Finding Fault

“First of all, we waited too long. We let the Islamic state build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria. Then when [ISIS] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.”
 —Former President Jimmy Carter, October 7 in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

There is a refrain that I am hearing repeated more and more. It is the notion that the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, was virtually created whole-cloth by blundering American foreign and military policy.

To be sure, this is now a standard Democratic talking point. It is trotted out as a defense whenever Republicans criticize the Obama administration as being weak and feckless in the Middle East. And, of course, Republicans have their own contrasting talking point—that ISIS flourished in (if was not actually spawned by) a vacuum created by President Obama’s rush to get out of Iraq.

But it is not just political hacks who keep repeating the line about ISIS being a virtual creation of the Bush administration. It is a common theme among journalists and analysts in the UK and Ireland and undoubtedly many other countries. And also among many U.S. writers. Journalist/author Robin Wright could be heard on NPR’s Fresh Air a couple of weeks ago saying that the invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. In his book Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick (as one book review sums up) “blames the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 as the single most pivotal factor in the organization’s creation.” Warrick’s narrative focuses largely on Jordanian Abu Musab al Zarqawi who, he says, founded (before the Iraq invasion, by the way) the group that would evolve into ISIS.

The idea that really bad actors and bad events in the Middle East are the direct result of American (or, more generally, Western) actions has a long history. For generations academics and many journalists have laid the blame for this conflict or that war at the feet of imperial legacy. And of course historical events like the crusades and colonization cannot help but have had a major impact on the history of region. (Interestingly, however, westerners who lecture guiltily about the crusades never seem to bring up the fact that in the eighth century Muslims conquered all of Europe’s Iberian Peninsula and advanced into France as far as Poitiers and Tours.)

The mindset that every major thing that happens in the Middle East is caused by Western interloping seems somehow, well, western-centric and dismissive of other peoples as having a hand in their own destinies. Saying ISIS was “created” by America frankly makes it sound like some sort of comic book super-villain who starts out as a perfectly normal guy but suddenly turns evil because he fell into a vat of chemicals.

The most interesting take I have seen so far on the genesis of ISIS was in a Washington Post piece last April by Liz Sly, the paper’s Beirut bureau chief. Her sources were telling her that, while ISIS’s fighting and dying is done by recruits from many countries, the organization is run by Iraqis who are former Baathist military officers. In the end, her thrust was the same as Wright’s and Warrick’s—that the U.S. is at fault. But, according to Sly, the fault was specifically in disbanding Saddam Hussein’s army and turning all those armed men loose with no prospects in the new Shi’ite-run Iraq. This analysis is actually pretty hard to refute. Even people who defend the invasion of Iraq concede that the occupation was not well handled. But while many critics insisted that the very act of occupation was the cardinal sin, does it not seem that the problem of ISIS was caused by not having a more effective occupation? The Shi’ite majority had no interest in integrating the Sunni minority that had ruled over them under the brutal Saddam. If the U.S. had exerted more of its authority as the occupying power (instead of leaving Nouri al-Maliki and Jalal Talabani to their own devices) to ensure a more inclusive system of government, might it not have helped? In other words, perhaps the problem was not U.S. meddling but, rather, not enough U.S. meddling. After all, Iraq was largely peaceful (at least relative to its recent history) when Barack Obama took office in 2009. In fact, it is was so much so that (and it’s hard to remember this now) the president and Vice-President Joe Biden, in talking about the U.S. withdrawal, both touted Iraq as an American achievement.

What is interesting about Sly’s article is her description of how seamlessly Baathism mutated into a radical Islamic movement. “By the time U.S. troops invaded in 2003,” she wrote, “Hussein had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers.” She also noted that the regime brutality was ever increasing, thus presaging ISIS’s savagery. “In the last two years of Hussein’s rule,” she noted, “a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time.”

While this isn’t the point Sly was making, her article gives the unmistakable impression that Baathism under Saddam was quite possibly on track to evolve into something like the Islamic State even without American interference. After all, well before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam had invaded and fought wars with neighboring countries and had committed atrocities (including the use of weapons of mass destruction) on his own people. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the situation in the region would be hunky-dory today if the U.S. had kept all its troops at home during the past decade and a half. And you cannot even be sure that the region’s bad actors would have left the West alone absent the Iraq invasion. After all, the 9/11 attacks happened before the Iraq invasion.

Of course, there is no way we can ever know what might have (or might not have) occurred if things had happened differently. And that, ultimately, is the problem with the easy dismissal of complicated developments abroad as being entirely the result of the actions of just one of many actors in a complex world.

Market Forces

 Anderson Cooper: “What can you say to somebody tonight to convince them that you don’t want to take away everybody’s guns? That you’re not coming for their guns?”
 President Obama: “Well, first of all, Anderson, I think it’s useful to keep in mind, I’ve been, now, president for over seven years, and gun sales don’t seem to have suffered during that time.”
 Cooper: “If anything, actually, you’ve helped.”
 Obama: “They’ve—they’ve—gone up. I’ve—been very good for gun manufacturers.”
 —Exchange at CNN’s Guns in America town hall on January 7

What to make of that back-and-forth between the CNN anchor and the president?

I don’t want to put words in the president’s mouth, but I think it is fairly safe to say that he would prefer for gun sales to be going down rather than up. And, if we accept that premise, then the president’s defense against charges that he wants to undermine the Second Amendment basically amounts to this: Gun rights advocates do not have anything to worry about because I am so ineffective at achieving my policy goals—at least when it comes to guns.

The irony that gun sales have surged under this president—the very one who has been most vocal in our memory about the problem of guns in society—highlights an interesting point. Barack Obama’s actions as president suggest a very interesting understanding (or lack thereof) of how economies work. The BBC World Service’s overnight business program last week underscored, however unintentionally, that fact. One of their segments reported on how gun sales how had surged in response to his raising the gun issue. This is a pattern we have seen again and again. By injecting even the merest theoretical uncertainty into the future market availabilty of firearms, the marketplace responded by driving up demand for those firearms.

A similar thing has happened when it comes to business investment and, consequently, employment. During Obama’s first term, prolonged talk of tax increases and uncertainty over the healthcare law, which was rolled out in slow motion, caused businesses to hold back investment because they could not forecast their expenses. That, in turn, caused the recovery to be anemic. Yes, the latest job figures (seven years after the financial crisis) look good on paper, but the workforce participation number is the lowest in generations and wage levels have fallen.

The other segment on the BBC program was about the rise of healthcare costs in America. As reported by the BBC’s partner, the Marketplace program on American Public Media, a consequence of the Affordable Care Act is that it has encouraged hospitals to consolidate, resulting in higher costs from a lack of competition. To add insult to injury, Gallup reported the other day that, despite the ACA, the percentage of uninsured Americans ticked up to 11.9 percent last year from a low of 11.4 percent. (That compares to 14.6 at the beginning of 2008).

The president’s response to this sort of bad news is usually to blame participants in the economy for not conforming to his reality. He does not acknowledge the market demand he himself created for more firearms purchases. Instead, he blames the National Rifle Association for its lobbying activities. It does not seem to occur to him that the NRA’s successes are actually due to a widespread demand for guns rather than the cause of it. If people are rushing to buy more guns, it is not because of laws that are or are not passed by Congress or because of the activities of some lobbying group. If they are buying more guns, it is because they do not feel safe. You can argue whether those fears are rational or not, but it is certainly clear that this is what is behind the demand for guns.

If the president wants to see fewer guns being purchased, he needs to do what he can to make people feel safer because, so far at least, his response to terror attacks in France and California do not seem to have done the trick. Not only have weapons sales surged but so has Donald Trump’s political support. Even if that support does not amount to a majority of Americans—or even of Republicans—it is still an indictment on his ability to reassure the country.

Maybe more people would be less jittery if they perceived the government as having at least realized that the attack in San Bernardino was not strictly result of inadequate gun legislation. Or that the American marketplace consists of more than just the Democratic base.

Nollaig shona dhaoibh

Maybe my age has something to do with it, but there is definitely something different about winter at a more northern latitude.

I was born and grew up in central California and have been working my way toward the North Pole ever since—apart from a year’s sojourn in South America. Other places I’ve lived—France, Ohio, Seattle—have always seemed to be that bit further north. My current location, the Irish republic, is the most northernmost of all. Latitude-wise we are roughly in the neighborhood of Juneau, Alaska. That means nice long days in the summer and long dark nights this time of year.

Because people here tend to stick to traditions more noticeably than in the States (and also because of the age thing I mentioned), one feels a connection going back a long time. One senses the earth whipping around the sun and plunging us through the darkest part of the year—and how that must have felt for people who did not have our modern scientific understanding. It must have been only their faith that the world had always come out the other side and re-entered the light time and time again that sustained them. The defiant artificial lights and colors of the season now seem to me perhaps somewhat desperate but also affirmatively steadfast in the face of the universe. The traditions really bring comfort—even for someone like me who grew up with no particular religious tradition. We reject perfectly good traditions at our own peril.

One speaks of the magic of Christmas, and the longer I live the more that magic seems to be real.

To all those reading this, I wish you the best on this journey through space and time.