Just like imam used to make.

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Trying to help foreigners understand America, the Gummint pays for some of them to study in the US as Fulbright scholars. Nasser al-Awlaki and his wife came from Yemen in 1971 on a Fulbright to study agricultural economics. He got an MA from UNM, then a Ph.D. from Nebraska, then taught at Meenasotta for a couple of years. Almost immediately, he and the missus had a child. They named the sprout Anwar al-Awlaki. Having been born in the USA, Anwar was an American citizen. In 1978 the family returned to Yemen.

To be perfectly honest, the goat pizza available in Yemen paled in comparison to what could be had in the States. In 1990, Anwar al-Awlaki started in at Colorado State University. One summer he spent the break fighting in Afghanistan. (Must have made for interesting conversation in the dorm that Fall. “So, Bill, what did you do this summer? I picked lettuce on my uncle’s farm. Hoo-whee, we had some wild times on Saturday night. How ‘bout you Anne-War? Well, I ambushed opposing mujahedeen, then walked around shooting the wounded in the head.”) Anyway, by 1994 he got a B.S. in Civil Engineering and was a part-time imam in a mosque in Denver.

In 1996 he landed a job as an imam in San Diego. Here he got an M.A. in Educational Leadership from SDSU. However, Shaitan (in the form of babes in bikinis) beset him: he got hauled in for soliciting prostitutes a couple of times. In 1999 the EffaBeeEye came around, wanting to know if he had any ties to the “blind sheikh” who had organized the 1993 WTC truck bombing or to the then-munchkin terrorist Osama bin Laden. He said “no” and that was good enough for them. Meanwhile, a couple of the future 9/11 guys were attending services at his mosque. In 2000 he landed a job as an imam at a big mosque in northern Virginia. (We can’t even keep alcoholic child-molesters from becoming school bus drivers, so why blame a mosque for hiring an imam who can’t keep his pants on?)   During 2001 he worked toward a doctorate in Human Resources Development at George Washington University’s Education School. (He actually didn’t have much in the way of Islamic scholarly credentials, so his charismatic appeal to ignorant fanatics seems to arisen from what he picked up in American Ed. Schools.)

Then 9/11 came along. “The US was at war with al-Qaeda, not with Islam.” So, Awlaki got invited to a lunch at what was left of the Pentagon. They probably served pork chops or crab cakes, because the next thing you know (March 2002), he was on a plane to Yemen. From 2002 to 2004 he bounced between Yemen, the US, and the UK as an advocate of jihad.

After a variety of adventures, Awlaki settled down as a long-distance recruiter and inciter of jihadis. His fluent English and knowledge of American society, his charismatic personality, and his ease in using modern media made him a prominent figure despite hiding out in a remote area of one of the most backward places on Earth. The London subway bombers, the Times Square bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and many others all had his sermons on their computers or had exchanged messages with him. Since he has said that “jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding upon every other able Muslim,” he probably wasn’t trying to calm them down. When the Underwear Bomber said that Awlaki helped train him for his mission, the government got fed up and decided to kill him. On 9/30/11 they did.

Can the United States execute an American citizen without trial, without even producing the evidence upon which the decision to kill him is based? Would you really want to establish the legal precedent? Talk about “death panels”! So, civil libertarians opposed the execution. On the other hand, some of them say the US can’t “execute” anyone anywhere without trial. It will be hard to fight a war on terrorism with those hand-cuffs in place. What to do?

Carlotta Gall on Afghanistan

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The British had an empire all over the world, so both British journalism and the British intelligence service had an unusual reach. Many of the empire-builders, journalists, and intelligence officers were willing to go where others feared to tread. Henderson Alexander “Sandy” Gall (1927) grew up on a rubber plantation in Malaya, went to school in Britain, and then went to work for a series of news agencies. He reported on the Suez Crisis (1956); the Hungarian Crisis (1956); the Congo Crisis (1960-1963); the Vietnam War (various times, 1965-1975); the Six Days War (1967); Uganda (where he was arrested by Idi Amin’s police in 1972 while reporting on the expulsion of the Indians); and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Along the way, Gall did some work for MI 6, the British intelligence service. He slowed down a bit for a decade to work as the news presenter on a television show and to have a family. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 he went there to make a series of documentaries about the “mujahideen” fighting against the Russkies.

His daughter, Carlotta Gall (1971?- ) is a chip off the old block. She went to Cambridge University, where she “read” Russian and French, then got an MA in International Relations and Journalism. This provided her with a launching pad to become a reporter for the Moscow Times, covering the war in Chechnya (1994-1998). She briefly covered the Caucasus and Central Asia for the Financial Times and the Economist (1998-1999), then went to work for the New York Times. For a couple of years Gall covered the wars attending the break-up of the former Yugoslavia (1999-2001). Then she went to Afghanistan to cover the American war against the Taliban and al Qaeda (2001-2013). Now she is supposed to be covering the Middle East, but the Times sent her hot-foot to Ukraine when trouble cooked-off there.

Right at the moment (September 2014), she is best known for her book The Wrong Enemy.[1] Based on her years of reporting in and deep knowledge of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gall argues that Pakistan is the force driving the Taliban in its fight against the Americans. The Soviet invasion of Pakistan put a hostile state on the western border of Pakistan. Both the Americans and the Pakistanis involved themselves in supporting the “mujahideen” resistance to the Soviets. When the Soviets left in 1989, so did the Americans. The Pakistanis stayed. Soon, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) aligned itself with the Taliban, the victors in the civil war that followed the Russian defeat. Briefly, after 9/11, Pakistan aligned itself with the Americans who overthrew the Taliban as part of their hunt for Osama bin Laden. When, after several years, it became apparent that the Americans would not be leaving Afghanistan any time soon and appeared to be creating their own client-state in Kabul, the ISI re-entered the fray by reviving the alliance with the Taliban. The chief culprit here has been Pakistani General Ashfaq Kayani, who headed the ISI from 2004 to 2007, and then became chief-of-staff of the army in a country with a long history of military intervention in politics. Under Kayani’s direction, ISI armed, trained, and directed the Taliban in a war that has killed 2,300 American soldiers, 1,100 other foreign soldiers, and somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 Afghans.

Why haven’t the Americans recognized that they are fighting “the wrong enemy”? Possibly because the ISI is good at hiding its hand. Possibly because of long-standing deficiencies in the CIA. Possibly because the incompetence and corruption of the Karzai government is so much easier to see. Possibly because it would be difficult to explain to the American people.

[1] Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

Exporting Jobs

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Companies are owned by private investors seeking the maximum return on their investment. In the decades after the Second World War, the United States slowly became a high-cost place to do business. Labor costs (wages and benefits), and environmental and workplace safety regulations played an important role in this process. The weakening quality of the American workforce in terms of science and math also played a role.

Beginning in the late 1970s major American firms began seeking higher profits through the lower production costs that could be attained by moving operations outside the United States. General Electric, under Jack Welch, figures as one of the leaders in this movement and GE was not shy about encouraging its own suppliers to do the same. Many other manufacturers followed the example of GE. For example, in 1992 the Ford Motor Company overseas manufacturing sector employed 47 percent of its workforce, but still employed 53 percent of its workforce in the US and Canada. In 2009 the overseas operations employed 63 percent of its workforce, while 37 percent were employed in the US, Canada, and Mexico.

Then, in the 1990s, the growth of the Internet exposed service industries to globalization as well. Computer programmers have seen 13 percent of their jobs exported to foreign countries.

Furthermore, the United States has the second highest rate of taxation on corporations in the world. The nominal tax rate on corporate profits is 35 percent. Companies have spent decades lobbying Congress in successful efforts to create tax loopholes, so the average effective rate is 25 percent. In Canada the corporate tax rate is 16.5 percent; in Germany it is 15.8 percent; in Ireland it is 12.5 percent. Thus, the tax rate on corporate profits in the United States remains higher than the rates in many foreign countries.

Many American companies have created foreign branches to take advantage of lower labor and regulatory costs, and lower rates of taxation. Moreover, American corporations with operations abroad must pay the difference between the tax rate in the country where they earned the profit and the tax rate in the United States when they repatriate those profits. Rather than do so, the companies reinvest the foreign profits in their foreign profits in expanding production overseas, rather than reinvesting in the United States. America is almost alone in double-taxing profits earned abroad.

In 2010, the Simpson-Bowles commission President Obama recommended that the US tax rate be lowered to 23 percent and most loopholes closed. American business leaders generally accepted this proposal. However, the proposal also encountered opposition from the left to any reduction of taxes on business. According to one critic of corporate tax avoidance “It’s unpatriotic, it’s unfair, and we can’t afford it.”

Who profits from this strategy? American corporations profit: in 2009 47 percent of the revenues of the five hundred leading American corporations came from their overseas operations. Developing economies that host American corporations profit: between 1995 and 2008 China’s GDP grew an average of 9.6 percent and India’s GDP grew an average of 6.9 percent. It’s harder to say that America itself benefits. Between 1995 and 2008 the GDP of the United States grew an average of 2.9 percent. In 1950, the United States Government pulled in thirty percent of its revenue from taxes on corporations. In 2010, the United States Government pulled in nine percent of its revenues from taxes on corporations.

Corporate “inversions” are just the latest example of these problems.

“Where America’s Jobs Went,” The Week, 25 March 2011, p. 13; “Taxing corporations,” The Week, 2 September 2011, p. 13.

Arab Youth

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Can one be optimistic about the future of the Middle East? Not if you read the newspapers. What if you read the work of knowledgeable scholars? Then there might be more cause for optimism. Juan Cole has argued that a watershed divides the older generation of Arabs from the youth of today. The older generation is poorly educated and often illiterate, largely rural, and religiously observant. Fundamentally conservative, they have accepted a “complacent, stagnant and corrupt status quo” in politics and the economy. Younger people, Cole argues, are better educated, more concentrated in urban areas, more familiar with all kinds of technology, and less religiously observant than are their parents and grandparents. In Egypt, half the population is less than 25 years old. They are also un-employed and under-employed at “Depression-era rates.” On the one hand, this gives them serious grievances against their own society. On the other hand, it leaves them with a lot of free time for complaining, talking, organizing, and demonstrating.   Their familiarity with social media magnifies these tendencies. Cole argues that these sorts of young people played an important role in the “Arab Spring” uprisings that brought down authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.[1] Cole focuses in particular on “left-liberal youth living in towns and cities” whom he sees as forming a credible opposition to both traditional authoritarian governments and to Islamic fundamentalists.

There are objections to Professor Cole’s optimism. For one thing, if you track the historical background to the “Arab Spring,” you can see a rising wave of public discontent. In early 2003, there were demonstrations opposing the American attack on Iraq; in 2006, came Youtube videos of Egyptian secret police abusing suspects in custody; in late 2008, there were demonstrations over the first Gaza war between Israel and Hamas; and in early 2011, video of Tunisian police firing on demonstrators started the ball rolling for the “Arab Spring.” The trouble is that these were equal parts anti-Western (US, Israel) and anti-authoritarian.

Second, the concept of rootless, estranged young people is an umbrella category. Estranged young people looking for a cause don’t have to choose left-liberal progressivism. Young people in the Thirties flocked to Nazism with as much enthusiasm (and in greater numbers) as they did to the International Brigades that fought for the Spanish Republic. Jihadists shelter under the umbrella just as much as do progressives. A familiarity with social media is no vaccine against Islamism. Both ISIS and Anwar al-Awlaki could master modern social media as well as can the progressive young people of the Middle East.

Finally, faced with a choice between Islamists governments elected after a “revolution,” and a return to the old order under the auspices of a military-economic elite complex, the progressive young people celebrated by Professor Cole seem to have opted for the latter. Now that the old order is back in power, the young progressives appear to have come in for as much repression as has the Muslim Brotherhood.

However, the real question is not what mistakes were made by the young people studied by Professor Cole, but what they have learned from those mistakes. They will get another chance. The fighting in Libya will—eventually—burn itself out. The al-Sisi government doesn’t appear to have any solutions for the deep social and economic crises of Egypt. ISIS is going to give radical Islamism a bad name in many quarters. The older generation will gave way to the younger generation. Time is on their side.

[1] Juan Cole, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

Arming the Moderates

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Controversy has swirled around President Obama’s Syrian policy. In particular, people have talked a good deal about the need to support the “moderates” opposing Bashar al-Assad. It has been said that the failure to support the “moderates” allowed the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) to expand its power. In light of this discussion, it is interesting to revisit a piece in the New York Times from April 2013 by Ben Hubbard.[1]

According to Hubbard, the rebellion against Assad began among, is led by, and continues to draw most of its support from conservative Sunni Muslims. They were pro-Islamist from the start. In contrast, the supporters of a “democratic” Syria mostly have been “civilian activists, protesters, and aid workers.” Such people played a role in igniting the rebellion, but soon found themselves pushed to the curbside. Instead, the Ahrar al-Sham group and the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front raised soldiers, obtained arms, and launched attacks. Early small successes snowballed into greater successes later on. Rebels armed-up and added more recruits by seizing Syrian army posts, then towns, and then key resources. ISIS represents this pattern carried to an extreme.

Hubbard reported that one moderate rebel military leader had claimed that most Nusra Front recruits had “joined the group for the weapons, not the ideology” and “some left after discovering the al-Qaeda connection.” However, he acknowledged that the Nusra Front fielded the strongest military force in his area and spoke “on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.”

A year and a half ago Hubbard reported that “nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” Instead, “More than two years of violence have radicalized the armed opposition fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, leaving few groups that both share the political vision of the United States and have the military might to push it forward.”

 

A couple of observation and questions.

Islamist jihadis come to fight for ISIS. Why don’t equivalent figures come to fight for a democratic, secular Syria? Rich people and governments arm the Islamist rebels in Syria. Why don’t equivalent figures or governments in other Arab countries arm the supporters of a democratic, secular Syria? Is it because the supporters of secular, democratic government are few and far between in the Arab world? This isn’t to argue that such people don’t exist. Television talk-shows are full of them.

The American conjecture that fighters flow toward the Islamists because they are the ones with the guns, rather than because of ideology, is belied by the many foreign jihadis who have come to Syria and by the growth of ISIS at the expense of the Nusra Front.

Would Western efforts to arm the moderates just lead to the supporters of the Islamists upping their own support?

Would supporting “moderates” sufficiently to bring them to power just create a puppet-government that has no legitimacy with the majority of the Syrian people? One that is scorned by other Arab governments?

Is it possible that “moderates” just don’t want to fight? Maybe they’re just too “moderate.”

[1] “Islamist Rebels Create Dilemma on Syria Policy, NYT, 28 April 2013, A1, A8.

 

Straight talk on American Education.

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The cost of sending your kid to a university has gone up by 8 percent in the middle of the next-best-thing to “The Great Depression” that my folks lived through. President Obama—God bless his pointy little head—has offered a plan to help some of the worst off. His Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has been hard at work on a plan to replace the much-despised “No Child Left Behind” with “Well, Some Children Will Be Left Behind.” (At least it falls in the tradition of what American schools have been doing for two hundred years.) Asian countries have been gaining on American educational achievement like alligators fed on a mix of steroids and speed. Americans are desperate for better and more cost-effective schools.

I’ve taught at a little college for almost twenty years and at an Enormous State University for half a dozen years before that, so I’ve got a pretty good idea of what high-school graduates bring with them to college (aside from enormous bongs and that idiot dub-step music). I’ve got two boys aged twenty (graduated from a public school in the suburbs and attending a private college in the farther suburbs) and seventeen (who may graduate from an elite private school—unless he does one more thing to piss-off the headmaster), so I’ve got some idea of what kids are capable. Here’s my plan.

Close a bunch of the lesser universities and colleges, public and private. On the one hand, this will increase the competition among students to get in to colleges. There won’t be “safety schools.” There will just be clerking at Wawa or being the assistant manager for deep-fried products on the swing-shift at McDonald’s. You’ll end up looking like Jabba the Hutt and you’ll never get a member of the opposite sex to look at you. So, get good grades in high-school or Darwinism will take care of the rest. On the other hand, this will stop the facilities arms race that began in the Seventies. I spent six weeks in a Harvard dorm one summer a few years ago. No air-conditioning, buy your own fan; drizzle of lukewarm water from the shower, no matter how far you had run; took five minutes to get the badly-cut key to turn in the door lock; Army noodles with ketchup in the dining hall every night; did you want them with fish balls, pork balls, or tofu balls? Gym is crowded? Go for a run and do some push-ups. Library is crowded? Read your textbook in your room. Classroom is crowded? Get there early or stand at the back. Long line outside the professor’s office? Bring a book—or chat with the others about Darwin.

Fix the public schools. On the one hand, “Waiting for Superman” was right up to a point, but then confused the little bit—teachers’ unions are bad–with the larger whole of the problem—the schools are a mess. You have to be smart, committed, and know your subject to teach. Nothing more. Teach for America is right: smart kids who know a lot about their subject do better than ordinary teachers. Socrates didn’t have an Education degree. In fact, nobody had an Education degree before the end of the 19th century. Education schools didn’t exist. How did we ever manage to progress? On the other hand, stop using the schools as the vehicle for delivering useful public services. Self-esteem, psychological disorders, poor nutrition in the home, bullying, obesity, and sports-band-ceramics for that matter, are not central to the educational mission. Focus! (NB: That doesn’t mean some other agency can’t deliver those services.)

At the root of all our educational problems is the family. Turn off the “social media” (including the television). It turns kids’ brains to applesauce. Take your kids to the public library. Library is closed? This is worth burning buses over. Most of all, read to your kids. Nothing is more important. Except, maybe them seeing you read too.

Technology? Remember, Bill Gates didn’t have a computer in his house or school when he was growing up. Imagination and ambition come from somewhere else.

 

The End of the University as We Know It.

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A letter that the New York Times did not publish.

 

To the Editor,

Thank you for publishing the wonderfully stimulating and utterly wrong-headed essay by X    X.  Professor X writes from the perspective glimpsed from the balcony of the ivory tower and, as so often happens, his view is distorted.  (Try shooting a gun downhill sometime: one tends to aim too high and miss the target.)  My own perspective on the problems of American education–seen from closer to–or even under–ground level–is as follows.

First, the essential problem is to fix public education.  There is no reason so many people should be going to college after high school.  The reason they do so is because college has become two years of remedial high school and two years of post-industrial arts classes.  Schools are failing to prepare students for life in any of its forms, so college has become a form of educational Spackle.  This situation can be remedied.  The remedy would entail getting rid of schools of Education and teacher certification.  I have one son in a public school, generally bored out of his mind; I have another son in a boarding school, deeply engaged by all that his teachers place before him.  Many of the teachers in the public school are time-servers waiting on retirement.  None of the teachers in the boarding school have ever taken a class in an Education program.  Education courses are a waste of time which deprives their students of exposure to real knowledge in other disciplines.  Teach for America is the “dirty secret” to which Professor Taylor should attend.

It would also entail doing away with the system of funding public education through local property taxes.  This is a formula for disaster for any children attending public schools in depressed urban or rural areas.  Parents in upper middle class areas already load enough cultural advantages on their children.  The outbreak of swine flu among the students of a Catholic prep school in New York who had spent their Spring Break in Cancun is eloquent testimony to the inequalities of experience which parents can provide. Why make it much worse by relying on local property taxes as the basis for school funding?  States–or the federal government–should equalize per capita school spending.

Second, the follow-on problem is to fix post-secondary education at its various levels.  On the one hand, this would involve forcing a great many minor colleges into bankruptcy.  The Baby Boom led to the expansion of many institutions of American life as the mouse passed through the belly of the snake.  The result was an overbuilding of capacity in many areas.  While retirement homes and Kevorkiums are on the horizon as investment opportunities, colleges and universities are struggling to survive by recruiting from a shrunken pool of students.  The educational arms race has turned colleges toward creating a country club environment in order to attract students.  It also compels them to keep marginal students by supplying support services.  Support staffs at colleges and universities have grown far faster than have full-time faculty teaching substantive knowledge and intellectual skills.  If many colleges were driven out of existence, then the remainder could afford to become pickier about which students they admitted while reducing unnecessary and costly amenities.  The schools would be compelled to do their job properly so that high school graduates would have a better chance of finding work or getting in to a college.

On the other hand, there is much to be said for closing down many marginal graduate programs in the liberal arts.  Only a handful of elite schools–Columbia University among them–have any prospect of seeing the graduates of their Ph.D. programs find rewarding and useful employment.  Many other graduate programs exist to provide the professional certification needed for promotion in various bureaucracies (Education, Psychology, Social Work).  Between these heights lies a morass of graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences which exist for the convenience of the tenured faculty in minor institutions.  By running graduate programs these scholars get teaching assistants to grade the masses of semi-literate work generated by open-admissions policies, and they get students for graduate courses which are so much more interesting than is instructing freshmen on the differences between this and that, and that and which.

How are the interests of the republic advanced by any of this nonsense?

 

Some questions about the origins of the First World War.

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There is one question above all others to which historians return again and again. Could this catastrophe have been avoided? In trying to answer that question, historians have tried to tackle smaller chunks of it. Here is a sampling of the questions that historians have asked.

 

Did the monarchical governments of Germany, Austria, and Russia impede a rational solution of complex problems by means short of war? If so, how? Is democratic government naturally more peaceful than monarchical or authoritarian government?

Did the military staffs and their plans, especially in central and eastern Europe, get out of hand?

What part did the widely accepted beliefs of the day play in the coming of the war? The elites in all countries saw war as a legitimate instrument of national policy. Many people accepted ideas of competition, rather than cooperation, between countries, races, and social classes.

 

European social and political systems were out of joint with the basic realities, so perhaps a great upheaval would have come in any event.

What did domestic crises add to the decision for war? Germany’s established rulers faced political problems in dealing with the rise of the SPD and Center parties; the Austrian rulers faced crises over domestic reforms and South Slav resistance to “Magyarization; Russian rulers feared that a failure to support Serbia would revive the revolutionary forces of 1905. Did the struggle for more responsive government in Germany, Austria, and Russia mean that all were headed toward revolution even without the First World War? Did decision-makers choose war as a way of holding off or resolving domestic problems?

What role did international problems play in the decision for war? The key problems were the rightful place of Germany in Europe, the inability of anyone in central and eastern Europe to formulate a constructive solution to the problems of nationalism in multi-national and multi-ethnic states.

Was the war the product of human errors, which could have been avoided or corrected if better people had been in power, or was it the product of profound causes, which better people might have delayed but could not have prevented from boiling up at some point?

 

To these questions I would add one more. What lessons, if any, do the answers to these questions have for our own time?

 

CrISIS.

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Between 2003 and 2008 al-Qaeda in Iraq came to play an important role in the civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites and in the resistance to the occupying American forces. However, they wore out their welcome with the Iraqi Sunnis. In 2008 the Sunni “Awakening” movement swung most of the Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaeda in Iraq, while the American “surge” added to American strength in the fight. By the end of 2008 the remnants of al-Qaeda had been driven into Syria’s Raqqa province. Syria is torn by a different civil war, so it is in no position tp control its own borders. Here the defeated survivors split into quarreling factions. Al-Qaeda “Classic” lost the initiative to the more radical Islamic State (ISIS). ISIS went about building its power base by recruiting enthusiastic fighters. Many of them are volunteers from Muslim countries outside Syria and Iraq, and perhaps 500 of them come from Western countries. Estimates of the numerical strength of ISIS forces vary widely, from a low of 7,000 to 10,000 actual soldiers to a high of 10,000 to 15,000. ISIS also raised a lot of money through extortion and systematic kidnappings for ransom. In February 2014 al-Qaeda “expelled” ISSIS followers from its clubhouse. As if they cared.

In 2011 the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Iraq. This allowed Shi-ite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to reverse the course of Sunni-Shi’ite reconciliation that had paved the way for the defeat of al-Qaeda. When al-Qaeda renewed its attack in Iraq, many disgruntled Sunnis renewed their cooperation with the jihadists, while the Iraqi army had been degraded through neglect and corruption. Maliki and the Shi’ites had created a disaster.

In early 2014, perhaps 3,000 ISIS fighters invaded Iraq. Iraqi forces failed to hold them back. In June 2014 a small force of ISIS troops (estimated at 800) drove away in panic 30,000 Iraqi Army troops and seized the city of Mosul. Later they advanced toward Baghdad.[1]

 

To what extent should we worry about ISIS? The ISIS fighters appear to be professionally competent irregular soldiers with experienced commanders. They are adept at terrorism. They attract a good number of recruits from abroad. They have what looks to journalists to be a big war chest funded by crimes. They have the “momentum” so beloved of sports enthusiasts. They scare the living daylights out of a lot of people.

At the same time, they have won their successes in badly fractured countries whose professional soldiers were preoccupied and divided by other conflicts, and where there exists no political consensus. What happens if and when ISIS slams up against opponents with solid governments, real economic and military resources, and a disposition to fight? Turkey, Iran, and Israel form a cauldron in which the ISIS experience is likely to come to an end.

People will immediately scoff at this idea. Iran, Turkey, and Israel cooperating in spite of their bitter grievances with one another? A historical analogy is useful here. Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union all were at odds with one another before the Second World War. The common danger posed by Hitler’s Germany forced them into what Winston Churchill called the “Grand Alliance.” That alliance began to unravel as soon as the danger had passed.

Another historical analogy is that of Sino-Soviet relations in 1949. Americans assumed that the Soviets would alienate the Chinese. The Korean War then prolonged the Sino-Soviet alliance. Now some Americans assume that ISIS will alienate Sunnis. What if the unexpected happens, as it often does? Which historical analogy is correct, if either one is correct? Should the United States take the lead in solving this problem?

[1] “Rise of a terrorist state,” The Week, 11 July 2014, p. 9.

Palestine.

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Back in the very many days ago, there were a couple of runty little Jewish kingdoms in what is today Palestine (between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean).  Then came the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks under that psycho Alexander, and the Romans.  No more Jewish kingdoms.  Jews ended up spread all over the Middle East and Europe.

Flash forward to the end of the 19th Century.  Everybody else gets a country (Germany, Italy, Rumania for crying out loud), why shouldn’t the Jews have a country too?  This idea is called Zionism.  Trouble is that the place where Zionists wanted to have that country, Palestine, was now full of Muslims and belonged to the Ottoman Empire.            Then, jump to the First World War.  The Ottoman Empire fought on the same side as Germany (which lost) and against Britain (which won).  The Ottoman Empire got broken up, with the British in temporary charge of Palestine.  Also, during the war the British had supported the creation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.

Next, along came the Nazis, who tried to wipe out the Jews of Europe.  After the war many of the survivors of the Holocaust didn’t want to remain in Europe.  One bright idea: let them go to Palestine.  Zionists liked the sound of this.  Arabs didn’t like the idea because they were starting to set up their own countries and didn’t see why they should take in a bunch of European colonists just because some other Europeans had done some bad stuff.  Brits weren’t too crazy about this idea because it would make the Arabs mad.  Nevertheless, the Zionist managed to ship the Jews to Palestine, then fought a war (1948-1949) with the Arab countries in order to create the state of Israel.

Lots of Palestinian Arab Muslims got driven off their land during the war.  They ended up living in refugee camps in Egypt (Gaza Strip), Jordan (on the West Bank), and Syria.  Arab countries weren’t too good about taking in their fellow Arabs, although they were pretty good at chasing out all the Jews from their own countries and stealing their property.  Instead, the Arab countries kept talking about wiping Israel off the map and letting all the Palestinian refugees go home.

However, the post-Holocaust Jews of Israel weren’t the pre-Holocaust Jews of Europe.  After the Holocaust the Israelis always took people seriously when they said that they wanted to wipe out the Jews, then spent a lot of time figuring out how to beat up on people who talked that way.  They beat up on Egypt in 1956; then Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967; then Egypt and Syria in 1973; then they bombed a nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq in 1981.

Outcomes of the war of 1967. First, Israel took the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which were full of Palestinian Arab Muslims.  So they have this huge population of captives who hate their guts.  Second, the Palestinians got fed up with Mickey Mouse Arab countries talking about wiping Israel off the map, only to get beat up on by Israel, always making the situation of the Palestinians worse than it was before the Arab countries tried to “help.”  Palestinians decided that they were going to have to fight on their own to create a country.  It had worked for Israel, so be like Israel.  They didn’t have an army or an air force, so they turned to terrorism.  Israel doesn’t want to turn loose of the West Bank and Gaza if it is just going to turn into a safe-haven for extremists who will try to wipe out Israel, but the longer Israel holds these people captive the more anti-Israel the Palestinians become.  If that’s possible.