Jeffrey Goldberg

No Country For Liber-tari-ans And Nobody’s Business But The Turks? Some Links

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From Middle-East Perspectives: ‘What Are Erdogan’s Intentions After The Fall Of Afrin?‘

‘That said, it is interesting that Erdoğan keeps using the term “Ottoman” in much of his rhetoric – for decades the Turks have avoided the term, claiming that atrocities such as the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides were not done by Turks, but the Ottomans. It appears now that is a distinction without a difference. His displays of the 1920 “national oath” map are not accidental – it is there for a reason.’

Sorry for the title, but I’m still thinking the resurgent Islamism and authoritarian populism of Erdogan, combined with the fires burning across the Middle-East, along with the revanchism of Putin’s Russia, and the relative weakness of European leadership, bears watching.  It’s got me worried.

Via Stratfor via Twitter:

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Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: ”A Dissent Concerning Kevin Williamson‘

Written from inside the publication:

‘Individuals participating in the public sphere, and publications that aspire to cultivate a broad civic dialogue, ought never slip into indifference to injustice or abandon moral judgments. But neither should they mistake tolerance for moral collapse. Much can be worked out by objecting to the objectionable in ways that do not foreclose the possibility of all cooperation. As citizens, if not as employees of any particular company, we are inescapably bound. And it is incumbent on all of us, even in our inevitable moments of pained outrage, to model how to work together.’

When you write for money, you have to make some compromises on principle; you’re part of an organization.  You’ll have to plug other people’s work and placate the financial interests and readers of the magazine.  More broadly, all of us are, subtly, and often imperceptibly, influenced by the people and environments through which we move.

My two cents regarding the fracturing of the political Left: The Atlantic, The NY Times, The New Yorker etc. have long published and endorsed various forms of progressive and radical politics, especially since the 60’s.  Such politics traditionally came packaged with a commitment to the arts, the avant-garde, dissenting voices, liberal and sometimes even conservative establishmentarianism.  In the past, there was more of a functioning establishment to react against.

As I see the world, pegging highest ideals and deepest moral thinking to Civil Rights activism, social justice, and various reactionary and collectivist political movements has caught up with these publications.  There’s always someone more pure.

Just as there is a fractured and frustrated conservative movement and Republican party, there is a fractured liberal and activist Left and Democrat party.  The Atlantic is plugged into much of that populist Left sentiment (irrationally anti-Trump).

Don’t be surprised when it happens: Many individuals on the Left will continue to subsume their own experiences into group identity, feeling perfectly righteous and justified as part of a mob swarming dissenters on the path to the better, or perhaps, the perfect world to come (speaking and acting for what they believe to be ALL women and minorities within group indentity and endless protest).

Kevin Williamson, and for that matter, Fridersdorf if he’s not careful, can easily become dissenters.

Heretics, even.

Via The Future Of Capitalism: ‘The Politics Of The New Yorker’

Under A Green Moon-Ira Stoll At The New York Sun: ‘Comma in the New Yorker Opens Up Quite a Vista Of Liberal Parochialism’

From The New Yorker: ‘Writing Powered By Amtrak’

Kevin Williamson At The National Review: ‘Whose Liberalism?’ 

The Personal Ain’t Political-Holding The Line Against Rape Ideologues-Conor Friedersdorf On George Will

 

Graeme Wood At The Atlantic: ‘The American Leader In The Islamic State’

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Full piece here.

Wood:

‘Western jihadists find their way to violence many different ways, but they often match a profile. And that profile fit John like a wet suit. He came from an upper-middle-class family. He squandered opportunities commensurate with his innate talent; he recognized that he would not excel in the fields chosen or glorified by his parents and authority figures. Often, a personal crisis—a death in the family, a near-death experience of one’s own—triggers existential contemplation, leading to religious exploration; in John’s case, his childhood frailty might have filled that role.’

Well done.  Likely worth your time.

A previous Grame Wood piece on ISIS and interview:

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About that ‘upper-middle class’ part…it may be more broadly applicable:

Perhaps due to an incoming American administration less favorably ideologically aligned with those making decisions at media outlets, we’ll get more vocal notice of the same problems.

Which map are you using to understand this conflict?:  From The American Interest Online: Francis Fukuyama On Samuel Huntington

Ebrahim Moosa At Bloggingheads Discusses Islamic Reform

al-Zawahiri’s Egypt, a good backstory: Lawrence Wright At The New Yorker: ‘The Man Behind Bin Laden’

Michael Moynihan jihad.com.

Repost: Kenan Malik In The Spiked Review Of Books: ‘Twenty Years On: Internalizing The Fatwa’-Salman Rushdie’

Link sent in by a reader to Alexander Hitchens essay:  As American As Apple Pie: How Anwar al-Awlaki Became The Face Of Western Jihad

Paul Berman At The New Republic: ‘From September 11 to the Arab Spring: Do Ideas Matter?’…From Foreign Affairs: ‘Al Qaeda After Attiyya’….From The AP: ‘Al-Awlaki: From Voice For Jihad To Al-Qaida Figure’

From Reason: ‘Mohammad Cartoonist Lars Vilks Headbutted During Lecture’

Passed Along By A Reader-Robert Satloff’s 10 Questions For Obama On Iran

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Jeffrey Goldberg has reproduced the questions without comment at The Atlantic.  Some of them are pretty good.

Click through.

Here are a few concerns I’ve produced in the last 20 minutes:

–In working to constrain the use and threat of military force to the strict conditions of the deal (the terms of which have gradually grown more lax), are you prepared to deal with the continued fallout of rewarding the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran alliance, traditionally adversarial to U.S. interests?

–In setting such narrow conditions for the use of American force, have you not inherently given Putin leverage in Ukraine and possibly increased the likelihood of raised tensions in the Baltics and a flare-up along old Eastern boundaries?

–Do you envision a longer-term American strategy regarding the bitter Syrian civil war, Assad’s regime still clinging to power (and chemical weapons), and the subsequent growth of Daesh/Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which also can threaten U.S. interests?

–By riding a wave American isolationist sentiment at home, funneling foreign policy decision-making through a smaller group of like minds and executive branch management (away from State and a lot of experienced, principled men and women), have you not weakened American foreign policy by splitting the parties and country along partisan lines in order to achieve your objectives?

Add your own!

Another Addition: Israel, Iran, & Peace: Andrew Sullivan Responds To Charges Of Potential Anti-Semitism…Some Saturday Links On Iran-Skepticism, To Say The Least George Shultz & Henry Kissinger At The Hoover Institution: ‘What A Final Iran Deal Must Do’ So what are our interests and how do we secure them as the fires in the Middle-East rage?  Michael Totten makes a case here in Why We Can’t Leave The Middle-East.’  He gets push-back in the comments

Democracy as we envision it requires people to constrain themselves within laws and institutions that maintain democracy…through Mill’s utilitarianism?: Thursday Quotation: Jeane Kirkpatrick – J.S. Mill  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’
Do we try and invest in global institutions as flawed as they are…upon a Kantian raft of perpetual peace?:  Daniel Deudney On YouTube Responding to Robert Kagan: Liberal Democracy Vs. Autocracy

American Foreign Policy-Somewhere Between Peace Activism & Humanitarian Intervention?

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Walter Russell Mead at the American Interest:  ‘Obama, Anti-Semitism, and Iran:’

Mead riffs on Obama statement from this interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goldberg and Mead suspect that the anti-Semitism found in some quarters is not rational, and doesn’t lead to rational decisions.

Mead:

‘The problem here is that the President, ironically enough, doesn’t seem to understand diversity. He thinks diversity is trivial: that people of different religious faiths, ethnic backgrounds and ideological convictions are not all that different in the way they look at the world.’

and:

‘Essentially, Goldberg was asking the President whether his years in the White House have taught him that real diversity exists, and that it matters. He was asking whether the President understands that people from different cultures can sometimes operate on the basis of such radically different presuppositions that their mental world maps are fundamentally incompatible with the norms of reason as the President sees them. He was asking whether the President had considered whether Iranian leaders in particular reason so differently from standard cosmopolitan Washington liberal thinking that they may not, in fact, be approaching these negotiations from what the President, and most Americans, would recognize as a logical point of view’

The ‘rational actor’ model the President relies upon has distanced American interests from many allies, while getting America close enough to try and do business with various non-allies, adversaries, and traditional enemies.  It has done so on the assumption that American threat and use of force is part of the problem.  It has assumed that Vladimir Putin, the post-1979 mullah State in Iran, and the Castros in Cuba are rational enough to have a hand extended to them during this recent change in diplomacy.

This approach comes with the obvious risk that such a model may not be universally shared, but rather one among many concepts shared by a smaller subset of Westerners with a worldview of their own.  It risks trusting that Vladimir Putin and the post-1979 mullah State (the Castros can probably really only hurt the Cubans under their control) will act under the presumption of a certain amount of good faith the ‘rational actor’ model requires.  It presumes we can trust these guys enough to reach deals, even without the threat of force, and that we’re on the same ‘plane.’

Of course, it may be just as rational to guide policy based upon actual behavior, expecting such regimes to continue doing what they’ve been visibly doing.  Both Moscow and Tehran have deep anti-American sentiment and have held loose alliance between themselves.  They are busy maintaining, expanding and exploiting their spheres of influence by means that set themselves and their people against American policy, as well as Western and international laws and much else besides (claiming American policy, international laws and expectations are aggressions and constraints against their interests).

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Some other links:

From The New Yorker: ‘Journey To Jihad:  Why Are Teenagers Joining ISIS?‘

Informative piece which follows a Belgian jihadi from a Belgian Anjem Choudary wannabe organization to the Syrian desert.

***As to the title, I’m guessing you have to write titles like that at the New Yorker.  For some people, understanding is to Terrorism what PTSD can be to War.  If we just understand and explain terrorism, it might not go away, but it will get better.  If we just have the experts explain why terrorists want to kill us, or why wars happen and how badly people can be affected by them, they might not go away, but it will all get better.

This can be an exercise in reinforcing a set of beliefs about the world rather than what’s going on in the world itself.

This can have political, social and institutional consequences that don’t necessarily make the world any better.

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Meanwhile, Iranian backed Hezbollah is still active, of course:

Claudia Rosett:

‘Reports out of southern Lebanon tell us that the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah  continues to expand its network of tunnels along the border with Israel, preparing for another war. That’s not an accusation by Israeli sources, but a boast by Hezbollah, detailed in a series of recent articles in a Hezbollah-linked newspaper, As-Safir.’

Henry Kissinger & George Schulz Via The WSJ: ‘The Iran Deal And Its Consequences’…Inside Everyone Is A Western Individual Waiting To Get Out?-Repost-Roger Sandall At The American Interest: ‘Tribal Realism’

Iraq, Islamism & Terrorism-The National Defense-Some Wednesday Links

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Yes, there’s oil involved and the policing of the global marketplace for it (oil which we would do well to get more of here at home, but which won’t likely happen with a ballooning EPA and an activist-sympathetic administration). There’s also Israel and the larger region to think about strategically, as well as our national security.  Should ISIS/ISIL be able to control and hold any territory, like other Islamist held territories or those sympathetic to Islamist causes, this will create a genuine threat to our interests and safety pretty soon afterwards.

Thousands of fighters from the Western world have joined their ranks. This is dangerous stuff.

Vice magazine has another dispatch up from the Kurdish controlled territories of Iraq. Perhaps the Kurds would not easily give up Kirkuk after taking over its defense from fleeing Iraqi Army forces and defending it from ISIS/ISIL.

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https://twitter.com/MsIntervention/status/481798600092286976

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Walter Russell Mead tears into the current administration’s unraveling foreign policy, while Jeffrey Goldberg takes a rather bleak, non-interventionist stance, and tries to redirect focus away from the Obama blame (whom most of the press is just getting around to judging more objectively after exhausting all other options):

I’ve often thought of real neo-conservatives as liberals who’ve left the fold. Many Left-liberal loyalties and underlying liberal humanist sympathies remain, but now married to American military power and a more realist look at international affairs. The use of force is justified to promote those ideals, especially regarding Israel.

So, perhaps the more Left-liberal and ‘progressive’ our culture drifts, an eventual backlash out of the grad schools, social sciences, and policy-halls of liberal humanitarian thought awaits.

Just as many libertarians are most vocal about criticizing liberal collectivism and Statism, neo-conservatives are often most vocal about criticizing Left-liberal and non-interventionist foreign policy.

What am I missing?