Sami Zubaida, emeritus professor of politics and sociology at Birkbeck College, London:
Sectarian violence, ethnic conflict, religious politics, are all prominent features of the current situation in many Middle Eastern countries. Thriving Jewish communities came to an end in every country after the inauguration of the state of Israel and the subsequent wars. Christian communities, integral to the population and society of many countries, and prominent participants in the politics of Arab and regional nationalism, are now increasingly under pressure, and diminishing in numbers and importance in most countries, due to differential migration and fertility, and, in the case of Iraq, suffering violence and dislocation. Ethnic and sectarian solidarities and conflicts are ever sharper, and the perennial Arab-Israeli quagmire takes on increasingly an ethno-religious garb.
A common theme in public discourse, in both the region and the West, is that these patterns of conflict have deep historical roots in the 'mosaic society of the region, conflicts being only suppressed by imperial impositions, whether of the Ottomans or the British, and subsequently by violent dictatorships such as that of the Ba`th regimes. The current conflicts, then are explained in terms of imperialist manipulation, dictatorial rule and/or recent military interventions.
The cultural and psychological turns of anti-colonial Third Worldism, pioneered by such cosmopolitan intellectuals as Franz Fanon, and supported by Sartre, and later Foucault, as well as a host of Western leftists, found an echo among many intellectuals in the region. Equally cosmopolitan intellectuals, such as Ali Shari`ati in Iran, developed this anti-capitalist, anti-Western search for authenticity, found in an invented liberationist Shi`ism of the martyrs. Many Arab and Turkish intellectuals developed similar trends of thought and culture. Those who followed them did not share their wider universalist visions and proceeded in more insular and fundamentalist directions.
These trends, combined with the regimes that gained power through a series of military coups in the second half of the twentieth century such as those of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba`th, bringing to power regime cliques from poor rural backgrounds, who resented and subordinated the old notable elites that were part of the diverse Middle East. The totalitarian regimes and their popular constituencies sharpened religious and ethnic solidarities and tensions, contributing to the heightening of communal insularity, and, in extreme cases, such as Iraq, to ethnic cleansing.
When your Middle Eastern friends now say to you, in sadness and wonder: Where has all this sectarianism and fanaticism come from? We never knew who was Sunni or Shi`i, did not care who was Copt or Muslim! - the chances are that they are part of the educated middle class, subordinated and impoverished by the totalitarian clan regimes and their cultural apparatus, the lucky ones migrating to the green pastures of the West, where the old Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism thrives in London and Paris.
There's a running narrative that's commonly used to explain the current conflict in the middle east. It goes something like this:
There are deep, natural ethic and religious divides in the middle east. These were suppressed and/or caused to some degree by imperial rule: first the Ottomans and then the Brits/Euros. Western leftist intellectuals agitated for the dismantling of the colonial empires. Their ideology took hold among many intellectuals in the region, with the result that thuggish regimes like the Baathists (and Nassar and others before them) were enabled to take power. Those intellectuals at least in theory worked toward a wider unity among the Muslims. In practice, however, the result has been fragmentation which feeds more violence.
Meanwhile, the intellectuals who didn't drink the Baathist/pan-Arab/etc. koolaid fled to the West, which is why there aren't any moderates in the middle east any more.
It will be interesting to see whether the author agrees with that common narrative or pokes holes in it. Can't tell without publication of the book as a whole.
#8
I ran into a worldly Egyptian ex-pat selling women's designer clothes at one of our suburban mall Macy's, recently... It's like the French aristos who descended on England and the American colonies during the Revolution. Does anyone know what happened to their children?
SHOULD the Turks and Kurds live together? The answer from many of Turkeys restive Kurds has long been no. A vicious separatist campaign launched by rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been raging since 1984. In recent months the PKK has stepped up its attacks, killing dozens of Turkish soldiers in and beyond the predominantly Kurdish south-east. Most recently, on July 20th, a Kurdish raid near the town of Cukurca killed six Turkish troops and injured at least 15.
But now a growing number of Turks are questioning the merits of cohabiting with the countrys estimated 14m Kurds. Never mind that Istanbul is the worlds largest Kurdish city, or that few of the provinces claimed by the Kurds are ethnically homogenous. In television debates and across the blogosphere support for the idea that the Kurds should go their own way is growing. Onur Sahin, who heads the Chamber of Agriculture in the Black Sea province of Ordu, says his fellow producers no longer want seasonal migrant Kurds to harvest their hazelnut crops.
If they can't learn to live together, and they get separate homelands, they will just find new supgroups to fight within their 'cleansed' lands. It's a state of mined.
South Korea and the United States are set to start a joint military exercise in the East Sea on Sunday. Washington is preparing to freeze some North Korean assets soon. A U.S.-led multinational naval drill, apparently aimed at stopping North Korea from trafficking weapons of mass destruction, is scheduled for October in the sea off the South Korean port of Busan.
North Korea has no one else but itself to blame if it feels the noose tightening around its neck. It was North Korea that put its head in the noose in the first place when it torpedoed a South Korean warship in the South Korean territorial waters in the West Sea in March, killing 46 aboard.
When the South Korean-U.S. joint military drill starts in the East Sea, North Korea will have to put itself on high alert, diverting resources for a defense posture. This should be painful to the destitute communist state.
The U.S. financial sanctions, now on the drawing board, may prove to be even more damaging. Washington says it will blacklist more North Korean corporations and individuals in two weeks to cut off money flowing into Pyongyang from its exports of weapons of mass destruction and counterfeit products. In October, a multinational naval maneuver will start near Busan under the Proliferation Security Initiative, a global effort to stop the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction.
All the measures are a follow-up to Wednesdays conference of the foreign policy and defense chiefs from South Korea and the United States, the first such two-plus-two meeting designed to demonstrate the commitment of the United States to South Korean security in the face of a military threat from the North.
The two military allies are called on to keep up the pressure until Pyongyang admits to its responsibility for the torpedo attack and vows not to engage in such hostilities again. There is no need for them to rush back to the six-way talks on the denuclearization of North Korea, which Pyongyang recently proposed to reopen -- an apparent move to divert international attention away from the torpedo attack.
Juxtaposed with the enhanced U.S. security commitment is South Koreas recent diplomatic defeat at the U.N. Security Council, where Seoul failed to have Pyongyang condemned for its unprovoked act of hostility. With the dust settling from the debacle, it should be worthwhile for Seoul to review what went wrong and seriously consider what needs to be done if it is to avoid a similar fiasco.
At the center of the controversy is not only North Korea but China, which went the extra mile to protect Pyongyang from being censured by the UNSC.
#1
How do you "tighten the noose" on these MFs? It's hard to get to the leadership short of dropping a bomb on them. They barely understand it when their people die. Even if you give them a blanket they think that's cool.
Blow up their navy one night and act all shocked maybe?
Blockade seems to me the only thing that might do the trick. Might put the kabosh on their nuclear program, too.
The leaders might understand it better if they felt it on a very personal level. Imagine if all their foreign assets went poof overnight and suddenly they had no place to run when the walls came tumbling down. Imagine then if the walls started to crumble.
But they have nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide. They're stuck. So they're going to play it to the last card and then kill themselves.
I don't see how we can offer their leadership a sneaky way out of the country in any significant numbers.
The only thing left is to squeeze their food supply at the same time.
Unless we just bomb the crap out of their government buildings and military weapons centers that could be used to suppress the population, and then hope that the people could put it together themselves.
China could save the peoples' butts without even trying really, but then NorK would become part of China, and SKor would have to forget reclaiming their relatives.
What a pain.
Maybe just a few very well placed bombs, with a promise of a few more unless they open up and get with the program.
#2
I'd say it's time for some NK naval accidents. Two can play at that game and we have the better tech/people. Don't expect Oblahblah to do it, but I would've taken two of theirs out on GP
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/25/2010 15:31 Comments ||
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#3
Again, SECSTATE HILLARY > no new talks or progress until Kimmie formally admits its attack on the CHEONAN [+ makes amends].
Slow food is the response to fast food. It is about taking the time to savor rather than gulp, about celebrating the diversity of local ingredients and cuisines, about preserving traditional standards of excellence and ethical behavior. Perhaps we'd all appreciate a return to slow news, Ruth - traditional standards of excellence and ethical behavior?
You can see, in the wake of the warp-speed exposing and retracting, firing and unfiring of Shirley Sherrod, where I'm going with this. See, she thinks the exposing was the whole problem.
Blogging is about speed: the early post catches the Google. It is about linking, which may sound like creating a community and encouraging diversity of views but which too often deteriorates into a closed circle of reinforced preconceptions, like Journo-list, for example. It is about provocation. Shrillness sells. Even-handedness goes unclicked. I'm sorry; are we talking MSM or something else?
Once the people in my business spent time checking and rechecking facts and first impressions or so I've been told. Opinion writers mulled things over. In the world of the blogosphere, mistakes can always be crossed through and corrected; seat-of-the-pants reactions refined.
Except: Shirley Sherrod. The only one of a zillion or more she wishes to discuss at this point.
I am being unfair, in part, by singling out the blgosphere. Blogosphere, Ruth, blogosphere. There's fact-checking, then there's spell checking.
The Sherrod story originated there, but the sins of Andrew Breitbart were aided and abetted by bloggers' co-conspirators on cable news. And, of course, in the Obama administration. Of course.
Perhaps a better phrase would be slow news, which used to sound like a bad thing, back in the lazy days when those senior White House officials could wait until after the evening news to call you back and deliver their spin for the next day's paper. But the Sherrod affair reminds us all that slow, or at least slower, news is often better news. Maybe you need some self-policing? Government policing? UN? Or the slow death of the free market?
I read blogs. I write blog posts. I revel in the immediacy of the blogosphere. Sometimes less is more and quicker is better. You may not be able to do much to improve a well-marbled steak than to quickly sear it. Sometimes cooking something for too long turns it into mush. What chef loves a crockpot? But some dishes require care and patience. So does some journalism, whatever form it takes.
Slow blogging. Think about it. What for? To make you feel better? I'd rather think about slow news, when getting it right was more important than selling a newspaper. You could sell slow news and let the blogs thrash around in the mud. But you like the mud, don't you. You revel in it!
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2010 14:01 ||
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Sometimes cooking something for too long turns it into mush.
#2
I have a few questions here that have yet to be answered.
1. Just where did this story break?
2. Who edited the tape setting her up?
3. Who pressured a President to get involved in the firing of a director? Seems to me way down on the food chain for him, but then he called a cop stupid when the cop was right.
4. What about the rest of the tape and her other questionable remarks?
Seems to me the progressive libs that jumped the story are now all running for cover. This whole thing stinks and a good start would be with whoever released the edited tape.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
07/25/2010 14:37 Comments ||
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#3
'twas bloggers that made her relate that racist incident, and furthermore bloggers that made all those people at the NAACP nod approvingly at her relating of that story.
Wonder if Ruth Marcus, the writer of this piece, got her talking points from the successor of Journolist, or whether she leaned over to the next cubicle and got them directly from Spence Ackerman and Ezra Klein.
I was at a luncheon today with House Minority Leader John Boehner at which just about every question for the Ohio Republican started the same telling way: If you become speaker.... The striking thing about Boehner's answers at the lunch, sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, was how little of a positive program he presented. The Republican agenda as sketched out by Boehner was more of an absence of Democratic policies than the implementation of Republican ones. I've noticed that myself. Where's Newt when you need him?
It's like immigration reform: First close the borders...
He did say that Republicans would have more to say in September, after spending next month checking in with voters. "You have to listen before you outline an agenda, and we're listening," he said. For the country's sake, I sure hope they hear something worthwhile. Because what Boehner offered up was pretty unconvincing.
Of course, our journalist was prepared to be unconvinced. And she believes her readers share her viewpoint.
Asked the first three things he would do as speaker, Boehner rattled off a list that added up to Not Being Democrats.
The first: "repeal Obamacare," which Boehner described as a "giant impediment" standing in the way of job growth. Except... President Obama won't be signing that repeal even if it were to pass the House and Senate. Deny the People, O, and run on that in 2012!
Political positioning for the presidential election in 2012. This keeps the issue front-of-mind for the next two years, instead of it quietly fading into the way things are done.
Second, "no cap-and-trade.... You raise the cost of energy, you raise the cost of doing business." Except... no cap-and-trade legislation appears to be on its way, Republican House majority or not. Sez who?
And the Republicans get to take credit for it. That sure stinks for the Democrats.
Third, "not raise people's taxes," because "you cannot get the economy going again" without "giving people some certainty about what their taxes are going to be." Except... much as Boehner & Co. would like voters to think otherwise, the only question is whether the Bush tax cuts will be extended for everyone, or for almost everyone (other than those making more than $250,000 a year.) This is the WaPo...
"On Election Day, if we win the majority a lot of the uncertainty is going to go away," Boehner said. That, he said, "will do more to help American employers than anything we can do."
Except... what part of the massive uncertainty? Boehner mentioned another going-nowhere-fast proposal, "card check," the labor-backed measure to make it easier for unions to organize, and another not-disappearing-anytime-soon measure, the just-signed financial services reform bill. Hard to see how having a Republican House - or even a Republican House and Senate - would change either of those situations.
It's better, no doubt, for Boehner and his party if the election is, as he put it, "a referendum on the job-killing policies that are coming out of this administration and my colleagues across the aisle." But voters are entitled to hear more from the man who would be speaker - and to hear it before Election Day.
Keep pushing back the tide, my dear. The exercise is good for you.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2010 00:00 ||
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and is Ruth Marcus asking the Democrats to have a succinct platform also
like,
we'll try to raise taxes but first call them something else
we'll increase regulation
we'll find new ways to get earmarks
Posted by: lord garth ||
07/25/2010 0:17 Comments ||
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#2
Where's Newt when you need him?
The latest rumour has him considering a run for POTUS in 2012.
#6
I believe any in campaign debate both major party candidates should be required to wear this rather than a business suit or dress. Though this would work as well.
#11
It's a long time until November. A lot can happen between now and then. Reid, the little weazel, has managed to close the gap with Sharon Angle. Lately, he is presenting an image of sweetnes and light to the voters. The guy is a human chameleon. It wasn't long ago that he was showing his disdain for the voters--particularly the Tea Party.
Generic polls show the Republicans are favored by about 3-5 percentage points presently. However, I don't believe generic polls. Many voters are issue-specific voters, e.g. firearms, abortion, taxes, small government, health care, etc.
The Republicans are going to have to sharpen and focus their messages. They will have to come up with a program that will resurrect the country--a la "Contract with America". I agree that Newt is a good policy man but he doesn't seem to connect with the voters. He might look better after two more years of Obama.
#12
Besoeker, that's what he's saying now. A couple years back he was appearing on platforms with the current Secretary of State, and saying we needed to Do Something about the Greenhouse Gases and Health Care.
#13
Gingrich is a f'ing tool. He is untrustworthy. He was on the couch with San Fran Nana, now he's singing a different tune. Running around on his wife while appearing to be the faithful type.
Newt is a 2 faced opportunistic ass. We don't need any more of those in DC.
Ultimately, a two faced man is unstable in all his dealings
For months, top U.S. military leaders have accused Iran of supplying weapons and training to Taliban fighters battling American and Afghan troops. What should be done about it is in debate.
May I suggest bombing Iran, or at least certain key bits of it? I confess to being a thoroughgoing warmonger, but it seems to me in this case justified. We've got a manpower shortage in our occupation forces, and they've got an excess of unemployment, especially among their youth, so we could outsource the clean-up phase to them.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander in Afghanistan, said shortly before he resigned last month that there is clear evidence that Iran is arming and training the Taliban.
#1
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander in Afghanistan, said shortly before he resigned last month that there is clear evidence that Iran is arming and training the Taliban.
Why do you think he was fired, for criticizing Obumble? No, he told a truth Washington (BOTH parties) didn't want exposed.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
07/25/2010 17:10 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
