of the silliest wars ever fought, which isn't to say it wasn't an actual war. For the men, and they pretty much were all men, who were involved it was probably filled with horror and hardship and pain. All wars, even relatively small ones, are very real for the people who fight them, even if killing people to control windswept rocks covered in sheep shit is a very strange thing indeed.

Farley makes great points all around. (And yes this post is based on comments I wrote on the blog.)

Personally though I've always been impressed by the cultural impact of the war as well, particularly in Britain. Musical artists as different as Dire Straights, NOFX, The Fall, and Vampire Weekend have referenced the war (the best lyrics has to be Vampire Weekend's from their song "Mansard Roof "The Argentines collapse in defeat; The Admiralty surveys the remnants of the fleet"). Which when you think about it is strange. The Iraq War was a much bigger thing, but I only can think of a few songs about it. The best of course is Steve Earle's "Home To Houston."

Heck even The Simpsons have a joke about war for control of strategic sheep purposes and to solve domestic political problems. (Yeah and to also liberate those British subjects etc.)

But more than anything it I think the war reinforced the idea of Thatcherism as a political ideology in Britain. That is to say the idea that confrontation and destruction of your foes is the best way to go about conducting your political affairs. Accommodation? Compromise? Negotiation? "No! No! No!"

So you don't just make the miners accept cuts in subsides for their industry, you completely destroy their union and their way of life. You don't just criticize Michael Foot's politics, you humiliate him as a weakling and an eunuch on the front page of your tabloid paper daily. You don't just disagree with members of your cabinet, you scream at them at the top of your lungs until they resign or admit defeat. And you certainly don't let loyalty to the who woman plucked you out of obscurity (John Major I'm looking in your direction) stand in the way of your chance at glory. Thatcher had seen it work so well with the "Argies" so why not do the same thing at home?

Nicholas Kristof's Circular Logic

Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column attacking Obama for his previous policy of not getting heavily involved in Syria's civil war. I think it encompasses a lot of the poor thinking that got us into the whole Iraq mess in the first point, and is filled with his naive tendency to divide the world into what Adam Curtis has called "goodies and baddies", but this one passage jumped out at me:

His [Obama's] “red line” about chemical weapons turned out to be more like a penciled suggestion. His rejection of the proposal by Hillary Rodham Clinton and David Petraeus to arm moderate Syrian factions tragically empowered both the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Nick is rolling out the classic circular thinking of American military adventures: if war works then that shows that war is awesome and should be done more often. If war doesn't work (as it didn't in Iraq) then that means that what we need is more war. In short war can never fail to improve things, it can only be failed by presidents that don't do it enough or do it well enough.

Hence the idea that giving more weapons to various Syrian factions would have automatically made things better that Nick cites. There's no evidence of this at all in the real world, for example nobody has ever even suggested giving the Syrian rebels the weapons they would actually need to turn the tide of battle, that is sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles. And rightly so! In Ukraine rebels used such weapons to shoot down a Malaysian jet liner recently. In fact the whole reason ISIS is so powerful right now is they were able to capture a huge amount of weapons this summer that we supplied the Iraqi Army with!

But in Nick's military adventure world this contention proves itself. Since things are bad and we didn't give weapons to Islamic extremists not named ISIS (which is basically what a lot of the "moderates" are) Obama made a mistake, because weapons would automatically have made things better. And indeed in an alternative universe where we did give them weapons and things didn't get better Nick could say, "Obama didn't give enough weapons soon enough!" Or whatever. Likewise nobody thinks the bombing proposed by Obama last year would have ended the war, but again it was a failure because we didn't bomb and bad things happened.

In short, this is a bizarre way to think about the world. Unfortunately it's a pretty popular in our foreign policy establishment.

On Being Done With Writing On "Culture"

The other day WaPo's Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a nice essay about " how we talk about politics is influencing how we talk about culture." It was about some of her own observations about how she thinks the world of culture writing has changed since she started.

I guess I would agree in someways with her take culture and politics but using her example Game of Thrones as an example, I diverge in an important way. As a fan I am totally open to people criticizing aspects of the show and in no way treat it as some holy writ that's beyond anyone's critique. Indeed, where's Strong Belwas or Donal Noye? Those are great characters and it's too bad they got cut out. But what I do find annoying is criticism, that like the bloviating of various political pundits, goes off course and degenerates into what you might call "cultural partisanship."

So for some it's not enough to say "I didn't like this scene", or "I wish they did X." Instead we get people like The Atlantic's Chris Orr calling the show "stupid and offensive" or other critics labeling it "dangerous" as if it's going to warp our children's' minds like so many Judas Priest albums in the 80's. It's at that point where I feel I have to draw the line and dismiss such criticism the same way i think that saying healthcare.gov is going to doom Obama's presidency, indeed liberalism itself, (serious political commentators made these very claims!) is ridiculous hyperbole and should be ignored.

And in my view this is a major problem because "cultural punditry" is becoming how a lot of people, especially younger writers, are approaching writing about culture.

A classic example occurred a few weeks ago when the New Republic published an article detailing how Lana Del Rey's new album is a "sad indictment of post-feminism" that also "can be dangerous" and can "send out a sinister message."

Here I was thinking that Ultraviolence was Lana Del Rey's second studio album, instead it appears it was a political argument that failed somehow and will surly cause people to run out and commit school shootings the same way Marilyn Manson's music did.

It's hard for me to respond to this kind of (poorly reasoned) argument because it's not really about art at all. Or at least about how I understand art. Instead it's about art as a political argument. And sometimes art can be that, but sometimes it really isn't. What's the social and political argument of Othello? Don't let your daughter marry a black guy? Kill your wife if you suspect her of infidelity? Don't trust your best friend? Men can't be trusted?

You can write an argument that Shakespeare is making these arguments, but it really doesn't hold up that well at all. After all the tragedy is driven by the fact that Othello is overly suspicious of Desdemona and too trusting of Iago. Othello is an outsider because of his birth and color, but still is one of Venice's best soldiers and gets to marry the daughter or a prominent Senator. Iago's motivations are famously unknown. Thus in Othello trust can be necessary and destructive, men can be dangerous (Iago) but women can be naive (Desdemona) etc. etc.

So no art doesn't have to be a political argument. It can be a lot more than that.

Indeed I'd argue that what great art does isn't tell you want to think, it makes you simply think about stuff. So trust can be an important part of a relationship, but blind trust can be foolish. So the world has it's share of dangerous liars who will try to deceive you like Iago, but also it's Emilia's who will help protect you. Thus Lana Del Rey's music isn't suppose to argue that having your boyfriend punch you is great, she's instead exploring different types of relationships indeed different ways of thinking about what love can be. Love that can make you very sad, love that can feel like being kissed when emotionally you are actually being punched.

These are pretty basic ideas here, it's a shame they've been ignored or forgotten.

In other words I'm open to arguments about why someone thinks King Lear is better than Othello. But I'm going to dismiss someone who calls Othello "stupid and offensive" or "dangerous" or "misogynistic" because Othello kills Desdemona. And why? Well because these plays aren't about politics in the second decade of the 21st Century, they are about a lot more than that.

Which is a long way of saying I'm not going to be reading much cultural criticism for a while. If I want to read about politics I'll read about important people like Hillary Clinton, not unimportant people like Lana Del Rey. And if I want to read about culture I'm more interest in reading about how Lana dodged the dreaded "sophomore slump" and made an even better second album than her first great one.

Also for what it's worth the lyric that "he hit me and it felt like a kiss" is a Phil Spector lyric from the 60's, performed by The Crystals. So yeah Lana isn't saying she likes getting punch by her boyfriend, she could just be referencing pieces of pop culture from previous eras (which she does a lot of). Or doing something else entirely. In fact maybe you should ask the artist her intent instead of making a "sinister" one up for her.

Poor Writing On Pop Culuture

Vox published a look back at how Seinfeld influenced television the other day. Some of it is quite good, for example their look at how Seinfeld moved the way sitcoms are shot from a multiple camera style where people perform on a stage with different cameras covering different angles, think Cheers, to a single camera style with long shots and close ups, more like a film. The piece's points about how the show changed sitcom writing were also pretty good.

But the author really missed the boat when it comes to looking at the characters. He tries to do it through the lens or contemporary liberal writing about race and I think really misses the boat. For example he claims this about George:

George essentially believes he deserves to have sex with a beautiful woman because he's a white guy living in modern America, and when he doesn't succeed (but Jerry or Kramer do), he grows ever more petulant. He doesn't particularly want to strive to succeed. He just wants life handed to him on a silver platter. 

I think that really get's the character, and the show in general, wrong.

George doesn't "believe" that he "deserves to have sex with a beautiful woman because he's a white guy living in modern America..." he's a pathetic loser who really wants to have sex with beautiful women, not because of "white privileged" or anything but because he's a greedy person. Since he has neither looks, nor money, nor status, he is forced to go through all sorts of contortions to try and achieve his goals. And since he is so shallow and greedy hilarity ensues.

Hence George willing to pretend to be a famous neo-nazi author in "The Limo" as long as he can use it as a way to be able to date tall, blond, aryan-looking women. George doesn't care about the racial or ethical implications or what he's doing, he just wants to get the blond, hence pretending to be a neo-nazi while sitting next to his Jewish best friend no less! These aren't the actions of someone who thinks their race or nationality "deserves" anything, they are are the actions of a shallow person trying scam their way by hook and by crook into what they want. Another example would be George pretending to be an architect or marine biologist to try and impress women.

But it's not just George that is lazy and wants things handed to him. Kramer famously doesn't have a job and mooches of Jerry for almost everything. But even Elaine, the strong female character or whatever, isn't any better put together than any of the others, she's just better at hiding her dysfunction. Sure she has better jobs than George, but once she get's her big break with the J. Peterman catalog she screws it up with idiotic ideas like the urban sombrero.   

This is what makes Seinfeld's comedy about things like race or sexuality so good, and so potentially offensive to some people. George and the gang only address questions about things like race or sexuality when it directly affects them or how they could appear socially. Hence George and Jerry work frantically to try and prove to the world that they aren't gay, while also stressing, "not that there's anything wrong with that!" Meanwhile Jerry get's upset when another man asks his gay acquaintance out on a date while Jerry is sitting next to him. Jerry get's offended when someone doesn't assume he's gay and then goes back to trying to prove to journalists that he's not gay! Or more bluntly George wants to date a woman from Senegal because she doesn't speak English and hence he doesn't have to worry about what to say to her. Or he's excited to date a woman in prison because she is locked up and thus can't boss him around.

In short these characters only address these issues when there's some sort of social advantage to gain or faux pas to avoid, otherwise it's completely irrelevant to them due to their shallow narcissism. That's what made the show so funny.

But the biggest problem of the piece is that they forgot the fact that so much of the show was about pushing boundaries and making reference to themes that normally wouldn't be discussed on network TV. They did this by oftentimes talking about it in an opaque manner, like in "The Contest", but that was one of the biggest legacies of the show and it's a shame Vox missed that point.