Regular Iranians Speak Directly to America. By Max Fisher.

“You’re not the boss of the world”: Regular Iranians speak directly to America. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, September 27, 2013. Also here.

CNN’s “Open Mic” in Tehran: Iranians Tell It Like It Is. By Nima Shirazi. Muftah, September 27, 2013. Also at Wide Asleep in America, CASMII.

Open Mic: Tehran. Video. CNN, September 25, 2013. YouTube.

Russia’s Coming Implosion. By Clifford D. May.

Après Putin, Le Déluge? By Clifford D. May. National Review Online, September 26, 2013. Also at Real Clear World.

In the long term, Russia’s prospects look dim.

Who Are the Real Suicide Bombers? By John Hinderaker.

Who Are the Real Suicide Bombers? By John Hinderaker. Powerline, September 27, 2013.

A Civil War in Islam. By David Gardner.

A schism in Islam is ripping the Middle East apart. By David Gardner. Financial Times, June 14, 2013.

Islam’s Civil War. By William S. Lind. American Conservative, September 24, 2013.

America can win it by staying out.


Gardner:

President Barack Obama’s decision to send unspecified “direct military support” to Syria’s rebels may have as its proximate cause the now firm US conviction that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons against them. But it will be seen across the Middle East as a choice by America to throw its weight behind a Sunni alliance against Iran-led Shia forces across the region – a conflict in which Syria is the frontline.

 

How could it be otherwise when, after two years of dither, the White House moved on the same day as a conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo declared a jihad against what it called a “declaration of war on Islam” by “the Iranian regime, Hizbollah and its sectarian allies”? Or, as former president Bill Clinton put it, chiding Mr Obama’s hesitation over Syria, “now that the Russians, the Iranians and the Hizbollah are in there head over heels, 90 miles to nothing.”

 

While his words revive memories of the western contest with the Soviet Union in the Middle East, the cold war was straightforward in comparison to the Sunni-Shia conflict driving events across the region, not just in the Levant but from Turkey to the Gulf.

 

This primordial struggle within the Muslim world dates back to the great schism inside early Islam at the end of the 7th century. A latent contest between the Shia minority and overwhelming Sunni majority has reignited in the past three decades – and western leaders brought up to distinguish black hats from white tend to see just a blur of turbans.

 

When the region was bound into a cold war straitjacket, even tumultuous conflicts such as the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 or the mainly Muslim-Christian civil war of Lebanon in 1975-90 could be constrained. The sectarian viciousness of the current Sunni-Shia battle knows no boundaries. It is bursting through the arbitrary borders drawn by the British and French a century ago.

 

First Lebanon, then Iraq and now Syria have all been convulsed by ethno-sectarian civil war. But what had been a Sunni-Shia subplot in the drama burst on to centre stage after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. That catapulted the Shia minority within Islam (a majority in Iraq) to power in an Arab heartland country for the first time since the fall of the heterodox Shia Fatimid dynasty in 1171. It thereby tilted the regional balance of power in favour of the Islamic Republic of Iran – Shi’ite, Persian, with ambitions as a regional hegemon to rival Israel – and fanned the embers of the Sunni-Shia stand-off into millenarian flame.

 

Iraq became a sectarian bloodbath, grinding minorities such as its ancient Christian communities between the wounded identities of the Sunni and Shia. Syria, similar in its ethno-sectarian make-up, is heading the same way. But sectarianism is the consequence not the cause of this conflict, which started as an Arab spring-inspired civic uprising against the Assad clan, which has built a lucrative tyranny around its Alawite minority sect, another esoteric offshoot of Shi’ism.

 

Now, the decision of Iran and Hizbollah, its Lebanese paramilitary proxy, as well as the Shia Islamist government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, to help the Assads crush Syria’s predominantly Sunni rebels has polarised the region and set the scene for a car-bombing contest from Beirut to Baghdad.

 

In 2006, when Hizbollah was able to appear as the champion of Arabs and Muslims, Sunni and Shia, after holding its ground against Israel in a five-week war, a Syrian Sunni town near the Lebanese border called Qusair took in hundreds of Shia refugees. Last week, Hizbollah fighters stood in the rubble of Qusair, which they boasted of liberating from Sunni jihadi fanatics.

 

Sunni hierarchs hitherto at odds closed ranks: Abdelaziz al-Sheikh, the Wahhabi mufti of Saudi Arabia; Ahmad al-Tayeb, the grand sheikh of Cairo’s al-Azhar university; and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, all chanted from the same prayer sheet to denounce Hizbollah and Iran. On Syria’s eastern border, rebels killed dozens of Shia they dismissed as “apostate rejectionists”, as the old Wahhabi poison about Shi’ite “idolaters” oozed north from the Arabian peninsula. It is contagious.

 

An underexamined aspect of Turkey’s present crisis, for example, is the deteriorated relations between the increasingly Sunni ruling party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the minority Alevis, a heterodox and varied Shia sect of up to a fifth of the population. Mr Erdogan’s initiative to make peace with Turkey’s Kurds has as its subtext drawing Syria’s and Iraq’s Kurds into a Sunni Turkosphere. With the Shia Alevis, by contrast, dog-whistle politics are the order of the day. His government wants to name a third bridge over Istanbul’s Bosphorus after Selim the Grim, Ottoman Sultan and the first Caliph, who massacred the Alevis during his war against Safavid (and Shia) Persia in the early 16th century.

 

This, then is the arena Mr Obama, and his post-imperial British and French allies, are entering. Their timing – just after the Hizbollah siege of Qusair – looks deeply suspect in a suffocatingly sectarian environment.

 

Giving rebels the chance to tilt the battlefield against Bashar al-Assad’s savage regime and draw support away from Sunni jihadis on the rebel side is still worth a try. Standing back, and subcontracting arming the rebels to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Qatar has contributed to polarised extremism. Despite support from Russia and Iran, the Assads cannot win, as their dependence on Hizbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shows. There is a certain school of realism that believes it is better to let the Shia Islamists of Hizbollah and al-Qaeda sympathisers such as the rebel al-Nusra front fight it out, like scorpions in a bottle. But Syria is not some sort of jihadi fight club that can be contained.

 

Afghanistan, in the mountains of central Asia, incubated al-Qaeda and 9/11. Leaving Syria to its present devices will create an Afghanistan in the eastern Mediterranean.


Lind:

One of the disappointments of the young 21st century is that H.L. Mencken was not around during the presidency of George W. Bush. He would have had what soldiers call a “target-rich environment.” Mencken would have understood Bush’s invasion of Iraq as a world-class blunder, one so dumb only a boob from the deepest, darkest Bible Belt could have made it.

 

One can imagine what Mencken might have written of Bush’s neocon advisors: perhaps something on the lines of “A cracker barrel of backwoods Arkansas faith healers, card sharps, and carnival side-show barkers, galvanized with the sheen of the garment district, clustered about the head of their moon calf . . .”

 

In Heaven, which may bear a resemblance to Mencken’s Baltimore, we shall know.

 

It is therefore ironic that Bush’s Iraq debacle may have opened the door to the possibility of American victory in the Middle East. How has this miracle come about?

 

One of the unanticipated and unintended results of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to reignite the latent Sunni-Shiite civil war within Islam. As David Gardner wrote in the June 15 Financial Times, the invasion “catapulted the Shia majority within Islam”—a majority in Iraq—“to power in an Arab heartland country for the first time since the fall of the heterodox Shia Fatamid dynasty in 1171. It thereby . . . fanned the embers of the Sunni-Shia standoff into millenarian flame.”

 

Fighting for a sect or a religion is one of the most powerful contributors to Fourth Generation war, war waged by entities other than states. So powerful is religious war that it can sweep states away altogether, as has happened in Syria. Gardner writes, “The sectarian viciousness of the current Sunni-Shia battle knows no boundaries. It is bursting through the arbitrary borders drawn by the British and French a century ago.”

 

The harsh fact is that extensive Fourth Generation war in the Islamic world is inevitable. As descendants of Western colonies, most Islamic states are weak. Their legitimacy was open to question from their founding, in part because their boundaries seldom lie along natural divisions in the cultural geography. Sects, tribes, and ethnic groups overlap. Frequently, representatives of one tribe or sect—often a minority—form the political elite. They treat the state as a private hunting preserve, stealing such wealth as it has while supplying government as incompetent as it is corrupt.

 

On top of weak states has been laid a demographic bomb, in the form of vast populations of young men with nothing to do and no prospects. So what will they do? Fight.

 

They will fight us, they will fight their neighbors, they will fight each other in supply-side war, war occurring not as Clausewitz’s politics carried on by other means but war driven simply by an over-supply of warriors. If this sounds strange to moderns, it would have been familiar to our tribal ancestors.

 

Finally, we think of jihad as something waged by Islam against non-Muslims, but quite often it has been between one Islamic sect and another. Now Islamists are once again declaring jihad on each other. In June the New York Times reported on an influential Sunni cleric who “has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims around the world to help Syrian rebels . . . and labeling Hezbollah and Iran”—both Shi’ite—“enemies of Islam ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians.’” David Gardner’s Financial Times piece tells of a “conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo [that] declared a jihad against what it called a ‘declaration of war on Islam’ by the ‘Iranian regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies.’”

 

How should the West react to all this? With quiet rejoicing. Our strategic objective should be to get Islamists to expend their energies on each other rather than on us. An old aphorism says the problem with Balkans is that they produce more history than they can consume locally. Our goal should be to encourage the Muslim world to consume all its history—of which it will be producing a good deal—as locally as possible. Think of it as “farm to table” war.

 

All we should do, or can do, to obtain this objective is to stay out. We ought not meddle, no matter how subtly; if we do, inevitably, it will blow up in our faces. Just go home, stay home, bolt the doors (especially to refugees who will act out their jihads here), close the windows, and find a good opera on television—perhaps “The Abduction From the Seraglio.”

Ramallah, Gaza, and the Palestinian Identity Crisis. By Ramzy Baroud.

A Tale of Two Cities: Ramallah, Gaza, and the Identity Crisis. By Ramzy Baroud. The Palestine Chronicle, September 13, 2013.

John Kerry’s Middle East Obsession. By Robert Kaplan.

John Kerry’s Middle East Obsession. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, September 26, 2013.

Islamist War on Christians. By Lee Habeeb.

Islamist War on Christians. By Lee Habeeb. National Review Online, September 25, 2013.

Tormenting the Souls of Religious Arabs: “Arab Spring” Degrades into Sectarian Counterrevolution. By Nicola Nasser.

Tormenting the Souls of Religious Arabs: “Arab Spring” Degrades into Sectarian Counterrevolution. By Nicola Nasser. The Palestine Chronicle, September 20, 2013.

The Two-State Solution Died Over a Decade Ago. By Ilan Pappe.

The Two State Solution Died Over a Decade Ago. By Ilan Pappe. The Palestine Chronicle, September 26, 2013. Also here.

Oslo Failure Finally Acknowledged Two Decades Later. By Iqbal Jassat. The Palestine Chronicle, September 15, 2013.

It’s now clear: the Oslo peace accords were wrecked by Netanyahu’s bad faith. By Avi Shlaim. The Guardian, September 12, 2013.

Arafat’s Camel. By Avi Shlaim. London Review of Books, October 21, 1993.

The Morning After. By Edward Said. London Review of Books, October 21, 1993. Also here.

Syria’s Refugee Problem and the West. By Daniel Pipes.

Syria’s Refugee Problem and the West. By Daniel Pipes. National Review Online, September 25, 2013.

Two Miserable Decades. By Jonathan V. Last.

Two Miserable Decades. By Jonathan V. Last. The Weekly Standard, September 30, 2013.

Don’t worry, it was even worse in the 1970s. Or was it?

Back to School. By David Gelernter.

Back to School. By David Gelernter. The Weekly Standard, September 30, 2013.

A reclamation project for higher ed.

Hassan Rouhani’s Jewish Problem. By Max Fisher.

Hassan Rouhani’s Jewish Problem. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, September 26, 2013. Also here.

The End of Quiet Music. By Alina Simone.

The End of Quiet Music. By Alina Simone. New York Times, September 25, 2013.

Maybe It’s Time for Plan C. By Alex Williams. New York Times, August 12, 2011.

Yes Vladimir, America Is an Exceptional Nation. By Adam Turner.

Yes Vladimir, America Is an Exceptional Nation. By Adam Turner. The Blaze, September 26, 2013.

Radio Host Bill Cunnigham on Ted Cruz.

Billy Cunningham: Ted Cruz is a modern day Jim Bowie, John Wayne, and Davy Crockett. Video. No More Cocktails, September 25, 2013. YouTube.

Right-Wing Media Go Wild For Sen. Cruz’s Fake Filibuster. Video. Media Matters for America, September 26, 2013.

Note to Media: This Is What Democracy Looks Like. By Matthew Sheffield. NewsBusters, September 26, 2013.

After talking the talk, Ted Cruz wins. By Rich Lowry. Politico, September 26, 2013.

Unbridled Hatred for Ted Cruz. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, September 26, 2013.

The Desperate Courage of the Republican Populists. By Ben Domenech. NJBR, September 24, 2013.

War, Space, and the Evolution of Old World Complex Societies. By Peter Turchin et al.

War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies. By Peter Turchin, Thomas E. Currie, Edward A. L. Turner, and Sergey Gavrilets. PNAS, published online before print, September 23, 2013. Also here.

Abstract:

How did human societies evolve from small groups, integrated by face-to-face cooperation, to huge anonymous societies of today, typically organized as states? Why is there so much variation in the ability of different human populations to construct viable states? Existing theories are usually formulated as verbal models and, as a result, do not yield sharply defined, quantitative predictions that could be unambiguously tested with data. Here we develop a cultural evolutionary model that predicts where and when the largest-scale complex societies arose in human history. The central premise of the model, which we test, is that costly institutions that enabled large human groups to function without splitting up evolved as a result of intense competition between societies—primarily warfare. Warfare intensity, in turn, depended on the spread of historically attested military technologies (e.g., chariots and cavalry) and on geographic factors (e.g., rugged landscape). The model was simulated within a realistic landscape of the Afroeurasian landmass and its predictions were tested against a large dataset documenting the spatiotemporal distribution of historical large-scale societies in Afroeurasia between 1,500 BCE and 1,500 CE. The model-predicted pattern of spread of large-scale societies was very similar to the observed one. Overall, the model explained 65% of variance in the data. An alternative model, omitting the effect of diffusing military technologies, explained only 16% of variance. Our results support theories that emphasize the role of institutions in state-building and suggest a possible explanation why a long history of statehood is positively correlated with political stability, institutional quality, and income per capita.


War Drove the Rise of Civilizations. By Akshat Rathi. Real Clear Science, September 25, 2013. Also at The Conversation.

Human cycles: History as science. By Laura Spinney. Nature, Vol. 488, Issue 7409, August 2, 2012. Also here.

Warfare the Key to Evolution of Complex Society? Popular Archaeology, September 23, 2013.

Horses a key part of rise in empires, research shows. Horsetalk, September 28, 2013.

War and space: Simulating the evolution of Old World complex societies. By Tom Currie. Video. NIMBioS, April 18, 2013. YouTube.

America’s New Isolationism. By Michael Barone.

America’s New Isolationism. By Michael Barone. Real Clear Politics, September 24, 2013.

Is Hamas Finished? By Juan Cole.

Is Hamas Finished? Facing a Youth Rebellion and Egyptian, Iranian Hostility. By Juan Cole. Informed Comment, September 23, 2013.

Should Kids Be In Beauty Pageants?

Should kids be in beauty pageants? Video. Imus in the Morning. Blonde on Blonde segment with Deirdre Imus and Lis Wiehl. Fox Business, September 25, 2013.

Ted Cruz Reads Green Eggs and Ham to the Senate.

Ted Cruz Reads Green Eggs and Ham to the Senate. Video. HD NEWS, September 24, 2013. YouTube.

Why a Populist Grand Strategy Might Be Unpopular. By Daniel W. Drezner.

Why a Populist Grand Strategy Might Be Unpopular. By Daniel W. Drezner. Foreign Policy, September 25, 2013. Also here.

The Power of Economics and Public Opinion. By Daniel W. Drezner. Policy Review, No. 172 (April/May 2012). Also here.

The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion. By Daniel W. Drezner. Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1 (March 2008).

Obama to World: The American Empire Is Dead. By Colum Lynch and Ty McCormick.

Obama to World: Bad News. The American Empire Is Dead. By Colum Lynch and Ty McCormick. Foreign Policy, September 24, 2013. Also here.

Before Kenya Attack, Rehearsals and Planting of Machine Guns. By Jeffrey Gettleman et al.

Before Kenya Attack, Rehearsals and Planting of Machine Guns. By Jeffrey Gettleman, Nicholas Kulish, and Eric Schmitt. New York Times, September 24, 2013.

Could There Be a One-State Solution? By Robert Mackey.

Could There Be a One-State Solution? By Robert Mackey. New York Times, January 12, 2009.

The One-State Solution. By Edward Said. New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1999. Also here.

The One-State Solution. By Virginia Tilley. London Review of Books, November 6, 2003. Also here.

Beyond tribalism. Interview with Tom Segev by Suzy Hansen. Salon, December 8, 2001.

The Past Is Not a Foreign Country: The Failure of Israel’s “New Historians” to Explain War and Peace. By Anita Shapira. The New Republic, November 29, 1999.

Eyeless in Zion: When Palestine First Exploded. By Anita Shapira. The New Republic, December 11, 2000. Review of Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete.

The war against the Jews. By Efraim Karsh. Israel Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 3 (July 2012).

One-state: solution or illusion for Palestine? By Abdallah Schleifer. Al Arabiya, September 25, 2013. Also here.

Two-State Solution or Illusion? An Analysis. By Lawrence Davidson. Intifada Palestine, September 21, 2013. Also here. Discussion of Beinart and Lustick. Rabidly far left and anti-Zionist Jew.

Davidson:

If Beinart’s hope for mutual understanding is naive, Lustick’s hope that more “blood” will lead to the “magic” of a positive outcome is not at all assured.

 

One might ask just how much disaster is necessary before the hard-line Zionists who have long controlled Israel will compromise their ideological commitment. Keep in mind that the Israeli political elites, right and left, have always been expansionist. Even Peter Beinart is not pushing for a return to the 1967 Green Line and an evacuation of illegal settlements, as far as I can tell. In the past, the Israeli elites have judged their terror and brutality to be justified. They will do so in the future as well. Some of them will interpret any increase in Jewish emigration (a process already ongoing) as a weeding out of weak elements. Militarily the Israelis can probably maintain superiority over their neighbors even in the face of reduced American aid, and as far as world opinion is concerned, most of them care little about it. If this assessment has any validity, the Israelis could go on ethnically cleansing for a very long time.

 

In my view, the only viable weapon against such vicious stubbornness is a worldwide comprehensive economic boycott on the South Africa model. However, even this may not be the last page in the drama. Such an economic boycott may prove strong enough to undermine the will of some Israeli ideologues, but not all of them. And then, unlike South Africa, you may need an intra-Israeli Jewish civil war to finally bring the curtain down on the tragedy of Zionism.


Are Israelis Now Appropriating the Nakba? By Susan Abulhawa. The Palestine Chronicle, May 14, 2013.

Abulhawa:

One can cite endless examples of Israeli appropriation of everything Palestinian – land and home, heritage and culture, hummus and couscous, narrative and history. Now, we see an example of appropriation even of our deepest collective wound. When and how did the Nakba become the purview of Israelis?

 

Israelis have no place inside our pain, the anguish of our society that they themselves created and perpetuate still. Why does AJ Stream think it’s appropriate, on this solemn remembrance day for Palestinians, to hold a discussion among Israelis about whether and how their country should acknowledge the savagery they perpetuated against the indigenous people of the land they now occupy? And why, most importantly, would any Palestinian lend legitimacy to such an offense?

 

The vexing and unforgivable part of this is that some of us facilitate this kind of imperialism.  Should we call it “emotional imperialism?” colonization of our pain? Palestinian organizations invite Israeli speakers to mark Nakba commemoration events. Why? Is there nothing sacred? Is there a shortage of Nakba survivors? Of Palestinian historians, activists, or intellectuals? Can we expect that the Nakba will now be colonized by Israeli voices? Is it simply that the Nakba commemoration only becomes real when Israelis say so, just as our history only became real when Israeli historians copied our books and published what we had said for decades?

 

The only contribution that Israelis should make to the Nakba discourse is an unqualified, unmitigated apology, followed by a conversation about restitution, repatriation, and compensation. That’s it! Inviting a public conversation with Israelis to discuss whether their country should recognize our humanity is offensive and hurtful as we gather to remember and grieve; and Palestinians and Palestinian supporters should not stand for it.