Matt Yglesias on the Iran War

Intelligent take:

They say that defeat is an orphan while victory has a thousand fathers.

So even though the invasion of Iraq was extremely popular in 2003, you rarely meet someone who’ll own up to having supported it at the time. Both that war and the one in Afghanistan shook out so badly that their architects have been retrospectively cast as a team of buffoons.

At the time, though, Colin Powell was the most popular public figure in the United States. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were old policy hands with long and wide-ranging track records. Their actions were widely embraced by knowledgeable elites, including top former officials from the Bill Clinton administration.

Which is not to say that the ideas of these members of the George W. Bush administration were good or that their policies worked (clearly they were not and did not), just that it’s not right to think of what happened in the early aughts as “a bunch of clowns took over and wrecked things with their clowning.”

The danger of this line of thought is made clear, I think, by the way that Donald Trump seems to have talked himself into a new round of military adventurism in the Middle East. If the problem with the Bushies was that a bunch of morons got the United States sucked into “forever wars” through their obsession with nation-building, then the solution is to build a team that’s not made up of morons, a team that is relentlessly focused on lethality. They put their ideas to the test with a smaller-scale strike on Iran last year. Then again in Venezuela. And it worked, so why not try it again?

What all this misses is that this is exactly what the Bush administration thought they were doing.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush denounced nation-building and peacekeeping missions as a waste of time. His team contained many believers in a Revolution in Military Affairs involving (to quote a 2002 article) the “use of smart machines that allow networked, integrated forces to become more lethal at the same time they become more agile.”

Which is just to say that they didn’t intend to get bogged down in simultaneous counterinsurgency missions. It’s not like someone was sitting around the Pentagon saying that it would be a good idea to engineer a situation where, years after the invasion, Marines were engaged in intense house-to-house fighting in Anbar province, and years after that, isolated garrisons were trying to secure American interests in a country whose politics are dominated by pro-Iranian political parties.

Quagmires happen by mistake. 

I was thinking this just the other day: Trump and Hegseth keep saying that their war will go better because they are not idiots, but whatever label you want to give to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington et al. they were not stupid.

What they shared with Trump and Hegseth was the belief that violence can be used to reshape the world as we would wish. This belief may sometimes be true, but it is always very dangerous.

Things Happening in the Middle East

Successful Iranian attacks against oil infrastructure are multiplying: here, here, here, here, here

Oil prices are rising and stock prices are bouncing around. (NY Times, CNBC)

Seems clear that neither the US nor our Gulf allies have enough cheap ways to shoot down drones, leading us to shoot $4 million Patriot interceptors at $100,000 drones. We have programs to create better anti-drone defenses, and I have written about them here, but we don't seem to have procured them in anything like the numbers needed for such a war. 

Riots in Bahrain as the Shi'ite majority protests their country's involvement in the war against Iran. Did anybody plan for this?

Turns out that the FBI agents Kash Patel recently purged for investigating Trump's document dump at Mar-a-Lago were from an elite counter-terrorism group called CI-12 with expertise in Iran. 

Trump says in the same post that 1) US weapons stockpiles are sufficient, and 2) they are depleted because Biden sent too many weapons to Ukraine. 

Three US F-15 fighters were shot down by Kuwaiti air defense. The pilots survived.

I see floundering men drowning in their own foolish hubris.

The "Plan"

I've been trying to withhold judgment, because it seems that the Trump administration actually did have a plan for Venezuela. But the signs concerning any Iran plan are not promising. The NY Times:

In a brief telephone interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.

Among the options he suggested was an outcome similar to what he engineered in Venezuela, in which only the top leader was removed during an American military strike and much of the rest of the government remained in place, but newly willing to work pragmatically with the United States. . . .

During the roughly six-minute call, Mr. Trump said he had “three very good choices” about who could lead Iran, although he declined to name them. Earlier on Sunday, Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, said that an interim committee would run the country until a successor to the supreme leader was chosen. . . .

When pressed on his plans for a transition of power, Mr. Trump said he hoped Iran’s elite military forces — including hardened officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who have held substantial influence and profited from the existing regime — would simply turn over their weapons to the Iranian populace. “They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he said.

It was those same security forces — in particular, the Basij, which organizes local militia — that opened fire on street protesters in January and killed thousands.

Then he offered a very different model of what the transition of power in Iran might look like, referring repeatedly to his experience in Venezuela after he ordered a Delta Force team to seize Mr. Maduro.

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Mr. Trump said. . . . “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people,” Mr. Trump said of the outcome in Venezuela.

He was vague on the question of who should be in the top ruling position in Iran after the ayatollah’s death, or even who should decide. At first, when asked whom he wanted to lead Iran, he said, “I have three very good choices.” He added: “I won’t be revealing them now. Let’s get the job done first.”

But then he described a scenario in which the Iranian people would overthrow the existing government. “That’s going to be up to them about whether or not they do,” Mr. Trump said. “They’ve been talking about it for years so now they’ll obviously have an opportunity.” That would, of course, be the opposite of the Venezuela model that he had said minutes earlier he wanted to replicate.

Not encouraging. Trump says we have the weapons for four or five weeks of aerial attack. What happens in five weeks when the battered government is still in place? We're talking about a regime with thousands of determined guerrilla fighters who have been skirmishing with the US for decades. They are not likely to go quietly. So far as I can see, the only remotely plausible outcomes are 1) the regime remains in place, either chastened or with renewed fervor, and 2) we install a new regime that is then embroiled in civil war with surviving elements of the old, just like in Iraq.

Grim.

Middle Eastern Art at Christie's

An Armenian Repoussé Gold and Enamelled Bowl Kayseri, Ottoman Turkey, Early 18th Century.

Koran page by Ahmad Hamdi Ibn Ahmad, Probably Istanbul, dated 21 January 1800 AD

Bracelet, Seljuk, c. 1200.

Silver and brass bowl, Syria, c. 1450

Two Angels, Ottoman, 16th Century

Iznik Tile, c. 1565. This sold for  £33,000

Gilt Oval Astronomical Verge Watch, Istanbul, c. 1670.

Many more here.

The Tragic Absurdity of War with Yemen

One of Trump's best lines, when he was first running for President in 2016, was his attack on our "forever wars." His particular statements were often incoherent, but you could extract a sort of ideology from them: if we're going to fight wars, we should fight them to win, and then move on. Once in office he did confront the Pentagon about Afghanistan, eventually forcing them to agree to a withdrawal timetable. That timetable was so long that our final departure fell after the 2020 election, leaving Biden to bite the bullet, but that strikes me as normal politics and I give Trump credit for standing his ground.

Fast forward to 2025, though, and we find Trump dabbling in exactly the same kind of unwinnable quagmire war he always ran against, and then recoiling from it in what looks very much like surrender. My point is not just to mock Trump's Yemen policy, but to use it as a case study in how the US keeps getting drawn into these wars.

The current conflict started after October 7, when Israel began bombing Gaza. To support the Palestinians, Yemen's Houthi leadership announced a policy of attacking Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. Actually they had no clue which ships had anything to do with Israel, so they were just attacking ships at random.

So here's my first question: when a nation is randomly attacking civilian shipping on a vital international sea lane, should the US do nothing? 

When you ponder why US presidents keep bombing people, you have to remember that every time anything violent happens in the world a dozen people call them up or visit them to say, "We have to do something." Across my whole lifetime, US presidents have found it very hard to resist this pressure. Obama was extremely proud of the one time he said "no," over the "red lines" thing in Syria. Biden, despite being the closest thing to a pacifist we have had as president since Carter, and despite his decades of political experience, gave in to the pressure and ordered airstrikes on the Houthi military, and then had US naval ships use very expensive missiles to help shoot down Iranian and Yemeni missiles flying toward Israel.

The Houthis backed off for a while, but they soon resumed both launching missiles at Israel and randomly attacking civilian ships.

Enter Trump and his team, fired up by their election victory and eager to smite somebody. The Houthis made a convenient enemy, since they were both attacking Israel, about which Trump seems to care a lot, and tweaking their noses at the world by attacking ships. So Trump ordered a new bombing campaign with much laxer rules of engagement than Biden's. The administration did not announce any timetable or goals. (To me the striking thing about the leaked Signal chat was that nobody in it said a word about what our airstrikes were supposed to accomplish.) But the NY Times has been doing a lot of reporting, of which I found this ungated summary:

The Trump administration initially refused to lay out the exact parameters for its campaign against the Houthis. But the Times, citing three U.S. officials, reports that the plan was for a long operation expected to last eight to ten months. The objectives were more aggressive than President Joe Biden’s failed air campaign against the Houthis, and included a plan to use tremendous firepower to take out the group’s air defenses and also assassinate Houthi leaders.

But, according to the Times, Trump asked for a progress report after a month and, feeling unsatisfied by the progress, decided to scrap the plan. Instead, the U.S. and the Houthis settled on a ceasefire agreement that the Houthis would stop firing on U.S. ships in exchange for the U.S. suspending its operations. Notably, that agreement did not restrict the Houthis from firing on Israel or shipments it considered helpful to Israel, which in turn has contributed to a growing rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The times said Trump's distaste for long Middle Eastern wars was a big factor. 

By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials. But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.

So after spend about $7 billion on our six-week war we gave up again, and the Houthis remain in power, still randomly attacking ships. 

Meanwhile, though, the US has done one concrete thing in Yemen: cutting off all aid to Yemeni civilians. It seems in one sense bizarre that the US has been both bombing Yemen on a regular basis and supplying hundred of millions in aid to its citizens every year, but that is the world we live in. When Elon's Doge was feeding our aid programs "into the wood chipper", aid to Yemen was the first thing to go. Nicholas Kristof thinks this was a big mistake:

I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation’s protectors while driving them closer to Iran.

“Cutting humanitarian aid into Yemen is likely only going to benefit the Houthis that much more,” Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arab Gulf States Institute, told me. “As the cuts further exacerbate an already horrendous humanitarian situation, families in Houthi-controlled territories will have little choice but to align themselves with the group in a desperate attempt to survive.”

Despair over just this intersection of human misery and evil autocracy was one of the reasons Bush  II invaded Iraq. If the people are suffering, and we can't even help them because the regime will just steal the aid, what are supposed to do? With the threat of terrorism in the air, Bush opted to invade and rebuild Iraq "from the ground up," a phrase I feel like I heard six thousand times in those years.

Fortunately, nobody seems to have any appetite for a ground-up rebuilding of Yemen, so we're going to avoid that nightmare. But instead we are stuck with the ongoing bad dream of a famine-wracked country spending its resources to attack international shipping, an echo of the slaughter and destruction in Gaza, which is an echo of events that go far back in time, the legacy of which we seem unable to escape.

Middle Eastern Dominos

It strikes me that October 7 is turning out to be the most consequential regional event in a long time, certainly since the Arab spring of 2011 and maybe since the US invasion of Iraq. American officials are cheering the failure of Iranian ambitions along the arc through Iraq and Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and some Arabs thinking the same way:

A new Middle East is taking shape, with the Iran-led axis facing a significant setback. The Lebanon ceasefire marked a pivotal moment, signaling the end of an era and the onset of a political upheaval for the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance.

Here's a tweet with some good background on HTS and their leader. He calls himself "Abu Muhammad al-Jolani," a nom de guerre that references his desire to retake the Golan Heights from Israel. The sources I have found are very much divided on al-Jolani, some thinking he has changed his tone and beliefs, others thinking he is a violent jihadist in sheep's clothing.

A Syrian:

I hope now people will stop asking us if we regret launching the revolution. We regret nothing. We dared to dream, and we will not regret the struggle for our dignity.

How many refugees will return? Some are already crossing the border from refugee camps, but what about the ones in Europe? Some are tweeting about how excited they are to return, but much depends on what happens in Syria over the next month.

It was only 11 days from the launching of the rebel offensive to the fall of Assad.

David Roberts in Palestine and Egypt

Sultan Kaitbey Mosque, Cairo

David Roberts (1796-1864) was a Scottish painter and engraver best known today for the works he produced during journeys to the Middle East in 1838-1843. I discovered these via Robert Irwin, who used them for illustrations to The Arabian Nightmare. Anyway I love them.

David's Tower and the Walls of Jerusalem

Hebron

Jerusalem. These images are actually lithographs by Louis Haghe based on Roberts' paintings. I like some of these better in black and white but can't find many good images.

Silk Merchants Bazaar, Cairo

Ruined Mosques in the desert west of the Cairo citadel.

Gateway of the Metwaleys, Cairo

Gate of Victory, Cairo. More here.

Biden Quietly Winds Down the Drone War

Ryan Cooper:

Where Trump oversaw more than 1,600 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria during his first 11 months in office, Airwars reports just four during Biden's term so far. Strikes in Somalia fell from roughly 75 last year to fewer than 10 this year, with no civilian casualties. And in Yemen, the annual total dropped from about 18 to maybe four, with fewer than 10 casualties of any kind. 

Which I think is great. But notice that Biden has said exactly nothing about this in public. I suppose he thinks talking about this would just make him look weak.

Tel Aviv and Dubai

Tom Friedman is fascinated by the budding tries between Israel and the UAE that have sprung up since Jared Kushner brokered a deal between these nations in October (New York Times). Since then, 130,000 Israelis have flown from Tel Aviv to Dubai, and this in the midst of a pandemic.

Something big seems to be stirring. Unlike the peace breakthroughs between Israel and Egypt, Israel and Lebanon’s Christians and Israel and Jordan, which were driven from the top and largely confined there, the openings between Israel and the Gulf States — while initiated from the top to build an alliance against Iran — are now being driven even more from the bottom, by tourists, students and businesses.

A new Hebrew language school that holds classes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi has been swamped with Emiratis wanting to study in Israel or do business there. Israel’s Mekorot National Water Company just finalized a deal to provide Bahrain with desalination technology for brackish water. The Times of Israel recently ran an article about Elli Kriel in Dubai, who “has become the go-to kosher chef in the U.A.E. … Last year, Kriel launched Kosherati, which sells kosher-certified Emirati cuisine, as well as fusion Jewish-Emirati dishes.” And, by the way, those 130,000 Israeli visitors helped to save the U.A.E.’s tourist industry from being crushed by the pandemic during the crucial holiday season.

This is certainly encouraging; better tourism and business deals than missile bombardment. It is also important, I think, that so much of this is being driven by governments in the region rather than dictated by great powers.

On the other hand, it all rests on accepting that some problems simply can't be solved now. The status of Palestinian refugees, the political rights of people in Arab autocracies, peace with Iran; all that is set aside. The liberating dream of the Arab Spring is forgotten. Instead, we're all going to get on with our careers and try to get rich.

As I have said before, this is pretty much all the world has to offer millions of people. Democracy is either not in the offing or, if it does come, partial, contested, unstable, and unbeloved. (Russia, Thailand, Burma, Ethiopia, Egypt, etc.) It is not at all clear to me that people in Tunis are in a meaningful way more free than people in Saigon (yes, that's what people who live there call it). In both places politics is mostly frustration, and while Vietnam is a dictatorship, Saigon has a booming business scene and double-digit economic growth. 

What is our civilization really good at, other than science and capitalism?

So it makes perfect sense to me that if there is going to be a thaw between Israel and the Arab world it would take place between businessmen. No Arab is going to study Hebrew out of love, but it seems plenty will for a chance to get rich.

Sometimes, you take what you can get.

Thomas Friedman on the Assassination of Qassim Suleimani

Qassim Suleimani has been a hugely prominent figure in all of Iran's proxy wars across the Middle East, but that does not mean his policies have been wise or successful:

On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran’s interference in Iraqi politics.

The whole “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.

In a way, it’s what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead.

I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East.

First, often in the Middle East the opposite of “bad” is not “good.” The opposite of bad often turns out to be “disorder.” Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn’t mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 — and that is Iran’s tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change.

Today’s Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after.

Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the “martyr.” The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won’t get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran’s wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East.

And yes, the morning after, America’s Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani’s death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.

The real tragedy of four decades of US-Iran conflict is that none of it was much wanted by the citizens of either county. There is no reason for the US and Iran to fight, except that intense mutual suspicion has made peace impossible, leaving various opportunists on both sides to advance their careers by stirring up trouble.

As for Suleimani himself, I think he is best remembered by some of his own words:

The battlefield is mankind's lost paradise – the paradise in which morality and human conduct are at their highest. One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush landscape. But there is another kind of paradise – the battlefield.

Khayamiya

Khayamiya is an Egyptian textile art, once used to make elaborate tents, which is why you buy it in Cairo's Tentmakers' Street.

Now these artisans mostly make quilts and cushions for sale to tourists, and the decline in tourism since the revolution has hit them hard.

The old style was entirely geometric, but these days representation is common, including political scenes like this depiction of the Tahrir Square protests.

With tourism drying up Egyptian merchants are trying to sell these online, but so far that hasn't replaced sales to visitors who want something to remember Egypt by.

Houthi Drones Strike Saudi Oil Refineries

Yemen's Houthi regime has been engaged in a campaign of long-distance harassment against the Saudi oil industry for more than a year, as part of their ongoing war. This week they achieved their first significant success:

Drone attacks claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck two key oil installations inside Saudi Arabia on Saturday, damaging facilities that process the vast majority of the country’s crude output and raising the risk of a disruption in world oil supplies.

The targeted oil facilities can process 8.45 million barrels of crude oil a day between them, the bulk of production in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, said production of 5.7 million barrels a day — well over half of the nation’s overall daily output — was suspended.

Armed drones are so cheap now that any self-respecting terrorist force can use them, and Yemen has used them to launch a damaging strike across 500 miles. I mention this because it is a sign of changing military realities around the world, giving weak states another means of harassing stronger enemies and raising the cost of warfare. This reality is part of why the US military is so nervous about a war with Iran, since Iran can launch enough drones and missiles to shut down the Persian Gulf oil industry and make big trouble for US ships and bases.

Fear of this kind of warfare -- attacks by swarms of drones and cheap missiles -- is driving US military research and development, and is why we are spending billions developing laser weapons. Lasers are lousy weapons for killing people but they can disable drones and damage missiles, and they can fire very fast, perhaps (nobody really knows) protecting US assets from these new threats.

Meanwhile the immediate response of the Trump administration to this attack was to blame Iran, no surprise since they are always looking for things they can be mad at Iran about. And it is probably true that Iran supplied either the weapons themselves or the technical knowhow to make them. But the real cause is the disastrous Saudi war in Yemen, and the way to end this threat is for the Saudis and the Houthis to negotiate a peace.

Yemen's Houthis are Beating the High-Tech Saudi Military

The Houthi movement that dominates Yemen, which now calls itself Ansar Allah, has proved remarkably adaptable. They began around 2004 as a bunch of badly organized guerrillas who could do little more than set bombs and stage ambushes. But as the Yemeni government collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence, venality, and brutality, they quickly metamorphosed into a fighting force capable of taking or defending towns, and in 2014 they made an alliance with a faction of disgruntled army officers, staged a coup, and took over the capital of the country and most of the government.

This victory caused Saudi Arabia and its allies to launch an intensive air campaign against the Houthi regime using up-to-date US planes, missiles, and radar. Billions have been spent in this war, and the Saudis have halted the advance of the Houthis, preventing them from taking over all of Yemen. The Saudis keep the front lines of the conflict under constant aerial surveillance, attacking any group of vehicles and even launching million-dollar missiles at lone men carrying guns.

The Houthis have adapted by dividing their forces into units of 3 to 5 men, never more than can fit in a single vehicle, and they cache weapons near any place they might want to fight so their soldiers can travel around unarmed. They have stopped using any sort of electronic signaling. They have filled combat zones with networks of bunkers connected by zig-zag trenches. As a result they are able to concentrate their men to repel any attack on their lands despite the constant presence of Saudi fighter-bombers overhead.

And:

Where Ansar Allah has been notably more successful has been in the raiding war along Saudi Arabia's border, where it has fought a Hezbollah-style harassment campaign against Saudi border forces. Houthi forces have achieved great tactical success against Saudi border posts through offensive mine-laying on supply routes and ATGM [anti-tank guided missile] strikes on armored vehicles and outposts. The Houthi military has sustained more than three years of continuous raids and ambushes, demonstrating its resilience and depth of reserves. Ansar Allah is now one of the premier practitioners of offensive mine warfare in the world, utilizing a range of explosive devices, concealment tactics, and initiation methods.The Houthis make very effective propaganda use of video from such raids, with a dedicated cameraman attached to all raiding parties, irrespective of size. By March 2018, the Houthi movement had also fought a long-running deadly ‘cat-and-mouse’ game of rocket launches under Gulf coalition aerial surveillance, launching 66,195 short-range rockets into Saudi Arabia, killing 102 civilians, wounding 843, and depopulating several hundred small villages.

Lately the Houthis have been attacking Saudi oil facilities hundreds of miles from the border with missiles and drones.

All of this comes from a report posted on the web site of the West Point Center for Combating Terrorism. The report notes that while the Houthis now get a lot of support from Iran, that did not happen until after Saudi Arabia intervened in the Yemeni civil war. Even the US military recognizes that the Saudi claim that they had to intervene in Yemen to block Iranian schemes is baloney.

Of course by intervening in that war the Saudis have created exactly the situation they feared, an Iranian ally on their southern border, so how they will extricate themselves from this quagmire is a hard question. One doubts the Trump administration will be much help.

Max Abrahms, "Rules for Rebels"

Political science professor Max Abrahms devoted more than a decade to comparative research on rebel groups around the world, trying to figure out why some succeeded and some failed. In his new book, Rules for Rebels, he summarizes his findings in three golden rules:

1. Don't kill innocent civilians.
2. Create a highly centralized command structure under a clever leader.
3. Maintain your brand through total denial when things go wrong.

The review I just read of this in the September 21 TLS focuses on the contrast between the Islamic State and Hezbollah. The Islamic State broke all these rules with abandon, and as a result, says Abrahms, united the world against it and was crushed. Its wanton killing only eroded its legitimacy, and its habit of welcoming any man willing to fight for the cause meant that its ranks were filled with uncontrollable thrill-seekers and psychopaths.

Hezbollah, on the other hand, has a tight command structure and a very strict program for new recruits, who must sit through a year of indoctrinary education. When it does kill innocents it either denies having anything to do with the murders or apologizes, as when Hassan Nasrallah went on al Jazeerah to apologize to the family of two Israeli-Arab children killed by a Hezbollah rocket in Nazareth. Note that the key point is not that rebels should never kill civilians, which is inevitable in war; it's that they are not seen to be seeking it or reveling in it. Many rebels, notably the IRA and the Jewish terrorists of the 1940s, have issued warnings demanding that all civilians be evacuated from target areas; if people stayed behind, well, then that was on them, wasn't it?

It's an interest argument, but it will take a lot to convince me. My impression is that while wanton violence often fails it sometimes succeeds. Abrahms' argument seems to be mainly statistical, i.e., he says rebel groups that intentionally kill civilians are 77 percent less likely to succeed. And maybe that's right, although I'm sure in practice figuring out which rebel groups "intentionally kill civilians" is rather complicated, and sometimes figuring out whether they succeeded is also hard. Hezbollah, for example, has succeeded in becoming a powerful group in Lebanon, but they have utterly failed to liberate Palestine.

The Spy Who Came Home

Fascinating article by Ben Taub at the New Yorker about Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case office in the Middle East who quit and became a beat cop in his home town of Savannah:

He joined the agency during the early days of America’s war on terror, one of the darkest periods in its history, and spent almost a decade running assets in Afghanistan, Jordan, and Iraq. But over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.” In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise—the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad—was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

Of his time in Afghanistan he says,

Tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.

They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”

The assessments of field operatives carried little weight with officials in Washington. “They were telling us, ‘Too many people have died here for us just to leave,’ ” Skinner recalled. “ ‘But we don’t want to give the Taliban a timeline.’ So, forever? Is that what you’re going for? They fucking live there, dude.”

Skinner spent a year in Afghanistan, often under fire from Taliban positions, and returned several times in the next decade. He kept a note pinned to his ballistic vest that read “Tell my wife it was pointless.”

The Bias Toward Action

So we've been launching missiles again, because faced with any kind of crisis we just have to "do something." Emma Ashford:

Mr. Trump evidently shares the assumption that America must do something in response to atrocities in Syria — a wholehearted embrace of the Washington bias toward action.

In this, Mr. Trump and his predecessor have something in common: Both he and Barack Obama came into office promising to change America’s foreign policy, but when faced with crises, both yielded to pressure to intervene. This bias toward action is one of the biggest problems in American foreign policy. It produces poorly thought-out interventions and, sometimes, disastrous long-term consequences, effects likely to be magnified in the era of Mr. Trump.

The concept of a bias for action originated in the business world, but psychological studies have shown a broad human tendency toward action over inaction. Researchers have found that World Cup goalkeepers, for example, are more likely to dive during a penalty kick, though they’d have a better chance of catching the ball by remaining in the center of the goal. . . .

The American policymaking system reinforces this tendency. Political pressure and criticism from opponents, combined with the news media’s habit of disparaging inaction, can render even the most cautious leaders vulnerable to pressure. America’s overwhelming military strength and the low cost of airstrikes only add to the notion that action is less costly than inaction.

So we end up with messes like the ones in Iraq and Libya, and we keep stirring the pot in Syria despite the lack of evidence that lobbing in missiles helps anything.

Listen to Talleyrand, a real genius of foreign policy: Most things are achieved by inaction.

How the Caliphate was Run

Fabulous Times story by Rukmini Callimachi about how he and a team of helpers entered Mosul while the rubble was still smoldering to look for documents left by the Islamic State. Much material had been destroyed, either intentionally or during the fighting, but they did eventually find many real documents left by the Caliphate's bureaucracy. Putting these together with interviews, they discovered that after taking over Mosul's administration Islamic State commanders purged everyone not male Sunni Muslim but ordered all the rest to get back to work or else. Some things ran just as before. Some things ran better, especially trash collection, since the city was patrolled by armed men quick to arrest sanitation workers for slacking.

“Although they were not recognized as a state or a country,” said one shopkeeper, Ahmed Ramzi Salim, “they acted like one.”

One new thing was the comprehensive seizing of land owned by non-Sunnis and its redistribution to Sunni farmers:

Folder after folder, 273 in all, identified plots of land owned by farmers who belonged to one of the faiths banned by the group. Each yellow sleeve contained the handwritten request of a Sunni applying to confiscate the property.

Doing so involved a step-by-step process, beginning with a report by a surveyor, who mapped the plot, noted important topographical features and researched the property’s ownership. Once it was determined that the land was owned by one of the targeted groups, it was classified as property of the Islamic State. Then a contract was drawn up spelling out that the tenant could neither sublet the land nor modify it without the group’s permission.

Callimachi eventually tracked down the man whose signature was on all of these transfers, Mahmoud Ismael Salim, "Supervisor of Land," and he turned out to be a mild-mannered bureaucrat with a combover who shuddered as he said he was forced to do it under threat of death:

On busy days, a line snaked around his office building, made up of Sunni farmers, many of them resentful of their treatment at the hands of a Shia-led Iraqi government. In the same compound where we found the stacks of yellow folders, Mr. Salim received men he knew, whose children had played with his. They came to steal the land of other men they all knew — whose children had also grown up alongside theirs.

With the stroke of his pen, farmers lost their ancestors’ cropland, their sons were robbed of their inheritance and the wealth of entire families, built up over generations, was wiped out.

“These are relationships we built over decades, from the time of my father, and my father’s father,” Mr. Salim said, pleading for understanding. “These were my brothers, but we were forced to do it.”

So sad, so predictable. I highly recommend the whole piece.

Incidentally the Times must have spent more than a million dollars on this one story, sending a team of people to Iraq five times and providing them with protection, then arranging for a committee of experts to review the documents for authenticity and help analyze them. I feel like one simple thing we can all do to keep  civilization going is to subscribe to at least one of the major newspapers and do our part to pay for this kind of work.

Three Senators Against Undeclared Wars

Yesterday's interesting news:

On Wednesday, in a show of bipartisan unity against unauthorized wars of choice, Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah),Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) courageously introduced a Senate joint resolution under the War Powers Act, directing President Trump to halt all current U.S. military activities in Yemen.

If passed, the president would have 30 days to stop U.S. forces and resources from continuing to assist the Saudi-led conflict against the Houthis there. The war has been raging on for two years and has resulted in millions of Yemeni displaced, starving, and suffering from a catastrophic cholera epidemic.

In a joint press conference, Lee and Sanders said the U.S. military has been “engaging in hostilities” with the Saudi-led coalition against the rebel Houthis in Yemen in two critical ways: refueling Saudi bombers and providing aerial targeting intelligence and reconnaissance. These activities should have triggered a declaration of war or an authorization of force under the War Powers Act.

“This legislation is neither liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican— it’s constitutional,” said Lee.

“As congress has not declared war or authorized military force in this conflict our involvement is unconstitutional and unauthorized,” said Sanders. “It’s long overdue for congress to re-assert its constitutional authority.”

This bill would force Congress to vote on continuing assistance to the Saudis. Congress would almost certainly vote to continue the war, but since most Senators don't want to put their support for the war on the record, this will most likely not even come up for a vote. Which I think is sad.

Ethics and Art at the Louvre Abu Dhabi

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has finally opened, five years late, on an artificial landform dubbed Happiness Island. This is a licensing deal for sorts; for $1.15 billion petrodollars, Abu Dhabi received the right to use the Louvre name for 30 years, during which time the franchise can borrow extensively from the Louvre and France's other state-owned museums. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter visited the new museum and produced a meditation on the intersection of art, politics, and ethics:

A walk through Mr. Nouvel’s domed museum complex, with its luminous shade and its breeze-channeling sea vistas, is an enchantment, almost enough to make you forget grim physical and social realities that went into creating it. And the manifold beauty of galleries filled with charismatic objects nearly persuades you not to remember that art is a record of crimes as well as of benign achievements. It takes an exercise in ethical balance to engage fully with our great museums, to walk the shaky bridge they construct between aesthetics and politics. A mindful visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi requires this balance. That may be what is most universal about it.

Besides those "grim social realities" – for example that Happiness Island was built by contract laborers from South Asia, the palaces of ancient Egypt by slaves – there is the reality of art world insiderism. This gives us works like the one shown above, “Food for Thought — Al Muallaqat,” by Saudi artist Maha Malluh. I kind of like this, but it is an assemblage of stew pots blackened by use:

they retain the marks of the past but also the imprint of the stories told during mealtimes in nomadic tradition. Maha Malluh has transformed the pots into a visual poem, in tribute to classical Arab poetry.

Which is just the sort of thing that makes so many regular folks residents of flyover country grouchy about the snobbery of coastal elites. Elite art often appears as a celebration of division, that is, the division between people who get it and people who don't, to the greater glory of the former.

I find that I enjoy contemporary art best as a sort of lark. If I enter the museum in an exploratory frame of mind, ready to laugh at what amuses me and to be impressed by anything that seems amazing, I enjoy myself. But if I enter in the reverent mood I carry into cathedrals and the Met, I end up grouchy about the weirdness of a world that pays Jeff Koons millions for metal balloon animals. Do you suppose Maha Malluh was paid more for this assemblage of pots than the men who made these earned in their lifetimes, or he is perhaps not at that pinnacle of the profession yet?

Change in Saudi Arabia

Tom Friedman traveled to Riyadh to interview crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (M.B.S.) and talk to other Saudis, and the result is a long article that practically bubbles over with enthusiasm. He calls recent events the "Saudi Arab Spring":

Unlike the other Arab Springs — all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia — this one is led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and, if it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its success — but only a fool would not root for it.

He emphasizes two things about the new regime. First, the anti-corruption drive, which led to the arrest of hundreds of wealthy Saudis:

The stakes are high for M.B.S. in this anticorruption drive. If the public feels that he is truly purging corruption that was sapping the system and doing so in a way that is transparent and makes clear to future Saudi and foreign investors that the rule of law will prevail, it will really instill a lot of new confidence in the system. But if the process ends up feeling arbitrary, bullying and opaque, aimed more at aggregating power for power’s sake and unchecked by any rule of law, it will end up instilling fear that will unnerve Saudi and foreign investors in ways the country can’t afford.

But one thing I know for sure: Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive. The Saudi silent majority is clearly fed up with the injustice of so many princes and billionaires ripping off their country. While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”

And second, the prince's move toward a moderate interpretation of Islam. The people around the prince do not consider the Wahhabi sect to be the real tradition of Islam, or even of Saudi Arabia, but a radical movement imposed on the people after 1979:

Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me: “Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam — we are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins — and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979.” At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical theaters, there was mixing between men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia. “The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman!” So if the Prophet embraced all of this, M.B.S. asked, “Do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”

Then one of his ministers got out his cellphone and shared with me pictures and YouTube videos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s — women without heads covered, wearing skirts and walking with men in public, as well as concerts and cinemas. It was still a traditional and modest place, but not one where fun had been outlawed, which is what happened after 1979.

I do not consider Tom Friedman to be a person of good judgment – for starters, he supported Bush's invasion of Iraq – but knows a lot more about the Middle East than I do, so maybe it is worth taking his enthusiasm seriously. Actually it may be that his support for overthrowing Saddam and his admiration for the new regime of M.B.S. stem from the same source, his sense that the Middle East is so messed up that only radical shake-ups have any chance of leading to real improvement.

I have three serious concerns about the events in Saudi Arabia. The first is that the prince and his father have taken a very hard line against Iran and regularly compare Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler, and I worry they could either stumble into war or provoke one if they got in trouble domestically. The second is that M.B.S. seems like a would-be tyrant to me, and the history of the Middle East is full of leaders who talked radical reform when they came to power but clung to it until they themselves became the corruption. And the third is what the Saudi proponents of puritanical Islam might do in response to these reforms; a repeat of the violent struggle in Egypt between the military regime and the Muslim Brotherhood seems well within the possible.

But it feels good to me to think that change for the better is at least possible.