Russian Hackers, A Link On el-Sisi’s Egypt & A Little Less Mephistopheles For This Kindergarten

December 30, 2016 / chr1 / Leave a comment

This blog believes fundamental conflicts within the West, fermenting within our institutions, foaming-over into our politics, invite the calculated meddling of those who think differently.

In the world of Statecraft, I’d prefer cold-eyed realism and calculated bastardry, when necessary, in the pursuit of American interests (ideally attached to decent human beings with checked, limited powers). Overreach and hubris is easy. Humility and good strategy is hard.

It’d be nice if Russia wasn’t being run as a kleptocracy by an ex-KGB agent, incentivizing a lot of bright hackers with little economic opportunity into the service of State propaganda and espionage…but:

C.S. Dickey: ‘Putin Outfoxes Obama, Lies In Wait For Trump‘

Populist steam seems to be translating directly into policy these days. Maybe it’s a kind of passive-aggressive placation of outrage in the service of ‘optics’.

That would be short-sighted and petty.

Link from a reader: The Deep State in Egypt has been controlled by the military for a long time…’Egypt’s Failed Revolution.’

Many Westerners will probably go ahead and double-down on certain radical/semi-radical Western ideals just as those ideals are failing to translate into effective strategy by an exiting American administration.

Better keep James Taylor handy.

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

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Gore Vidal had a line that stuck with me in his review of Italo Calvino.

‘For the last year, Calvino had been looking forward to his fall and winter at Harvard. He even began to bone up on “literary theory.” He knew perfectly well what a mephitic kindergarten our English departments have become.

Well, that might be a little much.

Personally, I like to read people who don’t really think like me, especially when they satirize bureaucratic bloat and puffery as they find them.

I like folks on the outside looking in…tracing the shape of something.

Why do we have so many administrators, regulators, and overseers within our institutions?:

Incentives matter. A vigorous freedom and skeptical citizenry is hard to maintain, but vital nonetheless.

Climb aboard and hang-on, dazzled as you may be by the thrill of the thing.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

–David Hume

The Weather At Home & Journalists In Egypt-Two Tuesday Links

February 4, 2014February 11, 2014 / chr1 / 2 Comments

Alexis Madrigal At The Atlantic-Talking About The Weather: The Next Level:’

Some good weather links and a nod to climate science, but also climate science as a defining and organizing worldview for a healthy percentage of the readership, I imagine:

‘There are three general types of resources here. First, there are people and institutions that analyze the weather and tell us about them. The second category is unfiltered public weather data and imagery. And the last tranche of resources deliver forecasts or computer models on which forecasts are based.’

Joshua Hersh at the New Yorker: ‘Journalism Becomes A Crime In Egypt:’

‘For foreign journalists, who were tolerated under the Brotherhood but have never been viewed with great affection in Cairo, the steep decline in working conditions hit bottom in December, when the police busted down the door of an upscale hotel suite that served as the offices for Al Jazeera’s English-language channel and dragged away the staff.’

The democratically-elected/peaceful uprising vision of the Arab Spring would have been nice (inside every Egyptian is a freedom-desiring human waiting to get out and possibly build democratic institutions), but we’ve gone from Mubarrak to Al-Sisi most likely, and a deep-State still controlled by the military.

At what cost our current committments? How are we best able to secure and advance our interests?

What’s our strategy?

Quote by Jeanne Kirkpatrick:

In his essay Representative Government, John Stuart Mill identified three fundamental conditions which the Carter administration would do well to ponder. These are: “One, that the people should be willing to receive it [representative government]; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them.”

-From Dictatorship And Double Standards.

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

The Greensburg Tornado on Doppler Radar…Tornadoes In Major Cities: Atlanta

From The Weather Channel: 3D Image Of The Tuscaloosa Tornado April 27th, 2011…Tornadoes! Some Links…The Greensburg Tornado on Doppler Radar…Tornadoes In Major Cities: Atlanta…From NOAA: Tornado Safety Guide…From CBS St. Louis: ‘UPDATED: Video of the Joplin Twister’

Adam Garfinkle At The American Interest: ‘Of Photo-Opportunism and Hazmat Garbage Collection’

December 30, 2013 / chr1 / 2 Comments

Full piece here.

Grafinkle offers a Middle-East roundup from country to country:

‘As long as our elite press censors itself in this manner, an objective socio-political description of these (and other) countries will remain impossible, and a distorted understanding will inevitably feed misbegotten policy adventures like the Libya war. I would like to be able to assure you that what ails the academy and the press does not afflict the clear-eyed professionals at the CIA and the State Department and USAID and the NSC and the officer corps of the uniformed military. Yes, I would like to… but a lot of these guys went to those same universities.’

Related On This Site: A Few More Syria Links-’Unmitigated Clusterf**k?’…

More Syria-From Via Media: ‘Congress on Syria: Going In On A Wing and A Prayer’…From Slate: ‘In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta Thought He Could Build The Ideal Islamic City’

Michael Totten At World Affairs: ‘Syria’s Regime Not Worth Preserving’…James Kirchik At The American Interest:

Michael Totten’s piece that revisits a Robert Kaplan piece from 1993, which is prescient: “A Writhing Ghost Of A Would-Be Nation”. It was always a patchwork of minority tribes, remnants of the Ottoman Empire

Adam Garfinkle At The American Interest: ‘What Did The Arab Spring Really Change?’…Liberal Internationalism is hobbling us, and the safety of even the liberal internationalist doctrine if America doesn’t lead…Via Youtube-Uncommon Knowledge With Fouad Ajami And Charles Hill

Is Bernhard Henri-Levy actually influencing U.S. policy decisions..? From New York Magazine: ‘European Superhero Quashes Libyan Dictator’…Bernhard Henri-Levy At The Daily Beast: ‘A Moral Tipping Point’…Charlie Rose Episode On Libya Featuring Bernhard Henri-Levy, Les Gelb And Others…

From Via Media: ‘Bambi Meets Godzilla In The Middle-East’

August 18, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

‘The end of history, which AI founder Francis Fukuyama used to describe the historical implications of the Cold War, is to American political philosophy what the Second Coming is to Christians. In the end, almost all Americans devoutly believe, the liberal, market principles on which our country is built will triumph around the world’

and:

‘Meanwhile the President’s most ardent critics, both on the right and the left, believe that his biggest problem is that he isn’t exhibiting sufficient faith in the national credo. Since we know that liberal democracy is triumphing everywhere, if it isn’t working in Egypt it must be the President’s fault. There must have been some policy path, there must still be some policy path, by which the President can bring Egypt into the Promised Land.’

Worth reading.

It’s not a bad summation of the national credo.

I suspect Obama’s civil-rights alliance, the arc-of-history-bends-towards-justice thinking has placed him in an arguably more Left-of-Center, human rights advocacy position than even Jimmy Carter had placed himself.

It might be worth revisiting his Cairo Speech, as it’s clear Obama has a kind of global, universalist vision for the world and America’s role in it. Call him secularly universal, anti-imperial, non-nationalist, but it’s clearly a vision of process and democracy promotion. ‘Violent extremists’ is a curiously vague idea.

I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Obama, like Carter before him, is not only on the human-rights circuit at some point in the future, but may still be pushing his Organizing For Action in some capacity here at home: A permanent civil-rights protest political machine with a particularly racial focus, perhaps aiming to unite the Left-Of-Center 60’s idealist coalitions under some vision of liberal managerialism.

Here’s a quote from Anne-Marie Slaughter, on liberal internationalism:

‘The central liberal internationalist premise is the value of a rules-based international order that restrains powerful states and thereby reassures their enemies and allies alike and allows weaker states to have sufficient voice in the system that they will not choose to exit’

Of course, a similarly human-rights focused policy didn’t turn out so well for U.S. in Iran, and here we are a few decades leader trying to strategize and stay ahead of the tide of Islamism and many other forces in the region.

As to foreign-policy, maybe we could return to some kind of realism, but that will take serious work, as the Republican party is quite split at the moment between pro-military nationalists, neo-cons, realists, the religious, pro-Israel right, all the way to the anti-Statist libertarian isolationists, with anti-war types among them.

Meanwhile, many decisions being made inside Egypt will likely affect our policy towards the region for generations to come.

What should we be doing, and why? What can we do? What’s already being done?

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

One problem with Fukuyama is the Hegelian collectivism and statism: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’…

Michael Totten Interviews Eric Trager: ‘The Truth About Egypt’

August 16, 2013August 16, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

‘The United States has done a very poor job managing perceptions in Egypt. The administration assumed if it wasn’t critical about Morsi’s behavior domestically, they’d win his cooperation on foreign policy. The problem is that Morsi was only willing to cooperate with us on foreign policy in the short run. The Muslim Brotherhood wants to consolidate power in Egypt and then create a global Islamic state. It’s a key part of their ideology and their rhetoric. They talk about it with me. They can’t be our partners.

Worse, by not speaking up and criticizing Morsi as he tried to create unchecked power for himself, it created the impression that the United States wanted to replace Mubarak with the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s extremely damaging in a place like Egypt with such tumultuous politics’

We didn’t support the Brotherhood. We failed to speak up and manage perceptions. In the future, the only way to address this problem will be to make sure we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. We have to spread our risk by making sure we engage everybody.’

What kind of chance does the idea of democracy and democratic process have in Egypt given the endemic poverty, the oppression, and the lack of readiness in most of the people for it?

Placed against the backdrop of a longer-term Islamist resurgence in the Middle-East, pushing against Arab nationalism, and the answer is not too much.

Such a vision of ideal and pure one voice, one vote democracy in the most stable of countries can become a vehicle for majoritarian rule, leading to a quid pro quo politics of corruption, patronage, and vote-buying.

In Egypt, the democratic process was merely a stalking horse for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and now the military has cracked back down hard on the Brotherhood, and it’s getting bloodier.

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

Michael Totten At World Affairs: ‘Egypt Falls Back On The Military’

July 3, 2013July 3, 2013 / chr1 / 2 Comments

Full post here.

Comments are worth a read. The Army and President bluffing?

Stranger things have happened, but we are looking at country with grinding, nearly 3rd world poverty, in an economic spiral downwards.

Totten’s interview with a Muslim Brotherhood representative shows their rather nutty worldview and impracticality in the wake of Mubarak (not really people we can do business with), and any hope of stability is now being placed back upon the foreign-aid supported military.

The State Department and the Obama administration are still trying to convince the American people democracy has been brought to the Middle-East and be seen as having done so. True, these were ‘democractic’ elections, but the conditions for any kind of democracy or liberalism the West would recognize were never ripe for the serious business of a power vacuum and the failure of Egypt’s institutions and conditions on the ground.

Spengler At PJ Media: Egypt Falls Back On The Military:

‘There is only {one} reason the military might do a better job than the Muslim Brotherhood or the liberal opposition, and that is because Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states (besides tiny Qatar) might decide to provide funding for a military regime that suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Saudi regime rightly fears as a competitor to its medieval form of monarchy’

Adam Garfinkle’s Adbel Fattah al-Sisi-Memorize That Name:

‘This drama has never been about the fate of democracy or liberal attitudes and institutions. That was our passion play, not Egypt’s. This drama has always been about the fractionation and dissipation of traditional sources of social authority in a country that has tried and failed now at least three times since Napoleon’s 1799 invasion to come to terms with the press of modernity – ‘

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

From Via Media: ‘A Light Fails In Egypt’

June 30, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

A piece well-worth reading. We have a big stake in a stable Egypt, given the instability of the region, and Egypt’s ‘liberal’ class of educated folks is thinner on the ground, and not capable of supporting the broader kind of representative government we’d like to see. There’s not enough wealth, education, opportunity and economic and institutional strength in Egypt to support it.

That was the dream. Morsi’s biggest problem never was, and still is not today, the twittering liberals of early Tahrir; western oriented secular liberalism has a long way to go before it can become a significant ideological force among the masses in Egypt. His greatest ideological opponents are cynicism and despair and he is in such deep trouble today because the collapsing economy and the general paralysis make him look like another snake oil salesmen selling a fake route to progress. What if Islamism like Nasser’s nationalism is a failure in Egypt? What then? What next?

The Islamist party hasn’t been capable of addressing these deep-rooted problems, nor leading very competently at all.

Millions of people are out in the streets.

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

Najat Fawzy Alsaeid At The Center For Islamic Pluralism: ‘The War Of Ideologies In The Arab World’

March 1, 2013March 1, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full piece here.

Interesting piece:

‘If one were to ask an Arab what has happened to the Arab countries, and why the terrorism and extremism we see today did not exist in the 1950s and 1960s, the answer would probably point to the frustrations and struggles of dual identities: Arab nationalism and Islamism.’

Our foreign policy will have its hands full these coming decades. She goes on:

‘Moreover, books by Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), Sayyid Qutb and others, which reject pluralism and promote extremism, should be studied in context, alongside works by Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Ali Abderraziq, and other, more modern and open-minded commentators. The Shias in Sunni-majority countries should also be given more equal opportunities and should have the right to study moderate Shia scholars such as the Iraqis Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr (1935-80) and Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei (1899-1982), who favor separation of clerical and state authority.’

And from Via Media, it looks like Egypt is in deep trouble, suffering a high, restless youth population with nowhere to go:

‘The economy is in a meltdown. And the situation on the ground will only be exacerbated by the hordes of young people (under-30s make up an estimated 60 percent of Egypt’s population) unable to find work to pay for the rising costs of basic goods -‘

Waiting for things to shake-out?

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

Francis Fukuyama At The American Interest Online: ‘Political Order in Egypt’

For a brief moment there, I had hope for a conservative liberal movement, but the poverty, corrupt bureaucratic state, economic scarcity and the rise of Islamism more generally was a better bet: Walter Russell Mead At The American Interest: ‘Mubaraks, Mamelukes, Modernizers and Muslims’……James Kirchik At The American Interest: ‘Egyptian Liberals Against the Revolution’

Michael Totten At World Affairs: ‘Morsi In His Own Words’

January 7, 2013January 7, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

Discouraging, but unsurprising, quotes from two years ago at the link:

‘He’s a Muslim Brotherhood man, and this aggressively bigoted and warmongering attitude is de rigueur for that crowd.’

Morsi was probably deploying some political rhetoric as he is a politician, but there’s a lot to be worried about.

Our current administration understandably sat on the fence regarding whether or not to continue supporting Mubarrak and his regime. There was a larger movement afoot in the Middle East and it was roiling Egypt as well. Stability is always an attractive option for us, especially regarding Israel, and the Suez Canal. It’s arguably worth many of billions of dollars.

But change did come, Mubarrak fell, and the deep poverty, the oppressed Brotherhood members and other Islamists, the smaller groups of liberals and the more Western-influenced and well-educated, the many reformers denied access to politics; all of them suddenly faced a vacuum. The immediate prospect was the SCAF filling that vacuum and carrying on as before, installing another leader in Mubarrak’s wake.

There has since been a power struggle for control of the deep state and typically, the longer a power vacuum exists, the worse people there are to fill it. Egyptians came and went from Tahrir Square, tensions rose and fell. We took a hands-off approach, and tried to encourage an orderly process with free and fair elections, all based upon an ideal of democracy that is presumed to be universal.

Nevertheless, we are running into the realities of the Middle-East.

As I see it, the Muslim Brotherhood is better viewed as a member of a broader Islamic resurgence throughout the Levant. They are the most stable front of this resurgence, but there is a revolutionary and ideological quality to their thinking akin to the patchwork of similar interests and neighbors who are generally anti-Western, anti-Israel, and pro-Islam. Following the money, the guns, and the political power isn’t a bad rule of thumb to figure out what the future may hold.

As for Morsi, his political coalition is made up of Salafists and other Islamists in Egypt, and they’re taking over the old, corrupt and oppressive bureaucracy and controlling the public square with a rather narrow Constitution.

Islam has prescriptions not just for the religious and personal spheres, but for politics and the public square as well. Many Westerners can call Al-Qaeda the violent edge of a radical, impossibly purist, interpretation of Islam, trying to lay the blanket of Western humanism, idealism and multiculturalism over the Muslim world in order to blunt this sharp edge, but it will only cover so much. Many Westerners can blame the West first for its colonial adventures, oil and money interests, trade and education interests, but that’s not tenable for the long-haul either. Obama is continuing most of our government’s bureaucratic aims set up in the wake of 9/11: using our military, security agencies, special-ops, and drone-strikes in order to hunt out those who would do us harm.

The broader humanist approach sold as neoconservatism lite or a move away from “empire-building” should be held to some account, no matter the practicality of its realpolitik.

Where do we go from here?

My two cents.

Nancy Okail At Freedom House: “‘Muslim Rage’ and the Politics of Distraction in Egypt’…From Al Jazeera English: ‘Morsi Wins Egypt’s Presidential Election’…Adam Garfinkle At The American Interest on Egypt: ‘Still More of the Same—and Something New’…are we still on a liberalizing, Westernizing trajectory?, however slow the pace? Adam Garfinkle At The American Interest: ‘What Did The Arab Spring Really Change?’

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

From Al Jazeera: ‘Egypt Cracks Down On Satirists And Media’

January 2, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

There’s been a long battle for control of the deep state in the wake of an oppressive regime, between the SCAF after Mubarrak’s ouster, and Morsi’s new Islamist coalition:

‘Rivals accuse Morsi, who won Egypt’s first freely contested leadership election in June, of polarising society by foisting a divisive, Islamist-leaning constitution on the country.

In the case against the independent daily al-Masry al-Youm, the presidency accused the paper of “spreading false news representing a danger to civil peace, public security and affecting the presidency”, the paper said.’

It’s reasonable to envision the inertia of the old, corrupt, oppressive Egyptian bureaucracy slowly being taken over by the new Islamist coalition and being as, or more, illiberal. It might be possible to leverage Morsi to make as broad a tent as possible, but the Egyptian Constitution will make that difficult.

Life’s going to get tougher for most of the Egyptians who pushed for social change, but didn’t necessarily have the full force of the minds of the people nor enough economic opportunity and education to control the forces unleashed. A free people wasn’t necessarily ready to cleave to a broad constitution and sacrifice to make the institutions necessary to support freedom as we understand it.

Western ideas only go so far, and I suspect a major reason behind the Islamist resurgence in the Middle-East is that many Muslims feel overrun by Western ideas and interests, have low opinions of the West, and remain tribal and kinship based, with Islam as the glue.

Oftentimes, Muslims don’t really understand what we mean by individual liberty unless they’ve lived in the West. Even then, some Muslims have reacted violently against it. Many Muslims understandably resent our involvement in their backyard, and many clearly resent their own oppressive leadership (tribal, authoritarian, military dictatorship) exacerbated by an exploding youth demographic (a lot of what the ‘Arab Spring’ was about).

Many people in the West assume their ideas of freedom are universal. It’s important to keep in mind that Islam hasn’t undergone a reformation (they’ve also never had a central authority like Rome) nor the challenge to Christian doctrine and earthy power that occurred during the Enlightenment.

Islam doesn’t leave it up to you to not drink, watch porn, go to stripclubs, ‘freely mix’ with women, lend money etc. It prohibits these activities through strict control of the laws, politics and the public square. Right now, rather extreme groups like the Salafists are seeking such very restrictions in Egypt, for everyone, as part of the ruling coalition.

We should make our foreign policy accordingly to deal with these strategic realities, and I believe we can still aim for broader understanding, for avoiding unnecessary war, for being smart about pursuing our interests and smarter about our partners.

My two cents.

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”