Dealing With Iran

The tragedy of Iran is twofold.  First, there is the fact that its people are quite open-minded and moderate compared to the rest of the Middle East, and even took to democracy without America having to impose it on them - it is only its revolutionary Islamist regime that makes the country an enemy of freedom.  Second is the fact that Iran would still be a parliamentary system if the United States hadn't once again decided that as part of its global struggle to protect democracy from communism it should set up an authoritarian puppet regime, whose collapse set the stage for the aforementioned revolutionary Islamist regime to take over.

But there's no use bemoaning America's past mistakes (save for hoping that we'll learn from them at some point), so we have to look at the situation we have now, and figure out where to go from here.

Iran is not a friendly country.  Its leadership hates us for backing the Shah decades ago, hates us for backing its rivals in the Middle East now, and hates us for being a country where women can wear a bikini and men can skip church to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.  Iran supports Bashar al-Assad, the tyrant who led Syria into civil war, and terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.  Its regime rejects notions of human rights in favor of religious fundamentalism, and when Iranians attempt to protest election results they’re suppressed by security forces and Islamic militias.  And its nuclear program has had ambitions to build a weapon in the past, and a history of ignoring international treaties and hiding things from nuclear inspectors

Almost as worringly, Iran is also a schizophrenic country.  It has an elected national government that at every level is checked by a fanatical religious regime, so even while Iran's negotiators try to work out a deal with us, the Ayatollah is posting taunts and threats on social media while his priests lead the "Death to America" refrain they've been singing for nearly forty years now.  It has a conventional military, as well as an Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution and its auxiliary Basij militias, which act on their own initiative when it comes to brutalizing or imprisoning citizens who dare to speak out against the religious regime.  This is not the sort of system that you'd want to have access to nuclear power, in other words.  Even if Iran doesn't build a conventional bomb with it, there's all sorts of mischief its glassy-eyed fanatics could get up to with a radioactive sample.

America's response to all this has been to try to isolate Iran diplomatically and, along with other countries, impose economic sanctions in an effort to punish and limit its misbehavior.  They haven't worked.  Even after the UN Security Council sanctioned the country for continuing its nuclear program, Iran was able to build a functioning reactor, step up production, even start a second underground facility.  As we've also seen in places like Iraq and Cuba, if a regime is willing to brutalize its own people to stay in power, imposing additional hardships on that population probably isn't going to get it to do what we want.

So the status quo isn't working, and the Obama Administration has done something pragmatic.  Rather than sticking to our current strategy and watching as Iran develops its nuclear program despite the sanctions, the president has attempted to give us some control over what the country does next, lifting some ineffective economic disincentives if Iran behaves itself and follows some instructions.

Naturally, the Republicans are outraged.  Iran will surely use the money it makes from lifted sanctions to back terrorist groups.  Israel, our 51st state, will be placed in mortal peril.  All our valuable allies in the region (whoever they are) will lose faith in America's resolve to stand with them, assuming they had any left after we watched our dictator in Egypt be replaced by another dictator, or ISIS run all over Iraq.  Even the American public doesn't have a whole lot of support for this triumph of years of patient diplomacy - it simply feels wrong to lift sanctions on a hostile, undemocratic regime that hasn't changed its tune.

But we don't have many alternatives.  If we stick to our principles, fold our arms, and refuse to deal with Iran, we miss out on Iran's agreement to let nuclear inspectors in, reduce its low-yield uranium stockpile by 98%, cut down on centrifuge production, and so forth.  It's an unhappy compromise, and dropping some of the sanctions against Iran means that a troublesome regime will have more money to spend on other projects we don't like, but at least it will have some restrictions on a program that has us very worried.  How else are we going to control Iran's nuclear aspirations?  Is anyone seriously proposing yet another American military operation in the Middle East, at a time that we're already reluctantly working with Iran against ISIS?

Optimistically, this deal could lead to further negotiations on those other things about Iran we find so objectionable.  And if nothing else, lifting some sanctions could help bolster Iran's middle class, that important ingredient for democracy.  So not only would we be helping out some people that already have enough problems just living under the Iranian government, we might be causing problems for that Iranian government when those people question why they're required to chant "death to America" every day.

This is not a deal that America would normally be proud of, but right now it might be the best option we have.

Terrorism, or Something

Nearly a year between posts?  Pathetic.

If you want to see the difference between CNN and Fox News' approach to journalism, look no further than their 5:00 headline news hours last evening, when they responded to the attacks in Chattanooga.

On CNN you could see Wolf Blitzer talking to journalists on the scene, basing the discussion on witnesses, authorities and other experts.  He focused on what was known and could be verified, and took care to describe Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez as "the alleged gunman" or "suspected gunman," even if everyone was pretty certain he did it.

Meanwhile on Fox News you had Bret Baier introducing the story, then turning to a panel of conservative pundits so they could give us their opinions on it.  This was mainly an opportunity for the perpetually-scowling Charles Krauthammer to complain that President Obama is once again describing the incident as a "lone gunman" situation because the president is too limp-wristed to immediately interpret the shooting as another battle in our eternal war against radical Islam.

One network deals with facts, the other opinions.  One is out to report on reality, the other to create a specific reality for its viewers to live in.

Was it an act of terror?  Hard to say at this point, we're still working out why someone who lived in a quiet neighborhood, got a degree as an electrical engineer, and brought up some kids would suddenly pick up a rifle and shoot up a recruiting center and Navy facility.  But the authorities are treating it as a potential terrorist attack, and it's not an unreasonable assumption to make.  The suspected shooter was a Muslim, if I heard the news right he hadn't been employed since 2012, and he made several trips to the Middle East over the past few years.  This would fit the pattern of "normal Muslim disaffected by life in America and radicalized into a murderer" that's going on these days.  But again, we haven't confirmed that yet, so for all we know he was radicalized by the Westboro Baptist Church and set off by the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.

But back to the question - was it terror?  I've taken classes on the subject and can only rub my temple wearily.

Terrorism is supposed to be a dialogue.   There's a strong Group A, a country or government or something, and a weak Group B, a revolutionary movement or insurgency or the like.  Group B cannot get Group A to change policy on its own, but instead they target something else, like Group A's civilian population, or Group A's ally Group C.  "Do what we want," Group B says, "or more people will die."  The idea is that between Group A's desire to protect what Group B is attack and that population's outrage that Group A can't protect them, it will have no choice but to bow to their demands.

Now, this Abdulazeez fellow - a Muslim, yes, might have been radicalized by ISIS or whoever, yes.  But what was he saying?  What was his purpose behind shooting up these places?  We haven't found a video he made explaining his actions yet, or any social media posts warning of it.  I think I heard that ISIS' twitter account tried to take credit for it, but that hasn't been verified yet either.

If he was another ordinary citizen convinced to murder on behalf of ISIS, I guess he's a terrorist, since they're a terrorist organization trying to change the United States' behavior.  But if he was then he didn't do a very good job of advertizing it, and was annoyingly vague on what he wanted us to do.  Perhaps stop the airstrikes against ISIS targets?  Cease our support of the regimes ISIS is fighting against?  Cover up our bikini-clad supermodels? 

Another possibility is that Abdulazeez bought into ISIS' (and Krauthammer's) belief that America and Islam exist in natural conflict, that our respective values are incompatible and inevitably lead to violence.  In this case he would be killing Americans for the sake of killing Americans, because what, are we all supposed to renounce our citizenship and Western liberal values in favor of the extreme fundamentalist Islam ISIS espouses?

But if that's the case, why did he choose a recruitment center and Navy facility, as opposed to randomly opening fire in some public area?  Why these two military targets?

See, a uniform makes the question of whether a given act of violence was terrorism or not a bit more complicated.  Let's say Group B blows up a bunch of vehicles with a roadside bomb.  If they were buses belonging to Group A's civilian population as part of a campaign to get Group A to alter it's behavior, it's clearly an act of terror.  If they were tanks and humvees belonging to Group A's military that's occupying Group B's country, then it's an example of asymmetrical warfare - the point of a uniform is to announce that you're a valid target in the game of "War" you're playing. 

But in this case these military victims (condolences to the families of Thomas Sullivan, Squire Wells, David Wyatt, and Carson Holmquist) were in America, not currently fighting anyone or oppressing anybody.  They were arguably the instruments of American policy, but weren't executing it at the moment, so that puts them in a strange place - they're not quite like a civilian population terrorists attack to put pressure on a government, but they aren't active combatants in a war zone.  If Abdulazeez was at "war with America" or "punishing America for its crimes" or anything, he was unusually specific in how he expressed that.

All this to say, it's unclear if this was an act of conventional terrorism or not, but as we've seen in cases like the Fort Hood shooting, it's close to the sort of terrorism we get these days.  Really, we need to wait and get the whole story before making a judgment.

Hear that, Fox News?

Cold War Deux?

Tensions with Russia are... probably falling, actually, the violence in Gaza has been pretty distracting and no passenger aircraft have been shot down lately.  This doesn't mean that the situation in Ukraine is necessarily better - though the Ukrainian army has made progress against the secessionists, there's a lot of Russian soldiers hovering on the border, and it's easy to imagine them moving in to rescue persecuted Russian-speaking Ukrainians from those national socialists in Kiev, or responding to an attack that those treacherous Ukrainians claimed they never made.

So it's no great surprise that the cover of the previous issue of Time was mostly red, had Vladimir Putin on it, and was titled "Cold War Two."  The subject is so grave and important that of course the cover story of the issue that came in the mail Sunday was "Manopause" and contained a quote by Obama denying a second Cold War.  But let's humor the magazine anyway.

The Cold War was an exciting time for me - I learned to stop soiling myself, figured out how to walk, and was well on my way to tying my own shoes.  By the time I got to college, political scientists and historians had put together an autopsy report explaining how the previous era started, how it worked, and how it ended.  So it's pretty simple to compare current events to this model to see how accurate Time's Cold War II cover was.  The original Cold War's distinguishing characteristics were its bipolar structure, the ideological basis of the conflict, and the fact that said conflict never escalated to direct fighting.  Are these being repeated in this hypothetical second Cold War?

Bipolarity - Polarity refers to the distribution of power within a system.  Mutlipolarity has been the norm for the past couple of centuries, with a collection of great powers competing and balancing against each other so that no single player was able to totally dominate.  After World War II and the decline of the French and British empires, the world was left with the United States and the Soviet Union as a pair of superpowers that could check each other, but were leagues beyond anyone else.  With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, we had the rare case of one state so powerful that no combination of rivals could challenge it, making it the lone superpower in a unipolar system.  And in America it's best to insist that this is still the case, that the United States is unstoppable and capable of anything, and certainly not suffering from imperial overreach or anything like that.

Since obviously the United States cannot not be a superpower, I guess the question then is whether Russia's caught up to the obscenely bloated US military.  A quick glance at GlobalSecurity's Russia military guide suggests that the answer is "no."

On the other hand, my Russian history professor made a good point when he was discussing the Cold War - at its onset, the Soviet Union's superpower status wasn't due to the might of its armies but where they were.  The Soviets didn't have the best generals, or the best weapons, or the best-trained soldiers, but what it did have it had in bulk, and at the end of World War II that bulk was sitting right between Eastern and Western Europe, positioned to swarm into the rest of the continent faster than you can say "blitzkrieg."  It took some years for the Soviet Union to build enough nukes to become a "legitimate" superpower, but even before that it was treated as one because the power it had was in place to do some major damage.

Today, the Russian army still hasn't recovered from the post-Soviet crisis, and isn't even up to the Soviet Union's standards.  More importantly it isn't sitting in East Germany, poised to defend communism by rolling into Paris or the capitals of its "allies."  It still has a bunch of vintage Soviet nukes, of course, but nuclear weapons are hard to work into calculations of power.  What conflict would be worth going to nuclear war for?  Would the threat of nukes deter conflict, or would Putin calculate that the United States wouldn't be willing to risk atomic retribution by nuking Russian forces liberating Ukraine from those awful Ukrainians?  For all the effort countries put into getting nuclear weapons, they've only been used twice, and most people are very happy for that fact.

The short version is that the Russian military is no match for the United States', and doesn't have the force projection capacity or infrastructure to counter it on a global level.  That said, Russia is more than a match for its neighbors, and is well-positioned to assert its dominance within its neighborhood of former Soviet satellites.  Which is bad news for any of those satellites that might want to move into a more democratic, pro-Western orbit, such as Ukraine.  And just because the United States would probably win a fight with Russia doesn't mean anyone should be looking forward to such a scenario.

Ideology - It wasn't just the distribution of power that made the Cold War unique, it was how those powers defined themselves.  After centuries of competing kingdoms and empires, the Cold War featured two competing political systems, democratic capitalism and communism.  These weren't merely rivals on the world stage, but saw themselves as mutually incompatible, turning the conflict into a struggle over the future of mankind's political evolution.  When the USSR collapsed, it seemed like the great political question of the century had been answered, that democracy was triumphant, leading Fukuyama to declare it the "end of history."  The world could look forward to a future of government by the people, for the people, and everyone would be rich thanks to free markets.

Obviously that isn't how it happened, and the world has in fact gotten less democratic in recent years.  With the expectation that other countries would have no choice but to democratize, the West has sat on its laurels.  But even if communism has been shown to be a dead end, the tyrants of the world are in no hurry to give up their power.  And it turns out that free markets don't necessarily require governments to have free and fair elections, or to stop controlling their people through fear and violence.

Russia is, technically, a democracy.  There are elections, and there are supposedly limits on its government's power.  It's just that the government controls something like 90% of Russia's media, and it's hard for opposition parties to get their message out, or even show up on ballots.  And people who criticize the government end up in jail, or beaten to a pulp, or dead from radiation poisoning under mysterious circumstances.  And Putin keeps rewriting the rules so he can bounce between the offices of President and Prime Minister, never leaving power.  And he owes a lot of his influence to browbeating the oligarchs who looted the country during the wild days of capitalismization into supporting him, with the help of his buddies from the KGB. 

In short, Russia is not a part of the Free World, and its leader views the democratic West as threats and rivals.  But unlike its communist predecessor, modern Russia has no alternative model to offer the world, no revolutionary government that would save it from capitalist exploitation.  Instead, what Putin is backing in places like Syria and Iran is something even older, Czarist notions of absolute sovereignty and governance free from interference by "human rights" organizations, international "law," or anything that limits the power of the state's ruler.  Communism appealed to the masses, what Putin believes in appeals to presidents-for-life and other tyrants.  This is why he (and other non-democracies like China) have to wave the nationalism flag around and find threats within and beyond the nation's borders to rally the people against - it helps excuse the measures he makes to stay in power, and distracts them from questioning why they let him get away with it.

So while the Soviet Union had the communist bloc to support it, Putin's network is much more diverse.  Syria is an illiberal Arab presidency, Iran a Persian theocracy.  Sometimes the "BRICS," the fivesome of up-and-coming states that are or are about to rival the major players of Europe when it comes to economic and military power, are described as some sort of Russian-led alliance, but take a closer look at it: Brazil, a Latin American democracy recovering from a dictatorship, Russia, described above, India, a subcontinent boasting the world's largest democracy, China, a one-party free market powerhouse, and South Africa, perhaps the most functional country in sub-Saharan Africa.  Most of these guys lean closer to democracy than Putinism, and the only thing any of them have in common is that they aren't part of the Western establishment.  The Warsaw Pact 2.0 this ain't.

Russia doesn't have anything to offer the world other than its markets and national resources.  It's not part of an ideological bloc anymore, Putin simply styles himself as the leader of a group of nations(' rulers) that are opposed to the West's domination (because it threatens their grip on power).  At the same time, the West isn't marching in step these days - Bush and Obama have squandered a lot of American soft power, and Europe can't agree on a continent-wide agenda, much less one encompassing the democratic world.  Even after the Malaysian Airlines disaster, France is selling Russia a pair of helicopter carriers.

In short, this current "Cold War" isn't really based on ideology, and there's much less unity within its "sides."

Indirect Conflict - The Cold War is called that because the United States and Soviet Union never declared war on each other, and never acknowledged the times their forces may have fought each other.  Instead they waged war by proxy, backing revolutionaries or governments that agreed with their ideology... or revolutionaries or governments that merely opposed the other guy.  Since both sides had enough combined nuclear weapons to cover the surface of the Earth several times over, it is a very good thing that the Cold War never went hot.  Turning the Third World into a battlefield full of puppet dictators seems a small price to pay for sparing the rest of the planet, hmm?

As recent events in Ukraine show (assuming you believe the capitalist imperialist non-Russian media), this sort of thing is still going on.  Russia has backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and before it had to back those Ukrainian separatists it was backing a pro-Russian regime in Kiev.  In response, the United States has pledged billions of dollars in aid to the new government in Kiev and is moving increasingly closer to providing military training and support.  And like during the Cold War, we're supporting these guys because they're talking about democracy and opposing Russia, and not really considering whether the east Ukrainian separatists have some legitimate grievances about being discriminated against, or being roped into a country they don't want to belong to due to arbitrary post-imperial borders.

On the other hand, we're not doing the same in Georgia or other Russian satellites, probably because Americans would have a hard time finding them on the map.  So unlike the Cold War "I push back wherever you push" mentality, we've grown a bit more discerning.  Ukraine is on Europe's doorstop, and after fifty miserable years under the Soviet Union's thumb, nobody in Eastern Europe wants Russia to start rolling west again.  Central Asia, meh.

So, to wrap things up:

This is not a second Cold War.  Relations between the United States and Putin's Russia are quite chilly, the rhetoric is nasty, Russian-backed insurgents are causing problems, and it looks like Russia may start invading its neighbors again.  But this isn't a global conflict, or an ideological conflict - I'd say it's closer to the United States' relations with Iran.  Our antagonist is once again a country that holds elections but is dominated by an autocrat and his cronies, who are backing insurgents and tyrants where it benefits them, and who happen to be sitting on a bunch of oil they can use as a bargaining chip.  The United States' response to this has not been direct confrontation, but sanctions and attempts to isolate them diplomatically, which are foiled when our allies decide to deal with them anyway.

During the Cold War we tried to contain communism, and since communism is a concept, that meant we got to fight it wherever someone with access to a Kalashnikov read about Marx.  Russia in contrast is just another country, so the scale of this Cold Skirmish is smaller, and the stakes are much lower.  And this should come as a relief, because the Cold War was a godawful period in human history, and the best we can say about it is that it didn't go hot and lead to mankind's extinction in a nuclear holocaust.  Nobody should be eager to return to such a dismal era.

The problem is that it sounds like Putin is.  As awful as the Cold War was, it was also Russia's time in the sun, when Europe's most backward country got to split the planet with another power.  Appealing to that faded glory is winning Putin a lot of support at home, and judging by interviews with Russian-speaking east Ukrainians, a lot of people in or around Russia are happy to fall into the old "the Americans are behind everything and we need to be strong" mentality.  Putin insists that the American-led West is trying to contain and gang up on a resurgent Russia... and unless we want to encourage more incidents like Georgia, or Crimea, or Ukraine, we might just have to.

An Ounce of Prevention

There's two theories concerning what happened in Ukraine last weekend.  One is that the Russian government, as per a tradition of destabilizing neighbors who dared to cross them by arming insurgents within their borders, gave high-end military hardware to idiots who proceeded to shoot down a civilian airliner after mistaking it for a legitimate target.  The other is that Flight 17 was loaded with exsanguinated corpses and shot down by the Ukrainian air force as part of a pretext for an invasion of Russia / after being mistaken for Putin's personal aircraft, all as part of a conspiracy involving Western journalists, the internet, and in fact every media source that isn't controlled by the Russian government.

The whole incident has been called a game-changer, but when the folks on TV use the words their referring to states' policy towards Russia.  I'd prefer it to be a game-changer in terms of changing the way the game is played entirely.

See, despite the phrase "international community," states aren't always good neighbors.  Sure, they occasionally give aid packages to each other, help find another country's lost plane, form neighborhood organizations that change what we think global governance can accomplish, or liberate their friends from their enemies.  But when it comes to civil conflict, the response is usually "could you keep it down, please?"  If the countries of the world were houses on a block, it'd be one with constant gunshots and screams coming from far too many homes, while the rest mostly crank up their sound systems and try to ignore it.

The issue is, as usual, sovereignty.  States are recognized as the ultimate legitimate authority within their borders, and only within those borders.  Therefore, any internal conflict is the problem of that particular state, and others have no "right" or obligation to interfere.  There's a couple of problems with this, though.  First, for a civil war to be going on in the first place, a state has by definition lost its monopoly over the legitimate use of force used within its borders, and is sufficiently weak that a rebel groups believes it stands a chance of overthrowing it.  Or in other words, civil wars happen in states that are least equipped to deal with them, yet their neighbors expect them to handle the problem.

Second, there's no guarantee that a civil war will stay confined to those neat little lines we've drawn on the globe.  Even in a "normal" civil conflict, and despite the aforementioned tenants of sovereignty, states like to meddle.  Russia supplying the separatists in Ukraine is nothing new, the issue of the past week is that this meddling cost an airplane full of noncombatants their lives.  Worse are situations like the one in the Middle East, where the ISIS group is committed to redrawing the map entirely.  It was able to establish itself in Syria during its ongoing civil war, and is now pushing against a neighboring failing state, and is influencing politics throughout the region.

The inevitable questions after looking at all this is: what if, rather than merely condemning the fighting in Syria, someone had decided to intervene and bring it to a conclusion years ago, before ISIS built its power base?  What if someone had helped Kiev's new government pacify its rebellious eastern provinces, and secure its country's borders so no Russian anti-air platforms could be fired by trigger-happy morons at civilian aircraft?

Ah, but the phrasing of the question provides the answer.  When we say "someone needs to do something," we rarely mean "I should do something."

If states are the ultimate authority within their borders, then there is no legitimate agent in the world to go around interceding in civil conflicts to keep things like Flight 17 from happening - at least, not without those states' invitation.  And who would such a do-gooder be, anyway?  The United States, a war-weary superpower with a host of domestic issues to deal with?  The European Union, which can't quite decide whether it wants to move beyond its component national identities?  Or what if it's China or Russia that decides to go about (in Russia's case, overtly) interfering in civil conflicts to resolve them?  Would less authoritarian parts of the world be happy with the results?

And even if the world decided that someone was authorized to go around using force to end civil wars before they spread further, would that agent want to?  Could they afford to?  Some of the factors behind the United States' non-intervention in Syria was the fact that we'd just spent a decade occupying two countries in what's looking like a failed attempt at spreading democracy, and that Syria's anti-air capacities were a couple of levels above those of the regimes we'd previously crushed - the conclusion was that intervening in Syria was likely to be even less pleasant than "fixing" Iraq and Afghanistan.  But even if our military was still in top form, and confident it could evade Syrian AA fire, would we have been willing to commit out forces to a potentially lengthy occupation and peacemaking process?  Or would we be willing to have those soldiers available in case of a crisis that impacted states we were directly interested in?

Maybe it won't always be like this, but we're at an awkward stage in our development as a global community where our humanitarian inclinations are up against national interest and political notions devised to empower kings, which leaves us knowing we ought to act without feeling that we're able to.  And so we get the current situation, where we sit and watch civil wars happen, and hope that they stay relatively civil so we don't have to send troops to prop up an ally when a conflict spills over national borders, or lose citizens to trigger-happy insurgents supplied by a borderline rogue state.  Like watching a neighbor's house burn down and praying that the sparks don't land on our yard.

Not Quite Textbook

It's been a while since my Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies course, so I may not be remembering things correctly, but the current situation between Israel and Palestine doesn't fit into the normal narrative for dispute settlements.  Obviously the fighting has intensified over the past few days, but earlier this week there was an attempt to calm things down, calls for a ceasefire to be negotiated by Egypt. 

Normally, calls for arbitration or ceasefires are the result of a stalemate.  The thinking is that the belligerents enter their conflict each expecting they will win, because why would you fight a war you think you'll lose?  Once the fighting has gone on for a bit, and everyone's true military capacities are exposed on the battlefield, then the combatants realize who is likely to win the war if it continues.  The losing side may call for a time-out in an attempt to save itself, and the winning side is unlikely to comply if it's winning decisively, because why would you negotiate a peace with your foe if you could just crush him?  It is only, therefore, when the fighting has gone on for a bit but both sides are stalemated that you see genuine attempts at negotiated ends to the fighting.  The opportunity for peace is said to be "ripe," the belligerents have accumulated some war weariness, and neither is confident that continuing to fight will pay off more than reaching a settlement.

That's not what happened earlier.  We had one side, the Israelis, dominant yet pushing the hardest for a ceasefire.  The Palestinians in Gaza had made no gains, but were doggedly refusing to budge until they got concessions even when all they can "offer" is days of being bombed.  Evidently my course literature didn't account for suicidal combatants.

But this isn't a simple two-sided conflict, and looking a little deeper makes things make more sense, if a disturbing sort of sense.

In this case, peace, or at least an end to the current fighting, isn't necessarily the main objective, or even a shared objective.  Hamas, the group controlling Gaza, has defined itself through its opposition to Israel, and has been willing to commit terrorist acts in its pursuit of a Palestinian state.  It has little to show for this beyond a role in perpetuating a cycle of violence, but Hamas has at least proven popular enough to be elected to Gaza's leadership.

The problem is that there is now an alternative, an Arab, Islamist, anti-Israeli group that has actually succeeded at taking territory - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  The group has already used the Syrian civil war as a staging point for its expansion into Iraq, and there are worries that it might try and keep expanding into places like Jordan, if not further.  Hamas, in short, has competition.  How fortunate that someone kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens, prompting a revenge killing that escalated into thrown stones, guerrilla warfare, and an Israeli offensive into Gaza?  It's certainly convenient that Hamas has a chance to get in the news and show Palestinians that it can still fight the good fight.

But it can't win the good fight, hence Hamas' dilemma.  For it to stay in power it needs to show that it can get results.  Since it can't do that through an outright victory, it must reject Israel's calls for a ceasefire and provoke more fighting, in hopes of making its inevitable defeat as uncomfortable as possible, bogging the Israelis down in urban warfare, provoking riots and bombings, launching the sort of underground attacks seen today, until the hassle of dealing with Hamas brings Israel to the negotiating table and allows Hamas to wring something, anything, out of them.  This is obviously a terrible spot to be in, hence Hamas' seemingly-insane attempt to get concessions before the Israeli offensive - I don't think anyone would look forward to getting blitzed by the IDF.

This tortured logic also puts Israel in a bind.  If they strike back too hard, and come out of this latest conflict too victorious, there's a chance that Hamas could fall and something worse could take its place, a group more fanatical and, so far, more successful.  At the same, Hamas is hardly a good neighbor, and being too generous with concessions and ceasefires runs the risk of encouraging them to provoke further conflict.  And Israel can't sidestep the issue and simply cease the current fighting without antagonizing elements of its own population that want vengeance/justice for the lives lost in the conflict's most recent iteration.

Perversely, this would really be a good time for the two sides to work together.  Israel could give Hamas opportunities to be seen leading the Palestinians, and hand over some slight concessions that Hamas could wave around during election season, proving that they can get results and Palestinians don't need to turn to ISIS.  This would also keep Hamas from causing too much trouble, as the more havoc they stir up, the less of a loss for Israel it would be if ISIS ended up taking over.  Unfortunately, if the two sides were able to find a common ground in this manner the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have ended by now.

There are other outs, of course.  A lot of Israel's issues with Gaza only apply if it intends to allow Gaza to remain an independent territory after this conflict, and while they've insisted that its latest campaign is an "incursion" and not an invasion... well, look at it this way, you're being attacked from a neighboring territory and the government controlling it is either unable to stop it or in fact encouraging it.  Occupying Gaza to keep any sort of extremists, Hamas or ISIS or whatever, from running the place may start to look tempting.  The obvious downside is that this would antagonize the entire region and earn Israel criticism from its allies.


Another alternative would be for the people of Gaza to ditch Hamas but pick a non-violent party to replace it, one that wouldn't have to continue this conflict to shore up its legitimacy, but I think the Israeli occupation of Gaza is more likely than that.

What's So Great About America, Anyway?

I’m wary of the phrase “American exceptionalism.”  To consider my country is exceptional is fine and good, but it’s easy to twist that phrase into meaning that exceptions should be made for America, and that doesn’t end well.  We may be the world’s sole superpower, for the moment, but that doesn’t mean what it used to in 1991.  America can “go it alone” when it comes to international consensus over its foreign policy, but that means we get to pay for the consequences ourselves.  The world’s best military is great at destroying things, not so much at building lasting accomplishments.  Our vast resources don’t do us much good when our government can’t balance a budget or reach a consensus on what to do with them.  And so forth. 

Likewise, gushing about how awesome America is can lead one to conclude that it exists as the final chapter of some global narrative.  To describe the country as some shining city on a hill is one thing, to add an element of destiny is another.  Considering all the people that had to die for America to happen, and all the shameful chapters in our national history that led up to this point, if America has any divine mandate it is on behalf of a genocidal, Old Testament sort of deity at odds with the benevolent God most Americans say they worship.  More importantly, claiming that America represents the most that any nation can aspire to blinds us to what we can learn from other countries, or even to the possibility that we can improve ourselves.

Nevertheless, I still think America is an exceptional country, and it doesn't have anything to do with deserving special treatment or our holy destiny.

Whereas other, later colonies were founded on the backs of subjugated indigenous populations, providence saw fit to clear out America's natives with diseases, and the survivors were able to be pushed westward or onto reservations as more colonists arrived.  The result was a lot of land just ripe for the taking, especially attractive if you're coming from a continent where all the real estate was divvied up between a bunch of old, feudal families.  America, once those troublesome natives were swept from it, was a blank slate, a place where someone with no prospects in the old country could make something of himself, become a landowner, and rise to the local aristocracy based on his own efforts, not a family inheritance or passed-down title.

This may be as much to blame for America's conception of men and kings as all those Enlightenment scholars like Locke who are usually cited when discussing the Founding Fathers' ideology.  If Goodman Joseph can get off his boat in New England, work hard for a decade or two, and become a respected landowner with a prosperous farm and associated business, it might be harder to believe that the inhabitants of a distant palace are somehow inherently better than the rest of us.  You might start to think that maybe people are created more or less equal to each other, and their differences in station are due to circumstance and their actions more than anything else.

At any rate, the end result was America's reputation as the Land of Opportunity.  Now, this may not be as true these days as it was a few centuries ago.  America eventually developed an aristocracy of sorts, and has political and business dynasties such as the Kennedys and Bushes, the Rockefellers and Waltons.  The gap between the richest fraction of a percentage of the population and the rest of us is growing wider, and despite our "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" national myth it's a lot easier for a millionaire to become a billionaire than it is for a poor man to become rich.  The frontier is gone, jobs are getting harder to find, and we have a looming water shortage that will one day prove that America does in fact have a maximum sustainable population.  But the main thing is that Americans like to believe that, with the right opportunity, anyone could improve their lot and prosper, and those who are wealthy aren't necessarily "better" than the rest of us.  We can recognize the differences in income while still viewing each other as equal.

This is all important because it attracted so many people to come start a new life in America, and that I think is the most exceptional thing about America.  We're a nation of immigrants, with a strong British heritage but also representatives from every other country on the planet.  Granted, this process was not without friction, and whatever minority population characterized one generation tended to assimilate in time to voice their dismay at the next wave of foreign invaders.  But generally we recognize that anyone on the planet is a potential American, if they buy into our national values.  

In short, "American" is not an ethnicity, though it might be a suffix to one.  Anyone, from anywhere, can come in an become part of our country.  They can wholeheartedly embrace their new homeland, or adopt America's culture and values while retaining the parts of their old country that they want to bring with them as a ___-American, either works.  You can do this in other countries, of course, but you won't fit in as well.  It's a lot easier to become a French or Swedish citizen than it is to become French or Swedish, because those are national identities tied to specific ethnicities and histories.

This is special because it puts us ahead of the curve, in a way.  The basic international unit for the past century or so has been the nation-state, a political entity inhabited by a national entity.  The French live in France, the Swedes live in Sweden, and so on.  The problem is that the world is changing, and populations are moving about - blame globalization for shifting economic opportunities, and modern transportation for making it possible to chase them.  The result is friction, strife, fears of a country being taken over by its immigrants, reactionary xenophobic nationalism, and so on.

America doesn't have to deal with that - or at least, it isn't acceptable to openly admit as much.  When we rail about Central American immigrants, it's because they crossed the border illegally, not simply because there are now Mexicans living in our country.  Oh, there are efforts to enforce English as a national language through de jure legislation rather than de facto custom, and some alarm about immigrant enclaves that are refusing to assimilate into the local culture, but America isn't "threatened" by newcomers in the same way as other countries are.  Beyond being one of the architects of the current globalized world, we're well-situated to weather the turbulence of globalization.  So long as they buy into national values of equality and share our belief in opportunity, we're generally accepting of immigrants.

It's the whole e pluribus unum thing, how a diverse population when it comes to ethnicity, religion, and subculture can still belong to the same ideologically-based nation.  It's why the European Union is so interesting to watch, at least from the perspective as an international affairs-minded American - we can see our own history in it, as a collection of states take steps towards becoming something more.  Granted, a collection of English colonies with limited capacities had an easier time unifying than a continent's worth of nation-states that are or were great powers in their own right, and that's probably why a unified "European" identity isn't taking precedence over national identities yet.  But that may change.  I'm not advocating an "end to history," but I do think America can be considered the future, or at least a future, that other countries can follow.

Until that day, well... in a world with shifting populations, and where states' borders may not necessarily align with, or may even divide, national distributions, the fact that America has been able to build such a successful country that people keep wanting to be a part of, a country based on lofty ideals of equality and opportunity rather than an ethnic identity or totalitarian adherence to a religious or political doctrine, remains pretty exceptional.

Global Governance or the Lack Thereof

The current crisis is of course the violence in Libya.  The one before that was eastern Ukraine, which isn't to say that particular problem has been resolved, but we're currently more interested in other things.  Falling between them was a fuss between China and Vietnam over an oil platform being built in what the latter insists is its territorial waters, which isn't so much a distinct crisis as it is the most recent flareup of an ongoing dispute that's plagued the region like herpes.

It's a problem with serious policy implications and long-term consequences, yet I only found out about it a few days ago, 'cause Fox News was on the TV nearest my treadmill at the gym.  The incident was naturally being used as further proof that the Obama administration had no coherent foreign policy plan, America's weakness was emboldening its enemies, countries like China or Russia will continue to flout international law until someone sends them a firm message, and so forth.  The panel - there's always a panel, Fox is always ready to interpret the news for you so you don't have to draw your own conclusion - stopped short of actually proscribing policy, and didn't explain what firm actions the US should take to keep China from stepping outside its boundaries.  Maybe park our navy outside a Chinese port and threaten to bombard it?  A missile strike or two?  Obama will surely know what to do.

It got me thinking, mostly morose thoughts about how international governance can be easily spoiled by a few brutes who refuse to play by the rules everyone else has agreed to, and how little these normative and legal regimes can do to stop transgressors.  We - mainly the countries in the West - build something like the UN that's supposed to resolve international conflicts, and act sort of  like a world government, yet cringe at the thought of an official world government.  We like local government just fine, and are willing to tolerate national governments, but as things scale up, our attitudes change.

If my neighbor is trying to build a well, and according to my documents he's trying to do it on my property, it's not going to be hard for me to resolve the issue.  I can show him my property deed and where the lines are drawn, and point out that if he continues he'll be violating the law.  If he refuses to stop, I call the police, who can use force to stop him.

If my neighboring country is trying to build a well on what according to international agreement is my property, it's a bit different.  I can show him these treaties and the maps and argue that he's violating international law, but he may declare that these treaties are unfair, or inaccurate, or illegitimate.  If he refuses to stop... I guess I get to decide how far I'm willing to go to try and stop him.  If I'm Luxembourg, and my neighbor is the United States, I'm probably not going to be able to stop him at all.

If the neighbors are individuals within a country, we rarely see a flat-out rejection of the law, even if neither party was involved in crafting it.  I have no idea who came up with the system used to determine what land I can "own," or who drew the lines that carved out my home property.  I don't question the legitimacy of my property lines, they're part of a legal system I was born into, and even though I don't participate in it, I don't mind living under it.  I suppose I do have a little say in how it operates if I remember to vote once every so often, assuming the candidates I vote for get elected and happen to make a decision regarding property laws.  But it's indirect control at best.

Likewise, I don't quail at the thought of a policeman appearing on my street.  It helps that I'm a white male in a white male's country, of course, but even if I weren't, I doubt the notion of a cop stepping in to settle my property dispute would generate the sort of abhorrence we see when we suggest establishing some sort of hard enforcement mechanism for international law.

In short, while some states are keen on the idea of global governance, and are willing to adhere to international agreements, or even let foreign soldiers onto their soil as peacekeepers in emergencies, there is a real reluctance to give international institutions the sort of coercive power necessary to fully govern.

The state-level explanation for this is straightforward.  The world we live in is dominated by a number of actors called states, institutions that define themselves as the ultimate legal authority in their respective territories, and claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in their domain.  Adding any "higher" laws, or allowing an outside organization to step in with armed forces, undermines this definition and goes against their self-interest (unless they decide it is in their self-interest to abide by this laws or allow foreign forces into their country). 

A related argument would be that states play at higher "stakes" than bickering neighbors, and have to be strong enough to repel their rivals, and therefore refuse to weaken themselves by empowering international governments.  Or in other words, the world system is anarchical and "help yourself," so states can't afford to create something capable of bringing order to the system or helping themselves and others.  I find this explanation particularly unsatisfying.

I prefer to work on the individual or "people" level, states only exist in our minds anyway.  From this angle, the explanation for the lack of strong global governance is as follows - I'm not a minority living in a country dominated by a different ethnic group or other demographic, so when I talk about my government or my police, I feel a connection to them.  Even if the laws of the land are drawn up in a distant capital, they were made by "my" people, and a few folks from my region were at least in the room when those laws were signed.  Police officers are similarly drawn from the cities they protect, making them as much neighbors as they are enforcers of the federal government.  In short, I see a lot of myself in the people writing and executing the laws, so I feel like they're looking after my interest, or at least not out to get me.

If we talk about international law, or some sort of global army to enforce the United Nations' decisions, I can't feel so confident.  Are people from a culture from the other side of the planet, who grew up hearing different morality tales from a different religion, whose history diverges from mine so many, many centuries ago, really like me?  Can I trust them to keep my interests in mind, or are they out to get me?  More importantly, if we try to make the UN less dysfunctional by removing the five permanent Security Council members' vetoes, how could I stop the General Assembly from denouncing Israel?  Things only get worse when you consider some armed force that could settle things like border disputes - can you really trust someone who doesn't even speak your language?

So this is why right wingnut fears about the New World Order and world government are pretty silly - whether on the individual or national level, not many people are comfortable with the idea.  But I think that might change, in time.  We've got this wonderful, globalized world, where ideas can flow and diffuse with greater speed and ease than at any point in human history.  We had, until recent setbacks, and attempt to spread a particular group of norms that were supportive of regional and international governance.  And modern communications have allowed people to connect from all corners of the world, proving that whether they're from the United States or Brazil, Russia or China, people are equally capable of jackassery on the internet.

So maybe there will come a time when we see enough of ourselves in the Hague to give the International Criminal Court some real weight (or maybe even ratify it!).  Maybe someday we'll feel comfortable with empowering other countries' soldiers with the authority to use force to keep countries from building platforms where they're not allowed, even if those countries could potentially include us.  But we've a ways to go, and in the meantime we're stuck with figuring out how to talk China into voluntarily following an international law it would rather ignore.