Despite its many flaws,The New York Times is an indispensible institution right now, producing more and better actual journalism than any other major American media outlet. Setting aside the low-bar-snark, though, its ongoing willingness to offer David Brooks a platform is a running chancre that infects every hard-won story from the real reporters whose beat has the ill-fortune to attract BoBo’s fancy that day.
That’s true even when he arrives at something of a defensible argument, because to get there, he pays his way in counterfeit intellectual coin.
See, for example, today’s dog’s breakfast of an attempt to go all big-think-wise-man on “the biggest threat to world peace right now.”
That would be his attempt to frame the situation on the ground now in Syria as an example of the great war of Sunni versus Shiite. As he works his way through to a (to me) surprisingly modest end, Brooks displays several of the tropes that make his work such an embarrassment to anyone who actually cares about either journalism or honorable argument.
Let’s go to the videotape.**
First up, there’s an old Brooks standby: useful innumeracy in support of a claim intended to raise stakes beyond the facts on the ground:
As the death toll in Syria rises to Rwanda-like proportions…
Bullshit.
What’s going on in Syria is awful. Horrible. Wretched. Vicious. Supply your own adjectives.
That doesn’t mean it is comparable to what occurred in Rwanda. In the genocide there, between 500,000 and a million Rwandan civilians were slaughtered, accounting for up to 10% of the population as a whole. The best current estimates of the toll of the Syrian civil war place the number of dead at a still-horrific 100,000 or so — less than 0.5% of Syria’s approximately 22 million inhabitants.
In raw numbers and — to focus on Brooks own term — as a proportion of the affected population, the two disasters are not equivalent.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that Syria is anything less than an utter humanitarian disaster and tragedy. But holding on to the problem of Brooks here, look at what his rhetoric is doing: calling something a genocide or its equivalent raises the moral and international-legal stakes for action by a lot. Such claims need to be earned, not (as so often with this source) simply and wrongly asserted.
Onwards. Brooks has a long-standing difficulty untangling cause and correlation, not to mention his long dance with the dread might/must fallacy:
Meanwhile, the strife appears to be spreading. Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is spiking upward. Reports in The Times and elsewhere have said that many Iraqis fear their country is sliding back to the worst of the chaos experienced in the last decade. Even Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain and Kuwait could be infected.
Some of the difficulty here isn’t simply a failure of causal argument. Brooks is perfectly capable of making sh*t up. Despite his claim that the current battles in Syria are causing violence in Iraq, Sunni-Shiite conflict is, as most of us with a functioning nervous system may recall, hardly a recent phenomenon. Consider just this cursory timeline, courtesy of the BBC:
2011 April – Army raids camp of Iranian exiles, killing 34. Government says it will shut Camp Ashraf, home to thousands of members of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran.
2011 August – Violence escalates, with more than 40 apparently co-ordinated nationwide attacks in one day.
US pull out
2011 December – US completes troop pull-out.
Unity government faces disarray. Arrest warrant issued for vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, a leading Sunni politician. Sunni bloc boycotts parliament and cabinet.
2012 – Bomb and gun attacks target Shia areas throughout the year, sparking fears of a new sectarian conflict. Nearly 200 people are killed in January, more than 160 in June, 113 in a single day in July, more than 70 people in August, about 62 in attacks nationwide in September, and at least 35 before and during the Shia mourning month of Muharram in November.
Nearly 200 people are killed in bombings targeting Shia Muslims in the immediate wake of the US withdrawal….
And so on. But Brooks isn’t merely wrong as a matter of fact. Rather, these facts point to the deeper problem, one that has crippled his (and many others’) arguments for American action in far off places. That is: the suggestion that Syrian events are driving Iraqi conflict includes a crucial unstated assumption: that Iraq’s own problems, fractures, circumstances and history are irrelevant.
You get this a lot amongst grand strategy or Great Game thumb-suckers. Countries, movements, peoples, funny-looking or sounding foreigners are all objects, not agents, mere counters in the game. Except, of course, as we found out the hard way from 2003 onwards, they’re not. They’ve got their own stories and they stick to them, by gum. Does an increase in conflict, a decrease in stability within a region matter to countries nearby? Sure. But other things matter more. Otherwise, El Paso’s murder rate during the last years of last decade might look a lot more like Ciudad Juarez’s than it does, if you catch my drift. (Happy to report, BTW, that the news there is getting a bit better.)
And there’s more! File this next one in the “fighting the last war” category:
It is pretty clear that the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal and nation-building at home has not helped matters. The United States could have left more troops in Iraq and tamped down violence there. We could have intervened in Syria back when there was still something to be done and some reasonable opposition to mold.
I’m not actually sure what the hell Brooks means in the first sentence above. We left Iraq under treaty, at the insistence of the Iraqi government. Is Brooks really saying we should have maintained a force under those circumstances? If so, he should make that clear, and then suggest some way that could be done…and then tell us how 100,000 or so (post-surge levels) US troops could actually police the kind of violence Iraq has seen in recent months and years.
Or to put it another way: this is pure REMF bullshit; thereoughtabealaw material: Brooks only gets to say we need more armed Americans in conflict zones if he’s willing to embed with a tooth unit for a full year.
And as for that “nation-building at home” line — WTF? Really — what does he mean? Or rather, please, sign me up. Get us a Nancy Pelosi speakership so that we could actually pass a jobs or infrastructure bill. Then we’ll talk.
And last: about that “we could have intervened in Syria back when…” Tell me, Mr. Brooks, what in detail you think we should have done. “Intervene” is such a usefully vague word.
Hell, don’t. Let’s read the chicken entrails you’ve left for us in this column. To me, the most revealing note in the whole piece is that phrase “reasonable opposition to mold.”
That sense of a plastic organization ready for whatever the U.S.’s child-like hands chooses to pinch or fold recalls nothing so much as Chalabi worship, the delusion that actors in a place about which we know little are dolls for us to dress-up and move and pour pretend tea for as we choose.
Never mind that they actually are the heirs and current proprietors of their ownlong history of faction and party and ideology and interest of which Mr. Brooks (and me, to be sure) have asymptotically close to zero grasp. Does he think that American blood or just American artillery would have persuaded anyone involved not to fight their own corner? Didn’t happen in Iraq, where US intervention brought out into the open long-(violently)-suppressed sectional conflict. Flash forward to the harsh tyranny of now, and still Brooks offers not one shred of evidence or argument to suggest that we had a better grasp of internal Syrian tensions this time around.
Astonishingly (to me) — and in all fairness, to be lodged on the credit side of his ledger — Brooks does land at a more or less reasonable conclusion. Echoing his colleague Nick Kristof, he endorses a strike against the Syrian government in support of what both columnists call the norm that prohibits the use of chemical weapons. (More on that later, perhaps.) But then he suggests something resembling restraint:
[There are] at least three approaches on the table. The first is containment: trying to keep each nation’s civil strife contained within its own borders. The second is reconciliation: looking for diplomatic opportunities to bring the Sunni axis, led by the Saudis, toward some rapprochement with the Shiite axis, led by Iran. So far, there have been few diplomatic opportunities to do this.Finally, there is neutrality: the nations in the Sunni axis are continually asking the United States to simply throw in with them, to use the C.I.A. and other American capacities to help the Sunnis beat back their rivals. The administration has decided that taking sides so completely is not an effective long-term option.
Brooks even concedes the crucial uncertainty:
…at this point, it’s not clear whether American and other outside interference would help squash hatreds or inflame them.
Given that, he concludes:
Poison gas in Syria is horrendous, but the real inferno is regional. When you look at all the policy options for dealing with the Syria situation, they are all terrible or too late. The job now is to try to wall off the situation to prevent something just as bad but much more sprawling.
I’ll take it anytime an Iraq cheerleader reins in his or her lust for another great adventure for someone else’s kids. Really. So I’ll pull back on my own bridle and note only that the claim that we are on the verge of a great Sunni-Shiite apocalypse is a conclusion assumed in advance.
Once again, the idea that the Syrian conflict might be, well, actually and in important ways distinctly Syrian is never actually entertained. The fact that the strife now in Egypt has nothing to do with sect-based religious rivalry and a great deal to do with very specific and long-standing fissures in Egypt’s society and polity never seems to enter Brooks spotless mind. And so on.
Which is to say that a glass-half-full kind of person might say well, at least our Bobo is learning. As for me, I’m no such Pollyanna: even when Brooks, blind pigging and all that, does reach a point that isn’t crazy, the way he gets there remains a problem. I guess it is the incuriousness that gets me the most. There’s a lot of sunshine in his spotless mind.
And as for the Times? They’ve made their bargain: Brooks’ celebrity is secure now; he gets clicks and he gets tons of exposure, both gold in this transitional media moment. He’s a smooth — I’d say glib, but YMMV – writer, to be sure, but he’s a genuinely crappy thinker. And that’s not going away. Still, even if his work does or ought to bring a flush of shame to those in the building who do put their minds (and sometimes their bodies too) out into the fray is something the powers that be in Timesland seem willing to worry about another day. The tricky thing is that places are only indispensable until they’re not, and it’s after the rubble settles that those long-ago first cracks reveal themselves as warnings unheeded.
*Where n is an arbitrarily large number
**obligatory h/t to Warner Wolf.
Images: Clara Peeters, A Vanitas Portrait of a Lady, c. 1613-1620.
Frontspiece of the Bible Moralisee, God the Geometer, c.1250.
Margret Hofheinz-Döring, Brigitte with Doll, 1946.
chopper
hear, hear. jesus, i just died a little inside cheering that sentence.
HinTN
Monumental deconstruction. Worthy of Driftglass! Alas, every mention of Bobo just reinforces his self image of importance.
scottinnj
I think Brooks serves a pretty useful purpose, – I’ve long thought he presents pretty much pure/ unadulturated opinion of what the Georgetown cocktail party/chin-stoking/both-sides-do-it/very serious person crowd is really thinking. I think to get transparency into that OP ED page is worth something – but not more than that.
NotMax
Deconstructing Brooks is like deconstructing the Dick & Jane books.
Gin & Tonic
I appreciate your analysis and your writing, but, truly, BoBo is unworthy of your efforts. There are many better things to spend your valuable time on, IMO.
reflectionephemeral
@scottinnj:
Absolutely. I wrote about a Brooks column a few years back, “As with almost all op-ed columns, the sociological implications are much more relevant than the actual content.”
piratedan
courtier class is clueless, no film at eleven because they don’t allow cell phone cameras to their soirees…..
CONGRATULATIONS!
Innumeracy and a lack of challenging the numbers will be the death of us all.
Heard some restaurant association gasbag on the radio saying (in response to the fast food strikers yesterday) saying that an average restaurant’s labor costs were 30%.
No challenges from anybody on that number. AND THAT’S THE PROBLEM. No one even asks anymore, so you can just pull numbers out of your ass.
I worked a decently staffed McDonalds right out of high school. If you, as a manager, scheduled or ran over 8% labor costs on any given shift, you were fired.
Innumeracy.
kindness
Brooks wins a prize every time but MoDo, well she’s the Michelle Malkin of the Grey Lady.
? Martin
It would be beneficial if people noted that at least in the runup, Syria is the near mirror of Iraq. Anyone who is cheerleading Syria over WMDs and the like who also cheerled Iraq needs to fully come clean about how they got Iraq so fucked up. Iraq didn’t have chemical weapons. Syria unquestionably does. They demanded we act before/against the UN inspectors assessment in Iraq, and they’re actually repeating that mistake again – with no acknowledgement that had they listened to UNSCOM, they would have avoided a terrible mistake. At the same time, some of the people who argued against Iraq because they didn’t trust the intelligence (and were proven right) there are arguing that whatever the US produces, no matter how definitive should be rejected because of the previous administration, as though the US possesses an unwavering viewpoint regardless of who has been elected to office. The critics in Congress who are now bemoaning that this might cost as much as a billion dollars were the ones that led us into a trillion dollar war and then proceeded to call anyone who questioned their decision a traitor.
The biggest problem with the Syria debate is that the overwhelming majority of participants are thoroughly dishonest about their reasons and track record. Brooks is a good example of this, but hardly an exceptional one. But everyone seems so goddamn definitive of what should happen, and I don’t see how any honest, considerate individual can be so definitive about this.
catclub
@CONGRATULATIONS!: “I worked a decently staffed McDonalds right out of high school. If you, as a manager, scheduled or ran over 8% labor costs on any given shift, you were fired.”
Really? Wow. I guess that is how McDonalds is the low price leader. I was certainly under the impression of 1/3 labor, 1/3 food, the rest was equipment, real estate and profit, for the restaurant business.
catclub
@? Martin: Another mirror image is that Saddam was a blowhard who frequently attacked his neighbors ( With US aid in the case of Iran). Assad may own Lebanon, but if he has any plans to destroy Israel, they are well concealed. Assad has never been a friend of the US.
Sanity may prevail. We invaded Panama to arrest a former ally/ employee. We did NOT officially invade Nicaragua.
catclub
You buried the lede, which is that Brooks MAY be learning.
Progress!
Brooks is much more like the random rewards systems that are so addicting, because he occasionally says something sensible.
JustRuss
Nice take down. “Reasonable opposition to mold”? Christ. Please, Mr. Brooks, point out one example in the last half century where that’s worked out.
Anoniminous
@? Martin:
Americans don’t do Critical Thinking. Come up with the right emotive hook and you can get Americans to buy anything. Pet rocks being a good example.
? Martin
@catclub: No, 20%-25% is standard in low-end food service. 8% is very low. I’m sure there are some franchises that low, but that’s exceptional. Average labor costs for McDonalds last year was about 20%. 1/3 is about right for cost of sales (ingredients, wrapping). Rent/insurance/utilities that kind of stuff is 30%. Advertising/promotions is about 5% or so. Profits about 6%.
Raising wages by 50% would raise the menu price by about 10%. Maybe slightly less because they’d likely have less turnover, less shrinkage, etc. But if you gave a million workers that much buying power, they might actually be able to afford to eat at McDonalds – or at least afford to order off the loss-leader dollar menu.
Bob In Portland
Thank you, Tom. You read it so we don’t have to.
MikeBoyScout
Can You Find Damascus On A Map?
All of the REMFs and alleged security experts should step up for a to be nationally televised quiz on what they know about Syria.
I’m so sick of knownothings parading their ignorance as intelligence.
Gin & Tonic
@JustRuss: Well, in fairness, I’m pretty opposed to mold myself. And mildew. Despite (or perhaps because of ) my reasonableness, I fight a losing battle in the basement on both fronts.
Anoniminous
@Anoniminous:
FIFM
Ted & Hellen
The guy in the top painting has nice little tits.
I did not know Christ was a surveyor.
The bottom painting sucks.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
The best thing about this screed is that you used the phrase “REMF”. Back in my Intel Officer days, I tried to work that into a report I was generating (part of a daily thing for the Joint Chiefs). My boss even let it slide but the editors had a cow and whacked it.
raven
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: They call em (us) FOBBIE’S now.
Anoniminous
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Why was it whacked? All it stands for is “Reactive Emergency Military Force.”
:-)
Tom Levenson
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: Thanks. I always feel I haven’t earned the right to that phrase (and other jargon I’ve picked up on the way), given my life-long civilian status. But sometimes it just fits, you know.
raven
@MikeBoyScout: You think the 11 Bravo’s have a better idea?
catclub
@MikeBoyScout: 44 miles, better than 92% of the previous 500 players.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
What kind of impact could we make by dropping all of America’s neocons and neolibs onto Damascus from, say, 40000 feet? It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
raven
@Tom Levenson: Don’t let it bother you. The vast majority of people in the military are “in the rear”. Vets know that and, as long as someone doesn’t go around misrepresenting their service, it’ s simply the way that it is. All that warrior shit is just so much hot air for the most part.
MikeJ
@catclub: I got 3 miles away, better than 100% of the last 500. I guess I should get to decide all US foreign policy because I’m really good at geography.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Ted & Hellen: That’s Evil Freemason Jesus.
ericblair
@raven:
Thought it was Fobbits.
raven
@MikeJ: 59 miles here. I’m reading a book about Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in WWII, the fuckers with maps and sophisticated navigation gear couldn’t find their ass with either hand.
raven
@ericblair: same idea Forward Observation Base dwellers. My Signal Battalion insignia from Vietnam said “Forward Support”. We were forward of some things but sure as hell not the infantry.
Bill in Section 147
@MikeBoyScout: I would have bombed Aleppo so not as much back-slapping as if I had hit Damascus but for some, it would do.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
And it’s that kind of macroeconomic effect (also, too, that all the competitors would be raising wages and prices at the same time) that make owners complaints that raising the minimum wage would drive them out of business so ridiculous. A higher minimum wage would be a huge win for businesses like McDonalds and WalMart that both hire and serve primarily low wage workers.
Villago Delenda Est
@scottinnj:
Which is why every fucking member of that crowd needs to be beaten brutally to within an inch of their lives.
Then you take that last inch.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
You’re in good company. Leviticus has an extensive section on what to do about mold and mildew.
Roger Moore
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
I don’t think it would do much for Syria, but it would definitely help the US.
Villago Delenda Est
@raven:
Here, here. I’m always upfront about my branch (Signal) and that I served on staffs at battalion, brigade, and division levels. Not on front lines. Back in command and control headquarters intentionally away from the lines. Even when I was in a “line” Signal battalion, my platoon supported maneuver brigade headquarters…well back from the front lines.
Of course, non-vets don’t have the knowledge to suss all this out, which makes them vulnerable to braggadocio from SGT Rock of the DISCOM types.
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: Shoot, move and communicate.
mainmati
The timeline for the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict actually spans the entire history of Islam since the split occurred among the direct claimants of Muhammed’s legacy. So Bobo’s infection comment is horribly uninformed. Second, Tom, you are correct to say that individual country legacies are actually as or more important. Egypt is overwhelmingly Sunni; there are far more Coptic Christians than Shi’a (numbering just a few thousands). While there has long been tension between the Muslims and Christians this was mainly manipulated in recent years by Mubariq and then exacerbated by the Brotherhood-led government. The real problem in Egypt is economic mal-development and class oppression, not religion. BTW, as bad as Bobo’s analytical skills are, Chunky Bobo’s are far worse.
priscianus jr
On several occasions in the past I thought Brooks might have beenlearning (because he occasionally wrote something that made sense), and then it turned out he wasn’t. He has his idées fixes and world events must somehow conform to them, period.
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: That cleansing procedure sounds a lot more complex than washing with a bleach solution.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I am impressed, for all those words Brooks never explains what he thinks the results of bombing will be. That was the whole problem with Iraq, it was: Blow Shit Up + ? = FREEEDOMMMM!!!
Allen
“Producing more and better actual journalism than any other major American media outlet…”
You’re forgetting (especially) Mother Jones, and even Rolling Stone. True, they aren’t dailies, but they usually don’t print anything asinine either (well, except for the occasional RS music review!).
Leo Artunian
As someone with allergies, I have always had a “reasonable opposition to mold.”
Oh — that’s not what you meant. Sorry.
Pococurante
“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”
Discuss.
Tom Levenson
@Allen: Not really. Both are good, and there are a number of others. But none comes close to the Grey Lady in the number of journalists they keep in the field (in lots of fields) or the resources with which they back them. Just about every blogger on current affairs relies on them, the Guardian and a handful of other venues to supply the raw material on which we chew. And the Times is the biggest kid on that block.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Pococurante
Obvious that means if we use a nuclear weapon on Damascus to stop Assad from using poison gas on the city’s population the world will rejoice
jaleh
This was the most recommended comment in NYT: And, I love it.
“Love these quotes:
“It could become a regional religious war similar to that witnessed in Iraq 2006-2008, but far wider and without the moderating influence of American forces,” wrote Gary Grappo, a retired senior Foreign Service officer with long experience in the region.
“It is pretty clear that the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal and nation-building at home has not helped matters. The United States could have left more troops in Iraq and tamped down violence there.”
You Mr. Brooks, who aided and abetted Bush and Cheney in rushing into Iraq after 9/11, should not be allowed to rewrite history. The reason there were American forces in Iraq, and this needs to be repeated again and again and again so there is no misunderstanding, is because we were lied to by Bush and Cheney for the reason we should invade, we were lied to about what the cost would be (it would pay for itself according to Cheney because of the Iraq oil fields, which didn’t happen), and we were lied to when we were told we would be out of Iraq in 3 months.
And then we unleashed a regional religious war by our invasion.
So, when you ask what the biggest threat to world peace is, I would say it is neocons and it will always be neocons, and the reporters, or opinion writers, who support them.”
JustRuss
@Gin & Tonic:
Swear to god, when I read your reply I had just returned from the hardware store with a quart of Kilz! Maybe I should send some to Bobo.