Pre-Communist

Kremlin announcement --

The President of the Republic of Belarus, Chairman of the Supreme State Council of the Union State of Russia and Belarus Alexander Lukashenko has been awarded the Order of Alexander Nevsky for his great personal contribution to the development of traditional friendly ties between Russia and Belarus, to deepening bilateral cooperation in the political, defence, economic and social spheres.

Among Alexander Nevsky's titles are Grand Prince of Kiev. He also cut deals with Russia's eastern neighbours at the expense of good relations with the west.

Vladimir Putin never misses an opportunity to send a message, in this case using an award that goes back to Catherine I. 

Post-Communist

On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, Phil Gramm and Michael Solon, building off an Atatürk exhortation to Turkey for economic success in 1923, write about Ukraine and Poland's highly divergent economic paths following the collapse of the USSR, but then segue to their real message --

Atatürk's dictum is a warning that without economic growth and prosperity, political and military victories can be transient and historically inconsequential. President Obama has won historic political victories. ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, the largest stimulus program in American history and the most pervasive expansion of regulatory authority in three quarters of a century largely fulfilled a progressive agenda that predated the 20th century. While Mr. Obama has transformed American society, his program has failed to produce an economic triumph, a failure that a free society will not long tolerate.

For some conservatives, it's always 1938. For others, it's always 1989.

That's what friends are for

On a day when as far as everyone except readers of The Nation are concerned, Russia has invaded Ukraine, South African President Jacob Zuma kindly shows up at the Kremlin to discuss ... The BRICS Development Bank.

Ankara not a big college town

Barack Obama yesterday in a speech to the American Legion --

And more broadly, the crisis in Iraq underscores how we have to meet today's evolving terrorist threat. The answer is not to send in large-scale military deployments that overstretch our military, and lead for us occupying countries for a long period of time, and end up feeding extremism. Rather, our military action in Iraq has to be part of a broader strategy to protect our people and support our partners to take the fight to ISIL. So we’re strengthening our partners -- more military assistance to government and Kurdish forces in Iraq and moderate opposition in Syria. We're urging Iraqis to forge the kind of inclusive government that can deliver on national unity, and strong security forces and good governance that are ultimately going to be the antidote against terrorists. And we're urging countries in the region and building an international coalition, including our closest allies, to support Iraqis as they take the fight to these barbaric terrorists.

Barack Obama announcement today --

President Barack Obama today announced the designation of a Presidential Delegation to Ankara, Turkey to attend the Inauguration of His Excellency Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President-elect of the Republic of Turkey on August 28, 2014. Mr. Jess L. Baily, Chargé d’Affaires a.i. of the Embassy of the United States to the Republic of Turkey, will attend the Inauguration.

So when the supposed distinguishing feature of his counterterrorism strategy compared to that awful man George W. Bush is that it relies more on regional partnerships, all Turkey gets for its Presidential Inauguration of the country's dominant politician is that the interim ambassador will hop in a car and head over to the event? That would be Turkey: NATO member, Syria and Iraq neighbour, transit route for foreign fighters, outlet for Kurdish oil, and all-round major player in the region!

Barack goes wobbly

Richard Haass (President of Council on Foreign Relations), no doubt speaking for many of Washington DC's Very Serious People (VSPs) on foreign policy, advocating (in the FT, subs. req'd, preview) that Bashar al-Assad is Our Man in the Levant against ISIS --

Such a policy change would be costly but not as costly as a scenario in which Isis could use Syrian territory from which to mount attacks on the region and beyond. The Assad government may be evil – but it is a lesser evil than Isis, and a local one.

Richard Haass, explaining way back in the early 1990s to a PBS Frontline documentary about how the US Very Serious People on foreign policy had gotten Saddam Hussein so wrong in the late 1980s --

Q: And, again, you must have thought long and hard about this, why didn't you spot what was going to happen [in Kuwait]? What do you think was the fundamental reason why you weren't able to say to the President, hey, this guy [Saddam] we've got to watch, he's really dangerous, he's going to do it? 

RH: None of us harbored any illusions about Saddam Hussein. I think though that the reason we failed to predict what he did was simply because of its sheer brazenry and its magnitude. The idea that on a Sunday afternoon or something I was going to stroll into the Oval and go, by the way, Mr. President, Saddam Hussein is going to amass 100,000 plus forces and is going to walk into Kuwait and he's going to make this the 19th province of Iraq, and this is going to be major test of the post-Cold War world. It was too dramatic. Particularly when he probably could have had a lot of what he wanted short of doing that. Saddam, simply by being ... powerful, simply by being next door to Kuwait, it could have probably Finlandized and could have done what Syria did to Lebanon originally or what the Soviets did to Finland. He could have ..... pressured Kuwait into probably giving him a lot of what he wanted. Maybe we were - maybe we were victims of a mindset. Here it is, it's the post-Cold War world, people are talking about the end of history. Maybe we thought that the era had passed when countries, if you will, ............ with all their military force and simply tried to erase other countries off the map. Maybe it was simply too big of a thought for us to comfortably absorb. And if that's the case, I plead guilty.

So having admitted a long time ago that he underestimated the regional ambitions of a Baathist dictator, Richard Haass now wants us to gamble on another Baathist dictator.

If Bashar al-Assad actually comes out of the Syrian civil war that he caused still in power, he will do so owing Russia and Iran a lot of money and needing even more money to launch some kind of rebuilding, especially to keep his core Baathist constituency onside. And of course he has the track record of a semi-occupation of Lebanon for 20 years until his overreach of ordering Hezbollah to assassinate Rafik Hariri forced him out of there.

But despite the obvious parallels to the 1990 version of Saddam Hussein, Washington's VSPs are ready to cast their lot in with Bashar al-Assad. History happens the second time as farce in Washington, but always as tragedy in the Middle East.

Arnoud the American

Former French Minister of Economy Arnoud Montebourg quoted Paul Krugman in the speech that triggered the dissolution of the Cabinet but that wasn't the only American he quoted (or adapted) despite a line of rhetoric given to attacking American style capitalism. Here is during Monday remarks that sealed his resignation --

« Les faits économiques sont têtus »

That's the John Adams "Facts are stubborn things" line, adjusted for the circumstances. 

Trucial Taunt

If events in the Arab World weren't so tragic, they would be funny. New York Times --

CAIRO — Twice in the last seven days, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have secretly teamed up to launch airstrikes against Islamist-allied militias battling for control of Tripoli, Libya, four senior American officials said, in a major escalation between the supporters and opponents of political Islam. The United States, the officials said, was caught by surprise: Egypt and the Emirates, both close allies and military partners, acted without informing Washington or seeking its consent, leaving the Obama administration on the sidelines. Egyptian officials explicitly denied the operation to American diplomats, the officials said ... The officials said that the U.A.E. — believed to have one of the most effective air forces in the region, thanks to American aid and training — provided the pilots, warplanes, and aerial refueling planes necessary for the fighters to bomb Tripoli out of bases in Egypt. The U.A.E. has not commented directly on the strikes. But on Monday an Emirati state newspaper printed a statement from Anwar Gargash, minister of state for foreign affairs, calling questions about an Emirati role “an escape” from the recent election that he suggested showed a desire for “stability” and a rejection of the Islamists. The allegations about the U.A.E. role, he said, came from a group who “wanted to use the cloak of religion to achieve its political objectives,” and “the people discovered its lies and failures.”

Among the striking things about where the world seems headed is that even the safest of conventional wisdom or smug narratives has an ever shorter shelf life. In this case, all the arguing about whether the US should or should intervene somewhere seems beside the point when other parties are not sitting back and waiting for an American decision. If anything, it seems to be the case here, as in Syria, that it's the lack of US intervention that is drawing in new players, who sense a free-for-all.

Not enough of a minority

The one year anniversary of the Assad regime chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta has passed with little notice. While there was an understandable concern about the unknowability of the consequences of a western military coalition strike on Damascus in response to the red line being crossed, given that tens of thousands of Syrian people have died in the last year and that the one rebel group being ignored by the Assads has taken over northwestern Iraq, those would have had to be pretty bad consequences to be worse than the actual choice of doing nothing. Of course there was that great disarmament deal brokered by Russia, which seems to have decided to observe the anniversary by invading more of Ukraine. Heckuva job all round.

Moral hazard in Algiers

There's a line of commentary on the murder of journalist James Foley by ISIL stating that it shows the difference between European and US policy on hostage negotiations i.e. that European countries pay ransoms (and so fund and incentivize further terrorism) and the US doesn't. It's set out clearly in this Reuters blog post by David Rohde, who himself survived such a kidnapping (by escaping).

Unfortunately this depressing episode reveals (among other things) how quickly previous hostage crises and the lessons thereof are forgotten. In January 2013 the big news story was the siege at the In Amenas gas plant in southern Algeria, and the decision of the Algerian military to shoot their way into the plant to relieve the siege and take the risk of some hostages dying, which they did. There was a tone of mystified superiority in much of the western media coverage of the Algerian response (a debate well reflected in this New York Times article), even though the Algerians had faced much more brutal tradeoffs than any western country in dealing with extremists; it's also worth noting that the Algerian approach does involve direct attack by ground forces and not from the safety of drones, so it's not that they are taking the easy way out.

Anyway the point is that once again, Syria is going to challenge any simple narrative of what should have been done. Paying ransoms funds terrorists, so in fact contrary to the anecdote mentioned by Rohde, it's Europeans who should be prevented from going to kidnap risk areas, not Americans. The US did send special forces to attempt a rescue, which failed, but it's not like they did nothing. It might be tempting to compare the Algerian approach to the Assad approach, but at this stage the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s looks like a model of finesse and legitimacy compared to the Assads. But there is no new moral conundrum in the Foley case.What's new is the widening circle of people who are becoming aware of it.

Typed through gritted teeth

US President Barack Obama statement on the destruction of Syria's declared chemical weapons stockpile --

... we appreciate the assistance of Russia and China.

Note: Russia and China have blocked a referral of the use of chemical weapons in Syria to the International Criminal Court.

Here's one tweet that doesn't explain anything

At Vox, Max Fisher is excited --

News from 1096 AD: Pope endorses military force to destroy Middle Eastern caliphate ... Pope Francis, normally quite a peacenik, has endorsed the use of military force against Islamic State (ISIS), the terrorist group and self-declared caliphate that has seized large chunks of Syria and Iraq and is terrorizing civilians, especially Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities.

There follows a supercilious comparison of the alleged papal endorsement of the northern Iraq intervention with the Crusades against actual Caliphates.

The claimed endorsement is based on a Ken Thomas (AP) tweet which claims Pope Francis endorsed the use of force to protect minorities in Iraq. To leap from that to say that the normally "peacenik" Pope is suddenly endorsing wars is not consistent with a fuller account of the conversation occurring on the papal plane returning from Korea, as reported by Vatican news service --

Answering questions regarding the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities by fundamentalists of the Islamic State (IS), the Pope said that “it is legitimate to halt the unjust aggressor”. And he underlined the word “halt” pointing out that does not mean to “bomb”. He said the methods used to halt the aggressor are to be evaluated. The Pope also pointed out that in these cases we must not forget “how many times with the excuse of halting the unjust aggressor (…) have powerful nations taken possession of peoples and waged a war of conquest!” A single nation, he said, cannot judge how to stop an unjust aggressor, and he pointed to the United Nations as the right venue to discuss the issue. Pope Francis also pointed out that persecuted Christians are close to his heart but he underlined the fact that there are also other minorities suffering persecution, and they all have the same rights.

But that's all too subtle in the quest for click-bait.

UPDATE: A day later, a different Vox writer returns to the issue with a more considered approach.

So much for flypaper

From the US State Department announcement of additional sanctions against ISIL and Al-Nusra Front following the UN Security Council resolution on Friday --

Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, born Taha Sobhi Falaha in Syria, is the official spokesman for and a senior leader of ISIL. Al-Adnani is ISIL’s main conduit for the dissemination of official messages, including ISIL’s declaration of the creation of an Islamic Caliphate. Al-Adnani was one of the first foreign fighters to oppose Coalition forces in Iraq before becoming ISIL’s spokesman.

Recall that one of the ex post justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that the resulting fighting would attract bad guys from around the world to Iraq where they could be efficiently eliminated.

Napoleon Complex

Excerpt from a bizarre meeting between Vladimir Putin and pugnacious French conservative Philippe de Villiers, who was in Moscow to promote a War of 1812 theme park --

PHILIPPE DE VILLIERS: There’s something else I wanted to say with the press here. I want to say that in the hearts and minds of many Europeans, President Vladimir Putin is a much more respected figure, who they would much rather emulate than the majority of European leaders. 

VLADIMIR PUTIN: Thank you very much. 

 PHILIPPE DE VILLIERS: French farmers know full well who began this [Ukraine] war and who set this spiral of sanctions in motion. They know full well that it was the euro-commissioners in Brussels, who blindly follow what their American partners tell them to do. I think that Europe needs a voice now that would tell the other story and that would be heard. Though you can barely hear this voice right now, but it belongs to France.

The easiest way to get 50,000 people off a mountain

Is for them never to have been there in the first place. In the expanding annals of blog futility, we've tried to keep track of the more bogus news stories about ISIS: the US$500 million bank robbery, the tweet to Lionel Messi, the Rolex watch on the Caliph, and the alleged order of FGM for women. At first there was enough supporting evidence backing up a claim of a crisis of Mount Sinjar that the 50,000 fleeing people number seems to have slipped through the filters and motivated an American intervention which strongly benefitted the Kurds. Now, the Pentagon says there's nothing like that number of Yazidis still there, and it's not entirely clear where they went.

Remember, not everything you read about ISIS is true. 

Word on the street

Every so often this blog makes a futile attempt to enter the word Securocrat into the American news lexicon. Its perfect embodiment of how administration and internal security merge into an unquestioned aspect of every day lives is surely suited to events in Ferguson, Missouri. Of course as in the Northern Ireland context, we only get a good look at the full securocrat infrastructure in particular situations and at particular times.

Always involved

Not specific to David Brooks but here he is repeating a common claim of the last few weeks --

We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq. The last four presidents have found themselves drawn into that nation because it epitomizes the core problem at the center of so many crises: the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.

 The 4 presidents and their involvement being Bush I (Kuwait), Clinton (the no-fly zones), Bush II (Saddam) and now Obama.

The thing is, it's the last 5 presidents. Reagan supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war and actively intervened in the so-called Tanker War, which benefitted the Saddam regime. Iraq has been at war since 1980, and the US has been a player on the field since then.

The Syria shambles

At The Monkey Cage blog (hosted at the Washington Post), Marc Lynch argues very persuasively that US military supplies to the Syrian rebels would never have worked and would have pulled the US in even deeper as there would have been inevitable pressure to scale up once such an intervention had failed. Nonetheless, a few points may be worth setting out.

Lynch's basic diagnosis is that the anti-Assad forces were too fragmented and had too many competing external supporters for US support to be decisive. But that fragmentation of the opposition and the multiple external partners was itself due to a lack of direction from western countries in how to handle the uprising -- the default position was to outsource it to Turkey and the Gulf countries.

But taking that narrative of the opposition as given, how does the actual White House policy on Syria stack up? At key stages of the conflict, American policy weakened the moderate opposition and thus strengthened the hardline elements like ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front. Consider:

• Repeated announcements by the US that they would be supplying weapons to the rebels -- which as far as anyone can tell, never arrived. Not helpful to the moderates' credibility.
• Championing the Geneva peace talks even though they knew this was a disorganized opposition across the table from a cohesive Assad regime, which in turn had backing from Russia for a maximalist position. Not helpful to the moderates' credibility.
• The "red line" fiasco. Even if it was the right outcome, it confirmed to all sides that Assad could do anything and no western military intervention was coming. A gift to hardline rebels saying that jihad was the only solution. The massive private fundraising in Kuwait that Lynch describes doesn't happen in a vacuum -- it happens against a video backdrop of Assad regime atrocities committed with impunity, motivating donors to the rebel cause in the Gulf.
• Russia. The US spent at least two years operating on the assumption that Russia was not a bad faith actor in international relations, including in Syria. Key decisions including participation in Geneva (see above) and how to handle the chemical weapons attack (see above) flowed from that. Only with Ukraine (and despite claims from Ben Rhodes that there was no link between Ukraine and the Arab crises) did the scales fall from the eyes. Bad assumptions lead to bad policy outcomes.

And finally, even if all the above can be refuted, and Lynch is 100 percent correct, there is still the issue of managing the spillover. ISIS came to Iraq from Syria, apparently catching the US by surprise. If the rational decision was to let Syria fester for 3 years, the idea that all the chaos was going to stay one side of a Sykes-Picot line was delusional.

Not the last war's bad guys

Josh Marshall solicited reader views on why ISIS had been so successful encroaching on Kurdish-protected territory in northern Iraq and an apparently well-credentialed but unnamed reader provided a response --

As for ISIS, they are just a resurgent and re-named al-Qaeda in Iraq. They have the same combat capability they have always had. They fight with suicide bombers, AK-47s and RPG-7 rocket launchers, single vehicle long range battlefield rocket launchers and are mobile in what we call TTFs – Toyota Task Forces.

Reuters report on the ISIS advance --

The Sunni militants routed Kurds in their latest advance with tanks, artillery, mortars and vehicles seized from fleeing Iraqi troops.  

R2P, T&C may apply

New York Times processology on the American military intervention in northern Iraq --

Officials told Mr. Obama there was a real danger of genocide, under the legal definition of the term. “While we have faced difficult humanitarian challenges, this was in a different category,” said an official. “That kind of shakes you up, gets your attention.”

Since thousands of deaths in the Assad regime chemical attack on Damascus, not to mention the overall death toll in Syria, failed to generate this kind of shaking or attention-getting in the White House, one has to conclude that if any group of civilians is planning to be murdered in the thousands, they need to do it within driving distance of a US diplomatic facility (since the proximity to the Erbil consulate is being used as one rationale for intervention), or that the threatened group amounts to a significant percentage of the overall population.

Sorry, Sunni Arabs, you're out of luck.

Boundary issues

Barack Obama is conducting limited air strikes against ISIL and at Vox, the verdict is already in -- it's brilliant!

Max Fisher -- If you are a member of ISIS, here is how you might hear Obama's message: Stay away from Iraqi Kurdistan, and the rest of northern Iraq is yours to keep. Based on Obama's words and actions so far, you would not be so wrong.

Matthew Yglesias -- A policy of assisting Kurdish forces against ISIS while declining to do much to help the Iraqi government reconquer the rest of the country packs a lot less emotional punch than a stern declaration of America's commitment to fighting this truly evil group would. And yet it's the right call.

There's just one problem. The last President who thought he could confine ISIS to a particular zone with calibrated military intervention was ... Bashar al-Assad! It's well documented strategy of the Damascus regime to ignore the ISIS-held areas as long as they stayed away from the critical corridors from the capital to the sea, the thinking being that they were performing a useful role in fighting other anti-Assad militias behind the lines while discrediting the opposition overall. Unfortunately for everyone, ISIS used their space in Syria to grow into a much more dangerous trans-national force.

So now we have a situation where Bashar al-Assad thinks he can confine them to particular parts of Syria (except they've now popped up in Lebanon) and the Vox-approved Barack Obama approach is based on confining them to particular parts of Iraq.

And somehow Turkey -- a NATO member -- is not supposed to be alarmed by any of this.
 

Crowded attention space

The current focus on the plight of the Iraqi Yazidis makes it worth recalling the disastrous bombings they suffered in 2007, but occurring at another time when Iraqi deaths didn't seem to matter much, it was quickly forgotten. It's not clear whether the apparent White House rush to intervene now on their behalf reflects a reassessment of previous assumptions (e.g. that the Kurdish military would perform better than the Iraqi military) or of broader strategy in the region (e.g. the "let's leave Bashar al-Assad there and see what happens" approach to Syria). Without such rethinking, the current Yazidi crisis will be dust in the wind as quickly as 2007.

UPDATE: Good post from Josh Marshall making the same point as the latter element of the above i.e. that some of the assumptions about ISIS prospects in Iraq must be wrong. He puts it in terms of whether the Peshmerga was weaker than advertised or ISIS stronger, but the foundational assumption of the entire White House Levant strategy since 2011 is that Syria could be ignored -- and most pundits have dutifully followed that assumption.

Just in case anyone is telling you about the natural beauty on their Aran Islands holliers

Irish Times --

A massive logistical operation got under way off the west coast today [6 Aug] to deliver water to two island communities. Up to 240,000 litres of water is being transported daily to the Aran Islands of Inis Méain and Inis Oírr after a drought which left water supplies there at dangerously low levels. While many parts of the country have experienced repeated downpours and localised flooding since the start of the summer, the Aran Islands have had very little rainfall and the porous limestone terrain has meant that only small amounts of rainwater have been retained there.
 

Up the Republic (of Scotland)

As we've previously outlined, the Best of Both Worlds position on the Scotland referendum is that contrary to their mockery of the pro-Union catchphrase, er, Best of Both Worlds, it's the SNP who tried to have an unattainable Best of Both Worlds in the form of an independent Scotland with the pound as its currency, no lapse in EU membership, and the Windsors as the head of state. From that perspective, it follows what the SNP should do in the final 6 weeks to get to Yes, so here's the 3 point plan:

• The Scottish currency will be a currency board i.e. a newly issued Scottish pound but backed 100 percent by holdings of sterling and fixed at 1:1
• The SNP accepts that EU membership will lapse but instead proposes upon independence to seek immediate status equivalent to Switzerland while it reinstates EU membership. Any claim that rejoining the EU means committing to the Euro can be dealt with by the Swedish wheeze.
• The SNP admits that Queen or no Queen, Scottish citizens will no longer be UK citizens but will look for arrangements similar to that given to the Irish Free State after 1922, which included lengthy transitions on eligibility and generous treatment of resident non-citizens from each jurisdiction (note that for this one, being outside the EU might actually be an advantage).

But all of the above means admitting that independence will have costs and uncertainties, and realizing its full benefits will be protracted. And it doesn't guarantee that an independent Scotland will have no food banks (as Alex Salmond claimed in the debate with Alistair Darling last night). It's also the path to a Republic!

Data gets old quickly

The Glenn Greenwald vehicle The Intercept has a splashy story noting the preposterous size (around 1 million people) of one of the US government terrorist databases. But there are some puzzling things about some of the charts in the article, which appear to draw directly from powerpoint presentations within the US government about the database.

The main problem is that even though the numbers are presented as being as of 2013, they make several references to Al Qaeda in Iraq and even use an obscure acronym for that group (AQIZ) -- a group and a leader (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) that hasn't existed since 2008. Of course that group's DNA is present in ISIL, which descended from it, but ISIL is not mentioned at all in the database, whereas its more established competitor Al Nusra Front is mentioned, but only in the context of a social media-style "trending" analysis.

The Intercept article also presents what it sees as a contradiction -

Although the Obama administration has repeatedly asserted that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula poses the most significant external terrorist threat to the United States, the 8,211 people identified as being tied to the group actually represent the smallest category on the list of the top ten recognized terrorist organizations.

That's the difference between ranking groups based on "number of members" and "the one with a badass bombmaker" which is why the overall assessment can differ from the number of people in a database. It's something easily Googled, which might also be a better use of the NSA powerpointer's time/

If you study sociology, you're a communist

From Barack Obama's really quite good interview with The Economist --

Mr Obama: Well, this is why I say there may be some generational shifts that need to take place. I mean, if you think about a Brazil, an India, a South Africa, much of the leadership in those governments came of age when those countries had very different attitudes towards the global economic system. To their credit, they have made incredible adjustments. If you think about somebody like former Prime Minister Singh of India really dragging this massive, incredibly complicated but incredibly innovative society kicking and screaming into the world marketplace, and below him, though, you’ve got an entire bureaucracy that was trained in thinking that—

The Economist: By the British? (Laughter.)

Mr Obama:—well, but also that may have been schooled by economists who were experts on dependency theory but not necessarily on how are we going to unleash innovation.

From Radical-in-Chief, Stanley Kurtz's book-length thesis that Barack Obama has been always hiding his ultra-leftism in plain sight, there's a discussion of Obama's years in New York City immediately after graduation --

[quoting Obama] I instructed my mother on the various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred dependence in the Third World [end Obama quote] .... Knowledgeable leftists, however, will identify Obama's swipe at his mother as a reference to the dependency theory popular among Marxist students of the Third World at the time.

There's nothing especially Marxist about the view that development aid breeds dependence, in fact it's a view found among conservative critics of foreign aid. And it's definitely not a unique element of dependency theory, which is much more about the structural constraints facing peripheral developing countries, a story in which aid agencies are bit players. Kurtz just needed a leap from his Obama quote containing the word dependence to another piece of evidence for secret Marxism, and he found it.

As the Obama quote to The Economist shows, he knows full well what dependency theory is and how it related to India's flawed development model. To Kurtz, just the fact of him studying those issues was grist for the mill.

Blast Groundhogs Day

Superb reporting from Reuters on how ISIS is using Saddam's tunnels and drawing a response from the Iraqi government --

Fighters in the area are using rough terrain to evade death and capture: swamps, high reeds, bushes and irrigation canals that military vehicles can't traverse. Desperate to gain an upper hand, the army has started to pound the terrain with "barrel bombs" - drums filled with explosives or fuel dropped from the air. "Islamic State fighters swept the town and kicked out security forces, and to regain control we need to deal with around 10,000 acres of farmland area," said a military colonel."We have stared to follow a scorched earth policy. This is tough, we know, but army helicopters should have clear vision to chase and destroy them."

So the government is destroying farmland like Saddam Hussein and using barrel bombs like Bashar al-Assad. And yet there's headscratching among foreign policy elites about why ISIS can attract popular support!

Here's one theory you don't want to know about Gaza

Classic Vox journalism from Matt Yglesias at Vox about Gaza: apparently one reason there are lots of child casualties from the Israeli assault is that ... Gaza has lots of kids! He claims to be presenting the demographic background to something others have noted, but all he does is present a chart showing the percentage of the population that is young people. The much more edgy yet data-driven approach would have been to ask why Gaza has such a skewed population structure. But that would get into some very touchy areas for Israel, the Palestinians, and even the United Nations -- if for example one delves into the theories of Gunnar Heinsohn. We think there's a lot more going on than in Heinsohn's approach, but isn't this the kind of thing that Vox was going to help sort out?

Cranky World War I post

It is great that we will not have to get the downer World War II memorializing until 2039. And it is also excellent that the Great War started in August allowing the media to put all their planned programmes on tape 6 months ago and then run them during the silly season. Unless of course we are running the risk of not seeing the significance of news that happens in summer.