Secession and 'norm-skepticism'

Prof. Steve Saideman's post on how countries react to secessionist movements elsewhere cites some scholarship, including his own work and Jonathan Paquin's 2010 book on U.S. policy toward secessionist movements, but the post doesn't offer much in the way of a substantiated argument on a couple of points, or so it seems to me. Saideman asserts that a key factor is ethnic ties (as argued in his book The Ties That Divide), and he also says that when ethnic ties are absent, strategic interests will matter. But he pooh-poohs precedent and norms, declaring himself to be a "precedent-skeptic" and a "norm-skeptic."

Maybe the reason for this skepticism is made clear in his book and articles, but it doesn't really appear in the post. It seems reasonable to me to suggest that the territorial-integrity norm (which I believe is a real thing, continuing disagreement from some readers notwithstanding) would imply a baseline of opposition to most secessionist movements most of the time. And I would guess that if one surveyed all the secessionist/separatist movements active in the world today, one would find relatively few of them enjoying much support from states/governments. Certainly I'm not denying that ethnic ties matter in this context (not having read The Ties That Divide, it would be extremely rash of me to do that), but it does seem to me that a flat statement that one is a "norm-skeptic," with the subtext "if you want to find out why, you'll have to read my book," is not all that helpful. But maybe the evidence Saideman has in mind does not lend itself to summary in a sentence or two, in which case the flat statement is somewhat more defensible, I suppose.

ETA: This forthcoming book also takes an approach to secession that appears, according to the publisher's summary, to be 'norm-skeptical.' 

Note: Post edited slightly after initial posting. 

Quote of the day

The Victorian Protestant British scorned Hinduism’s polytheism, erotic sculptures, spirited mockery of its own gods and earthy mythology as filthy paganism. They also preferred the texts created and perpetuated by a small, upper-caste male elite, and regarded as beneath contempt the vast oral and vernacular literatures enriched and animated by the voices of women and lower castes. It is this latter, “alternative” Hinduism that my book celebrates throughout Indian history.

-- Wendy Doniger, in the NYT [link]

What caused the decline in interstate war?

In a recent post, Eric Posner (prof. at Univ. of Chicago Law School) writes that he sees little evidence that the UN Charter, which dates from 1945, has caused the decline in interstate war. Although I don't share what I take to be Posner's general view of international law, this particular point seems right, inasmuch as Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter is best seen as having codified an already-developed consensus rather than having instituted a 'new' rule. And it wasn't really new anyway: "The League of Nations Covenant specified that the highest purpose of the organization was to protect the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of its members. The Stimson Doctrine (1931) declared that the United States would not recognize as legal any territorial changes brought about through the use of armed force. The League of Nations subsequently adopted this position as a new rule of international relations." (K.J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns, 2004, p.134)

As I've mentioned before, I lean to John Mueller's argument that the seeds of the decline in interstate war, or at least in major-power war, were sown in 1914-1918. I'm not saying this is the whole story re the decline, but I think it's part of it. 

Here's a passage from Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday (1989), pp.55-56:

That World War I was a watershed event in attitudes toward war in the developed world is clear. Exactly why is less clear.... The impact on war attitudes of the Great War's physical devastation and of its horrifying weaponry should not be discounted.... But the bone-deep revulsion it so widely inspired and and the very substantial blow it administered to the war spirit so prevalent just a few years earlier should be credited at least in part to the insidious [I might have chosen a different word] propagandistic efforts of the prewar peace movement. The war proved to be a colossal confirmation of its gadfly arguments about the repulsiveness, immorality, and futility of war and of its uncivilized nature. Of course, the war also shattered the peace movement's airy optimism, and it certainly undercut its proposition that Europe was becoming progressively more civilized; but that was nothing compared to what it did to the notion that war was progressive -- as well as glorious, manly, and beneficial.... Since the peacemakers of 1918 were substantially convinced that the institution of war must be controlled or eradicated, they tried to apply some of the devices and approaches the peace movement had long been advocating.

He continues:

For reasons that seem in reflection to have been special, it didn't work out so well. In Germany a leader arose who almost single-handedly brought major war to Europe, while Japan, a country that had not substantially participated in World War I nor learned its lessons, set itself on a collision course in Asia that was to lead to national cataclysm.

If one accepts this narrative and explanation, the UN Charter formalized a change in attitudes that had been well underway for more than two decades, which could partly explain why the trend line of decline in interstate war does not track neatly with the UN Charter's adoption.

ETA: If Mueller is right, an underlying normative evolution is mainly responsible for the decline of major war in the 'developed' world, rather than the use-of-force rules themselves. Whether the argument can be extended to cover the decline of interstate war in general is something one could debate.

Note: Edited after posting to fix a grammatically challenged sentence. 

Putin, Mueller, and Thucydides; or, You haven't shown nothin'

Imagine a hypothetical opponent of a view I have occasionally supported here. This skeptic might say:

A major European power has invaded a neighboring country. You aggression-is-passé, major-power-war-is-obsolete people are full of it. It's now clear that you're nothing more than industrious tailors to a naked emperor.* In plainer language, your high-falutin theories are rubbish!

Um, not so fast. First, this kind of thing doesn't happen very often (which supports us, not the skeptic). Second, the chances of this leading to a major-power war are extremely low (if not zero, then very close to it). 

TV pictures of Putin watching military exercises outside St. Petersburg, which I just saw as shown on yesterday's PBS NewsHour (viewed via Youtube), are worth pausing over. Here we have a quasi-authoritarian leader of a country with a sizable military watching, with binoculars, his army's helicopters, tanks, etc. engage in maneuvers. One might almost be forgiven for thinking this was a newsreel from decades ago and that the army was about to roll across some (other) frontier. Binoculars and tanks, however, derive their significance from things one can't see. TV is great at visuals, but even good reporting doesn't always supply the context that visuals require.

In short, you nothing-has-changed-since-Thucydides folks have no reason to crow, because this event doesn't 'prove' anything. To adapt the title of the Stevie Wonder song: you haven't shown nothin'.

ETA: Just saw Dan Nexon's piece on the 'failure' of the 'reset' at Monkey Cage. More on it, perhaps, in due course. 
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*This phrase is borrowed from the title of Oran Young's 1969 review of a book by Bruce Russett, in World Politics, v. 21, no. 3.

Insular v. continental states, and their 'near abroads'

...one can distinguish between insular and continental states. An insular state is the only great power on a large body of land that is surrounded on all sides by water.... The United Kingdom and Japan are obvious examples of insular states, since each occupies a large island by itself. The United States is also an insular power, because it is the only great power in the Western Hemisphere. A continental state, on the other hand, is a great power located on a large body of land that is also occupied by one or more other great powers. France, Germany, and Russia are obvious examples of continental states.

-- J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.126

Recalling (for some reason) the above -- and putting aside for the time being the point that BraziI might not agree that the U.S. is the only great power in the Western Hemisphere -- I made this comment at Crooked Timber (slightly edited here):

It’s bad luck in a way for Russia, I suppose, that it’s a continental state, so when it acts improperly/illegally/thuggishly (pick your word) in its neighborhood the repercussions are felt by many countries and to some extent across Europe. Whereas, e.g., when the U.S. went into Panama in ’89 and toppled Noriega, the repercussions were not felt as widely, partly because of the U.S.’s insular location (and Panama's location). It may not be ‘fair,’ but geography matters — not to the (moral/legal) equities but in practical terms.

ETA: Before someone mentions e.g. Japan and the '30s, I should say I probably should have given this post a narrower title: "Russia and the U.S., and their 'near abroads'."

Further note on Ukraine

Dan Nexon writes:

With Russian military forces in place to “protect Russian citizens,” Crimea can declare independence, federate with Russia, or do whatever it wants. Meanwhile, it will be very hard for the EU and the US to make any argument against Crimean self-determination that doesn’t reek of hypocrisy. While I don’t find the Kosovo analogy compelling, it provides Russia with a pretty big rhetorical stick. And as Obama put it in his statement yesterday:

Now, throughout this crisis, we have been very clear about one fundamental principle: the Ukrainian people deserve the opportunity to determine their own future.

Moscow might aim to turn Crimea into a permanent lever over Kiev, support its independence and de facto annexation, or for formal federation via future plebiscite. All three might easily reflect the fundamental principle that “the Crimean people deserve the opportunity to determine their own future.”
 

I can see the logic here, in terms of rhetoric at least, which is the focus of DN's remark. But there is of course a difference; while I'm not saying here how much weight it should carry (that would be too long a discussion for the moment), the difference is that Ukraine is a recognized state, Crimea isn't. How does that bear on the asserted right to self-determination, and does it weaken the "rhetorical stick"? A topic for another time, perhaps.

Art. 2(4) and the Ukraine situation

I've been following, though not intensely, the developments re Russia/Crimea; this report has what seems to be the latest. For reasons of time (and lack of expertise on the region), I'll limit myself to one point. The news reports have been referring to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, under which Ukraine gave up its Soviet-era nukes and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. That's fine and all, but Russia is already required to do that under Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter. So the Budapest Memorandum seems to me, though I'm not an international lawyer, redundant on that point.

Also, one commenter at the WaPo said something like "why is the U.S. concerned about international law, given drones, Guantanamo, etc etc.?" That the G.W. Bush admin violated international law, and that the Obama admin may also be doing so in certain respects, is no reason to refrain from expressing concern/alarm when a country of some consequence appears to be violating one of the most basic norms of international society and one of the most basic provisions of the UN Charter. I'm aware there are all sorts of complications here, but the essential points, in terms of international law, seem reasonably clear. That's not to say anything about the policy questions, which I'm not going to do, not in this post at any rate.

Inferiority complexes and indigenous inventions

Hobsbawm writes (The Age of Extremes, p.462):

Chinese communism [he uses a small "c"; I'd use a capital C] cannot be regarded simply as a subvariety of Soviet communism.... For one thing, it triumphed in a country with a far larger population than the U.S.S.R.... Moreover, China was not only nationally far more homogeneous than most other countries -- about 94 percent of its population were Han Chinese -- but had formed a single, though intermittently disrupted, political unit probably for a minimum of two thousand years. Even more to the point, for most of these two millennia the Chinese Empire, and probably most of its inhabitants who had a view on these matters, had considered China to be the centre and model of world civilization. With minor exceptions all other countries in which communist regimes triumphed, from the U.S.S.R. on, were and saw themselves as culturally backward and marginal, relative to some more advanced and paradigmatic centre of civilization. The very stridency with which the U.S.S.R. insisted, in the Stalin years, on its lack of intellectual and technological dependence on the West, and on the indigenous source of all the leading inventions from telephones to aircraft, was a telling symptom of this sense of inferiority.

Well, I can think offhand of one Soviet-era invention that really was indigenous and that ended up being exported to much of the world: the AK-47.

The debate about boundaries

John Quiggin recently touched off a long discussion at Crooked Timber with the assertion, contained in a re-cycled post on "the traditionality of modernity," that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time, not less."

I won't repeat my comments in that discussion here, but want to follow up with a couple of reflections (one or two of which will be set out here, others perhaps in a subsequent post).

In questioning the assertion that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time," several CT commenters argued that not enough time has passed since the end of decolonization, or even since the end of WW2, to draw inferences about a trend.

For example, Peter T writes in a comment at the end of the thread:

John Quiggin would, I imagine, be fairly hard on those who repeat the “19 years of flat temperatures proves global warming is a myth” idiocy. But there’s a similar issue here. We should not expect national boundaries or state break-up/formation to proceed at a steady pace. They are affairs of decades at the least. Definite national boundaries, as opposed to zones of influence (sometimes broad, sometimes quite sharply defined), are a fairly recent thing over much of the earth anyway. The last wave – the decolonisation movement – only subsided around 40 years ago. There have been a number of minor shifts since then, plus the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. So it hasn’t really been all that stable, and it may be simply too early to go looking for explanations. If we get through another 30 or so years without major changes in state boundaries, then I’ll be impressed (if I live that long).

There are several issues here. One is that a strong argument can be made that decolonization itself, as it played out, contributed to boundary stability rather than the reverse (I dealt with that at CT, so won't elaborate here). Another is that Peter T (like others who made a similar point) assumes that the statement "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" contains an implicit prediction that stability noticed at time T will persist until some future time T + X, or will persist indefinitely. Although the context of JQ's post might have encouraged this interpretation, the statement that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" need not be read as anything other than a descriptive statement of what has been happening in recent years: the words "are becoming" do not necessarily mean "will continue to become" or "will continue to become, indefinitely." If someone looks in the mirror and says "my hair is becoming grayer," that does not necessarily mean "my hair will continue to become grayer." All it means is that the person has noticed that his or her hair is grayer now than it was two weeks ago, or two years ago. There is no guarantee that the process of graying will continue: the color of the hair could simply remain as it is, or it is even possible (if not perhaps likely) that the process of graying could reverse itself (without the application of hair dye or anything like that). 

The point, and sorry for the repetition, is that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" does not necessarily have to mean "national boundaries will continue to become ever more stable" or that "stability will persist indefinitely." It can simply mean that in a given span of time -- the last half-century, say -- national boundaries have become more stable. The notion that this, even if empirically accurate, is a meaningless observation because it probably just represents another phase in an endless up-and-down cycle, and the related notion that 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 years is too short a time span from which to infer anything of consequence, both suffer from the same weakness.

The weakness is that these dismissals ignore the normative context of international politics, the normative environment in which, in this case, fluctuations in boundaries do or don't occur. Actors have ideas and these ideas influence how they behave, at least to some extent. One idea that the corporate actors known as states now firmly have in their heads is that national (i.e., state) boundaries should be messed with as little as possible and as seldom as possible. We know this because they say it in authoritative contexts. Of course actions do not always match words. The question is how often actions diverge from words. Krasner in his book on sovereignty argued that states' actions diverge from their words quite often; he called this, borrowing from other writers, 'organized hypocrisy,' i.e., a situation "in which institutional norms are enduring but frequently ignored." Is the current norm about boundaries -- i.e., 'don't mess with them' in my colloquial rendering -- "frequently ignored"? Are we dealing here with organized hypocrisy? It depends partly on what one means by "frequently," but my sense is -- and some research, to which I referred at CT, backs up this intuition -- that the boundary norm (or 'the territorial integrity norm' as it has been called) is observed much or most of the time. Not all the time, but enough of the time so that one can say that the match between words and deeds in this particular context is reasonably (not perfectly, but reasonably) good. The norm could change, and/or the degree of conformity to it could change, but to write comments on this subject as if the norm did not exist is peculiar, to say the least. 

Commenters who made points like the one quoted above don't even ask the question about the match between words and deeds because they implicitly assume that words don't matter. It's as if the stability/instability of boundaries, for them, is a question in Newtonian physics, completely divorced from what humans in their collective capacity think or say. But that's not how politics, or almost any other aspect of human life for that matter, works.

Note (added 3/3): Peter T has replied in the comment thread attached to this post; those interested may read the ensuing conversation there. 

ETA: Another example of the same sort of thing, this time from a CT commenter who annoys me a lot more than Peter T ever has, namely bob mcmanus. Here's mcmanus (from another CT thread):

Just finished Daniel Alpert’s Age of Oversupply. It’s a readable middle-brow summation ... with affinities to DeLong and Krugman, with the usual laundry list of Keynesian technocratic prescriptions that are politically implausible.  I think the resource or supply constraints are still a long ways off. What we have is a typical glut, overcapacity, overproduction, oversupply crisis, a typical Marxist (too much capital) crisis of astronomical proportions. Combined with an equally terrifying failure of distribution and global and local imbalances of power and resources. Combined with perhaps social technological advances (US hegemon, nukes, smarter Central Banks, int’l technocrats) that prevent the old mechanisms of creative destruction and rebalancing, war/revolution and/or depression/capitals destruction => reterritorialization and reconstruction.

I've added the italics, because that's the part I want to focus on. What is preventing a global war, which mcmanus seems to think might in some way be beneficial, at least to the powers that be? Why, it's "social technological" factors: "US hegemon, nukes, smarter Central Banks, int’l technocrats." God forbid it should ever enter his mind that what statespeople say and believe actually makes a difference in how they conduct themselves. Or that the experiences of their predecessors might influence them. No, that's all superstructural rubbish.

A 'living document'

Two pieces on Syria in yesterday's hard-copy WaPo (p.A10). One, under Karen DeYoung's byline, reports an agreement among "the U.S. and its principal European and Arab allies" on a list of Syrian rebel groups, classified according to whether they should receive arms: yes, no (because of "clear extremist ties"), or maybe. An "Arab official" is quoted as calling the list a "living document," subject to revision as rebel alliances shift. It had better be, though still sounds as if it might be hard to implement.

The second piece, by Loveday Morris, is about the Assad regime's arranging of cease-fires with rebel groups in suburbs of Damascus that it has subjected to starvation and bombardment. The article quotes a range of opinion about these agreements and also notes there is a question about how long they will last.

Kristof's column is worse than I thought it would be

I liked Corey Robin's riposte to Kristof and Charli Carpenter's open letter to him, but until just now I hadn't read the full column itself. It's worse than I thought it would be. Nothing more to say on it right now but perhaps I will weigh in at more length later on. (Then again, maybe not.)

One thing, though: Kristof should spend more time actually reading what academics write. Sure, some of it is turgid and ill-written, but some of it is quite well written, and that even goes for political scientists, Kristof's particular target in this column. I don't want to start listing examples but they aren't that hard to come by.

Mon. linkage

First-hand report from the Central African Republic.

The abstract and the passive voice

Here (via) is an interesting abstract from an article in the American Economic Review of last April:

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected. The surge in imports was concentrated in industries in which the US had a comparative disadvantage, not a comparative advantage. Our analysis is able to rule out decreased trade costs, changing political ideology, and an increase in US loans and grants as alternative explanations. We provide evidence that the increased imports arose through direct purchases of American products by foreign governments.

An abstract can't do everything, but this one seems especially designed to frustrate a reader (or tempt him/her to read the article). First, what exactly is "increased political influence" via a "CIA intervention"? Presumably something like the overthrow of Mossadegh, Arbenz or Allende, but the wording also suggests something short of that. Second, although the abstract strongly suggests that the outcome (increased purchases from U.S. companies) was intended, its use of the passive voice drains the scenario of agency (yes, an overworked word): "increased political influence...was used to create a larger...market...."  Why not say: "We provide evidence that during the Cold War, the U.S. used CIA covert actions to benefit American companies by creating political conditions that led to more purchases of American products by foreign governments"? Maybe that doesn't say exactly the same thing and it's a bit long-winded, but it does indicate that someone was actively doing something, as opposed to "increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions...was used...."

WSJ: Saudi Arabia to increase its arming of Syrian opposition

A low-tech (and somewhat inefficient) way to keep up with the news: drive five minutes to the local convenience store and take a look, while there, at the front page of the hard-copy Wall St. Journal (without, needless to say, buying it. One has already bought something else, so that's cool).

Anyway, the center-page story reports that Saudi Arabia has promised to give the Syrian opposition -- I didn't see particular groups specified -- more sophisticated weaponry, including Chinese-made "man-portable air defense systems" (which apparently means, in plainer language, shoulder-fired missiles that can bring down planes).

The art (?) of forgetting

Something I read recently put me in mind of a line from Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art."  Though I didn't remember the poem's title (and wasn't entirely sure about the author either), I did remember the key line -- except for one crucial word. What I remembered was "the art of ... isn't hard to master."  I had to look up the poem for the missing word. The line is, of course, "the art of losing isn't hard to master."

The Syria talks: no 'bargaining space' means no bargaining

The title of this post is a somewhat jargony way of making an obvious point: two sides can't negotiate if they can't agree on what the issues are. This is where the Syria talks are now. The opposition wants to discuss a transition of power; the Assad government wants to discuss 'terrorism'. And fighting continues, with regime airstrikes intensifying near the Lebanese border and ongoing use of barrel bombs.

The linked WaPo article says that a meeting between U.S. Undersec. of State Wendy Sherman and Russian Dep. For. Minister Gennady Gatilov has been pushed up to Thursday. But it won't matter unless the U.S. and Russia shift their basic stances in some way, which seems unlikely.

A widely used international relations textbook (I'm quoting here from a 10-year-old edition) tells its readers that in "a bargaining process" there are

one or more issues on which each participant hopes to reach agreement on terms favorable to itself, but the participants' interests diverge on these issues, creating conflicts. These conflicts define a bargaining space -- one or more dimensions, each of which represents a distance between the positions of two participants concerning their preferred outcomes. The bargaining process [when successful] disposes of these conflicts by achieving agreement on the distribution of the various items of value that are at stake. The end result is a position arrived at in the bargaining space. (J.S. Goldstein, International Relations 5th ed., 2003, pp.78-9)

This description of bargaining does not apply to the Syria talks. There are no "issues" on which the parties' interests "diverge"; rather, there are two completely incompatible notions of what the issues are. By the same token there is no bargaining space within which the distance between positions can be measured and then narrowed via trade-offs with respect to "the various items of value that are at stake."   

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Noted (unrelated to the above): An Australian soldier has been awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for his actions in Afghanistan (link).

Tues. linkage

The first two are long-ish posts -- the second one in particular -- neither of which I've read with the care they prob. deserve, but mentioning here in case people missed them and are interested:

-- R. Farley reviews R. Overy's The Bombing War [I know Anderson's seen this review already b/c he's in the comment thread].

-- R. Rao on the Khobrogade incident and related matters. If pressed for time one might, I suppose, skip to the end for the Indian Sup Ct's 1925 definition of "carnal intercourse."

-- Also, T. Marvin on why the U.S. should get rid of its land-based ICBMs. (He also has a follow-up post which I haven't read.)

Eyes tight shut

A statue of a sleepwalking man has stirred controversy at Wellesley College (via). I have nothing to say about this because ars longa, vita brevis. Or something.

One person's "red tape" is another's "reasonable safeguard"

Rep. Rogers (R-Mich.) as quoted here:

Individuals who would have been previously removed from the battlefield by U.S. counterterrorism operations for attacking or plotting to attack against U.S. interests remain free because of self-imposed red tape.

Translation: U.S. citizens who would have been previously assassinated without due process remain (at least temporarily) alive because of the widespread, justified outcry against targeted killings of U.S. citizens abroad.

Sat. linkage (abbreviated)

David Miliband discusses the Syrian situation (from the standpoint of the Int'l Rescue Cte., which he heads).

Fri. eve. linkage (abbreviated)

This post from a year ago (h/t), recounting a conversation on a train between a young Bangladeshi and an observant Jew, is quite interesting. The one thing that rang a bit false (if understandably so) was the Bangladeshi's reference to his country having "won its civil war" with Pakistan: the young man neglected to mention India which, um, played a part.

ETA: The conversation centers on the Jewish guy's answer to the Bangladeshi's question about why some Pakistanis look down on Bangladeshis. But I'm not going to reveal the answer here; that would spoil the fun. Suffice to say it's not something you will expect (at least, I didn't).

Housekeeping notes

Last month I tried to move this blog to WordPress. Due to a glitch WordPress wouldn't confirm my e-mail address. I brought the problem to their attention and have just now asked them again about it. If it isn't fixed, I'll just stay here. (At this point I may do that anyway.) 

The other thing is that posting is going to be light here for the next few weeks.

Quote of the day

"Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up too. Straight history, auto-revised history, history without handles, for all the books and articles and white papers, all the talk and the miles of film, something wasn't answered, it wasn't even asked. We were backgrounded, deep, but when the background started sliding forward not a single life was saved by the information. The thing had transmitted too much energy, it heated up too hot, hiding low under the fact-figure crossfire there was a secret history, and not a lot of people felt like running in there to bring it out."

-- Michael Herr, Dispatches (pb. ed., 1978), pp.49-50.

"Untethered narcissism"

An Inside Higher Ed piece on the ISA Governing Council's misguided proposal about blogging generated a comment thread in which one commenter writes:

Let's first stipulate that this is a stupid proposal, is inconsistent with academic freedom, and deserves to be voted down.

That said, there is something to the broader point that academic blogging does not often reflect well on our profession. The vast majority of the blogs I have seen are exercises in untethered narcissism, with a thin layer of academic content that mostly screams "look at me, look at ME". The possession of a Ph.D. or even a long vita does not automatically make one's opinions golden, or even especially interesting. There's a reason we subject our work to peer review.

It's o.k. to complain about narcissism, though I don't find narcissism in blogging quite as prevalent as the commenter here does, but what I dislike about this comment is the implication, perhaps unintended, that if one's views haven't passed peer review they don't deserve to be expressed. I hope that's not what the commenter was suggesting. Blog posts and journal articles are obviously different things, as all participants in this discussion acknowledge. And the reason for peer review is not to keep "uninteresting" opinions out of circulation but rather, at least in theory, to maintain certain scholarly standards. If the commenter finds blogs to be exercises in narcissism, no one is forcing him to read them. And since most blogs probably have smallish readerships, it's unlikely they can do much damage to the image of the academic profession, regardless of their content. (As to whether this particular blog is an academic blog, that's in the eye of the reader. I don't have an academic job, as I've mentioned [narcissistically?] before.)

S. 1881

A commenter at R.P. Wolff's blog, C. Rossi, has a good comment on S.1881, the so-called Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act:

The legislation (S 1881) ... imposing addition[al] sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran is daylight madness. The bill would require the President to certify that Iran has met certain requirements of the bill, many of which the President could not determine much less certify. It would require Iran to forswear control over any of its nuclear activities, peaceful or otherwise. Worst of all, the Congress, which has cowardly given up its war powers to the Executive, would by this bill further cede these powers to Binyamin Netanyahu by requiring the US to provide “economic, military, and diplomatic” support to Israel if it chooses to wage war against Iran’s nuclear facilities. There is a good technical analysis of the bill by Edward Levine of The Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation (http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/iran/articles/analysis_of_faults_in_the_menendez-kirk_iran_sanctions_bill_s_1881/). Also, a trenchant criticism in the NY Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/20/iran-good-deal-now-danger/).  The bill is a priority of AIPAC, and the Democratic cosponsors tend to be clustered in the Northeast (NY, CT, PA, NJ, DE, and MD), that is, areas where AIPAC can still exert some direct effect on wayward legislators....

Cardin of Md. is a cosponsor. (Not too surprising. Still, as a constituent I suppose I should write him a note of protest.)

In "this town" but not of it

There are many Washington, D.C.s, not just the one punctured (or so I gather) in Leibovitz's This Town. And if there's a loop here (by "here" I mean Wash. DC plus Md. and Va. environs), I'm usually out of it. The thought occurred to me just now when I learned, via a story linked by blogger Pub Editor, that Ezra Klein is leaving the Wash. Post. The linked story called it the "talk of the town" but it was the first I had heard of it. And if I hadn't glanced at Pub Editor's blog just now I still wouldn't know about it. I read Klein at WaPo only very occasionally so it's not going to be a big deal for me one way or the other. When Monkey Cage moved to WaPo I pretty much stopped reading the Cage. For one thing there are a limited number of free articles one gets per month and to date I've been too frugal/cheap/whatever to take a digital subscription. CORRECTION: Ronan in comments reminds me that Monkey Cage is actually free for a year following the switch, and after that free if you arrive at it through twitter. So I guess I stopped reading it because I just stopped reading it.  

Bourgeois revolution 2.0

Charles Kenny, here (I half-read, half-skimmed).

From the file cabinet: Keegan on Churchill

It's probably just a sign of when I was born, but I have a file cabinet stuffed with hard copies of various things. Not that my files are in great shape. Just now I went to put something in the file labeled "WW1 & 2; Holocaust; Cold War" (yes, a single file for all that) and Iooking idly through it I came across a piece by John Keegan published in U.S. News & World Report of May 29, 2000. It's a hagiographic piece on Churchill on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his coming to office as prime minister in May 1940. Skimming through it I found a reference to Churchill's having become, during and especially after the war, "a hero in the United States, his mother's homeland, where he remains today the object of a cult status he does not enjoy in his own country." This cult status, especially but not only among certain American conservatives and neocons, is one reason there was a bit of a controversy when Obama a few years ago took the entirely reasonable decision to return the Churchill bust in the White House to the British embassy from which, iirc, it had been on loan.

Keegan also refers, earlier in the piece, to Churchill's commitments to "liberty" and "the rule of law." (To which I silently added an asterisk having to do with the Empire.) To give the flavor of the article more fully, I'll quote the concluding paragraph:

Churchill's sun, at the beginning of the third millennium, has risen and, if it should seem to shine fitfully at times and places, is nevertheless the light of the world. No other citizen of the last century of the second millennium, the worst in history, deserved better to be recognized as a hero to mankind.

I do think Churchill was a great war leader and that the particular moment matched his particular skills as orator and, to quote David Jablonsky, "Victorian man of action." However, the statements that the 20th century was "the worst in history" and that Churchill is the twentieth-century figure most deserving of the title "hero to mankind" are debatable. (Note: not wrong, just debatable.)

ETA: I'm reminded of a post a while back at R.P. Wolff's blog in which he went through a list of (supposed) 'great men' of the 20th cent., denying they were great, until he got to Mandela, who was, in his estimation, great (and in my estimation too, I'd hasten to add).

Khilnani on Bass and Raghavan

Sunil Khilnani's review, in the New Republic (Nov. 25, 2013), of Gary Bass's The Blood Telegram and Srinath Raghavan's 1971 is informative, but I do have a couple of small criticisms (well, the first point is a criticism, the second point is more of an observation).

(1) Khilnani twice refers to India as "militarily weak" (the first reference is to India in 1971 as "the world's largest democracy but also one of its poorest and militarily weakest"), and he writes that, during the months of the crisis leading up to the Indian intervention, "the Indians were aware that Pakistan's American weaponry gave it an edge over India...." Yet, as Khilnani also observes, once the war was launched in December it was a "swift and decisive" Indian victory. This doesn't compute. If India was so militarily weak, why was the victory so quick and decisive? Even if one agrees with Raghavan's view that the Indian victory "was considerably influenced by chance and contingency" (1971, p.235), Khilnani's emphasis on India's military weakness seems a bit odd.

(2) Khilnani writes: "...as Bass and Raghavan each make clear, Pakistan was not the only route available to the Americans [Nixon and Kissinger] to pursue their China goals. The United States could have restrained Pakistan's military actions while still securing the China opening." I think this is probably a correct historical judgment, but it's a bit more definite than what Raghavan says (I'm leaving aside Bass here because I haven't read the Bass book). Raghavan (as mentioned in my review of 1971, below) says Nixon's and Kissinger's refusal to "squeeze" Yahya was "understandable" (1971, p.92) through early July, when Kissinger made his secret trip to Beijing. It is after that point that Pakistan was no longer needed as a conduit to China. On the other hand, Raghavan also suggests that Nixon and Kissinger could have put effective economic pressure on Pakistan in late April or early May (p.266), probably without jeopardizing the China opening. But his overall judgment on this particular issue seems less definite than Khilnani's. It's a matter of nuance, not sharp disagreement. (Romania was the other possibility Nixon and Kissinger considered as a conduit to China, but "the line through Pakistan was the better bet" for reasons Raghavan explains on p.86, from which the quoted phrase is taken.)

MLK Day note

Before MLK Day ends, I thought I'd mention (since I don't think I've mentioned it before, though could be wrong) that last August I went downtown for the Saturday march/event/happening commemorating the 50th anniv. of the '63 march on Washington. I missed the actual march that Saturday but saw the crowds of people on its extended peripheries and the MLK memorial (which I hadn't been to before despite its relative proximity). The bust is striking. The language chiseled on the side, which sparked controversy because of the truncated way it had been excerpted from a speech and is being (or has already been) changed, was pretty easy to more-or-less overlook amid the sea of people. The day was quite a scene, and I'm fairly sure MLK would have liked it.      

Factoid of the day

In the 1970s "the number of the world's universities more than doubled."

-- E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994), p.297

Marcus on the FISA Court

On the NewsHour this evening (which, as per usual, I listened to on the radio), Ruth Marcus waxed enthusiastic about the virtues of getting the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court more involved in some aspects of the intelligence regime than it is now (issuance of warrants to do surveillance is basically what it does, and the reforms announced today by Obama will, among other things, require warrants in more situations. Yes, that's vague. I haven't read the news coverage properly yet. ETA: Court order will be needed "to query phone number records," to quote the WaPo blurb.) Marcus said (verbatim or close paraphrase) "I'm a big believer in judicial review." Well, that's nice. But the question is whether the FISA court has provided effective, independent judicial review up to now, and I think a good case can be made that the answer is no. Taking a defective model and applying it more broadly may not do the trick.

As for no longer eavesdropping on Angela Merkel's cell phone, I'm down with that. (Even Brooks thought that was good. Always a little scary to agree with him on anything, even what day of the week it is.)

Is "al-Qaeda-linked" a useful designation?

Joshua Keating suggests that because, for example, ISIS has "directly disobeyed" Zawahiri and clashed with Jabhat al-Nusra, it may not be useful to describe the former (or the latter) as 'al-Qaeda-linked.' He writes:

The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which is still being used to justify U.S. counterterrorist operations in places like Somalia, pertains to the groups that “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Dangerous as ISIS may be for its region, it seems like a bit of a stretch to describe its goals as in concert with those of al-Qaida central, circa 2001. As Osama Bin Laden’s successor, Zawahiri, appears less and less in control of the actions of groups like ISIS, al-Shabaab, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and others that routinely fall under the “al-Qaida” umbrella in media accounts, it seems like it may be time to narrow our definitions a bit.

I understand the point but I think there may be some reason to treat groups as linked if they share a common ideology, even if their specific aims differ. But it's true that the ordinary U.S. consumer of news, hearing the phrase "al-Qaeda-linked," probably has no clear idea what that means. And there's another point: 'al-Qaeda central' itself, c.2014, may not share the goals of 'al-Qaeda central' c.2001. What are Zawahiri's current goals, other than to survive uncaught and to keep issuing videos?

Book review: Raghavan on the birth of Bangladesh

Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh.  Harvard University Press, 2013.  358 pp.

The crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh was a major episode in the history of South Asia and had implications that reached beyond the subcontinent.  It raised issues that would recur frequently in subsequent decades, as humanitarian catastrophes increasingly took place in the context of civil wars and/or secession.  The creation of Bangladesh also had lasting geopolitical consequences: Srinath Raghavan writes in 1971 that it “was the most significant geopolitical event in the subcontinent since its partition in 1947” (4).  

Raghavan’s book is marked by narrative detail and backed by extensive research: among other things, he has gone into various archives (though Pakistan’s archives on the episode remain closed), read many memoirs and other sources, and also made use of the substantial amount of recent work on the international history of the 1960s and 1970s.  He maintains that the birth of Bangladesh was not inevitable but the product of “choice and chance” (8) and should be viewed in light of “the interplay between the domestic, regional, and international dimensions” (9).  Raghavan deals with the stances of many countries during the crisis and also pays attention to actors such as the press, celebrity musicians, NGOs, and the UN. However, the classic figures of diplomats, soldiers, and heads of state occupy center stage in his account.

This post focuses on what 1971 says about the roles in the crisis of the Soviet Union and the United States, and how these roles were complexly entangled with those of some of the other main players, notably China.  As will be seen, Raghavan is highly critical of Nixon and Kissinger, particularly the latter’s overemphasis on U.S. ‘credibility’ and his tendency to see linkages everywhere.

One general impression that emerges from this history is that none of the main actors wanted the crisis to escalate into a direct great-power military confrontation.  The dominant, though certainly not exclusive, diplomatic-strategic note was one of caution.  This impulse toward restraint, however, also meant that no decisive action was taken to stop the Pakistani army’s rampage in East Pakistan until India went beyond supplying aid to the indigenous independence forces and eventually intervened with its own soldiers (and Raghavan thinks India should have intervened earlier).       

The Nine-Month Crisis

Raghavan’s account starts with the fall of Pakistan’s ruler Ayub Khan in early 1969 and his replacement by a military regime led by Gen. Yahya Khan.  The catalyst for Ayub’s departure was student-led protests, part of the global wave of protests in 1968.  The protests “not only deposed Ayub Khan but also radicalized the movement for autonomy” in East Pakistan (266).  In December 1970, Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League, running on an autonomy platform, won a majority in parliamentary elections, including all but two seats in the East. 

Negotiations on forming a new government ensued between the Awami League and Yahya Khan.  When the negotiations broke down despite the League’s willingness to be flexible on some key points, the Pakistani army launched its crackdown in East Pakistan on March 25, 1971.  A description of the initial assault, written by a UN Development Program official in Dacca (the capital of E. Pakistan), referred to “Army trucks loaded with the dead bodies of civilians” (quoted, 148).  The army shot students in the halls at the university in Dacca (now Dhaka) and also hit Old Dacca (52).  Estimates of the dead from the initial attack varied from 5,000 to 25,000 (149).  Subsequent continued brutality by the Pakistani army led millions of Bengalis to flee into India.

Had India decided quickly to intervene militarily, the crisis would not have lasted long.  However, for reasons Raghavan details in chapter 3 India did not intervene early, and the episode unfolded over a period of nine months: April-December 1971.  When India did decide to launch full-scale operations, the war was short: it “formally began” (234) in the early hours of December 4 (though Pakistan launched a preemptive air strike in the west on Dec. 3), and it ended when the Pakistani army in the east surrendered on Dec. 16. 

Maneuvering in the Whirlwind

The birth of Bangladesh, as this book makes clear, occurred at a turbulent time in world politics.  The intense Cold War crises of the early 1960s – the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis – were in the past, but parts of the Third World (as it was then called) had become an arena in the superpower contest.  The U.S. was still mired in the Vietnam War (and had expanded its operations into Cambodia), while the Soviet Union and China had barely been on speaking terms since 1961 and had come to blows on the Ussuri River in 1969.  China was reeling internally from the effects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Prague Spring had been suppressed by the Soviets, and, particularly in the West, non-state actors and the emergence of human rights as an international-political issue both were having an increasing if uneven impact on the conduct of foreign policy.  At the same time the relatively new postcolonial states generally opposed secessionist movements wherever they occurred.        

The Sino-Soviet split and the U.S. determination to capitalize on it by a rapprochement with China provide the backdrop for much of the diplomatic maneuvering that surrounded the East Pakistan crisis.  The superpowers, Raghavan writes, took fundamentally different approaches to it: Nixon and Kissinger viewed the events through the lens of their grand geopolitical plans, whereas the USSR’s perspective was primarily regional (115). 

The Soviets, having mediated in Tashkent the settlement that restored the status quo after the 1965 Pakistan/India war over Kashmir, saw themselves as peacemakers on the subcontinent (and for a brief period they sold arms to Pakistan and India at the same time).  Premier Alexei Kosygin, for example, favored a “‘trade and transit agreement’ between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan which would be ‘beneficial for the whole region’” (114).  In line with this approach the Soviets, at least through most of the crisis, sought to discourage Indian military intervention in East Pakistan and to push Yahya Khan “toward a peaceful, political resolution of the problem” (116).  It was only toward the end of the crisis that the Soviets gave up hope that Yahya might release Mujibur Rahman from jail and negotiate a resolution with him (see below).         

The USSR and India signed a “friendship and cooperation” treaty on August 9, 1971.  According to Raghavan, it was a statement by Kissinger that finally pushed India to sign the treaty.  Having returned from his secret trip to China (see below), Kissinger informed the Indian ambassador to the U.S. on July 17 “that if China intervened in an India-Pakistan war, the United States would be unable to help India”; this led Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who had been hesitating, to move to finalize the treaty with the USSR (127).  The treaty’s key provision, Art. IX, called for “mutual consultations” between the parties with a view to “remov[ing]” any threat of an attack on either one; it also, in effect, ruled out Soviet assistance to Pakistan if India-Pakistan hostilities broke out.

However, a gap remained between the USSR and India on the proper approach to the crisis, since the Soviets for some time thought that the refugee issue could be resolved separately from the political issue of East Pakistan’s future (124) and were reluctant to give even conditional approval for Indian military action or to confer about “contingencies.”  The day after the treaty was signed, Soviet foreign minister Gromyko urged Mrs. Gandhi to view “the situation in a cold blooded way…The heart should be warm but the mind should be cool as we say” (quoted, 130).  It was only later, specifically in late September, that the Soviet leadership, having concluded that Yahya Khan “was unwilling to work toward any reasonable solution,…decided to throw its weight behind India” (226).  By late October, the Indian foreign minister was able to tell a parliamentary committee “that India could count on ‘total support’ from the Soviet Union” (226).  To the end, however, the Soviets remained determined not to become directly involved militarily in the crisis and worried about the possibilities of an escalation that would drag them into a great-power confrontation.                   

Tilting at Windmills

Now to the matter of the U.S. stance.  Although “Nixon wheeled with him to office a trolley of biases against India and in favor of Pakistan” (82), Raghavan contends that it was not these prejudices, for the most part, but rather the planned opening to China, and Pakistan’s role in it, that dominated Nixon’s and Kissinger’s calculations.  As the crisis erupted, Nixon ordered his people not to “squeeze” Yahya Khan (81).  The Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, had suggested that Yahya Khan’s good offices could be used to facilitate the China opening, and “[i]n this context, Nixon and Kissinger’s desire to refrain from squeezing Yahya…was understandable” (92), at least until after Kissinger’s secret trip to China in early July.  Incidentally, contrary to Kissinger’s claim in his memoir White House Years that “Pakistan’s leaders…never sought any reciprocity” (quoted, 87) for their role as conduit to China, Pakistan pressed for a resumption of arms sales, which the U.S. did resume on a one-time basis in October 1970 (84, 87).   

Nixon and Kissinger’s refusal to pressure Yahya Khan elicited a strong protest from the U.S. consul in Dhaka, Archer Blood, who sent cables in late March and early April 1971 “detailing the terror being unleashed on the populace by the Pakistani army” (89).  Nixon and Kissinger were unmoved, and the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad chimed in, deprecating “righteous indignation” (quoted, 89) as a basis for policy.  Raghavan suggests that, however “understandable” was the U.S. softness toward Yahya because of his role as channel to China, the U.S. could have  exercised economic leverage on Pakistan, which was “facing a major liquidity crisis” (94), without undermining the China opening.  Raghavan thinks it “highly probable” that U.S. pressure of this sort "in late April to early May" would have forced Yahya to grant the Awami League’s autonomy demands (266).  (This must remain somewhat conjectural, of course, since the leverage was not exercised.)

After Kissinger’s secret trip to China (July 9th-11th), U.S. policy, Raghavan notes, “began shifting from a disinclination to squeeze Yahya to an active tilt in favor of Pakistan” (105).  (Among major powers, the U.S. was mostly alone in this; Edward Heath’s government in Britain, for example, took a quite different tack; see 162-69.  For the positions of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and others, see chapter 7.)    

Why the tilt?  “After all, following Kissinger’s trip to Beijing, Pakistan was no longer important as a diplomatic conduit to China” (106).  The answer, according to Raghavan, boils down to Kissinger’s and Nixon’s “excessive concern with reputation” (198) – their belief that if they failed to tilt toward Pakistan and thereby failed to stand with an ally, the nascent U.S.-China connection would be damaged. 

During Kissinger’s July trip he and Zhou Enlai had discussed the crisis, and in their last conversation before Kissinger left, “Zhou asked Kissinger to ‘please tell President Yahya Khan that if India commits aggression, we will support Pakistan’” (106).  This statement was vague – “we will support Pakistan” could mean a range of different things.  But Kissinger interpreted it as a Chinese test of U.S. commitment to Pakistan, such that if the U.S., in Raghavan’s words, “stood aside and allowed Pakistan to be humiliated by India, [U.S.] credibility in the eyes of Beijing would suffer -- resulting in deep, possibly irreparable harm to the budding relationship with the People’s Republic” (106; cf. 198, 247). 

Thus when the crisis reached its climax in December, Nixon and Kissinger sent a U.S. naval task force steaming from the coast of South Vietnam toward the Bay of Bengal, told the Soviets that the situation on the subcontinent jeopardized U.S.-Soviet détente, and urged – unavailingly – the Chinese to move soldiers to the border with India (Nixon to Kissinger: “I tell you a movement of even some Chinese toward that border could scare those goddamn Indians to death” [quoted, 247].)  Kissinger’s remarks to Nixon at this point are laced with urgency: e.g., “the world’s psychological balance of power” is at stake (quoted, 248); and “at least we’re coming off like men” (quoted, 256).   

Nixon and Kissinger claimed credit in their memoirs for saving West Pakistan from Indian aggression, although the only concrete evidence of Indian intentions in that respect that they had was a single-sourced CIA report of early December (244).  Raghavan argues that an attack on West Pakistan was never India’s aim. He writes: “Nixon and Kissinger overplayed the importance of an intelligence source, mainly because it helped them rationalize their desire to demonstrate resolve to China and the Soviet Union…. The only practical consequence of the aggressive U.S. posturing was to spur the Indians to capture Dhaka and seal their victory – objectives that had not been on their strategic horizons when the war began.  This was Nixon and Kissinger’s war of illusions. In retrospect, they come across not as tough statesmen tilting toward their ally but as a picaresque pair tilting at windmills” (262-63).

***  

A few concluding remarks.  1971 covers a lot of ground, and I’ve left out much in this post.  For instance I’ve mostly passed over Raghavan’s discussion of how trends in the global normative/political environment of the time affected the crisis and the reactions to it (see chapter 6), a topic which could occupy a post by itself (and which, from my standpoint, would involve taking issue with one or two of the author’s interpretations, albeit on somewhat tangential points).  The book’s wide scope coupled with attention to detail will make it valuable to historians, IR scholars, and others.  Finally, a minor point: 1971 has a full scholarly apparatus and two maps, but in addition a timeline/chronology would have been helpful.

The War on Poverty 50 years on

See here for one of many media discussions of the 50th anniv. of LBJ's announcement of the War on Poverty.

One of the aspects that I haven't heard discussed in the current round is the use of the 'war' metaphor, although that's been written about before. See also, e.g., the War on Drugs, though the War on Poverty had significant successes, which I don't think -- although I'll stand open to correction -- the War on Drugs did.

Added later: Loomis says today we'd largely have to call the war on poverty lost. An overstatement. E.g. the kind of malnutrition that existed pre-'64 in Appalachia and elsewhere is considerably less prevalent in the U.S. today -- not gone, but less prevalent. By the way, why only 188 comments (at last look) on the Loomis post? It's LGM, after all; shouldn't there be at least 6,789,444,567 comments? Loomis writes, for the most part, serious posts, but I occasionally wonder what it would be like to blog at a place where you can write virtually anything (except Farley's videos of his talking-heads exchanges) and get a fair number of comments.

'Three-way war' in western Iraq

A WaPo piece about the apparent fall of Fallujah to al-Qaeda (ISIS) paints a picture of a confused situation:

The capture of Fallujah came amid an explosion of violence across the western desert province of Anbar in which local tribes, Iraqi security forces and al-Qaeda-affiliated militants have been fighting one another for days in a confusingly chaotic three-way war.

A few thoughts: 

(1) The U.S. 'surge' of 2006-07 in Iraq depended on making allies of the local Sunni tribes in the west in the fight against al-Qaeda. Those groups still oppose each other, but what was more-or-less a two-way conflict then has now become a three-cornered one, as the tribes are apparently no longer willing to make any kind of common cause with the Iraqi government. This point leads to:

(2) Had Maliki's government made more of an effort to reach out to Sunnis and bring them into positions of responsibility/authority, the disaffection of the Sunni tribes in Anbar province might have been less and there might not have been the demonstrations against the Maliki government that led to the Iraqi security forces' response and thence to the current situation that the linked article describes. That's a lot of "mights," but it seems hard to avoid the inference that Maliki's shortsightedness, foolishness, fearfulness or a combination thereof have contributed to the current mess.

(3) It might be tempting to argue (as McCain and others no doubt will) that had the Obama admin adopted a more interventionist position on Syria, the al-Qaeda forces currently operating across the Iraq-Syria border would not have had the opportunity to reconstitute themselves in the way they have over the past year or so. But this assumes, first, that a U.S. intervention in Syria would have been able to alter the dynamics of the Syrian civil war fairly quickly and easily, and second, it assumes that if Assad had been removed from power, 'moderate' rebel forces in Syria would have been strong enough both to hold the reins of the state and to keep at bay al-Qaeda and/or the Nusra front and the other anti-Assad Islamist elements. Both these assumptions seem questionable (if not simply wrong).

Added later: Liz Sly (WaPo) has another piece on various Syrian rebel groups fighting against ISIS in northern Syria. (I will put in the link later.)

Happy new year

Stay tuned for an announcement about the new site, coming soon.

Break

I'm taking a break from posting through the end of the year. Best wishes to all readers for a good remainder of 2013.

P.M. linkage

[note: last post before break]

-- China loosens its one-child policy.

-- Akash Kapur reports (paywalled) on the impact of development (or 'development') on an Indian village, and Pankaj Mishra critiques (paywalled) Perry Anderson's The Indian Ideology.

-- The Nation has a database compiling civilian casualties caused by ISAF and Afghan government forces' operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2012. (H/t FP's AfPak [now renamed South Asia] Daily Brief, which says that the total is in a range between about 2,800 and 6,500.) This is quite a bit less than Taliban-caused civilian casualties -- which does not excuse them, of course.

-- Latest UN estimates on global child mortality: available via this page.

Noted

From NYRB (Oct. 24): Malise Ruthven reviews (h/t) Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone.

A brief excerpt:

Ahmed argues...that the acts of terror or violence directed at the U.S. or its allies are set off as much by revenge based on values of tribal honor as by extremist ideologies.... It seems fair to argue, as Ahmed does, that the values of honor and revenge inherent in the tribal systems contribute to jidahist extremism, and that by ignoring this all-important factor the U.S. has been courting disaster.

But according to Ruthven, Ahmed sees the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) as "countertribal." Anyway, RTWT.

A modest proposal

When a major natural disaster strikes, like the recent typhoon in the Philippines, the U.S. military responds. On one level, that's good. On another level, however, it becomes grist for the rhetorical mill of those who argue that the U.S. is an indispensable provider of global public goods and that any cutback in its military posture would leave a vacuum that no one would fill.

What if the U.S. pushed for the creation of a multilateral Disaster Relief Task Force to be operated either as a freestanding entity or under the auspices of an international organization (it could be the UN, but wouldn't necessarily have to be)? That way, when a disaster strikes, the multilateral task force would be the main responder, not the U.S. military. That would, among other things, weaken the case of those who argue that the U.S. global military posture cannot or should not be reduced in any way.

Continuing on the Bangladesh theme...

...J. Ulfelder, here, on its fragile, 'unconsolidated' politics.

Klein on the ACA...

...and why Landrieu's bill will hurt it.

"We will go to Mars together" -- not

I recently bought Srinath Raghavan's 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. I rarely shell out for hardcover books, so I'm planning to read it properly, probably during my upcoming blogging break. For now, though, I've been dipping into it, reading passages here and there. On p.83 I found this:

Visiting India in the summer of 1969, Nixon reiterated to Indira Gandhi his commitment to India's economic development. "We will go to Mars together," he assured her.

India has just launched a Mars mission -- alone.

Quote of the day

...it is almost certainly true...that the U.S. government, and all other governments,...base their foreign policies on the notion that these policies advance their national interests. This information does not help us analytically, however, for the concept of national interest is anything but a sure guide to policy. In fact, except within very broad limits, the national interest is no guide to policy at all. Within these limits -- which are not trivial but are not very discriminating either -- national interest means whatever different people want it to mean. As a symbol for justifying actions and for rallying or mobilizing support, the notion of national interest has considerable power.... As an analytic concept from which one can deduce or predict behavior, however, the concept has very little utility.

-- Robert A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World (pb, 1976), pp. 323-24 (footnotes omitted)


Added later:
from R. Aron, Peace and War, trans. R. Howard & A.B. Fox (1966), pp.91, 93:

Not only are the historical objectives of political units not deducible from the relation of forces, but the ultimate objectives of such units are legitimately equivocal.... The plurality of concrete objectives and of ultimate objectives forbids a rational definition of "national interest".... The theory we are sketching here tends to analyze the meaning of diplomatic behavior, to trace its fundamental notions, to specify the variables that must be reviewed in order to understand any one constellation. But it does not suggest an "eternal diplomacy," it does not claim to be the reconstruction of a closed system.

Verdict in Bangladesh border guards case

A civilian court in Bangladesh, in a trial criticized by human rights groups (with some reason, it would appear), has sentenced 152 people to death in connection with the violent 2009 mutiny by members of the Bangladeshi Rifles (since renamed the Bangladesh Border Guards). [H/t FP Morning Brief, 11/6] 

Nowhere to go but up

A couple of things I've seen recently in the blogoshere led me to take a look at an article called "Decolonizing International Relations: Perspectives from Latin America," International Studies Review, Sept. 2012.

The author begins by saying that "the aim of this paper is to think differently about International Relations (IR) by thinking differently about the Americas." The author writes "as a Latin Americanist, and as such...bring[s] a particular geographical and disciplinary perspective to the question of power in the region, drawing on the 'coloniality of power' perspective developed by Latin American academics."

I suppose that could be interesting, provided the perspective is lucidly explained for those unfamiliar with it.

But then my eye fell on this passage, in which the author is approvingly discussing Inayatullah and Blaney's book International Relations and the Problem of Difference:

[Inayatullah and Blaney] show how ideas such as sovereignty and just war -- keystones in the edifice of IR -- are grounded in an understanding of the world which writes such ideas as universal without acknowledging that they emerged from a particular social milieu.

Let's put 'just war' aside and focus on sovereignty. How is the idea of sovereignty "grounded in an understanding of the world" which fails to acknowledge that it emerged from "a particular social milieu"? Virtually every intro IR textbook informs its readers that the idea of sovereignty (as the term is used in contemporary international law and relations) emerged from a particular milieu -- i.e., Europe during a particular era (whose precise dates one might argue about) -- and then eventually spread beyond the milieu in which it originated. No doubt the spread of the idea and institution of sovereignty was historically tied up in various ways with European imperialism, but are people not aware that the most vociferous proponents of state sovereignty and its corollary of noninterference in internal affairs are the states that emerged from the processes of decolonization in the nineteenth and then the mid-twentieth century? Try telling any leader of an Asian, African or Latin American country that the idea of sovereignty is a tool of the 'coloniality of power' because it is a European idea pretending to be a universal one. Chances are you'll be greeted with a shrug or a quizzical look and then politely asked to leave.

Things get worse with this:

...the notion of European superiority was caught up with the Peace of Westphalia, which allowed the birth of the modern nation-state to be heralded as a social advance and confirmed the nation-state as a 'natural' and desirable social model....

Actually the Peace of Westphalia had very little (indeed I would say nothing) to do with the "birth of the modern nation-state," which was a long process that did not reach its end-point until well after 1648. How much Westphalia even had to do with sovereignty is highly debatable, but sovereignty and "the modern nation-state" should not be treated as the same. As for the Peace of Westphalia allowing "the birth of the modern nation-state to be heralded as a social advance and confirm[ing] the nation-state as a 'natural' and desirable social model," I think that is little better than gibberish.

A glance at the rest of the article suggests that it gets somewhat better, but then, starting from such a low point, it has nowhere to go but up.

More on 'the nuclear taboo'

After reading the comment (by Hank) on the preceding post, I punched "nuclear taboo + Tannenwald" into Google, and the first thing to come up was a two-page summary of a 2005 article by her. I'm not sure exactly who wrote the summary, but here's the link (pdf).

The nuclear taboo is defined as a "normative belief that the first use of nukes is an 'unthinkable' policy option" (the quote is from the link).

There are at least two questions that can be asked about this:

1) Should this belief be held -- i.e., if people hold this belief, is it a good thing that they do? -- or is it preferable to view nuclear weapons in the same general light as other weapons, subject to the same kinds of legal/moral analysis as other weapons?

2) Is this belief actually held by publics (and/or policymakers), or not?

The article whose abstract I linked in the previous post is concerned, or so I gather, with question #2. Hank's comment raised issues pertaining to question #1. It's worth keeping in mind that these are different questions -- they may both be worth asking, but they are different.

P.s. (added later): Hank's comment was not out of place, inasmuch as the last line of the preceding post suggested that I think the answer to #1 is: yes, the nuclear taboo is a belief that should be held (whether it is actually held or not).