Happy Blogversary To Me
March 13, 2013 § 6 Comments
One year ago today I sat down at my laptop, signed up for a WordPress account, thought for five minutes about what to name my blog, and started writing. Although I hoped someone would notice, I had very little expectation that anyone outside of my family and friends would read it, and I just wanted to use it as an outlet to get my thoughts down in some sort of regular fashion as I had been frustrated at repeatedly sending pitches to places like Foreign Policy and the Atlantic and rarely having them accepted. One year later, the attention O&Z has gotten has outpaced anything that I anticipated, and I am truly grateful to all of my readers for listening to what I have to say and engaging me with your comments, emails, and responses. There are few things that give me more enjoyment than meeting someone new who turns out to be a reader of the blog, and interacting and debating with other folks in these arenas of Israeli politics and Turkish politics has led to a bevy of new friendships and professional contacts and immensely enriched my own knowledge and understanding of Israel and Turkey. The circle of people who seriously study one or both of these countries is growing, and I hope that even more people join the chorus of voices in writing about these two places in one form or another. For evidence that blogging is a worthwhile endeavor, just take a gander at my list of publications and note how many of them came pre-O&Z and how many of them are from the past year. So a sincere and heartfelt thank you to anyone who has ever made their way over to this corner of the Internet, I hope something I have written has made you think whether or not you have agreed with it, and I’ll do my best to keep writing about issues that I feel should be highlighted. In the meantime, since I doubt there is even a minyan of people who read my first post back on March 13, 2012, I am reproducing it below since it still applies one year later.
This is a blog about Turkey. And Israel. And Turkey and Israel. As someone who has lived in, written about, and studied both countries intently, I spend a good chunk of my day thinking about the politics of each. There is a lot of good commentary out there on Israeli and Turkish politics and current affairs, but I think I come from a unique enough place to add my voice to the din.
Over the past few years, in response to the domestic politics of each country and exacerbated by the Mavi Marmara flotilla affair, there is a growing trend among commentators and analysts who feel the need to pick sides and institute a mutually exclusive dynamic where you can be either “pro-Turkey” or “pro-Israel.” It escapes me why this has to be the case, but it is nevertheless largely the state of affairs that exists. This blog is an attempt to move past this dynamic. I love the culture, language, history, and general environment of both countries, and I also recognize that both of them are deeply flawed. I think that one can comment on both, considered separately and together, without letting one’s feelings about either of them adversely affect one’s analysis. This blog is an attempt to put forth what I hope will be an interesting take on the geopolitics of two important states without the animosity that characterizes lots of the commentary about both.
Aside from my own academic and professional interest, Turkey and Israel are fascinating to study in their own right. As I have written in a different (and far more distinguished!) venue, Israel and Turkey are remarkably similar. Both are non-Arab countries in the Middle East seeking to attain regional hegemonic status and are the two strongest military powers in the region; both were founded by staunch secularists who thought that the influence of religion would wane over time and yet both countries now find themselves with increasingly religious populations and are struggling to balance the religious with the secular; both are dealing with similar foreign policy problems; both have significant populations either within their borders or under their control that would like to form an autonomous state; and until recently the two were firm allies who remain linchpins of American strategy in the Middle East.
Despite this, Turkey and Israel seem to be moving in opposite directions in the eyes of the world. Turkey is widely seen as ascendant, with a strong economy, a growing hand in world geopolitics, and a foreign minister widely respected and viewed as one of the world’s influential thinkers. In contrast, Israel is viewed by many as a country under siege, with an imminent demographic problem, a rapidly deteriorating relationship with its most important Arab neighbor and ally, and most crucially a possible war with Iran on the horizon. Tracking these developments over the next few years as the aftershocks of the Arab Spring continue to be felt will be fascinating to me, and I hope to others as well.
So there you go. I hope to make this blog a valuable resource for commentary, analysis, and links on all things related to Israel and Turkey, and pick up some readers along the way. And given my past academic life and other interests, don’t be surprised to see some ruminations along the way on constitutional issues related to war and civil liberties, the Boston Red Sox, the politics of the American Jewish community, or why Parks and Recreation might be the best sitcom in the history of network television.
When It Comes To Turkey & Syria, Is Robert Wright Right?
October 11, 2012 § 7 Comments
Robert Wright has been keeping an eye on developments between Turkey and Syria, and unlike me, he thinks there is at least a 50/50 chance that the two countries end up going to war. Wright’s argument boils down to the fact that events on the ground are rapidly spinning out of both Turkey’s and Syria’s control and Turkey is facing serious refugee and Kurdish problems, so that “both of these issues–refugees and Kurdish nationalism–could lead Turkey to conclude that the sooner the Syrian civil war ends, the better.” In addition, Wright believes that the U.S. and NATO may get involved, and that the Turkish-Syrian border is not going to quiet down since Syria cannot afford to ignore it and because Turkey is basically poking Syria in the eye by arming the rebels.
With one exception (the point about the U.S. and NATO), all of these things are arguably correct to some degree, but Wright is overlooking a bunch of other factors that either mitigate or cancel out completely the variables that he has pointed to as reasons a full blown war may happen. First and most importantly is that Turkey does not necessarily have the ability to intervene in Syria in such a way as to end the civil war. As friends of O&Z (and superb guest posters) Aaron Stein and Dov Friedman persuasively argued in the National Interest yesterday, Turkey’s military options in Syria are actually quite limited. Ankara does not have the intelligence capability to carry out extensive target selection, its air force faces a challenge in the face of Syrian air defenses, and its months-long bluster has not been backed by equivalent action, destroying its ability to use credible threats to deter Syrian provocation. In short, Turkey has been exposed as a paper tiger when it comes to Syria. Despite General Özel’s constant tours of the Syrian border and the military buildup, this appears to be similar to what Turkey did following the downing of its F-4 during the summer, when it made a show of force but ultimately did not use it. This is the double secret probation strategy, in which Turkey keeps on ramping up the threats to punish Syria to the point of absurdity. Wright’s argument is that Turkey will end up intervening in Syria in order to put a swift end to the civil war, but the inconvenient reality here is that Turkey might not have the capability to do so, which has obviously been affecting Ankara’s calculus this whole time. In addition, even if Turkey did have the capability to step in and put an end to the sectarian fighting in Syria, Wright assumes that this would put a damper on Kurdish nationalism, but in fact it might very well have precisely the opposite effect. Once the Assad regime falls, the PYD and other Syrian Kurdish groups are likely to try and carve out their own autonomous sphere within Syria, and Turkish intervention on the side of the rebels could accelerate this process.
Wright’s argument about NATO arrives at a similar dead end. He writes that ”helping fight it [the Syrian civil war] could help end it–especially if Turkey’s fellow members of NATO help out. Speaking of NATO: The fact that a Turkish-Syrian war could draw America into the conflict will make such a war more attractive to some backers of American intervention.” There is, however, no way that NATO is going to get drawn into this war. There is zero appetite for it among NATO countries not named Turkey, and while NATO may be willing to convene an Article 4 meeting any time Turkey requests one and issue strongly worded condemnations of Syria, that is as far as NATO is going to go. The same goes double for the U.S., which is also going to sit this one out no matter how much Turkey begs and pleads. Wright is buying into the Turkish pipe dream that an international coalition is eventually going to be shamed into intervening in Syria, but I don’t see any plausible way that this happens.
Finally there is Wright’s point about the shelling along the Syrian border and Turkey already essentially fighting a war against Syria by arming and training the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups. The tit-for-tat shelling has been going on now for a week, yet despite this Syria has shown no inclination to ramp up its military activity, and Turkey has been making a big show of force while essentially standing pat. Wright asks, “ If Syria doesn’t want a war, and Syrian shells that fall on the Turkish side of the border could start a war, why doesn’t Syria quit firing shells anywhere near the border?…The answer is simple: The Syrian regime is fighting for its life, and along the Turkish-Syrian border lies the lifeline of its enemy.” There is another simple calculation in play here as well though, which is that Syria is not targeting Turkey with its shelling but is targeting the rebels on its own side of the border, and Syria knows that Turkey knows this too. Intervening in Syria is a potential nightmare for the Turkish army given the sectarian issues and the fact that Turkey will be fending off attacks from not only the Syrian army but Kurdish fighters well. When Syrian artillery misses, as it is bound to do, and kills Turkish civilians, then Turkey is forced to respond, but Turkey does not want to go into Syria on its own and will do nearly anything to avoid such an outcome. By the same token, Turkey has been arming rebel groups now for months, yet Syria is not deliberately shelling Turkish military positions because it too does not want to draw the Turkish military across the border. I get that there is a logic of unintended consequences at work here with the potential to spiral into a war, but Wright’s arguments for how this will happen ignore that there is a very powerful set of incentives on both sides to avoid such an outcome.
Gallimaufry: Islam and Democracy, Star Wars and Literacy
October 5, 2012 § 4 Comments
Time to dive into my when-I-feel-like-it Friday tradition and do some quick hits on interesting or random things I read this past week. Today’s gallimaufry is a little more all over the map than usual, but if you stick with it I promise you will come across something you might not have otherwise been exposed to.
First up is the New York Times, which ran an extremely odd feature in its Room For Debate segment yesterday on whether Islam presents an obstacle to democracy. Why do I call this odd? To begin with, six different people were asked to weigh in with opinions, and all six of them came to the same conclusion, which is that Islam and democracy are compatible with each other. Now, this is a position that I happen to agree with for a variety of reasons, but it seems strange to hold a “debate” in the world’s most influential newspaper in which all of the participants agree with each other and espouse the same view. Seriously, New York Times? You couldn’t find one credible voice to argue the opposing side? The entire world of scholarship and punditry is open to you and still you decide it would be interesting to your readers to solicit six short essays all making the same basic point?
What is perhaps stranger about this NYT feature though is that it is posing a basic political science question, but instead of asking even one political scientist about his or her views, it polls a former Islamist, a policy analyst, a professor of creative writing, an historian, and two professors of religion. I understand that part of this equation has to with Islam, on which some or perhaps even all of the experts the New York Times got in touch with have something credible to say, but the other half of the equation deals with factors that make democracy more or less likely to occur, and not one of the six people opining in yesterday’s NYT are logical choices to answer that question with any degree of expertise. There has been lots of research done on the question of whether democracy and Islam go together, such as this or this or this, and maybe getting in touch with someone who actually studies this question for a living would have been a good idea. After all, if the New York Times wants to ask me my views on whether there is other intelligent life somewhere in the universe because it is a topic that I love to read and talk about, I am happy to give an answer but it doesn’t mean that NYT readers should lend my views on the subject any particular credence as I am not an astrophysicist.
Continuing the theme of factors that affect political development, my friend Armin Rosen directed me to this piece of mad genius brilliance arguing that the galaxy created by George Lucas in the Star Wars films is largely populated by illiterates, and that this accounts for how the Empire was able to destroy the Republic and amass so much power. I want everybody to read this for themselves since it just ridiculously awesome and so I won’t go into all that much detail in the hopes of forcing you to click on the link and read the original, but the gist of the argument is that nearly all of the information in all six Star Wars movies is conveyed via hologram recordings, we never see anyone pick up a book or newspaper, there is no evidence of journalism or reporting of any type, and history largely seems to be of the legendary type passed down orally. The consequences of this are that it is easy for tyranny to flourish. As Ryan Britt, who is the guy who wrote this and whom I now want to meet, puts it:
Padme points out that liberty dies “with thunderous applause,” but really their liberty is dying because most of them can’t read and are powerless and disenfranchised. In fact most of the surviving characters at the end of the prequels are the bad guys, and they can probably read. The Jedi seem to be the most educated people in the prequels, but that changes when they all get killed. This would be like a real life Empire going and burning down all the colleges and schools and killing all the teachers. The academy, the keepers of literacy would be gone. And once that happens, it’s easy for a tyrannical empire to take over, to control the information. Maybe Padme should have said “this is how literacy dies…”
I say we start some sort of fund right now so that Ryan Britt can spend his days writing more of this type of stuff. I’m not joking.
Finally, while we are on the subject of once dominant republics that are now crumbling and whose citizens are powerless to remove the corrupt authoritarians running the show, I give you this great Charles Pierce reflection on the epic failure known as the 2012 Boston Red Sox. Pierce makes a fantastic point, which is that not only was this year’s team the worst in almost half a century in terms of wins and losses, but it was a true throwback Red Sox team that kind of makes you nostalgic. As Pierce says,
This was the way it was in my childhood. These were the kind of days that brought me back to my youth, the way all the baseball propagandists say the game is supposed to do. These were my Red Sox — overpaid and underachieving backbiters who ended up as comic relief. This was the Fenway Park of my youth — a rancid snake pit of venomous egos, and not a theme park. This was how I became a Red Sox fan before Becoming A Red Sox Fan became a piece of performance art. This was the way the season always used to end — with a discreet, but complete, collapse that hardly anyone noticed, because they were paying attention to other, real Major League Baseball teams that had not devoted six months to eating their own livers. The Red Sox went into Yankee Stadium and lost to a team that will not think about the Red Sox again until next April, or perhaps even later than that, if next year’s start is anything like this year’s start was.
When I read this, I was instantly transported back in time to being a kid in the 80s and early 90s watching mediocre teams populated by malcontents and managed by morons where the players all hated each other playing in a rundown dump. I remember going to Fenway Park as a little kid with my dad, and falling in love with the ballpark but being confused why the seats were so uncomfortable and the concourse so dark and why it was the only place in this country I had ever seen a giant trough in the bathroom in place of urinals. The old Fenway is gone forever, but the old Red Sox are back with a vengeance, and now that the unbelievable euphoria of 2004 has passed into the mists of history, I hate to admit that I kind of enjoy being able to bitch and moan about my dysfunctional team again.
Gallimaufry: Adelson, Clark, Architecture, and Curiosity
August 17, 2012 § Leave a Comment
You know the gallimaufry drill by now. I read a bunch of interesting or infuriating things this week that either required too little commentary for a separate blog post or have absolutely nothing to do with Israel, Turkey, the Middle East, or foreign policy, so let’s get started.
First is the essay on Jim Lobe’s blog by Marsha Cohen loathsomely titled “Protocols of the Elders of Las Vegas” which should have been more accurately and self-referentially named “Protocols of the Elders of Morons” given Cohen’s line of reasoning. Cohen’s argument – and I use that term loosely – is that there is a conspiracy afoot in which billionaire Republican Sheldon Adelson wants to “devote a small portion of his vast wealth to a neoconservative agenda determined to thwart negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinians; prevent the reelection of an incumbent U.S. president; engineer the destruction of political liberalism; and reshape the political environments of the U.S. and Israel by funding the election of politicians who serve his own corporate and ideological interests.” Cohen outlines Adelson’s myriad of immoral and illegal activities such as establishing a conservative think tank and a right wing newspaper in Israel, donating money to AIPAC, contributing money to political campaigns, devoting his time to political and philanthropic causes rather than concentrating solely on his business interests…wait, what’s that you say? None of this is immoral or illegal in any way? But Marsha Cohen claims that Adelson is orchestrating a vast illicit conspiracy! What Cohen is either too dim to see or too partisan to acknowledge is that under the First Amendment and the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, Adelson has every right to do all of these things, and in fact the only one that Citizens United specifically enabled him to do is donate tens of millions of dollars to Super PACs. Adelson has lots of money and is entitled to use it as he sees fit, and the real problem that Cohen has is not that Adelson is doing these things, but that he is doing them for Republicans. The implication is that right wing ideas, and particularly neoconservative ideas – which believe it or not have a long tradition in American political thought and discourse – are illegitimate and thus can only be advanced through nefarious means. I don’t agree with Adelson’s views on much of anything, and I think that Citizens United was a poorly decided case that has negatively reverberated in the exact way that the majority dismissed out of hand, but none of that is the point. The point is that Marsha Cohen thinks it appropriate to play on the most anti-Semitic of conspiracy theories about Jewish puppet masters using their money to control the world (and if you think I am being overly dramatic, go back and read again the verbatim quote where she describes what Adelson is doing) and has no problem retching venomous illiberal bile regarding free speech because she doesn’t like Adelson’s views. Someone please explain to me why a person willing to stoop to such an abhorrent low should be allowed in polite company.
Moving from unsubstantiated attacks to those with a little more substance, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and erstwhile presidential candidate General Wesley Clark has a new gig hosting a reality show on NBC called Stars Earn Stripes in which B-list celebrities perform simulated special forces military challenges, and it has a bunch of people upset on the left because it glorifies violence and a bunch of people upset on the right because it cheapens the military. Spencer Ackerman wrote an absolutely devastating putdown of Clark’s post-Army career, accusing Clark of being an unprincipled corporate shill, a failure as a general, and an idiot to boot. Clark’s son, Wesley Clark Jr., then emailed Andrew Sullivan with a defense of his dad that vociferously defended him from all of Ackerman’s charges and explained his decision to become a temporary reality show host as a way to get some much needed rest and spend time with his grandchildren. The entire exchange is really quite extraordinary, and you should read Ackerman’s critique and Clark Jr.’s retort.
From the Department of Comically Entertaining Miscellany, the New York Times had a great piece about a guy living on the North Shore in Massachusetts named John Archer who has constructed a 13,000 square foot mansion out of architectural salvage. Archer is clearly a unique kind of eccentric who has spent what has to be millions of dollars constantly buying and building and renovating, and the article about him is fascinating, but what you really want to look at is the accompanying slide show of pictures of Archer’s house. It is weird and stunning and beautiful and confusing all at the same time. Make sure to check out picture 13, in which there is a house in the background that looks like it was plucked from a medieval storybook and then you realize that it is actually the Danvers wing of Archer’s own house, and picture 16, which could pass for an Oxford dining hall.
Finally, I can’t let the opportunity pass without linking to something about the Mars Curiosity rover, which has to be the most impressive feat of science, creativity, and engineering in the history of mankind. Don’t believe me? Watch this 5 minute video simulation showing how Curiosity plunged through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour, slowed down to 200 mph with a supersonic parachute, hovered above the surface of Mars by basically turning itself into a jet-pack, and was then lowered to the ground on a sky crane. Then contemplate that there are people walking this Earth who not only imagined that such a thing could be possible but figured out how to do it, and then made it work despite the fact that it takes 14 minutes for signals to travel from Mars to Earth but 7 minutes for Curiosity to get from the atmosphere to landing, so that this was all done completely blind (!). It is literally the most incredible science fiction come to life, and I challenge anyone to watch this video and then tell me that not every single penny spent on the space program is completely and entirely justified.
An Important Language Correction
July 6, 2012 § 2 Comments
Last week, Brent Sasley and I had an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor on Israel-Turkey relations. A few days ago, I noticed that one of the commenters on the article said that he had stopped reading after seeing the phrase “nine Turkish human rights activists aboard the Mavi Marmara.” This struck me as odd, because that is not how I have ever described the nine people who died on the Mavi Marmara, I was sure that neither Brent nor I had written that phrase, and I didn’t even recall reading it. Yet there it was, right in the first paragraph.
I went back and looked at the draft that we had sent CSM, and my memory was indeed correct – we had not used such a loaded phrase. The phrase we had written was “the Turkish citizens killed on the Mavi Marmara,” which was deliberate because it did not include a value judgment or indicate that we were taking sides between the Israeli version of “terrorists” and the Turkish version of “human rights activists.” In fact, I would never describe the nine people killed on board the Mavi Marmara as human rights activists for three reasons. First, there is no question that they were armed with clubs, chains, knives, and other similar weapons, which is not how one would characterize human rights activists. Second, some of the Israeli soldiers suffered gunshot wounds, which is also an unlikely move on the part of human rights activists. Third, the members of the flotilla initially refused Israel’s offer to inspect their cargo and then send it along to Gaza, which indicates that there were other motives at play here aside from simply alleviating suffering in Gaza. Furthermore, I have written about or mentioned the flotilla numerous times on this blog, and anyone is welcome to go back through the archives and look; nowhere will you find me ever describing the people who died on board as human rights activists, or any variant thereof. My record on this is both extensive and clear.
So, how did the phrase “Turkish human rights activists” get published under our bylines? As part of the editing process, some things got removed, others rewritten, and different sections of the piece were moved around, and both Brent and I somehow missed this crucial change, partially because it got moved from where we had it in the piece to the very top. I can give you some good excuses for why neither of us caught this – Brent was in Israel at the time with nothing but an iPad to work on, and I had a 3 week old baby at home and was running on less than my usual amount of sleep – but the bottom line is that this is entirely on us. It is not the Christian Science Monitor’s fault, but ours alone, and we have to deal with the fact that we were sloppy. This is an unfortunate but sobering lesson on the vital importance of triple checking everything that ever goes out under your name, and all I can do at this point is set the record straight here.
Happy 4th of July
July 3, 2012 § Leave a Comment
In honor of Independence Day, O&Z is going to be taking the day, and perhaps the rest of the week, off. Let’s hope that war does not break out between Turkey and Syria, and that the Israeli government doesn’t splinter apart, since I won’t be paying any attention if it does. Happy 4th of July to all of my American readers, and see you back here in a couple of days.
Some Home News
June 4, 2012 § 5 Comments
I am sitting in a room in the maternity ward at the hospital, gazing at the most perfect and adorable little boy, whom my wife delivered earlier this morning. As a result, unless Israel and Turkey somehow come to open warfare, the posting is likely to be sporadic this week. I should be back up and running at normal speed by next Tuesday or so. And no, his name is not Mustafa Kemal Ben-Gurion.
