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I don’t quite understand Turkey’s anger over the Armenian genocide resolution. I have my doubts over whether it was actually a genocide in the technical sense, but that’s not the point here. (There’s a good commentary on this on NRO, though I take great issue with Kavulla’s offhand and unjustified comment that Turkey may have merely a “delusion” of civilization.”)

But who was responsible for the Armenian massacres? They occurred entirely under the Ottoman Empire, before the founding of the Turkish Republic. And what about the people involved? To the best of my knowledge Ataturk had nothing to do with it, and in fact didn’t get along with the Young Turks who were running the government. As for those Young Turks (this is admittedly all based on Wikipedia/Vikipedi):

• Enver Pasha: court-martialled by the Ottoman Empire for crimes including the abuse of Armenians; sentenced to death; fled Anatolia; rejected as a political partner by Ataturk.
• Talaat Pasha: court-martialled by the Empire in absentia; sentenced to death; assassinated by an Armenian.
• Cemal Pasha: court-martialled by the Empire; sentenced to death; assassinated by an Armenian.
• Behaeddin Shakir: court-maritalled by the Empire but apparently acquitted; exchanged by the British to Ataturk’s government but never took up a major position.
• Sukru Kaya: If I’m reading Vikipedi correctly, which I’m probably not, he was fairly involved in Ataturk’s government, and he definitely became a Foreign Minister from Ataturk’s party.

But I think the upshot is that except for Kaya, none of the perpetrators of the massacres went on to become a major part of the Turkish Republic. In fact, even the Ottoman Empire tried the Young Turks for their crimes—which may have been just a tool to punish them for losing the war, but still, even Germany didn’t try its own war criminals in 1945. In WWII that was left up to the allies, who in the one case here where they had the chance (Shakir’s), didn’t try the perpetrators.

My point is I think the Turkish Republic has a very plausible case for admitting the massacres, or even admitting a genocide, but denying any responsibility by the current government. Everyone in the post-war German government which accepted responsibility for the Holocaust had lived through the war, and many had even been in the German Army, though probably not the SS. But a government of Turks born long after the last Armenian was murdered still stubbornly insists on denying the massacres, even hiring washed-up US congressional leaders to lobby for them. Why? All I can figure out is that it has to do with a continued sense of the Republic as the heir to a Great Turkish Past, and maybe a sense of the artificiality of Turkish nationalism. There were certainly plenty of Turks outside modern-day Turkey (as shown by Enver Pasha’s post-war activities), and plenty of non-Turks inside it. Maybe Turks realize, even if they don’t want to admit it, that without the Armenian massacres and the population exchanges, there could be no Turkey as we know it? (Sort-of the point made here.) Thus, even if remembering the massacres doesn’t hurt Ataturk’s reputation, maybe it does undermine the founding myth of Kemalism: a historical predestination that Anatolia would be the nation-state of the Turks?

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I would say, “Happy Che Day,” but unless you plan to overthrow the US government or execute hundreds of prisoners without trial, then it’s unlikely your celebration would be very true to the legacy of Che Guevara. Maybe as passive participants in bourgeois oppression, we could commemorate him by shooting ourselves in the head?

This Robert Scheer article in The Nation is fascinating. First, because the only negative words about Guevara are asides that he was “flawed” and that it’s “fortunate” that current revolutionaries “prefer” the ballot to the gun. The linguistic sleight of hand is also classic Nation material: “Little was reported about…why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent.” There’s no evidence in the article that Guevara actually tried to help the poor in any way except by killing their alleged oppressors, but that doesn’t matter to Scheer. He has no trouble creating an equivalency between an empirical fact and an unjustified, self-serving claim by Guevara.

But the best example of Scheer’s shell game is in the fourth and fifth paragraphs: “Che was a Cuban Communist” trying to “spread his evil message…right?” No, because “Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, bureaucratized Cuban mold.” Catch the fallacy of equivocation there? “Cuban Communism” just changed meanings! In the first example it means an evangelical ideology dedicated to spreading itself, while in the second it means a conservative, immobile tyranny. So what we’ve just been told is that Guevara was NOT trying to “spread his evil message”… as proven by the fact that he became disillusioned when Castro STOPPED trying to spread the “evil message.” Something’s wrong with that logic. (The second definition also makes me think that Scheer’s one of those who believes Communism never really existed, so it can’t be blamed for Communists’ atrocities.)

But this is all immaterial, because if you read the article again, you’ll see that it isn’t really about Guevara at all. It’s about the horrible misdeeds of the US, and the point of the article is for Nation readers to nod in sympathy as Scheer confirms what they’ve already known, that the US is stupid and evil. Guevara has no independent existence or agency—and certainly his victims don’t—because he’s only there to show up US crimes and mistakes. Talk about dehumanizing the Third World.

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This blog post by an Australian officer who just got back from Iraq (linked from a Washington Times article) has some great comments on the Sunni tribes’ revolt (which I discussed earlier). It supports my general view that the tribal leaders’ falling out with al-Qaeda is a result of a breakdown in their formerly-shared interest in stopping Shi’a power, but Kilcullen gives a lot more insight into the precise reasons. For one thing, he notes that tribal leaders have been thinking ahead to what will happen when the US leaves, and realizing that al Qaeda is as big a threat to their power as the government. This raises an interesting question: maybe Congressional Democrats’ constant talk of withdrawing from Iraq has actually helped the war effort?

Kilcullen also points out that the tribes’ “flip” is probably the best development in the last few years, but ironically it wasn’t an intended goal of the surge. Also, I would file all his comments about the greater effectiveness of local community organizations in securing order under the heading of “Edmund Burke was right all along.”

But on to my main point. The catalyst for the tribes’ flip, Kilcullen says, was jihadists trying to marry local women. Apparently al Qaeda commonly marries its people into powerful local families, but that goes against Iraq tribal tradition.In most parts of the Arab Middle East first cousins are regarded as ideal marriage partners–thus obviously keeping most marriages within tribes, and making marriage to al Qaeda outsiders less desirable. (I’m surprised that I can’t find a good discussion of this on either Google or Wikipedia, but Stanley Kurtz’s discussion of the topic last spring was thorough, even if his conclusions were questionable.) It’s interesting that all the places Kilcullen says al Qaeda has used intermarriage successfully–Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Indonesia–are non-Arab. Though Islam is almost universally interpreted to allow cousin marriage, this doesn’t mean that it’s a specifically Islamic practice. In fact it predates Islam in Arabia, which explains why it might be a blind spot for al Qaeda types who study only Islamic, not general Middle Eastern, history. (The big catch here is that most of the al Qaeda leadership is Arab, but I don’t know how much cousin marriage is still practiced by jetsetting Saudi construction tycoons.)

Which brings me to the most interesting line in Kilcullen’s post: “AQ, with their hyper-reductionist version of “Islam” stripped of cultural content, discounted the tribes’ view as ignorant, stupid and sinful.” I think this is fascinating because it points to the way in which al Qaeda is arguably a post-Enlightenment entity. Like the 19th century Western Orientalists Edward Said critiqued, al Qaeda subscribes to the idea that there is only one way to practice Islam in its essence–but whereas Orientalists would’ve said other traditions were just irrelevant furniture making it hard to see the fundamentally Islamic character of every Islamic culture, al Qaeda seems to view anything not explicitly contained within its interpretation of the Koran as being not just neutral, but actually ANTI-Islamic.

Why does this matter? Well, I think we inadvertently contribute, in some small way, to helping al Qaeda’s essentialist view of things when we talk about the “Islamic” period in Middle Eastern history, by which we mean only the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. For example, I visited Islamic Cairo when I was in Egypt, and a Google search reveals more examples of such usage like this, this, and this. So Western scholars are implying that it was only under the early caliphates that the Middle East was truly “Islamic,” which also implies that the Ottoman Empire was, and the modern Middle East is, somehow not Islamic. This plays right into the hands of an enemy which sees the Umayyads and Abbasids as homogeneous totalitarian theocracies, and which wants to bring them back.

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There isn’t too much thought or coherent reasoning behind this article, but it does raise an interesting point: we were much more unified immediately after 9/11. It’s easy to blame Bush or the Democrats Iraq or American forgetfulness or the media or some combination, and to say as this guy does that because of Iraq, “America’s fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.”

I don’t think our national “fabric” is nearly that strained, but I also think that the post-9/11 unity was only illusory, and our divides run deeper Iraq . It only lasted as long as we could avoid talking about what to actually do. Once we have to take some action, all the political divides which had been brewing since Vietnam came back to the surface. Everybody looked at the inkblot and saw what they wanted to. What’s remarkable is less that 9/11’s unity wore off so fast but that it made a difference in the first place.

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I have to admit that I haven’t read Marshall, but I’ve seen him critiqued pretty heavily by the most recent generation of US WWII military historians (most notably Michael Doubler and Peter Mansoor), as part of the general effort to rehability the reputation of the US army in Europe. There’s apparently good evidence that Marshall was sloppy or maybe even dishonest in his research methodology (the argument is summed up here), and some WWII soldiers’ memoirs have explicitly said Marshall’s ratio didn’t apply to their units. (The only example I can remember is this one.) So I’m a little bit dubious of any argument that relies on Marshall. (From my reading of the critiques of Marshall, I think Grossman is right that soldiers more often just aim a little high, rather than not shooting at all as Marshall argued.)

And I agree with Joe that whatever inclination we have against killing (I think more societally conditioned than natural) is more easily overcome when dealing with those we know and who’ve offended us. A book I read recently argued that humans have been extremely violent throughout most of our history, and it’s only modern states that have managed to curb our tendency toward domestic violence. But when those states send people off to fight each other, isn’t there much less emotional motivation to kill?

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I do not read much about military history because I usually find it boring, but Wayne found this article and it surprised me. I guess I do not know at all if what he is saying accurately represents the evidence, or if the studies he sites have any merit. However, he seems to consider a variety of arguments, so it appears plausable.

This stuck out to me as problematic:

“I have realized that there was one major factor missing from the common understanding of this process, a factor that answers this question and more: the simple and demonstrable fact that there is, within most men and women, an intense resistance to killing other people.”

“Indeed, the study of killing by military scientists, historians, and psychologists gives us good reason to feel optimistic about human nature, for it reveals that almost all of us are overwhelmingly reluctant to kill a member of our own species, under just about any circumstance.”

I could easily mistake these passages as stating that people have this same reluctance to violence at home, in regular society. Most murders, rapes and other violence are directed at people who know their attacker. On a battlefield you do not know the person you are harming, but if you know him, live with him, or have a grudge against him, you might feel compelled to hurt him. You may even feel justified.

There might be hope for less violence on a battlefield (although that seems to be self-defeating), but I do not think it applies at home, where we do not need to manufacture contempt against others.

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There’s a fantastic editorial by Canadian MP Michael Ignatieff in the NYT today. A few quotes:

“The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting.”

“The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.”

“Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology.” [He goes on, without explicitly saying so, to basically endorse the paleoconservative critique of the Iraq War, not the DailyKos critique. Definitely worth reading, coming from a Canadian member of the Liberal Party.]

And best of all: “The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid.” [So, are political scientists doing the right thing by talking about Theory all the time, or are historians really on the right track?]

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Belatedly following the advice of Capt. Travis Patriquin, the army is apparently trying hard to work with Sunni sheikhs, many of whom have become disillusioned with al Qaeda. Patriquin was killed while this strategy was just getting off the ground (pay link), but it seems to be having some success–for example, Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon claim that al-Anbar province is now one of the safest areas in Iraq. A Lexis Nexis search shows only 4 references to the Sunni Triangle in US newspapers in June and July of this year, down from 19 in the same period last year.

This makes a lot of sense for tribal leaders. They have always jealously guarded their power, against the Ottoman Empire, against the British, and even against Saddam. In 2003, the biggest threat became the US-backed provisional government, which as Patriquin’s slide show pointed out, sought to dismantle tribal leadership and centralize power with Shi’a government in Baghdad. So most of the Sunni sheikhs were willing to cooperate first with their old rivals the Ba’athists, and then with al Qaeda.

But in 2007 it seems pretty ridiculous to suggest that the Shi’a government in Baghdad is actually going to exert centralized control over Anbar. The problem for the sheikhs now is that the (often foreign) terrorists they invited in aren’t willing to leave, and are trying to become an independent power player in the Sunni Triangle, with their own ideological agenda. In much of Iraq, sectarian power struggles drive the violence, and provide an incentive to paper over intra-sectarian differences. But there are no Shi’a in al Anbar, and the Baghdad government is a paper tiger, so the sheikhs are free to turn against al Qaeda. When the US Army comes around at the same time offering money and support to do what you want to do anyway, why not cooperate?

In Baghdad’s confused tangle of sects, people are putting aside jihad against the Crusaders in order to kill each other for more mundane political advantages. In Anbar, the sheikhs line up with the US to hunt down terrorists. But in both cases, al Qaeda is being beaten only because it gets in the way of Iraqi interests hammering out their own future.

Optimistically, I hope the situation in al Anbar offers some small hope for a balance of power between the government and various factions in Iraq, perhaps leading to a sort of de facto federalism. On the other hand, an Iraq which is even partially stabilized by co-opting the tribal power structure won’t be an Iraq with real democracy, individual rights, freedom of religion, women’s rights, or even a government that doesn’t brutalize its own people.

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