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The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked its 60th anniversary in May 2014. A unanimous opinion of the Warren Court, Brown prohibited official (i.e., de jure) segregation in the public schools and rejected the doctrine of 'separate but equal'. "Separate educational facilities," Chief Justice Warren wrote, "are inherently unequal." He explained that "[t]o separate them [i.e., African-American students] from others of similar age...solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." In a follow-up opinion a year later, the Court noted that implementation of its decision would involve a "period of transition"; it ordered states to "make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" with its ruling and directed the lower courts to "enter such orders and decrees...as are necessary...to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases."
While the practical impact of Brown, which took time to be felt fully (see below), was in some respects significant, the "symbolic quality of the decision," as Yale Kamisar observed in 1969, "was immeasurable," or at any rate substantial. Thurgood Marshall (later, of course, a Supreme Court justice) was the main lawyer for the successful plaintiffs, and the cases consolidated in the Brown decision were the culmination of a long litigation campaign by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Writing in The Atlantic around the time of the 60th anniversary, Ronald Brownstein described Brown's "core mission" as "unfinished" and went on to observe: "...racial and economic isolation remains daunting: One recent study found that three-fourths of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics attend schools where a majority of the students qualify as low-income." Brownstein also noted that the "increasing diversity and shrinking white share of America's youth population" makes more urgent than ever Brown's "broader goal of ensuring all young people the opportunity to develop their talents."
How much and in what ways did the Brown decision matter and, more broadly, how much did the courts in general contribute to the civil rights movement in the U.S.? On the one hand, the prohibition of de jure segregation in the schools was important both symbolically, as already mentioned, and because it did lead, first in the border states and then eventually in the deep South (after years of 'massive resistance' and other forms of obstruction), to some school integration. In 1954, 'dual' (i.e. segregated) school systems were mandated by statute in eleven southern states and six other states, as well as the District of Columbia. The situation in the border states began to change relatively quickly after Brown, but the decision did not have any substantial effect in the deep South until the 1970s, when, as James Patterson (author of a 2001 book about Brown) notes, the decision finally was enforced. Some cities and localities have been success stories of integration -- Raleigh, N.C., to mention one, as discussed in Gerald Grant's 2009 book Hope and Despair in the American City [link].
If that's the glass-half-full side of the story, the glass-half-empty side is that there is overall still a great deal of both economic and racial segregation in U.S. public schools -- there's more segregation now in schools in the North and West than there was 30 years ago. The Supreme Court had a chance to help reverse this trend in 1974 by allowing court-ordered cross-district (urban/suburban) busing in cases of de facto (residential) segregation, but instead a 5-4 majority of the Burger Court went the other way; the case was Milliken v. Bradley. Voluntary urban/suburban integration programs -- which typically do not involve an actual merger of urban and suburban systems, as occurred in Raleigh, but instead move relatively small numbers of students across district lines -- are not an adequate substitute for larger-scale court-ordered programs, but Milliken basically precluded those. Today, according to this piece that aired last month on the PBS NewsHour, there are only eight voluntary urban-suburban 'transfer' programs in the country, involving all together a mere 40,000 students, and almost half of those are in Hartford, Ct. The same piece noted that the number of 'intensely segregated' (i.e., more than 90 percent minority) schools in Rochester, N.Y., has increased fivefold since 1989, and Rochester has one of the voluntary urban-suburban programs.
There is by now a large literature on Brown and on the broader question of the courts and social change, most of which I haven't read (I've listed a few relevant titles at the end of this post, but this list is only the tip of the iceberg). With that said, Mark Tushnet's judgment on the impact of Brown, and of civil rights litigation more generally, seems reasonable, though no judgment here will command universal agreement. In Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law (1988), p.132, Tushnet wrote:
Brown galvanized black communities not so much because schools were desegregated -- except in the border states substantial [de jure] segregation continued for more than a decade after Brown -- but because it showed that one branch of the national government was on their side. Two years later the Montgomery bus boycott was the first episode in the development of the modern civil rights movement, whose sit-ins and marches prodded Congress to enact important civil rights acts in 1964, 1965, and 1968. The [Supreme] Court's response to the movement was hesitant and indirect. It never ruled that sit-ins were protected by the Constitution, but it did allow demonstrators to invoke the powers of the federal courts to limit the worst sort of harassment, and it upheld innovative efforts by the executive branch to convict white terrorists under old statutes. Overall the courts played a distinctly subordinate role in the post-1960 struggle for civil rights. It seems fair to wonder whether the pattern of race relations in 1970 or 1980 would have been dramatically different had blacks been forced to use only political methods.
Kamisar in 1969 emphasized more strongly Brown's "galvanizing" effect, arguing among other things that it contributed to the subsequent enactment of civil rights legislation and that it sped up or "perhaps even precipitated" the Warren Court's "revolution" in criminal procedure ("The School Desegregation Cases in Retrospect," in the Chelsea House volume listed below, p.xxiv). Probably the only certain statement is that the legacy of Brown will continue to be debated.
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References and further reading
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
Gerald Grant, Hope and Despair in the American City
F. Harris and R. Lieberman, "Racial Inequality after Racism," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2015)
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., All Deliberate Speed
James T. Patterson, "The Troubled Legacy of Brown v. Board" (pdf)
Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope
James Ryan, Five Miles Away, A World Apart
Mark Tushnet, Red, White, and Blue
Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952-55, vol. 1 of the series Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court (N.Y.: Chelsea House, 1970; paperback reprint, 1983), ed. Leon Friedman, with introductions by Kenneth Clark and Yale Kamisar.
[added later] R. Straus and S. Lemieux, "The Two Browns," New Political Science v.38 (2016)
Ending the break a bit early.
The blogger Bianca Steele has been posting about Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (a book I've read, but I don't have a copy to hand, so am not going to discuss it in any detail). Rather, this post is about Bianca S's remark about Rawls in this passage of this post:
Walzer describes “distributive justice” as a theory about the distribution of everything within a society, even things that aren’t normally transferable, and so on. This sounds like a good idea, and almost obvious. How else could philosophers and other thinkers evaluate the justice of a society, other than by characterizing the distribution of various bad or good things among its members? Why should questions of the distribution of one thing be discussed in different terms than the distribution of others? Moreover, as will be seen in the following pages, Walzer is responding to A Theory of Justice, a far-reaching theory published about a decade earlier by John Rawls. It’s not unreasonable to expect that Rawls is interested in justice as it applies to everything that might be shared either justly or unjustly.However, this is not what Rawls was doing. (At least, it’s not what he’s taken to have been doing, from the vantage point of today. I would be interested to learn whether he addressed this question somewhere in the very long text of his book, but for me, that’s a research project for another day.)
Answering the question of what Rawls was doing in this respect doesn't require a research project. It requires reading page 7 of A Theory of Justice (1971 edition), where Rawls explains that the main focus of his theory is justice in "the basic structure of society," i.e., a society's "political constitution" and its "principal economic and social arrangements" and how they "distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation." So yes, he's not focusing on the distribution of "everything that might be shared" but rather on how a society's basic institutions operate to distribute political rights, income, wealth, status, and other things that might be considered to make up the social bases of self-respect. As stated this is somewhat vague, but enough to show that Rawls is not interested in all of the distributional items that Walzer covers. For example, though my memory of this is hazy, Walzer in Spheres has a chapter on love, where he talks about dating and marriage etc. This is outside the scope of Rawls's concerns, since the basic structure of society as he conceives of it has to do with these matters only indirectly, if that.
ETA: Ordinarily I might have left this as a comment on Bianca S's blog rather than writing a post here, but she's made clear that my comments aren't welcome there.
ETA (again): Rawls does list "the monogamous family" as an example of a major social institution, but he has very little or nothing to say about justice in the family, as a number of his feminist critics have pointed out.
Interrupting the month of non-posting to say 'have fun shoveling snow' to anyone reading this in the relevant geographical area (which may be a grand total of zero people, but anyway).
Starting the year with a blogging break; I'm not planning to do any posting in January.
The Middle East was a main focus here this year. Among other developments, the Iran nuclear deal, the ongoing Syrian civil war (including the question of strategy against ISIS), and the resurgence of violence on the West Bank (engaged in by both sides though conditioned by the seemingly now-permanent occupation) received some attention. The four guest posts by Peter T. were a highlight: see here, here, here, and here.
Other posts from this past year perhaps worth mentioning include a note about Machiavelli and mercenaries and a reflection on 'critical junctures'.
Finally, thanks to the readers and commenters whose contributions produced some good comment threads in 2015.
In discussing post-1949 China in her classic States and Social Revolutions (1979), T. Skocpol quotes (on p.274) a passage from a 1975 article by Martin K. Whyte on how post-revolutionary China addressed the issue of inequality. The Chinese regime, according to Whyte, aimed not so much to eliminate income and other inequalities as to "mute [their] consequences." In this 40-year-old article, Whyte wrote:
People in high positions in China are viewed as entitled to certain kinds of differential rewards and authority, but at the same time flaunting authority or engaging in conspicuous consumption is tabooed. There is thus a concerted effort to blunt the subjective impact which existing inequalities might have on the initiative and dedication of the have-nots in whose name the revolution was fought.
The notion of the subjective impact of inequalities clearly relates to inequality's tendency, in some cases, to undermine the social bases of self-respect (as discussed in the comment thread attached to this post). My impression is that conspicuous consumption is no longer especially discouraged in China; some might consider that one of the acceptable prices to pay for having escaped the more destructive aspects of Maoism, but it's interesting that, 40 years ago at any rate, Chinese policy was apparently very conscious of what Whyte labeled the subjective impact of inequality.
Though Skocpol thought China was different from post-revolutionary France and Russia in this respect, I'm not so sure. The addressing of pretty much everyone as "citizen" after 1789, to take one example, might have been one way in which the new French republic tried to, quoting Whyte in this different context, "mute the consequences" of the inequalities that remained after the Revolution. Just a stray thought...
The title of this post could be the name of a rock band, but it's not. Earlier today I was looking briefly at an almost decade-old review (by Peter Thomas in New Left Review, Sept/Oct 2006) of Joachim Radkau's 1000-page biography Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens [the passion of Thought] (and don't get the idea that I have any German because, regrettably, I really don't). And just now, in writing a comment at another blog, I was prompted, perhaps (though who knows) because of having looked at the Thomas review this morning, to mention the passage in "The Social Psychology of the World Religions" in which Weber compares ideas to "switchmen."
Since this post doesn't have much of a point, you can file it under 'inconsequential stuff that your blogger thought he might as well throw onto the interwebs before 2015 shudders to a close'.
This is a list of the book reviews that have been posted here since the blog's beginning, in chronological order starting with the earliest.
Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (2009), reviewed 9/9/09
Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War (2011), reviewed 1/16/12
Jack Knight & James Johnson, The Priority of Democracy (2011), reviewed 12/23/12 [this wasn't presented as a formal book review, but for all intents and purposes it is a review]
Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013), reviewed 1/16/14
Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution (2011), reviewed 3/14/14 [again, this wasn't presented as a book review, but it comes pretty close to being one]
David A. Bell, The First Total War (2007), reviewed 9/22/14
James T. Johnson, Sovereignty (2014), reviewed 6/5/15 [the author is a different James Johnson than the one mentioned above]
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There have been a few other posts discussing a particular book in detail, but I think the above list will do. The (regrettable) absence of female authors from the list is accidental not intentional; however, I'll try to be more attuned to that in the future.
Have just become aware of a book that might be of interest to some readers of this blog: John Judis, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. The paperback edition came out last February. (Amazon link.)
P. Campos at the LGM blog:
How did Star Wars become such a big deal, culturally speaking? Why does
the franchise... have such a
vast and fanatical following? Why, for example, is Cass Sunstein, of all people, writing a book about Star Wars?
Oh, I know the answer to this one: it's the natural outgrowth of Sunstein's Harvard senior thesis on Samuel Beckett, written in 1975.
You're welcome. Next question. ;-)
ETA: Some blathering by me on the question of Star Wars and 'empire' can be found here.
I'm not going to write about the climate agreement because I don't follow the issue(s) closely enough, but A. Gilbert has some relevant, or so it appears, links here.
The Internet is full of discussion of the death of Benedict Anderson (see, e.g., Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, Corey Robin at his blog and also at CT, and Robert Greene II at the USIH blog).
Although I've read (parts of) Imagined Communities and admire it and was just looking this morning at a section at the end of the 1991 revised edition (where Anderson takes off from Renan on forgetting to discuss the paradoxes attending the ways in which national histories are retrospectively rewritten to emphasize "fraternal" quarrels), I can't say the book had an enormous effect on me. Its wide influence, however, is of course undeniable.
A book that deals partly with nationalism and had a bigger impact on me is Rogers Brubaker's Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992), not so much for its details (about 95 percent of which I've forgotten) or even for its main thesis, but rather because of the meticulous care with which it was researched, organized, and written. Today, many books published even by top-line university presses are littered with typographical and spelling errors and in some cases awkward or ungrammatical sentences; many of them are not written carefully, and they are not copy-edited or proofread competently. (Note: I'm saying "many," not "all.")
Citizenship and Nationhood, which was based on the author's dissertation, is the exact opposite: excellently written and virtually devoid of the small errors that bespeak a carelessness and haste and that are rampant in scholarly books today. I'm quite sure -- in fact, I'm positive -- that some of the arguments of Citizenship and Nationhood have been challenged since its publication, but the care that went into that book is obvious from the first page to the last. It's no surprise that the author, who has written a lot of other things since that book, has had a highly successful scholarly career.
Added later: I also liked, to some extent, Anthony Marx's Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism, which I read more recently.
Bernie Sanders in conversation with Ezra Klein.
Excerpt -- close paraphrasing (not verbatim):
Klein: Turning to foreign policy, is there a school of foreign policy you identify with - are you a realist or ...
Sanders: I don't know what the word means. I think we're all realists...
Klein (smiling): I'm not sure we are.
Sanders (repeating): I don't know what the word means.
Would have been a bit better, I think, if Bernie had said the word was unhelpfully vague instead of saying he doesn't know what it means. But this is a nitpick, admittedly. I didn't watch the whole interview, but the parts I watched were interesting.
Added later: Note also the exchange near the beginning where Klein asks about global poverty, immigration, and 'open borders'. Sanders's reply is substantively more or less what one would expect him to say, but it perhaps could have been framed a bit better.
I'm starting to read Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013). This passage appears in the Introduction:
Marx's life, his systems of thought, his political strivings and aspirations, belonged primarily to the nineteenth century, a period of human history that occupies a strange place in relation to the present: neither evidently distant and alien, like the Middle Ages, nor still within living memory as, for instance, the world of the age of total war, or communist regimes of the Eastern bloc in the years 1945-89. Every once in a while the nineteenth century suddenly emerges into the present, with an eerie clarity and familiarity. A prime example are [sic] the revolutions of 1848, whose rapid spread from country to country within a few months was a central political event of the nineteenth century, but since then have been known only to historical specialists. All at once, these obscure uprisings seemed current and familiar during the fall of 1989, as revolutions moved through communist Eastern Europe, or in the winter of 2011 as they raced through the Arab world. Much the same can be said about the relationship of Marx's life and thought to the present: there are moments of familiarity, but more often than not, I am struck by the differences....
Would it be nitpicking to point out that if the 1848 revolutions were indeed "obscure uprisings" known only to specialists they really wouldn't have been able to seem "current and familiar" in 1989 and 2011? What Sperber intends to say here is clear enough, but he's not saying it particularly well. A copy editor probably could have fixed this in about fifteen or twenty minutes; however, the number of publishers using good copy editors seems small.
In fairness to Sperber, I have about 550 pages to go, and a preliminary glance through the book suggested that the overall quality of the writing is high. It remains to be seen whether my preliminary judgment will be borne out.
In the last several decades, inequalities of wealth and income within many countries (especially, though not only, 'developed' countries) have been increasing, even as aggregate income and wealth gaps between countries have been tending to decrease somewhat (though still leaving wide disparities). Within-country inequality has reached a point where it has now become an issue in, to take one of many possible examples, the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Is inequality of income and wealth objectionable because it produces other harms, or at a certain level is there something intrinsically objectionable about extreme inequality, irrespective of any possible consequences? Why should people care, say, that, given current trends, the top 1 percent of Americans will soon hold more wealth than the bottom 99 percent (as I have seen asserted): is it because the very wealthy exercise disproportionate political power, thus distorting or nullifying democracy, or is there something inherently offensive and objectionable about the disparities? Similarly, should the extreme disparity between CEO pay and the pay of a median worker be of intrinsic concern? Or, to cite an example from the previous post on Lagos, is the existence of slums in close physical proximity to wealth objectionable in itself, or is it objectionable only or mainly because the basic material needs of those living in the slums are not being met in an economy that is operating well for the upper layer(s) of the population?
Many are probably familiar, either from first-hand experience or from photos, with the phenomenon of upscale houses or apartment buildings built right up against slums in cities in 'developing' countries; by contrast, in cities in 'developed' countries there tends to be more physical distance between poor neighborhoods and affluent ones. (ETA: Of course, one can also find that distance in certain cases in the developing world as well.) Is inequality more morally objectionable when wealth and poverty exist in close physical proximity, or is that simply an aesthetic, for lack of a better word, consideration? Are poor people injured in some additional way by being physically confronted, as it were, on a daily basis by the existence of people who are enormously better off than they are?
More questions. Is it "better" to live in an urban slum than in rural poverty, or does it depend on individual preferences? Is that sort of like asking whether someone would prefer to be executed by injection or by firing squad? Or does it depend on the particular circumstances of each case? (I think probably it does.) The continuing movement of people especially in the developing world from rural to urban areas is well known, but how many move back in the other direction? (I assume rough figures are available for particular countries, but I'm not going to look for them right now.)
In sum, I'm not altogether sure of the answers to many of these questions, but they strike me as worth asking, perhaps especially by those who think of themselves as egalitarians.
ETA/update: See the comment thread for, among other things, a helpful comment by js. on what it means to say that something is "intrinsically" objectionable.
Extreme inequality is certainly not unique to Nigeria, but this report, which aired on the PBS NewsHour a couple of nights ago, vividly depicts the economic disparities in Lagos. It's part of a series on Nigeria that is exactly the sort of thing public television should be doing.* Note, incidentally, Bill Clinton's appearance toward the end in the section on Eko Atlantic City.
(*I watched it online, as I don't have a working TV setup, as I've mentioned before.)
ETA: As discussed in the comment thread, the issue is not inequality per se, but rather the failure to meet the basic needs of a large portion of the population despite economic growth.
...in the U.S., according to one tally (via WaPo Wonkblog).
The U.S. military's recently released report on the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontières) hospital in Kunduz in October blames human and technical errors. However, it remains somewhat unclear why the attack continued even after MSF phone calls to Bagram air base reporting that the hospital was being shelled.
By coincidence, I recently ran across a reference to an attack by coalition forces in February 1991 during the Gulf War on an air-raid shelter in Baghdad, killing (according to news accounts at the time) two or three hundred civilians. In that case the U.S. apparently thought the shelter was reserved for Iraqi government leaders; a Human Rights Watch report released after the war argued the U.S. was legally obligated to have warned "the Iraqi civilian population that the facility
was no longer considered a protected shelter and provided sufficient time
to elapse so that [the] warning could be heeded" (see here - scroll down to the section headed "The Lack of Warning Prior to Attack: The Ameriyya Air Raid Shelter"). Not a precisely comparable situation, but similar inasmuch as misinformation/misidentification apparently played a role. (I'm sure the attack on the Baghdad shelter has been discussed in other places, but I'm not taking the time to research it any further right now.)
The current symposium at ISQ Online is about the politics of great-power retrenchment. The article that is the basis for the discussion has been ungated and can be read (and/or downloaded) here. (I've read neither the symposium nor the article; just passing this along for now.)
I'm using "incoherence" because it's the politest word I can think of under the circumstances. Those circumstances being that Jeb Bush has called, albeit vaguely, for ground forces to fight ISIS, and that call has also come from John Kasich (not to mention, needless to say, Lindsey Graham and other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, although the latter has probably been so vague as to have deniability for anything).
According to an NBC News report of a Kasich speech at the National Press Club:
[he] proposed leading a coalition that includes soldiers fighting on the
ground in both Syria and Iraq. He would not indicate a number and said
the coalition should not be involved in Syria's civil war.
How soldiers can be on the ground in Syria without being involved in its civil war defies the imagination. This person is a serious presidential candidate? Not to mention Trump, Cruz, et al.? This is a disgrace.
Oh yes, I almost forgot: Kasich also wants a new government agency devoted to spreading "Judeo-Christian values" around the world. (The phrase is in quotes to indicate that these are, from what I gather, Kasich's words.)
From Nov. 9: Joshua Landis interviewed by RT (Russian English-language TV) (h/t). One point that goes beyond the immediately topical is his argument that there are no state apparatuses in the M.E. separate from the particular regimes that are in control; hence, regime change always means chaos. I might have some further comment on it later.
ETA: See also, somewhat relatedly, this widely linked piece in The Nation from last month, describing interviews with ISIS fighters being held as prisoners in Iraq. Interesting on the issue(s) of motivation.
From a post by Timothy Burke about certain campus controversies:
What’s being called appropriation in some of the current activist discourses is how
culture works. It’s the engine of cultural history, it’s the driver of
human creativity. No culture is a natural, bounded, intrinsic and
unchanging thing. A strong prohibition against appropriation is death to
every ideal of human community except for a rigidly purified and
exclusionary vision of identity and membership.
Even a weak prohibition against appropriation risks constant
misapplication and misunderstanding by people who are trying to
systematically apply the concept as polite dogma. To see one example of
that, look to the New York Times article, which describes at one point a
University of Washington advice video that counsels people to avoid
wearing a karate costume unless you’re part of the real culture of
karate. But karate as an institutional culture of art and sport is
already thoroughly appropriated from its origins in Okinawa, and it was
in turn an appropriation of sorts from Chinese martial arts–and no
martial arts form in the world today is anything even remotely like its
antecedents in practice, form or purpose....
What I think many activists mean to forbid is not appropriation but
disrespect, not borrowing but hostile mockery. The use of costumes as
weapons, as tools of discrimination. But it’s important to say precisely
that and no more, and not let the word appropriation stand in for a
much more specific situational critique of specific acts of harmful
expression and representation.
As they say in the blogosphere, this times 1000.
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ETA (11/13): If someone wants to comment about the attacks in Paris, feel free to do so in the thread here. (I'm not going to post separately on it, partly because I don't have much to say beyond the obvious and what can be found elsewhere.) P.s. I agree with this.
Guest post by Peter T.
(For his previous posts, see here, here, and here.)
***
What are ISIS’ prospects of holding out against the coalition now formed against them? And how do the military prospects inform the outlook for a political resolution of the civil wars?
ISIS continues to hold significant parts of northern and western Iraq and north-east Syria, and is putting up a stiff resistance to Iraqi efforts to regain Ramadi and to a Russian-backed Syrian offensive around Aleppo. Various Islamic radical movements around the world continue to sign on as ISIS affiliates, and the extreme violence (gruesome forms of execution, suicide attacks, mosque bombings) characteristic of ISIS has spread to Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and further. How far can ISIS go?
ISIS is several things. At the core, it is a millenarian movement, preparing for (and trying to bring about) the end of days. It draws on Salafist Islam, Islamic eschatological doctrines and holy warrior traditions, and seeks purity through violence. This mix is attractive to many young men, and at the centre of ISIS military strength are some few thousands of devotees – fierce, cohesive, aggressive and, by now, thoroughly competent in battle. Around this core are Sunni tribe members, local conscripts, and foreign volunteers, adding up to some tens of thousands.
Against ISIS are the Iraqi and Syrian armies, Iraqi Shi'a militias, some Sunni tribes, Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces, competing rebel groups in Syria and, of course, Western (mostly U.S.) and Russian air forces and Iranian advisors. Numerically, this coalition is far stronger. It is also better equipped and supplied, and can draw on much larger populations. Yet the record, so far, is decidedly mixed. The regular Iraqi Army performed poorly against ISIS up to mid-2014. The Syrian Army has likewise not done too well. Iraqi Kurdish forces have been effective in defense, but made very limited gains. The Syrian Kurds have done better, sealing off the border with Turkey as far west as the Euphrates, but lack the numbers and equipment to attack major ISIS strongholds directly. In Iraq, the most effective forces have been the Shi'a militias and in Syria the Lebanese Hezbollah militia.
Up to now ISIS has been able to offset numbers with elan, ferocity, cohesion, greater military competence, and the advantages offered by being on the offensive. These have been enough to seize territory against weak opposition, but not enough to overcome any determined resistance. In the longer run, they are unlikely to be enough to hold what ISIS has gained.
ISIS has been slowly but steadily losing territory and populations in Iraq since mid-2014, and must now defend against greater forces along a wide front. Forces have to be tied down in defence of key points, such as the roads between Mosul and Raqqa. As the aura of success fades, and as supply tightens, its tribal allies and subordinates become less reliable, and greater pressure is needed to keep them in line. At the same time, the competence and morale of its enemies rises. Each successful battle (Kobane, Tel Abyad, Tikrit, Baiji, Hassakah, Shengal, currently Ramadi) costs ISIS core cadres and chips away at its aura of invincibility. Taking towns ringed with IEDs and defended to the last is a slow process, but it can be and has been done. This is not blitzkrieg, but a steady pressure against a determined but weaker force.
Military geography does not favour ISIS. Both Mosul and Raqqa are exposed, and comparatively minor gains by Kurdish forces in northern Iraq or eastern Syria would sever communication between the two. Likewise, ISIS has to hold Euphrates valley towns to access western Anbar and the Saudi border, but garrisons are vulnerable to Iraqi forces and their supply open to air attack. And ISIS has to maintain forces in northern Syria against the very effective Kurdish YPG to ensure access to the Turkish border. So its striking power is limited and its small elite vulnerable to attrition.
The Balance in Syria
Calculation of the military and political situation in Syria is more complex than in Iraq. The Assad regime in Damascus cannot muster the same numbers or depth of popular commitment as Baghdad, has to fight on several fronts, and faces a relatively stronger set of enemies. Its own indiscriminate use of fire-power has alienated many who might otherwise find it the lesser evil. While Baghdad enjoys support from all sides, the U.S. is hostile to the regime in Damascus and continues to tinker futilely with support for a “third party” -- a secular (or at least non-fundamentalist) and pro-democratic opposition. Although the Pentagon has recently ended its effort to train separate ‘moderate’ forces to fight ISIS, a CIA program to train ‘moderates’ to fight Assad apparently continues. Turkey is also hostile to Assad, and somewhat supportive, in terms of actions if not rhetoric, of both ISIS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.
In the broader view, it is all one war. Not only is ISIS a common enemy (certainly for all Shi’a, at any rate), but Syrian Allawis, the core supporters of the Assad regime, are close to the Twelver Shi'ism of Iraq (and Iran), the Zainab shrine near Damascus is a major Shi'a pilgrimage centre, and there are close family ties between leading Shi'a religious families in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Iraqi militia are reported to have deployed to Syria in support of the regime, and Iraqi or Kurdish successes in northern Iraq will certainly be pursued into Syria – Iraq is not about to halt its campaign against ISIS at the border.
A deal – or even a stalemate – with ISIS is hard to envisage (one Syrian rebel leader observed “You can't talk to them; they take their orders from God”). If defeats continue, ISIS is likely to go the way of their Algerian equivalent, the GIA (or, for that matter, the several similar groups that arose in 17th-century Europe): splintering in defeat into deserters and die-hards. It may be possible to broker an accord between Damascus and the rebel groups in southern Syria, and possibly even with the Nusra Front, along the lines of the resolution of the Algerian civil war. For that to happen, first ISIS would need to be defeated, and then both the regime and the rebels convinced that a military solution is out of reach. Both are some way off.
I used to work as an intelligence analyst, a profession notorious for hedging bets. But, if I were pressed to give a definite forecast, I would say that ISIS is unlikely to hang on as an organised force for more than another two years, and the defeat of ISIS is a precondition for any resolution of the Syrian civil war. That said, the defeat of ISIS is contingent on the coalition against them maintaining its present loose unity, and on the ability of the Damascus regime to avoid further major losses of territory.
One effect of the war is that whatever remained of the Shi'a tradition of political quietude has been largely abandoned. While Khomeini's advocacy of a commanding political role for the clergy remains controversial, pretty much all the leading Shi'a figures advocate some form of political activism. The days when the response to regime oppression was to don one's death shroud and wait are gone. This in itself makes the outcome of the civil wars pivotal for the wider Muslim community.
-- Peter T.
Before the Oct. 13 Democratic presidential debate fades into memory or becomes, in campaign timeline terms, ancient history, I just want to mention that I was impressed, while watching the debate in a restaurant, to hear Martin O'Malley quote the John Quincy Adams line about America not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. On the one hand it's a quite well-known line in some circles, but on the other hand how likely is it that one would hear it in a presidential debate? So props to O'Malley. I'm still for Sanders and I think Clinton will probably wind up being the nominee, but anyway...
Erik Loomis has a post trashing economics, which he says is basically pure ideology. (The post has attracted more than 200 comments, none of which I've read. I read the LGM blog only sporadically. In fact I often end up regretting having gone there at all.)
My two cents on this: Loomis is exaggerating. He's right that economics is not a value-free science, that data is/are not a freestanding avatar of The Truth. He's right that "free-market fundamentalism" is harmful. And I agree with him that "we have to find ways to improve the quality of lives of workers in the U.S. and overseas at the same time" (hard to disagree with that). But to dismiss the entire field of economics as simply capitalist apologetics goes a bit too far.
My father was an economist (in the world outside the academy), and I grew up around economists. I saw that Western economists in a developing country were people genuinely trying to help, even if in hindsight some of what they were doing might have been misguided. Intentions don't excuse everything, but in this context they aren't irrelevant either. Also, economists helped design the New Deal, no doubt a favorite era of Loomis's. Hasn't he ever heard of Keynes and Keynes's American students and followers?
I took the intro-to-econ course in college and I've never regretted having done that. I was reading Marx at the same time and it made for an interesting juxtaposition. I'm not sure the intro-to-econ course taught me much I couldn't have picked up in some other way or that it was essential to reading articles on international political economy, which I had to do then and later, but I don't think it hurt. It's fine to be skeptical of mainstream economics and keep a critical distance, but Loomis here, as I say, goes a bit too far. YMMV.
A Palestinian official on the radio today, when asked about the motives driving the latest wave of violence (including knife attacks on Israelis by a small number of Palestinians, followed by Israeli response), said the motives lay in 48 years of illegal occupation, coupled with feelings of hopelessness on the part of the younger generation. The official compared this incipient 'third intifada' in that respect to the Arab Spring, and he compared Netanyahu to Mubarak.
Whatever one thinks of that suggested analogy or parallel, there is one obvious, glaring difference: the anger of the Egyptian protesters from 2011 on was directed at their own government, whereas that of Palestinians, as in the present moment, is directed outward, toward a government of occupation, a government not their own in any sense. Hidden in this very obvious distinction is an implication one wonders whether Israel's leaders have ever fully grasped: namely, that once a sovereign Palestinian state is established, it would become the target at which its citizens would be most likely to direct whatever anger and frustration they might have about unfulfilled hopes or promises. The longer that Israel continues the occupation, the longer the Palestinians exist in a basically stateless condition, the longer it will be before there comes a time when Palestinians' anger is directed, in the first instance, where anger is typically first directed: i.e., at one's own government.
I wonder, in other words, whether Israeli leaders have ever taken an unabashedly pragmatic, self-interested view of a sovereign Palestinian state as an absorber of anger, which is what, among other things, it would be. After an initial period of euphoria, once the state got down to the difficult business of governing and trying to improve its citizens' lives, it would become responsible or accountable in a way that the Palestinian Authority, despite its degree of autonomy in certain spheres, has never been. This is presumably just one of several ways in which the establishment of a sovereign, universally recognized Palestinian state would benefit not only ordinary Palestinians (in psychic if not necessarily material terms), but also ordinary Israelis.
Added later: Lest the opening of this post give the wrong impression, I assure readers that I'm fully aware that (individual) Israelis have committed violent acts against (individual) Palestinians (including recently) and not just the other way around; on the level of individuals, the violence has flowed both ways, even while on the level of collectives it has been highly asymmetrical and unequal. My basic position on the conflict should be fairly clear from previous posts; those readers in search of posts that consist solely of impassioned denunciations might be well advised to look elsewhere, since although I sometimes appreciate impassioned polemic, I don't do it all that often here.
This year's economics Nobelist, Angus Deaton, was interviewed a couple of days ago on the NewsHour. I was a bit bothered by his statement toward the end that "there’s been very little serious discussion [of inequality] until recently," which I think was, well, unhappily or unfortunately worded (trying to give him every benefit of the doubt here -- he probably meant a particular kind of serious discussion, but it came out as just a bald statement). I also thought one of Judy Woodruff's questions was rather silly (n.b. I think she's generally a competent, hard-working journalist), but I won't waste time pointing out the question. (Or more precisely, I won't take the time to point it out.)
This weekend I'm looking forward to attending the annual meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH), being held this year in Wash. D.C. Have no current plans to write about the conference on this blog, though I could change my mind about that. The registration fees are quite reasonable; if interested in attending, follow the link at the end of this post.
It occurred to me this morning that I didn't know very much about Bernie Sanders beyond a few basic facts, so I took a quick look at the main Wikipedia entry on him. I learned from it, among other things, that he is a graduate of the Univ. of Chicago. Does this mean that if he wins the presidency (which I rather hope he does) the Great Books will get a new lease on life, so to speak, in the U.S. education system?
[Note to the humor-impaired: This post is intended to be humorous.]
From the late Stanley Hoffmann's Primacy or World Order (1978), p.70 (endnote omitted):
...[B]oth [Kissinger's] failures and his successes in the business of preserving American primacy show an obsession with stability, which puts him far closer to Metternich than to his own criticism of the Austrian statesman.... Détente and the new triangular relationship were supposedly to allow the United States to worry more about the designs of its equals than about the tantrums of the pygmies. And yet, even after Vietnam, the United States, in "destabilizing" Allende's Chile and in trying to help its friends in Angola, in submitting to South Korea's corruption and espionage in the United States and to Marcos's blackmail over our bases in the Philippines, in supporting the colonels in Greece, and in sustaining the Republic of South Africa (indeed in using it as a lever in Rhodesia, while proclaiming that it "cannot be regarded as an illegitimate government"), showed that the old equation of stability, anti-Communism and pro-Americanism had survived intact. Metternich's excuse was the fragility of his country, its desperate dependence on the status quo outside. Is the social and political order of the United States equally brittle and tied to conservatism everywhere?
[Comments as always are welcome, but before commenting please note, for the sake of context, when this passage was published. And obviously it was written earlier than the publication date.]
D. Nexon gave a talk yesterday at the U. of Ottawa on "International Hierarchy and Symbolic Capital: The Ming Treasure Fleets and the Apollo Missions." Description here.
These maps from NYT (including one showing which forces control which areas in Syria, based on data from the Carter Center) show the difference between Russian and U.S. air strikes in terms of who is being targeted.
Discussing the response of "relatively conservative Americans" to the American Revolution, Henry F. May wrote (in The Enlightenment in America [1976], p.96, endnote omitted):
Conservatives had many qualms, but there was no Thermidor, still less an aristocratic and legitimist reaction like that of Europe in 1815. There had never been a base for real aristocracy. The colonial bourgeois elite was not destroyed, only divided and weakened. Moreover, American conservatives were not romantic reactionaries, but Whigs and moderates.
The last sentence of this passage would seem to contradict Corey Robin's argument in The Reactionary Mind (2011, pb. ed. 2013) that conservative and reactionary are basically interchangeable categories. But perhaps the difference here is less substantive than terminological. According to Corey R., the "priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power -- even at the cost of the strength and integrity of the state" (p.15; italics added). It is subordination and hierarchy "in the family, the factory, and the field" (p.15) -- more than in the polity -- that conservatives have been concerned above all to defend. So if the "conservatives" in America in the 1780s were primarily concerned with 'order' in the public realm, then perhaps, in the framework of The Reactionary Mind, they were not conservatives at all, but merely traditionalists (see ibid., pp.22-23).
Another point might be that if conservatism in its recognizably modern form(s) arose in response to the French Revolution (ibid., p.43), then, perhaps, no responses to the American Revolution should be classified as conservative. (And didn't Burke himself favor independence for the American colonies?)
P.s. (added later): May, p.99, discussing the Constitutional Convention: "Most of the opposition to the adoption of the completed plan [i.e. the Constitution] reflected no fundamental difference of ideology.... It seems to me doubtful whether the Constitution could have been either framed or adopted if the Convention [of 1787] had been held only a few years later, when the Moderate Enlightenment had been challenged by a new kind of revolutionary ideology and most moderates had become reactionaries."
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