800 Words: Pity the Dictator...

It is said that no matter what other works of art he banned, Stalin never missed a performance of Boris Godunov. You would think that The Great Russian Opera would be the first to be censured by the Soviet Union - an opera about Russian tyrant who murdered his way to the throne, causes untold suffering to his people, and lives in perpetual terror of being held to account for his crimes. Even if this opera was about Czarist Russia, nobody could mistake the parallels to the Stalinist era. But at every performance, there was Stalin in his box, apparently listening quite intently. Even the stoniest heart of the century was moved to pity by the sight of his own soul’s reflection. So invested was he in Boris Godunov that he barred the Bolshoi’s music director, Nikolai Golovanov, from ever conducting again because Golovanov preferred a different bass for the role than Stalin’s favorite.

Brecht (rarely...) summed it up quite well: “How exhausting it is to be evil.” It is difficult to imagine that Stalin, the former seminary student who nearly became an Orthodox priest, could shed every last vestige of his former religious belief. Perhaps his psychopathy was untroubled, but it’s also possible to imagine him in his private gloom, awaiting the tumultuous hellfire which he knew was his ripe desert.

But historical figures like Stalin and Mao, as they existed in the twentieth century, are no longer possible. For the moment, there’s simply too much information and not enough means to collate it to gather useable dossier files after the manner of 20th century totalitarian states. In place of the totalitarian leader returns a creature both less and more lethal than the absolute monarch/dictator - the warlord. The warlord has no true power over his subjects in life, he only has power over them in death; and should the apparatus of war fall to pieces, so will he. Such is the lot of Bashar al-Assad, who has ceased to be an authoritarian dictator, he is now a warlord whose power is only demonstrable by the number of people he can kill.

Those of us who supported the Arab Spring have little to show for our beliefs thus far but an endless list of war crimes which will probably grow far more endless before the war ends. In the Syrian Civil War, there are as many as 120,000 dead, 130,000 missing, 1,500 foreign civilians killed, 1.2 million refugees, and 3 million internally displaced. The Syrian dictatorship as it existed before The Arab Spring exists no longer, nor could it ever. Syria is not an authoritarian state, it is chaos. And into that chaos was thrown a fifth of that country’s people, and who knows how many more millions will be thrown in before the chaos subsides?

Meanwhile, Egypt continues its dance upon an even deadlier volcano. Egypt’s elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was worse than a dictator, he was an incompetent would-be-dictator who attempted power seizures in the clumsiest possible manner. Even if he was elected, only way in which he could not be deposed by the Egyptian military was to entice the liberals to remain on his side - and yet he insisted on near-absolute constitutional power, and secular liberals left the Constituent Assembly (charged with drafting the new constitution) in disgust. No doubt, Morsi saw the example of Ayatollah Khomeini and thought that liberals could be casually brushed aside with a simple declaration the way Khomeini did in Iran. But the Egyptian revolution was built on far less solid ground than the Iranian one. The Iranian protests against the Shah involved as many as nine million people, whereas the protests against Mubarak were 2 million strong. Such was the hold of Khomeini’s charisma that upon his return to Iran, he was greeted by more than five million followers. Khomeini inspired so much devotion in his following that he could brush a liberal government aside with a wave of his hand, and no other Iranian had anything like the power to stop him.

Mohammed Morsi was never supposed to be president. He only became a candidate because the Egyptian military banned the candidacy of the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy chairman - Khairad El-Shater. No one knows how any Islamist in Egypt could believe that an Islamic president could get away with giving himself dictatorial powers, but there should be no doubt that any Islamist President would have done the same. There are still more extreme Islamic parties in Egypt, powerful ones like the Salafist al-Nour party which got 28% of the vote. As much pressure as there was on Morsi to stay within the limits of constitutional law, there may have been still more pressure on him to become an Islamic dictator.

Meanwhile, the protests in Turkey have become so common that, in comparison to Egypt, the media has barely reported on them - seeing little difference in what’s happening in Turkey to what happened all over the Arab world. But what’s happened in Turkey is, in some ways, even more dramatic. Turkey’s protests against Prime Minister Erdogan have attracted at least 640,000 people. And when Erdogan definitively took violent action against the protests, it was the reverse of Mubarak. When Mubarak took action, it showed that he was a dictator no longer in control of the country he ruled with an iron fist. But when Erdogan took violent action against those who protested him, he officially was no longer a mere democratically elected leader - he became a would-be-dictator who rules by force. Mubarak is the authoritarianism of the past, Erdogan is the authoritarianism of the future. He was once the great hope for all of us who believed that political Islam needn’t be compatible with tyranny, but there can be no mistaking that Erdogan has opted for despotism. Over Erdogan’s time, Turkey has censored over a million websites, the country’s imprisoned over a hundred journalists, has bomed Iran and Iraq in violation of international law and continually threatens to bomb Syria, and killed as many as 60,000 Kurds (though probably half that). It’s possible, however unlikely, that Erdogan has plans to exploit the instability of the Islamic world to be its imperial overseer. No one has more to gain from the Arab Spring’s plunge into chaos than Erdogan. But how can Erdogan rule over all Islam he can’t even control his own country?

And finally, there’s the Israel/Palestine conflict. The third and definitive piece in the tic-tac-toe board of regional war. Where this perennial cause celebre goes, there will the world go. Syria is already in catastrophic Civil War, Egypt seems on the verge of it. All that’s required to become a regional conflict is for Civil War to occur in Israel/Palestine. One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, I’ll go into all the reasons why war between Israelis and Palestinians, or even war between Palestinian factions, remains the most lethal danger for the entire area - the difference between contained conflicts, or a war that could metastasize to literally any corner of the globe.

But even if it doesn’t, barely lower levels of instability circle the governments of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia, and Bahrain. The entire Middle East is operating at a simmer, waiting for a match to strike the powder keg that will ignite it into the twenty-first century’s first grand conflict. If the rest of the world is wise, it won’t get too entangled. It’s the twenty-first century, but The Middle East looks very much like the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, because no matter how militant and extreme a warlord gets, there is always someone whispering in his ear that he must become still more extreme, still more violent - or risk violence being done to him.

(The Grand Inquisitor Scene from Verdi's Don Carlo)

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800 Words: 10 Years Ago... (Part 2)

With the Republican party’s late sixties resurgence, the Democratic party lost not only the vote of Dixiecrat bigots and religious fanatics, they also lost organized labor and defense hawks. These are four demographics that were by no means the same. However tenuously, from Truman to Johnson the Democratic party stood for civil rights at home and civil rights abroad, and did everything they could to drag the more backward elements of their party into helping them build a better world. In the process, they ditched party elements that could not acclimate to a better world, but they also ditched many who could. But without a belief that America was a force for good that could help institute civil rights abroad, America lost its zeal to grant civil rights at home. The end result was two entire generations who surrendered American progress to a conservative rule that became ever more conservativeas the decades advanced.

The Vietnam War was a tragic disaster beyond reckoning, but so were the lessons learned from it. By the 1970’s, the majority of Democratic party activists saw little difference between America’s moral credibility and the Soviet Union’s. So sclerotic and unsure was the Democratic party that even Hubert Humphrey, the greatest Civil Rights hero and champion the Democratic establishment ever had, could not galvanize liberals and progressives into uniting against Richard Nixon’s potential election in 1968. All it would have taken to beat Nixon was 500,000 votes more.

The Civil Rights movement, America’s moral conscience of the early 60’s, fragmented and radicalized beyond recognition. By 1965, the brotherly love of Martin Luther King and the political intelligence of Bayard Rustin were replaced by the bellicose provocation of Stokely Carmichael, who declared that “The liberal democrats are just as racist as (Barry) Goldwater,” and the righteous anger of Malcolm X, who declared “the day of turning the other cheek to the brute beasts is over.”

Just when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs seemed set to bring about the long-needed change - to give black people the education they needed to compete with whites and to integrate blacks into the American labor movement - the black community grew impatient with the rate of change, and all too many listened to their most incensing leaders. Had they held on to Dr. King’s dream just two years longer, The Great Society may have been achieved. But just as they fell prey to demagoguery, so could White America. Many blacks believed that Civil Rights moved too slowly, but by 1966, two-thirds of whites believed that Civil Rights were moving too quickly. The end result of Black Separatism was the Republican congress of 1967, which slashed Great Society programs to levels unrecognizable – programs that would have helped white laborers enormously as well as black ones.

The involvement in Vietnam did not help matters. Harry Truman instituted containment, and should be credited with implementing the policy that ultimately defeated the Soviet Union. But Truman went too far. The Truman Doctrine committed America to the assistance of all democratic movements in the face of Communist threat – as attractive in theory as so many progressive axioms, but just as difficult in practice. George Kennan’s original proposition of containment warned that assistance in a place where communism combines with nationalism is doomed to failure – a warning that the United States often did not heed, and with risible results. Nevertheless, it was still possible to oppose the Vietnam War with every fiber of one’s being, and still believe in the export of liberal democracy, to see the Soviet Union as a totalitarian threat to the whole world, and to believe that America’s presence in the world was still a on the whole a much greater force for good than evil.

But to a new generation of the American left, American liberalism was the problem itself. To the New Left, the very existence of The Vietnam War displayed the corruption at liberalism’s heart. The very belief in the moral superiority of America’s government to others and the belief in America’s fundamental benevolence on the world stage showed the older generation’s liberal sham for what it was. For many on the New Left, America was exhibiting all the same signs of totalitarian rule as could be found in the Soviet Union and even Nazi Germany. Many of them looked at The Vietnam War and the South, and they saw Munich and Kronstadt.  

Liberals wanted reform, The New Left wanted revolution. And because they agitated for revolution in a society that had reformed so much in so little time, they alienated the rest of America and drove two generations of voters into the arms of Conservative Republicans.

But The New Left did not agitate for Communist revolution. They agitated for a revolution of the educated. Their main organ, Students for a Democratic Society, saw organized labor as a stale remnant of the old liberal order which barred blacks and built the machinery of war. Both Richard Nixon and George Wallace seized the opportunity like vultures in a slaughterhouse. During the 1968 election, George Wallace claimed he was campaigning not only for segregation, but for the “average man in the street, the man in the textile mill, the man in the steel mill, this barber, this beautician, this policeman on his beat.”. In his convention speech, Richard Nixon declared that “Working Americans have become the forgotten Americans. In a time when national rostrums and forums are given over to shouters and protesters and demonstrators, they have become the silent Americans."

In 1972 and ‘76, the Democratic primary candidate Republicans truly feared was Henry “Scoop” Jackson, from Washington. The “Senator from Boeing” never met a defense budget increase he didn’t approve and repeatedly criticized President Eisenhower for not spending enough on the military, he supported the Vietnam War with a fervor that most Republicans could not equal, he supported the Japanese internment camps as a beginner congressman during World War II, and after the camps were disbanded, he opposed allowing Japanese Americans to return to the Pacific Coast. Scoop Jackson was also, next to Hubert Humphrey, perhaps the staunchest advocate of civil rights in the mid-century Senate. He helped create Medicare, anti-poverty spending, and environmental protections. He was at the forefront of the fight to allow Soviet Citizens to emigrate from the USSR, and few if any senators were as supportive of organized labor. Lastly, he was one of the few senators to vocally oppose Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare.

Scoop Jackson’s contradictions made him the ultimate embodiment of America’s mid-century folly. He was a tax-and-spend liberal who was equally brutal when fighting enemy combatants abroad and poverty at home. Like Truman, he was too idealistic about war to be a truly great president, but he’d have been miles better than either Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter – and he was more likely than any other Democrat to win two terms.

Jackson’s presidential campaigns were positively bathed in patriotism’s rhetoric. It was a last-ditch attempt to reclaim an unabashedly pro-America worldview for Democrats. When he declared his candidacy, he said that he was “fed up with people running down America. This is not a guilty, imperialistic, and oppressive society. This is not a sick society. This is a great country… that is conscious of its wrongs and is capable of correcting them.” The contradictions continued throughout the campaign, he was unabashedly pro-labor, he believed in national health care. He also voiced vehement opposition to using busing as a means to desegregate schools, and was the only Democratic candidate of his time who brought up escalating crime rates as an issue. By the end of the ‘72 campaign, Scoop Jackson, the civil rights lion, was denounced as a racist.

Scoop Jackson’s campaign assistant was a young Democrat named Richard Perle. Other young Democrats who worked for him included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Charles Horner, and Ben Wattenberg. The politicians who’ve cited Senator Jackson as an influence include Joe Lieberman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jane Harman, and R. James Woolsey.

Scoop Jackson is the patron saint of neo-conservatism. And because the Democratic party chose defeat rather than the victory of an ideologically compromised candidate, the neoconservatives of Scoop Jackson’s office decamped to the Republican side. These ‘Scoop Jackson Democrats’ learned a foully wrong lesson. Because of the Democratic party’s insistence on ideological purity, the Jackson Democrats saw their party as weak and mendacious. And because their hero was spurned for being too strong, they decamped to the American party which made a religion of strength. Their philosophy was mid-twentieth century American liberalism perverted into a tool to aid the goals of the delusional  and corrupt. By decamping, most of these neoconservatives demonstrated neither Jackson’s commitment to social progress nor his realism when it came to dealing with true conservatives.  When Ronald Reagan approached Jackson for a presidential endorsement in exchange for a cabinet post, Jackson refused: “My mind is still with The New Deal.”

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800 Words: Who is Mohamed Morsi?

In August of this year, a huge deal was made in the press about Mohamed Morsi’s trip to Tehran for the 16^th summit of the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ so that he could personally hand over the presidency from Egypt to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran. Virtually every policy expert in the world agrees, the Non-Aligned Movement is a colossal waste of time and resources. In 2012, Non-Alignment doesn’t mean anything. Non-Alignment was a policy option for many third and second world governments during the Cold War who didn’t want to be in lock step with the dictates of either the United States or the Soviet Union. Today’s Non-Aligned Movement is for all purposes a ineffective counterweight for all the other countries in the world against the US and the EU. Virtually everybody else (except Israel, of course) is either a member-state or an invited observer.

The visit by the new Egyptian president was seen by many in the West as the first step in a thaw of relations between Iran and Egypt which had existed since Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the same year in which Iranian revolutionaries deposed the Sha of Iran with a coalition of Islamists, leftists, moderates, and liberals. The parallels between the quickness with which the radical Islamist Ayatollah Khomeni consolidated power was seen by many as being in strong parallel with the quickness with which Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, achieved power in Egypt. It was seen by many that Morsi was doing everything he could to play up that parallel and that it would be a harbinger of the end of Iran’s long isolation in the diplomatic world. Thomas Friedman opined in the New York Times that his very presence at the meeting was a signal of hostile intent against the West and the democracy which Western thought represents.

And yet when Morsi arrived, he turned everybody’s assumptions for how the meeting would go upside down. Morsi blasted the Assad Regime in Syria for its repression and mass murder, for its neglect of democratic principles, for its disrespect of rule of law, and by extension, he blasted the Iranian regime whose support of Assad is so crucial to both regimes. In the ultimate insult, Morsi likened the Syrian struggle for freedom against Assad to the Palestinian struggle against Israelis. The Syrian delegation walked out, and as the host country, the Iranian representatives had to sit still as this lifelong critic of the United States gave a lecture in Tehran that could easily come from George W. Bush’s mouth.

But like George W. Bush, only much moreso, Morsi has a record of beliefs and membership that is abysmally far from the values he preached. Not only is Mohamed Morsi a US critic, he’s also a 9/11 truther. As late as 2010, Morsi was still alleging  that 9/11 was an inside job. About the Israel/Palestine conflict, he stated that ‘The two-state solution is nothing but a delusion concocted by the brutal usurper of the Palestinian lands.’ These statements of belief are not in themselves too different from those one hears on the proverbial ‘Arab Street.’ But Morsi belongs to an organization far more dangerous and cultish than even the Republican party, and that organization would not select him as their first leader to ascend to the Egyptian presidency if they were not positive that he is a perfect representation of their beliefs.

Like any successful organization, the Muslim Brotherhood gives their members a sense that they belong to something greater than themselves, and therefore the lack of freedom within the organization can be forgiven. Like all effective religious organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood is a combination of religious order, social club, and political action committee. It should go without saying, but women are not permitted, no matter how religious. Like any fraternity, the recruits of the organization have a period of evaluation during which their suitability is assessed. That period can last from five to eight years, during which their ability to tow the party line is assessed closely. Those who display signs of iconoclasm are summarily drummed out of membership. When Brotherhood youth activists, many of the same ones who organized the protests against Mubarak, expressed opposition to the Brotherhood consolidating themselves in post-Mubarak Egypt as a single party – the Freedom and Justice Party, with Mohamed Morsi as its leader – they were immediately thrown out of the Brotherhood. When a relatively liberal Brotherhood leader, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, announced that he would run for President, the Freedom and Justice Party’s President – Mohamed Morsi – announced that the party was not ready to endorse a candidate, and then the Brotherhood threw Fotouh out. When younger Brotherhood members announced their support for Fotouh, they too were thrown out.  

The brotherhood’s first stated goal is an authoritarian one: the widespread imposition of Sharia law. Its second goal is an imperial one: to unite the Islamic world. This is the Muslim Brotherhood creed: “Allah is our objective, the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader, Jihad (Holy War) is our way, and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of all our aspirations.”

This creed is not merely authoritarian or imperial. Those final two phrases will be familiar to anyone who has studied movements as different as Nazism and Communism and the Crusades and the KKK. It is the totalitarian credo. To the totalitarian, a great death is the highest honor life may bestow. And because a great death is so honorable, it gives totalitarians the spiritual cover their consciences require to do any beastly act in the quest to bring about their glorious end. In achieving their great death, they die so that a new, more glorious world may begin. Even if their world is one of squalor, these totalitarians have spent their lives killing, maiming, raping, and torturing so that a world can be born free of the acts they perpetrate. And yet after all those glorious ends, the new beginning never happens, and the bloody, ignominious suffering of millions happened for no reason at all.

And yet for the moment, Morsi’s proven quite practical in his foreign designations. It was Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, whom America was first to consult during peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine – and America consulted him because he was smart enough not to give any indication that he means to give up on the Israel/Egypt alliance. For all the rhetoric which Morsi and his party have issued against Israel, Morsi has thus far been surprisingly cool-headed on the issue.  He even went so far as to send Israel’s President Shimon Peres a letter in which he said “I am looking forward to exerting our best efforts to get the Middle East peace process back to its right track in order to achieve security and stability for all peoples of the region including the Israeli people.” A  Morsi spokesman later denied the veracity of the letter to his own people (a tactic many Israelis will remember as being straight out of Yassir Arafat’s playbook), but it doesn’t change the fact that the letter exists, and it says something encouraging (though not too much so) that Morsi is obviously convinced that the appearance of diplomacy is necessary.

Time will demonstrate whether Morsi means to plan for war while keeping the appearance of diplomacy. But whether or not he means to be a democrat, he clearly means to keep the appearance of an authoritarian. It’s hardly clear why Mohamed Morsi declared his edicts above judicial review, but he did so in such a way as to announce that his ultimate goal is to rule by decree – and also did so in such a way that he had to compromise with the judiciary to come to an understanding. It’s entirely possible that the whole mess was a masterful plan to show corrupt judges sympathetic to the military that he was not above overturning their decrees – or maybe it was just an extraordinarily clumsy power grab. But the end result was that he will not be seen as a democratic reformer for the foreseeable future – and when dealing with a country used to dictatorship, perhaps that’s necessary, even if he's really a democrat.

But if Morsi runs too afoul of democracy and peace, there are still some rather enormous incentives to keep Egypt stable – principle among them the $4.8 billion check Egypt requested from the IMF to stop their reserves from being depleted and the $1.7 billion check which the United States cuts to Egypt every year as a reward for unimpeded access to the Suez Canal, being at peace with Israel, and not remilitarizing the Sinai Peninsula. Should Morsi become a ‘War President,’ this money would dry up faster than the Dead Sea (hiyo!).

And yet right after Morsi left Tehran, he went to Beijing to visit Hu Jintao. Trade between China and Egypt is was $8.8 billion of business last year – a 30% increase over 2010. The Muslim Brotherhood may yet find that they can behave as bellicosely as they like and still get a source of funding should the US funding dry up.

It is simply not in Morsi’s interests to be too democratic or too diplomatic. Money should matter to the Muslim Brotherhood, and there should be no doubt that it does. But even if the US doesn’t give it, China might. And even if Morsi decides to broker peace between Israel and Palestine and institute democratic reform, there is still a larger problem.

Even if Mohamed Morsi is truly a moderate, or even a relative liberal in his own way, the organization which backs him is not. And any organization which spent the large majority of 84 years railing against American imperialism will be none too happy about an state ruled by an Islamic party that must still be dependent on America for its funding. And even if Morsi convinces the Muslim Brotherhood to a man to follow him in the accommodation of America and Israel, there is the added problem that 25.5% of the Egyptian parliament is comprised by three other Islamic parties – all of whose principle objection to the Brotherhood is that its goals are too moderate.

We liberals have a bad lot. We want to hope against wanting to hope that this revolution will be different, in spite of the fact that it hardly ever is. For all the Velvet Revolutions and constitutional republics, there are more authoritarian regimes which topple in great expense of blood and treasure, only to create a terrible power-vacuum in which a still more authoritarian regime takes over – sometimes a totalitarian one. It is virtually hopeless for a liberal rule of law to succeed in any country in which rule of law is lacking. If the judiciary is dishonest, if speech is censored, if elections are not fair, what is the point of democracy?

The perfect is the enemy of the good, the good the enemy of the adequate, and the adequate the enemy of the bearable. Over and over again, we’ve been wrong about the conditions which are required for revolutions to succeed. We were already wrong about the Liberal/Islamist alliance in 1979 Iran. We were wrong about the Liberal/Communist alliance in 1948 China and 1917 Russia. We were wrong about the Liberal/Nationalist alliance of 1848 Europe, and we were wrong about the Liberal/Military alliance of 1789 France. Many of us were even wrong about the liberal/conservative alliance of 2003 America/Iraq.  In Egypt, the protests against Mubarak were 250,000 strong – a high number until you realize that the total population of Egypt is 80 million. Those voices were not heard in the debates leading up to the toppling of Mubarak, but we hear them now; and what they have to say is terrifying.

There is a paradox within liberalism that while it can compromise on details, it can have no possible accommodation to other ideologies. The end goal of every political compromiser is either to ensure greater liberty, or to ensure less. Therefore, all elements of a ruling government must share the end goal of allowing for greater liberty - because in a compromise with authoritarians, all the authoritarians have to do is to sabotage liberty until authoritarianism becomes necessary. If, as in the case of President Obama, the rule of law is still on the side of liberals, then some compromise is possible if the other side is rational enough to allow for one. But any liberal who wants to ride the coattails of a more bloody ideology to greater power is an idiot. By their very definition, authoritarians have more incentive and willpower to enact their agenda. In a fair battle between liberalism and authoritarianism, liberalism will always win. But there are very few countries in which that battle is fair. In a no-rules battle with other ideologies, the most  repressive and violent ideology always wins. And the winning ideology won’t make the mistake of allowing even the small amount of liberal discourse which enabled them to come to power. It may yet seem probable that Mubarak was the best which Egypt – and the entire Middle East – could hope for, and if he was, then we will be moist-eyed for the good old days when a dictator only killed a few thousand people to keep the peace. 

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800 Words: Assad Remains

The death toll of the Syrian uprising has now well exceeded 14,000. There’s no sense pretending otherwise, the Syrian government will get away with it, and the death toll will grow much, much higher before these massacres end. If we’re not going to flinch from the truth, it looks for the moment as though Bashar al-Assad will mow down the entire Arab Spring movement in Syria and unless there is an unforeseen solution, he will imprison, exile, or kill anyone in his country who shows the any sympathy with it. And no one in the entire world is in a position to stop him.

To be even blunter, the only option that would remove Assad is military intervention. No amount of arming rebels will bring Assad down – arming Saddam against Iran did not bring down the Ayatollah, and sanctions brought down neither Saddam nor Milosevic, it merely starved the people they didn’t kill themselves. Nor would diplomatic overtures to Iran solve anything. Syria is far too important to Iran for Iran to demand anything of Assad.

No, no diplomatic measure will stop the coming disaster, only military intervention could. But military intervention will not happen at any point in the next ten years. Assad is now the only steadfast ally of Russia and China in the Arab world, and for them to allow him to fall make despots around the world would question the health of any of their alliances with these two 'superpowers.' America is overcommitted to Afghanistan and must still be considered ‘on call’ in case a true Iraqi civil war breaks out. England and France are still entangled in Libya and Germany won’t even bail out Southern Europe. Turkey has already made an enemy out of Iraq on their border and can’t afford a second neighboring enemy. Ironically, the only country in the world with the economic, military, and nation-building strength whose interests might be served by an intervention is Israel; but nothing would give Assad more credibility in the eyes of his countrymen than to have the Syrian government fight yet another war against those ‘Zionist pigs.’  

It would appear that Bashar al-Assad, once the ‘idiot son’ whom everyone thought was too weak to even last a decade, held firmly onto power while every one of his ‘more competent’ colleagues fell. And he did it by being firmer, more ruthless, and ‘stronger’ than any of his peers. Like George W. Bush, he was ‘misunderestimated’ by everyone, and the world pays the price for thinking he didn’t have what it takes to rule with an iron hand.

Along with Abdulaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Assad is one of only two Arab Nationalist dictators remaining – the rest of them, Saddam, Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, and Saleh are all gone. Each of them ended their career ignominiously as a dinosaur-like remnant from the age of pan-Arab nationalism – in which newly liberated Arab states thought they could stand up to their former colonial conquerors. Among the major Middle East powers, every military dictator has fallen but Assad.  

Ironically, while the model of the pan-Arabist ‘strongman’ seems extremely passé and 20^th century, the Kings and Sultans of the Middle East seem to have all the staying power they had in the Middle Ages. The reason for this isn’t hard to figure out: while Middle East dictators traditionally looked to Communist countries as allies, the monarchies looked to the West. The West bequeathed their ancestors with the thrones they currently occupy, and so long as their pipelines stay flowing, the West will protect these ‘sympathetic’ rulers by any means necessary.

The liberals of the Middle East look to America and Western Europe for support, however begrudgingly. They ultimately realize that the only these countries will support their cause with an eye for the liberals to prevail in the inevitable conflict that will arise against religious extremists. The only alternative is to look for support from the autocrats of Russian and Chinese governments, with whom the Islamists share a common loathing of liberal causes like free elections and due process.

So long as Russia answers to Vladimir Putin, Russia in particular will never be convinced to abandon Assad, and it’s lunacy to pretend any diplomatic overture would result otherwise. From the moment that the British and French abandoned their colonies in the Middle East, Russia (and before it the Soviet Union) looked upon the entire Middle East as its colony in all but name. Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya have all overthrown their Russian ‘proxy’ governments. In Vladimir Putin’s mind, this is a cataclysmic loss in prestige. If Putin can’t guarantee the safety of his allies in as firm a Russian stronghold as the Middle East, what chance does he have of building long-term alliances with sympathetic autocrats in Eastern Europe and Central Asia? If Assad goes, Russia’s protection is meaningless.

Turkey may seem to have a vested interest in Assad’s fall, and no doubt, Erdogan would like to see it happen. But whatever the Turkish governments’ defects, Turkey is seen as the world’s sole functioning democracy in the Islamic world and the Middle East’s sole center of stability. To invite open warfare with Syria, to even be seen as supporting the rebels too strongly, is to jeopardize all the influence which Turkey won over the course of the Arab Spring. If conflict with Assad becomes too open, Turkey stands to lose all its stability, and all its reputation for humanitarianism – war is murder, and when waging open warfare against their neighbor, Turkish soldiers could ill-afford to show more mercy than their Syrian counterparts.

For many years, the Iranian government needed Assad far more than Assad needed them. Iran needs safe passage through Syria to wage holy war against Israel. Iran, like Turkey, still harbors dreams of leading the entire Islamic world. To enable Syria to have an Islamic regime would firstly mean to cede Syria to the Sunnis. Assad is Allawite Shia, which is a 12% minority-within-a-minority sect in a mostly Sunni country. But it would secondly rob Iran of the ‘coming glory’ which masterminding the destruction of Israel would endow them – and yes, even if Iran doesn’t use the bomb against Israel, the destruction of Israel is still the centerpiece in their plans to come to the vanguard of the Islamic world. People who say that Iran would abandon Assad because he’s not religious enough have the issue entirely backwards – if Iranian government policy were not so grounded in religious dogma, they’d have long since abandoned Assad. Without Assad, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah would have any rocket supply, and Israel would long since have dismantled the Iranian nuclear program. Now more than ever, the Iranian government has reason to support Assad.

That the Arab Spring happened at all is its own kind of miracle – it only happened because pan-Arabism seems dead, at least for the moment. No matter how effective they once seemed, no military dictator in the Middle East since Ataturk brought anything like the eminence, the wealth, or the progress he promised. The vast majority of the Middle East has long since put its faith in either liberalism or political Islam. But miracles do not happen twice. In every country where a military dictatorship fell, there is an inevitable conflict brewing between liberalism and Islamism – and between all the factions within them both. Every outside country with a vested interest in the Middle East used up its political capital before the Arab Spring reached Damascus. Assad’s held onto power by doing what any good dictator does – suspending rule of law, imprisoning agitators and killing his enemies. He knows that if he can hold onto power for just long enough, the world will forget about Syria. Sadly, the coming violence in the Middle East may well make what’s currently happening in Syria seem rather small scale and insignificant. Assad is banking on that, and the worst part is that he may well be exactly right.   

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800 Words: The Eurasian Faultline: Part 2 - Athens (Part 1)

Athens: At the moment, Greece is still more complicated. And in order to work through that complication, we must take a brief and not completely welcome trip to France.

I am not one to lightly throw support to any government affixing a ‘conservative’ label to their affiliation. But as it usually does, a large portion of the European Left scares me as much as a large portion of the American Right. Many Europeans would have us believe that Nicolas Sarkozy was everything liberals hate, allegedly as bellicose and undiplomatic a leader as the world saw during his era. Yet there is not a single world leader in the last five years with his diplomatic accomplishments. Not even Barack Obama.

Sarkozy formed a bi-partisan government with Socialist leaders who trusted him enough to join his government in spite of being expelled from their own party. He supervised the negotiations the FARC group in Columbia that led to the release of a group of political hostages that included Ingrid Betancourt in exchange for the release of FARC’s leader: Rodrigo Granda. He negotiated the release of a group of Bulgarian nurses from Libya in exchange for providing greater aid to Libyans for health-care and immigration opportunities. And when Moamar Gaddafi threatened the same Libyan people to whom Sarkozy's France provided the aid Gaddafi wouldn't, Sarkozy formed a multi-national coalition to prevent Gaddafi's army from potentially committing a massive democide against the very people he ruled for over forty years. You don’t have to like Nicolas Sarkozy, or even support him as the lesser evil, but any subscriber to liberal values who is not a reactionary poseur has to acknowledge that he created an admirable list of diplomatic accomplishments which every world leader should try to emulate. In his place is Francois Hollande, a Socialist Party stalwart whose principle campaign promise in the midst of an economic maelstrom was to lower the retirement age.

What’s happening in France is just another version of events all around Southern Europe, in which a high standard of living is considered a guaranteed entitlement for which nobody needs to work too hard to sustain. The results of Greece’s recent election were inconclusive because most of the Greek voters cast their vote for whichever single-issue minority party best promised to uphold their particular special interest – is there any reason to expect that the June 17^th election will be any better? Youth unemployment is now over 50 percent in both Greece and Spain and around 30% in Italy and Portugal.

Whether or not America averted another Great Depression in 2008-9, it’s very much a Great Depression in Southern Europe. The European Central Bank cannot possibly print up enough money to buy all its Southern members’ debt. This is a situation that practically cries out for populist demagogues to tell these countries that they can simply opt out of the euro zone (meaning whatever countries operate under the euro) with no repercussions.

So let’s do what they won't, let's walk through the repercussions of this action:

1.     1. Whoever opts out of the euro zone will have a currency valued so low as to be nearly worthless – and any worth it still has will quickly be washed out by hyperinflation.

2.      2. If a country pulls out of the euro zone, the Euro itself has potential to go into free fall twice over:

a.       Any country who pulls out will do so with the express intention of defaulting on their loans -  thereby saddling the European Central Bank and the European Union with a gaggle of junk bonds which that country would probably never have the money to pay back.

b.      If one country pulls out of the Euro, so can any other – thereby terrifying worldwide investors in European companies who see a European investment as a guaranteed money loser.

3.      3. A Europe without a common currency would then be a union having neither a political nor a financial reason for existing. Russia, China, America, and the Middle East could practically dictate their own terms to a Europe in economic freefall. Any of the civil conflicts raging to Europe’s south could come up north, and there is no vested interest for the short-sighted politicians of any European country to involve itself in the problems of any other. Nobody knows where or how far the civil conflicts of the Middle East can spread.

There is, of course, one country which can still save Europe – but Germany simply doesn’t want to do it. They may have their house in order, but they’re no more willing to compromise their good lifestyle than Southern Europe was. Some figures say that this whole mess would be solved if Germany simply distributed 8% of its yearly GDP to Southern Europe – but no German wants to do that if they don’t have to. Once can certainly understand why they wouldn’t want to do it, but a Euro in free fall will ruin everybody’s party – even the Germans’.

There’s an even more practical solution which even (especially?) now few politicians are bold enough to suggest: A strong, unified, European Federation in which all countries have the same polity, the same legislators, the same army, and the same debts. But apparently it’s still too far fetched to imagine. Some policy makers suggested an intermediate baby step: the Eurobond – which pools together all European investments for a 10-year yield. If issued, it might be a convenient short-term solution. But even this baby step towards cooperation is so controversial that it may never appear on the market at all. As it always has been in Europe, national rivalries seem too bitter to ever overcome. 

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