What if ISIS just burns out?

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If it’s really true that Al Qaeda dumped ISIS for being too evil (which I highly doubt, as I’m sure it was more about competition, territory, or leadership) then I’d find it hard to believe that any people would allow them to rule over an area for long.

Ultimately, terrorist groups tend to hold political power only as long as they can deliver services more than they oppress people. It’s easy to take power but hard to hold it.

Is the only way to stop them really military action? What about letting them burn out under their own terribleness?

Banging around in the dark in Mesopotamia

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Mesopotamia: the land between two rivers, the buffer between eastern and western empires, the perennial peripheral battle zone between Persia and her Western challengers. Today: Iraq.

Parthian Empire at its greatest extent. Credit: Keeby101- Wikimedia

Parthian Empire at its greatest extent. Credit: Keeby101- Wikimedia

The Republican Iraq policy of the past 12 years has been to stumble through a pitch-black room of broken hazards with no awareness of what’s behind, what’s nearby, or what’s ahead. But they triumphantly declare that we’re almost there and everyone else is an unpatriotic traitor who wants us to fail.

On the other side of the room, Iran — supposedly the Republicans’ greatest boogeyman since the Soviet Union and at least the second greatest since 1979 — is standing silently with night vision goggles and thousands of years of knowledge of what’s behind. If we get too close, it steps out of the way, but remains inside the room. It used to wait outside the room, in the darkened hallway, but then the Republicans opened the door by trying to get into the room, as if they had no idea Iran was even next to the room and that that closed door had been the only thing keeping Iran out.

I don’t have an instinctive, overriding opposition to Iran the way some do. But if the goal was to keep Iran from gaining influence over more territory, there had to be a counterbalancing force left in Iraq which was in opposition to Shia Iran. And that would have meant a minority-led dictatorship, statistically speaking. Which is not a reason to support the existence of such a thing (though we had managed to mitigate it without dismantling it by 2002). But their bumbling haste meant they didn’t even attempt to reconcile that their regional policy goals — taking out the Iraq regime and containing Iran — were at complete odds. Today they find themselves rallying to the Shia-aligned government whose biggest friends are in Tehran, condemning the President for not unquestioningly dumping money, bombs, and troops into the cause, even as they condemn his efforts to negotiate a nuclear solution with Tehran.

Worst of all: Still today they refuse to entertain the idea that the 2003 invasion was a mistake of vast and sweeping proportions on all possible fronts. A crippling, even rippling, disaster at home in our politics, economy, and budget; the elephant in the room on U.S. foreign policy for years to come; and a massive disruption that upended the delicate Middle Eastern balance and tore a fragile country apart into a bloodbath. At least most Democrats who supported it, despite how obviously bad an idea that it was at the time, have the decency to admit they screwed up.

The continued denial of reality on Iraq, let alone repentance, from Republicans right now makes me politically angry in a way I haven’t felt since George W. Bush was in office. Their genuinely — not even strategically or cynically — held belief that President Obama is to blame for what’s happening now is merely the infuriating cherry on top of a rage sundae.

Oped | American Unexceptionalism & The Republic

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The real story of the origins of the U.S. political system. Composite oped from two new essays (here and here) in The Globalist.

You’ve read the story before. A number of loosely aligned, merchant-dominated offshore territories of a European empire begin chafing at their distant monarch and the high taxes he imposed without giving them a reasonable say in their own governance.

Predictably enough, their mounting dissatisfaction is met with an increasingly overbearing response — including military deployments. That strategy is pursued until the provinces reach a breaking point.

They declare themselves free of the faraway king and initiate a rebellion. Not all the territories are persuaded to join. Some prefer to remain loyal to the crown.

The rebellion binds together a small collection of sovereign entities into a union, equipped with a weak, loosely formalized provisional government. Its purpose is to direct the union’s foreign policy and manage the rebellion.

Government after monarchy

Having declared themselves without a king, the newly independent elite must devise a replacement system of government for the continued union.

For a time, they consider the possibility of bringing in another member of the European nobility to serve as king. Such an invitation or election of an outsider as king was common in Europe for centuries, from Poland to Sweden to the Holy Roman Empire. Even the papacy is an elective monarchy.

But eventually the merchant elites and past commanders of the rebellion decide they have been doing fine without a royal. They are now content to continue to strengthen the temporary system as it is.

The exceptional story takes shape

These elite gentlemen look around at other precedents for other self-governing states without kings. Smaller free states — such as Florence and Venice — had previously installed non-hereditary systems of rule by the commercial elites and major families. They had called them “republics,” after the elite-run classical “Roman Republic.”

Elections in such systems are highly indirect and susceptible to manipulation. They are also restricted to a very small number of participants. Essentially, the only voters are members of the propertied, male elite — usually white.

After all, they make no secret of the fact that this exclusionary voting franchise suits the new country’s leaders’ aims anyway. They are not interested in creating a democracy. Rather they are keen to establish a republic insulated from the passions of the mobs.

It is then agreed that under the new union of rebel provinces, each member republic would send delegations to the union’s government, but they will be answerable to their home governments. This further would keep the regular people away from any major levers of power.

Finally, they devise an elaborate system of checks and balances. The ostensible purpose is to preserve the sovereignty of the member republics within the union. The bigger purpose is to prevent the “tyranny” of a central government and an executive. The union will have weak powers of taxation — only enough to mount a common defense of the member republics.

This is, of course, the story of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces in Netherlands and their departure from Spain — about two centuries before the United States constitution was ratified by thirteen former British colonies.

So much for America’s origin story being exceptional, as claimed for so long.

The Dutch precedent was a model, both to be emulated and avoided, for the framers of the U.S. Constitution and those advocating for its adoption. Far from being an “exceptional” idea, the original version of the United States was just the latest iteration of an existing system. It is what came after that that made it exceptional.

Almost before the ink had dried on the U.S. Constitution, the United States and its citizenry — indeed, even its government officials — began adapting the document in other directions the framers had never intended or anticipated.

That is probably for the best, from the world’s perspective, and from the country’s, since rule by a narrow slave-owning elite is not exactly a paragon of excellent governance for the world to follow.
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J.K. Rowling labels Scottish ultranationalists “Death Eaterish”

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I guess the gloves are off now in this year’s Scottish independence referendum:

ROWLING has been subjected to an extraordinary torrent of online abuse from Scottish independence supporters after she donated [UK 1m pounds UK or US $1.7m] to the “No” campaign.

The creator of Harry Potter found herself targeted by the cybernats — the Yes backers who thrive on insulting those with different views — immediately after declaring her support for the Better Together campaign.

The writer, who lives in Edinburgh, is the most prominent figure to donate to either campaign. Her donation is a major coup for the pro-union campaign, which feared being out-financed by the Yes camp.

Yes Scotland and Better Together are now limited to spending $2.6m before the referendum — but the figure does not cover staff costs.

Rowling has previously made major contributions to research on multiple sclerosis, which her mother suffered from, and said that she was concerned about the effect a “yes” vote would have on medical research and on the economy.
[…]
Rowling launched a pre-emptive strike against the cybernats. She said that, although intelligent and thoughtful people made up the majority on both sides of the debate, “I also know that there is a fringe of nationalists who like to demonise anyone who is not blindly and unquestionably pro-independence and I suspect, notwithstanding the fact that I’ve lived in Scotland for twenty-one years and plan to remain here for the rest of my life, that they might judge me ‘insufficiently Scottish’ to have a valid view.”

She was born in the West Country, brought up on the Welsh border, and has Scottish, English, French and Flemish ancestry, and says that her allegiance is to Scotland.

“However, when people try to make this debate about the purity of your lineage, things start getting a little Death Eaterish for my taste,” she said, in a reference to characters in the Harry Potter books.
[…]
“Scotland is subject to the same twenty-first century pressures as the rest of the world. It must compete in the same global markets, defend itself from the same threats and navigate what still feels like a fragile economic recovery. The more I listen to the Yes campaign, the more I worry about its minimisation and even denial of risks.”

The latter day United Arab Republic

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Formerly briefly united into one country, known as the “United Arab Republic,” Egypt and Syria still look pretty similar politically and economically decades after separation. In spirit, the UAR lives on.

But in one country winning the presidency with 97% of the vote is deemed tyranny by the West. In the other, the same figure is “important for democracy.”

“The Egyptian election is important for the process of the democratic transition and return to forming an elected government in Egypt,” a [UK] Foreign Office spokeswoman [said.]

What a joke.

Maybe let’s stop trying to “help” Iraq for a second

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Iraq-NO-FLY-ZONES-map-1991-2003There’s this sort of myth, which sprung up in the 2004-2008 period of the U.S. War in Iraq, that the world could not just tolerate Saddam Hussein’s cruel rule a moment longer than March 2003. This was used to justify the invasion retroactively when it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, which was the original stated reason.

Of course, it’s a bit odd on its face to claim that the cruelty of his regime was suddenly supposedly intolerable by the end of 2002 (more so given that it took more than four months between the U.S. authorization of force and the actual invasion), in a way that it had not been a decade and a half earlier, when he was an American ally.

Moreover, not only was the Iraqi regime not actively committing some kind of genocide at the time of the invasion (again, not the stated reason for intervention at the time it happened), but the U.S. and the world had already pretty effectively contained the regime over the course of the 1990s.

No, Iraq wasn’t doing great by the end of 2002 — it certainly couldn’t be expected to under the weight of massive sanctions from around the world — but it was probably more stable and less violent than it had been for quite some time. And that wasn’t by chance.

With US/UK no-fly zones operating continuously from 1991 to 2003 to protect the Kurdish population and the Shia population from Iraqi air campaigns — the U.S. alone flew more than 200,000 missions by the beginning of 1999, often taking a lot of Iraqi anti-air fire — along with other protective measures for the persecuted zones, the bad old days were basically over (by comparison to what preceded or followed anyway).

Again, I recognize it was certainly far from ideal. Dissenters and sectarian minorities were still being persecuted at the hands of the regime in the Sunni areas and on the ground in the south, but that’s a situation that happens in authoritarian regimes the world over. In stark contrast with the 2003-2011 U.S. war, the ad hoc solution from 1991-2003 involved very little loss of life on either side — somewhere in the range of 50 people were killed during the no-fly zone operations — and it prevented the regime from going around bombing and gassing everyone (or sectarian extremists from killing each other). By the end of 2002, the world had a pretty solid handle on keeping Iraq stable and non-genocidal. Then George W. Bush’s invasion happened.

At that point, the whole country broke. Just plain fell apart into total violence and an extremists’ free-for-all where everyone could avenge every old wrong. We had no plan, no resources, no experience, and not enough troops, and we just decided to wing it. And the inevitable result was just total pandemonium and wholesale destruction.

We did that. That’s on us. And we never really did fix it before we left. (Which isn’t an argument for staying indefinitely, as I’ll get to in a moment.) There’s no way that was better than the default situation in 2002 where the persecuted populations were protected from mass slaughter and everyone else had it bad but weren’t living in an unending hell (one which never ended).

Now as ISIS pours over the border from Syria, capturing four major cities (including the country’s second largest) and perhaps soon the northern oil fields, while the Iraqi Army falls back into a chaotic retreat, U.S. pundits — the war everywhere always brigade — are asking each other whether it’s time to re-intervene in Iraq.

Because apparently a permanent U.S. military engagement from 1990-2011 wasn’t enough. Because apparently we didn’t do enough damage in the second round while trying to “help.”

Look, I’m no isolationist. I’m actually even an advocate for humanitarian military intervention in many cases, to the point of annoying some other progressives. But I try to be smart about it and historically conscious. And right now, right there, this just isn’t one of those cases.

Iraq now is like when you break an antique, keep trying to help fix it, and everything else around it breaks in the process and the big pieces keep breaking into smaller pieces. Finally your grandma tells you “just stop.”

Colin Powell is alleged to have once said, prior to the 2003 invasion, that there was going to be a “you break you bought it” policy on Iraq with regard to American involvement. Thomas Friedman dubbed this the “Pottery Barn rule,” in spite of Pottery Barn not actually having such a rule. But either way, one imagines that if you blew up an entire Pottery Barn store, you would not be asking “hey so do you think I should go back and help out?” two years later when someone else accidentally broke a vase.

We need to stop “helping” Iraq.