Since its been a few hours since the last post, and I’m sure the insomniacs and night owls could use it, here’s a fresh thread to follow up on the events in Paris or anything else you wish to remark on.
Paris Attack Updates: Updated with France 24 Live Feed; Updated Again and Again
Since Betty C’s thread is a few hours old, here’s a front page update on the attacks in Paris. The BBC is reporting that there was an explosion near the Stade de France, though it is unclear if this was a suicide attack or a more conventional bombing. The Beeb is also reporting fifteen killed near the Bataclan Arts Center and up to sixty people being held hostage there. Finally, they’re reporting that France has closed its borders!
I’m sure we’ll all be updating each other as the night and the weekend goes on, but we should all keep two important points in mind: 1) the reporting is going to change several times as new information becomes available, so what seems to be an accurate now may not be in a few hours. And 2) terrorism, no matter how repugnant or terrible, is a very low probability event. Terrorists real targets aren’t the immediate victims, they are the rest of us; their intention is to scare us into taking actions we would never ordinarily do.
Finally, all of our thoughts and prayers are with the people of France.
Update: Anoniminous provided the link to France 24’s live feed. So no one has to go looking for it, the link is here:
Update 2: France 24 just reported that the law enforcement response at the Bataclan is complete and two of the hostage takers are dead.
Update 3: In comments Robert Waldman posted the following, which I thought was important enough to be seen as part of the actual post on the front page:
“Anyone stranded in Paris reading Balloon Juice on a smart phone might be interested in the twitter hastag #PorteOuverte (open door). It is being used by people offering shelter to the stranded and by stranded people seeking shelter. Parisians are hosting stranded strangers who don’t think they can safely return to their homes or hotels.
The standard suggestion is to communicate location only privately with direct messages in case there are terrorists on twitter.”
Thanks Robert!
Paris Attack Updates: Updated with France 24 Live Feed; Updated Again and AgainPost + Comments (170)
A Dustbowl Where a Breadbasket Should Be
That big blue space west of the City of Baghdad, Mada’in Qada, was where I was deployed in Iraq. It is part of the agricultural belt that rings Baghdad. We also had an assumed risk are south of Mada’in in Wassit Province and, for about six to eight weeks, we had southern Diyala Province, which is just north of Mada’in. Eventually my Brigade Combat Team (BCT) also picked up Mahmoudiya Qada. This gave the Army’s non-modular, legacy brigade the entire southwestern, southern, and eastern belt/approaches to Baghdad. That’s a lot of territory for 4,500 people to cover. Since this is going to be a photo/picture heavy post, I’m going to put most of it under the fold in order to not swamp the front page.
A Dustbowl Where a Breadbasket Should BePost + Comments (71)
Source material
Chris, in a comment to my post on Syria, Strategy, and Policy, asked me about what I look at for source material. While both Cervantes and BobS weighed in with some good recommendations, I promised I’d put something up for Chris yesterday. This has slipped to today. I’m going to break this into three parts and actually start with the final third.
A lot of my research and analytical work is done using open source resources. When I do this type of work I’m basically relying on targeted key word searches that lead me to source material. I then vet that source material in several ways. First, I try to vet the author and the outlet. So if its on a blog or some other form of commentary site, I’m looking to see if I can identify the author and determine if they actually know anything about what they’re talking about and what, if any, biases I can determine. I’m also looking for links to related material at every source I’m looking at. For two reasons: 1) as documentation/citation for what I’m reading and 2) to widen my source material pool as I’m working my way through the subject search. I’m also constantly bookmarking and saving links to potential material that I might possibly need in the future. So that’s a portion of how I go about looking for, finding, and vetting source material. I go where the search takes me, vet continuously, and work the links in the sources I’m finding. The kind of work I do requires me to basically live in information overload, so I do.
So now back to the first third. For news sources, as in straight news reporting and not commentary, I largely avoid US news media. Rather than CNN or FOX or ABC or etc, I prefer the BBC, al Jazeera English, Agency France Press, the Guardian. I will use the AP and Reuters wires, as well as the Christian Science Monitor and McClatchy. For long form reporting I’ve found that the best stuff seems to be at Harpers, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Pro Publica, the New Yorker, and likely several others I’m forgetting. Overall, however, I tend to avoid initial straight news reporting from the US news media. Some of this goes out the window when I doing open source research and analysis. So if, while doing that, the best source is CNN or Time, I’ll use it. So that’s an important caveat.
In the middle third I understood Chris to be asking about material pertaining to the Middle East. I have several go to sites that I like to start with depending on the issue. These include Juan Cole’s Informed Comment (full disclosure: I’ve guest written a couple of posts for Professor Cole, specifically back in 2008 and 2009 shortly after I got back from Iraq) and COL Lang’s Sic Semper Tyrannis (full disclosure for those not paying attention: I used to be a front pager there and COL Lang helped train me). One of my favorite sites regarding the Middle East is Jadaliyya. Great site, interesting and informative material across a variety of topics. I also like to use the Middle East Monitor and for Israel-Palestinian specific issues +927 Magazine. I’ve also used the National AE, as well as Haaretz. A great site, that I actually used a lot when deployed to Iraq to get a good overview, is Musings on Iraq. The Al Monitor is very useful as they provide good translations of reports from Middle Eastern news sources. There are other sources that I use, but I don’t think we need to belabor this.
And that, as they say, is that. I know I promised to do something about the Levantine drought and I’ll try to get that up tomorrow. Everyone have a great night! Or evening for those of you in Mountain, Pacific, or points farther west.
Happy Veterans Day
Just a quick post to wish John, Soonergrunt, and all the other veterans who read and/or comment here at Ballon Juice, and those who don’t, a Happy and Healthy Veteran’s Day!
It is, however, also important to remember as Shakezula at Laywers, Guns, and Money points out, that there are over 25 homeless veterans in the US per every 10,000 US veterans! I would argue that this is both a national political and a national moral disgrace. I leave you all with Five Finger Death Punch’s take on this:
* Veterans Day image was found here.
Syria, Policy, and Strategy
Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Carter indicated that additional troops might be deployed to Syria in the future. Secretary Carter’s remarks were highly nuanced. He made it clear that any additional US Forces going to Syria would be contingent on identifying legitimate host country partners to partner with. This discussion of potential deployment of troops, however, misses something important: what is the strategic objective we are trying to achieve?
Unless or until someone can clearly articulate what the objective is for Syria, then everything else being suggested is simply tactical whack a mole! I have yet to see anyone, American elected or appointed official, European elected or appointed official, pundits, commentators, the Syrians themselves, explain just what the goal is: beyond removing Assad. And removing Assad is not the objective, it is a way to the end. Until someone can delineate what happens once the fighting stops, we do not have a coherent policy. The same goes for dealing with the related mess in Iraq.
And without a coherent policy we cannot have a successful strategy. As a close friend and colleague likes to say: “policy cannot ask of strategy what policy will not provide.” These issues go to an important question that is all too often not asked: what does it take to win the peace? Winning on the battlefield is, comparatively, easy: find the enemy, fix them in place, and reduce their capacity/capability to continue to fight. This is easier, provided you have the numbers, the will, and the logistics in a conventional interstate war. It is far harder in an irregular conflict where war is being made among the people. But in both of these the ultimate issue is what happens once the fighting stops. Managing the post conflict reality is really the hard part.
We had a highly developed understanding of the need to answer this question during World War II. After watching what happened with how World War I was resolved, and the inability of the victors to secure the peace, we developed the Marshal Plan for Europe and a similar plan for Japan and other parts of the Pacific theater. The result is that, unlike WW I, the allies not only won the war, but they won the peace. This was partially by enabling the losers of WW II to also prosper and to seemingly become the long term winners of the peace.
Until or unless we develop an actual set of objectives for conflict prosecution, termination, and post conflict redevelopment and stability there is little point in doing anything other than providing support for refugees and trying to contain the situation. This includes supporting our allies and partners in the region in dealing with the refugee and extremism/terrorism situations that they are facing. Without a coherent description of what Syria and Iraq ultimately should become, and without actual, reliable host country partners to provide that vision to us and to work with us to achieve it, there will be no resolution to the Syrian Civil War and the Iraqi conflict.
Netanyahu’s Historical Revisionism: There is More Here than Meets the Eye
Earlier this week Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu delivered a speech at the 37th World Zionist Congress. His remarks, which included a discussion of contested religious sites such as the Harem al Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem, as well as settlements also included some very interesting content about the Holocaust. Specifically PM Netanyahu alleged/asserted that the idea behind the Final Solution to eliminate all Jews was not the creation of Hitler and his senior aides and associates, but rather was thought up and pitched to Hitler buy Haj Amin al Husseini. Haj Amin al Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a member of one of the two most powerful Palestinian families/clans at the time. Haj Amin, who was involved with both the Palestinian resistance to the Jewish settlement of Mandatory Palestine (the Yishuv) and the British Mandatory Authorities, made common cause with Hitler and the NAZIs. However, the idea that Haj Amin came up with the idea for the Final Solution and convinced Hitler it was a better idea than mass deportation is simply fantasy.
And it is the fantastic elements of Netanyahu’s remarks that have received the attention. The Chief Historian at Yad Vashem has made it clear that this was not how the Final Solution was conceived of or decided upon based on the transcripts of Hitler’s meeting with al Husseini. Other’s have pointed out that the meeting actually happened after the Final Solution had begun. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also come out and made it very clear who was responsible. And while Chancellor Merkel’s, all of the actual historians, as well as some Holocaust survivors remarks are a welcome antidote to PM Netanyahu’s revisionist history, I think there is something else going on here.
Netanyahu has always been known as someone that code switches. When he’s speaking in front of one audience he’ll describe an event or his actions or a proposed course of action one way and when he’s speaking before a different group he will switch his language up and address these matters another way. Or, in the same remarks, he’ll go back and forth. In fact he was caught doing this just this week where in the speech to the World Zionist Congress he claimed to have had the fewest settlements created under his prime ministership (largely by splitting this up by his terms of office) and to another group asserting that the most settlements have been built while he’s been prime minister – one of these things can not be true.
Now its not surprising that politicians or other leaders tailor their remarks to their audiences. In the case of Netanhayu, however, it is clearly more deeply purposeful. As the Haaretz reporting linked to above relates, PM Netanyahu is a stickler for writing his own speeches and remarks – he feel’s they are part of history and the historical record. So this is not the case of a hired word smith tailoring an argument to a specific constituency or audience. Rather, I think what happened here is that the “Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem developed the plan to kill all of world Jewry and convinced Hitler to implement it” portion of the speech was not intended for anyone at the World Zionist Congress. It was intended for an American audience of those who seek to equate Islam with genocidal aggression against Jews and Christians.
There are several reasons for this, not least among them is that the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, at the time that Haj Amin held the position, was an administrative one. Despite attempts to argue otherwise, Haj Amin was not an Islamic cleric or jurisprudential scholar from among the ulamah. He had very little Islamic education – a year at al Azhar in Cairo, but was mentored throughout his life by Rashid Rida. Moreover, after going from being a pan-Arabist to a Palestine Arab nationalist, the British exiled him from Mandatory Palestine in 1937. It was during his exile that he linked up with the NAZIs – the enemy of my enemy is my friend… While it is true that Haj Amin was not a member of the Muslim clergy and had only a limited amount of formal, Islamic religious training, he did become a promoter of Islam in his role as Grand Mufti, which is, itself, a title with religious connotations.
Netanyahu’s remarks make a lot more sense if they were directed at an American audience that has been primed by graphic images and reports of the evils that ISIS is perpetrating in Syria and Iraq, Especially as many Americans still have not established a new normal/reached a new equilibrium fourteen years after the al Qaeda attacks on 9-11-01. Politicians and special interest group leaders still routinely demagogue over issues pertaining to Islam and Muslims – everything from whether new mosques or cemeteries can be built/established to comparative historical/comparative religion material in social studies curriculums. Combine this with the fact that most Americans, including the most devout, tend to know very little factual material about their own, let alone other’s religions, and referring to an Arab and Palestinian nationalist leader by the Islamic religious title that came with his administrative office and asserting that he was the creator of the genocidal plan to kill all the Jews was a political-linguistic dogwhistle.
To most people who actually know the history of Haj Amin al Husseini, which is precious few in the US, it was immediately clear that PM Netanyahu made an incorrect statement. To the vast majority that have heard that ISIS, which claims to represent all of Islam through its new caliphate of the Islamic State, has specifically targeted non-Muslims for death, Netanyahu’s remarks will ring true. It is this latter group, and especially American elected officials, special interest group leaders, and commentators that PM Netanyahu’s remarks were aimed. Those of us who know better heard a serious error made by a hyperbolic politician with serious issues. The majority who don’t heard that in the 1940s an Islamic leader devised the plan for genocide, which reinforces the message that Islam is inherently evil and inherently in opposition, perhaps genocidally so, to all non-Muslims. PM Netanyahu is not a stupid man and he knows and understands Americans and American politicians better, perhaps, than any other foreign leader and some American ones as well. His remarks were not an accident, nor were they a mistake. They were not intended for the ears of those at the World Zionist Congress. They were intended for the ears of those in the US who have been primed since 9-11-01 to think the worst of Islam, Muslims, and Muslim-Americans. PM Netanyahu was providing cover for some of the most toxic ideas currently bounding around American politics and society and he was doing so for his own parochial purposes.
Netanyahu’s Historical Revisionism: There is More Here than Meets the EyePost + Comments (80)