To Help Yazidis is to help Satan?

Yes I know people trapped on a summer mountain top is sad. But Yazidis are perceived throughout Mideast, especially in Sunni-land, as devil worshippers. True or not that is the perception. Now the US is their friend? Or does perception not matter? Probably the latter...have we entered Rousseau's final cycle of civilization? Alternatively, in a postmodern space, none of that matters overly. Everything contributes a bit maybe, but not enough to tip any scales in a definite direction. Ukraine will test this theory because if big powers can't produce big movements then no one can.

Obama: Lord of Chaos

So today we hear that the USA is bombing ISIL in Iraq. Whatever the reasons given, keeping Iraqis and Americans safe, can also be added the production of instability. The only pattern I can see behind US policy in the Levant is to make sure no one wins...not Assad but not the Free Syrians, not Gaddafi but no other Libyan, and in Iraq not ISIL but not Baghdad either. Toss in just enough kinetics to prevent any kind of stability. So long as the oil flows now and in the future...hence the price goes down!

(Check out Stephen Walt today on FP.com for this Lord of Chaos premise but with an opposite suggestion: to get out of the ME and do no more harm. Wow, is Stephen becoming an idealist?)

Gaza: Obama's Rwanda?

As Israelis war on Palestinians, witness the struggle between people who refuse to lose anything and people with nothing to lose. The outcome could be terrible quite quickly and what could have easily been stopped for minimal cost (like Clinton's Rwanda: Hutu with machetes were no match for Marines) becomes a historically cowardly mistake.

American Blowback

1. foreign kids streaming across the border.
2. high gas prices.
3. drought

These 3 phenomenon and more are blowback effects: from helping militarize Central America, to destabilizing oil-rich Iraq and Libya, to just plain old greed, some say these policies have reaped a terrible windfall (see www.FPIF.org).

Poststructuralism? it says that identity and dominance come from the production of Others and threats.

The points are not quite the same. But it does  suggest that we think in terms of relations and connections.

Manipulation by Facebook

The Guardian recently opined that we should expect Facebook to manipulate its users. It is a profit-seeking company after all and it wants effective advertising.

But this charge of manipulation hides a false, fixed  ideal: Autonomy, or the idea that individuals give their own law to themselves based upon rational decision-making regarding their circumstances. Whether that ideal ever held is one question. But it certainly does not hold now.

Facebook users expect to have their feelings changed, whether by their friends, responses to Likes, or their tailored newsfeeds. Facebook just happens to momentarily dominate that effect. But soon it will fade into one of many such feeders.

That researchers changed the feeds deliberately to test their effects only proves that users were not autonomous as according to the old model. This does not mean that users will accept any program. Luckily, there are too many incoming messages for any one message to predominate for long. Put another way, paradoxically, people can no longer be manipulated into being only autonomous.  

A Serious Suggestion for Iraq: The Middleman

A source told me that the Arab world often uses middlemen to coordinate outcomes. I suppose since you can't trust others (rightly so said Hobbes) then the use of a middleman can come in handy.

Maliki need not and should not go right now. No leader should step down under such conditions.

What is needed is the right diplomacy. Example: the US or the UN should use an ambassador to Iraq or a special one to shuttle between the various contenders. With some initial confidence building measures at first and then leading to something like an Office of the Purveyor to continue the Middleman role.

More likely is a de facto partition of Iraq with ongoing low level violence.

Sending in US spotters or spies will piss off someone. If they spy on Iran from Baghdad to see what it is doing in Syria that will piss off Baghdad too. If they spy on Sunniland to bomb targets that will piss off the Gulf States.

You see the goal of the US is instability: don't let anyone win, not Maliki (would help Iran), not Assad (helps Russia), not ISIS (helps Saudi and ould scare Israel).

But the backers involved want these factions to WIN. Unlike the USA, they dont want the pot to just keep on simmering forever.

Keep in mind too the track record of the US in that region has been a general failure. Things always seem to backfire over there.   

The Bergdahl Event

In postmodern thought, an event is singularity, either of one major theme or (more likely) of them all. It would be for example the coming together in thought or politics or writing all of the extant ideologies at once…i.e. a hot mess. The Bergdahl debate is such a happening. It has all that can be thought about war and POW’s in one spot. Traitor or patriot? Was too much given up for the trade? Were the exchanged only Taliban officials or warriors? Can Qatar be relied upon? Let’s look past the truth of these questions for a moment.  

But Bergdahl will mean nothing in terms of the outcome in Afghanistan. He will not provide much help either on the campaign trail. No Republican will talk it without undermining the ‘support the troops’ idea. No Democrat will talk it without the worry of what the exchanged might do. A wash. But a fluorescent one. A singularity which fits perfectly in no one narrative.