Gazistan

Legalistic Aspirations and Realities in Kyrgyzstan

2012-02-06T21:02:00.000-08:00

I'm going to use this blog in conjunction with Scribd to start posting some of my work. It allows you open access to valuable (or at least interesting (or at least legible)) information and it allows me some critique on my writing and presenting.

The first will be a paper I wrote last semester on Kyrgyzstan's new constitution. The constitution, I argue, is deliberately out of touch with some realities of life in Kyrgyzstan as it is written for a double audience; the international community and local elites. It leans heavily on Weapons of the Wealthy, Registan.net, Eurasianet and I'm sure others. Let me know what you think, or use it to further your own research.

An excerpt:

During the drafting process, Nurlan Sadykov stated that in the new Constitution, “[t]he prime minister will be accountable to the parliament and the parliament will be accountable to the electorate, the people.” This paper will demonstrate how the aspirational Constitution of Kyrgyzstan is not quite able to answer Sadykov‟s proposition. The paper begins by looking at the construction of civil society in order to display the vibrancy of non-governmental life in the country. Then, this paper will briefly survey the elite class of Kyrgyzstan, demonstrating that the same actors in power at the fall of the USSR are still in power today through an explicit combination of cooperative measures and exclusionary tactics. Finally, this paper will look at governmental accountability in two parts, as posited in Sadykov‟s above quote. First, it will examine the legal and illegal means through which parliament keeps a check on the head of state. Second, it will examine the relationship between parliament (called “Jogorku Kenesh” in Kyrgyz, a term that will be used interchangeably with “Parliament” in this paper) and the Kyrgyzstani people, showing how repression interplays with binding ties to create something well short of pure accountability.
Simply put, the legal norms in Kyrgyzstan are not quite level with its Constitution. By exhibiting the difference between civil society‟s and the elite players‟ methods of self governance, this paper will demonstrate the carrying conceptions and selective enforcement of rule of law. By testing intra-governmental and intra-state accountability, this paper hopes to show that though the underpinnings of a parliamentary democracy exist, the finished product is not quite where it purports to be. The Constitution is used throughout the paper to reflect and diverge from the range of anthropological, sociological, journalistic, and analytical accounts collated to construct an image of Kyrgyzstani life. By comparing Constitutional articles to the Kyrgyzstani reality, the gap between the two can be more accurately defined.

Another link.

Internetting While Muslim: The Jamshid Muhtorov Case is Unsurprisingly Weak.

2012-01-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

Joshua Kucera over at the Bug Pit cited me, Registan, and Central Asia analyst extraordinaire Eric McGlinchy in a somewhat incredulous look at Jamshid Muhtorov's arrest and any possible links to Karimov, NDN, and what have you. He seems to agree with me for the most part; it's very difficult to prove or disprove a link, but it's something interesting to postulate and keep an eye on.

It seems that Catherine Fitzpatrick disagrees, though, with one post with a title replete with exclamation marks and then another which very helpfully includes .pdf copies of the criminal complaint and indictment for "Material Support of a Designated Terrorist Organization and Attempt to do the Same." I appreciate the legwork because hey, this is just a blogspot blog and I hold myself to no journalistic standards of doing research. I'm just typing stuff before going on a Saturday run. I would wish she spelled the blog name right, though. I think our main cleavage is that I approach this from a legal background whereas she's approaching it from a regional writer perspective. I'm going to naturally lean towards my current state's motto and say "Show Me." And the complaint definitely doesn't.

The prosecution has some perfectly acceptable yet kind of skeevy tactics, like calling Muhtorov "Abumumin Turkistony" to make him sound more Muzzleem. The complaint is made up wholly of an FBI agent's statement that is literally exactly what you'd expect some FBI bro who couldn't find Uzbekistan on a map if you spotted him the Caspian. The background is mostly cribbed from the NCTC (ah, law, where you have to cite for journals but not for criminal matters) and talks about all the terrible things that the IJU has done. Well, at least both of them. Well, at least one attempted attack by two German guys and one attack that the only one who says they did it is the Government of Uzbekistan, which wanted counter-terrorism goodies from the US. But that's a different blog post.

There is some more smelly stuff in graf 9: A) Turkey seized weapons of IJU operatives in Turkey, B) The group claimed responsibility for attacks, and C) LINKS TO AL-QAEDA OMG BIN LADEN BIN LADEN PAGEVIEWS

At least the IJU has a website. And Muhtorov was a big fan of this website, Sodiqlar. He made internet friends with the webmaster, and talked about politics with other friends. There is also a claim of Bay'ah by Muhtorov. Bay'ah is a weird word used often to align with Sufi orders and others. Much like how a wed couple says "death do we part," Muhtorov said "any task, even with the risk of dying." But ok.

Then more talk, some arguments between Muhtorov and his wife, and my personal favorites: the presupposition of IJU used in a passive voice throughout the complaint. Muhtorov books a flight to Turkey, says goodbye to his family, and gets into an internet slapfight over some people, using real internet-dude words like "we have the best antivirus, the Koran" which is like the nerdiest thing I've ever heard. I suppose the whole graf 27 is the crux, that Muhtorov was going to go out and kill these two commentors on Sodiqlar because they disagreed about some things. The rest of the complaint is why they need warrants to go through the rest of Muhtorov's files.

So I perhaps should add full disclosure at this point: I'm an internet nerd myself, I spend way too much time on a Cincinnati Reds blog. I've said awful things about players, coaches, and other commentors on the blog. I've shared e-mails with friends I've made on the blog written entirely in inside jokes that sound weird/awful out of context.

Look, maybe Muhtorov was really going to fly to Istanbul and kill a couple guys for disagreeing on matters of Istihan. Maybe he was going there for a wedding. Maybe he was going to be in a medrese. Maybe he fell in love with a woman online and was leaving his family. There are thousands of Uzbeks living in Turkey; as workers, as refugees, whatever. The Emniyet in Istanbul is always full of them. Whatever it is, it's not outlined in the complaint. The criminal complaint is being used as leverage to go through the rest of his internet life in hopes of finding something that actually looks like support of a terrorist organization.

If there was actually good grounds, well, remember that graf 9 about Turkey being involved in investigating IJU? If he was going to Turkey to be involved with the IJU, you can bet that MIT would've been involved in it. Instead, this is the equivalent of frisking a dude in a black neighborhood and hoping that you find a pipe.

I'm hardly going to use this as a pedestal to complain about internet security. But I made an offhand joke earlier this week about "Internetting while Muslim being the new Driving While Black" and I think it absolutely holds.

What I'm most curious about is how Muhtorov was singled out. I honestly don't think there's anything as sinister as the Uzbek Foreign Minister saying to Ms. Clinton, "You want to use our country for a highway? Here's a list of people you have to arrest." What I do think is that "closer security ties" are a requirement for anything the US does nowadays, and that Uzbekistan gave a list of people in the US they were interested in. Muhtorov was on this list, and his internet persona got him a lot more interest than he may have expected.

A little bit of skepticism goes a long way when dealing with the Uzbek government's list of baddies. The IJU as a paper tiger is not a new or novel thought. Ambassador Murray has called them a hoax (whatever you think of Amb. Murray) and Joshua Foust was writing about them back in 2009, saying:

...when you take into account the Uzbek’s history of inventing phantom Islamic resistance movements to justify its police state, the lack of sources actually discussing the group (the sources in that Jihadica post and paper are all secondary and tertiary, and even reposted Wikipedia entries, except for the one website which isn’t even written in Uzbek), and everyone’s inability to name a single member aside from that one guy in the videos who wasn’t around in 2002 when the group was invented… well, it just doesn’t add up.

The entire experience reminds me of XKCD's citogenesis. There are fake facts repeated until they're true. This, combined with the spectre of al-Qaeda, really conceptually awful insinuations about Islam, and a few snippets of conversation with friends and family are the backbone of this case.

Even if they eventually find something, like maybe a bomb-making .doc on his computer that will get him arrested, isn't an absolution of the conduct here. The procedurally-correct and jurisprudentially-awful judicial system, spoken to at length by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker allows for these sorts of abuses. That is a different story, and besides, I won't write it better than Mr. Gopnik.

There's no actual proof anywhere yet, just the same few aspersions cast over and over. I would just be casting aspersions of my own over the US Government if I was to claim that the arrest of Muhtorov is quid-pro-quo for the opening of the NDN, I admit. But at this point, that's all the case deserves, a black mark and lots of tut-tutting.

Was the Uzbek Opposition Sold Out for the NDN? Jamshid Muhtorov as a Case Study

2012-01-26T11:52:00.000-08:00

Approximately two months ago, the United States chose to re-engage with Uzbekistan after Pakistan decided to shut down US military transit into Afghanistan. There was lots of teeth-gnashing about this; how to/if it was fair to equivocate "engagement" with "legitimizing"and whether not engaging was actually an effective strategy. My take was that emphasizing the NDN through Uzbekistan would 1) increase costs and create massive opportunities for corruption and 2) make US interests in Uzbekistan (human rights, increased openness, etc.) subservient to US interests in Afghanistan.

I'm going to focus on #2 here. My worry was - and still is - that Uzbekistan is a tricky enough country as it is. The US won't ever be all do-rah regime change about it and likely shouldn't be. But to view the country as a highway that requires protection is the mother of conflation. The new interest (NDN) is now the first and foremost interest, and protecting it and Afghanistan are more important than understanding what avenues forward exist in Uzbekistan. It gives an excuse to not care about Uzbekistan other than as a way to get out of Afghanistan successfully.

"Assessing the human rights situation in Uzbekistan is a tricky business." Joshua Foust writes, "No one argues with the very basic fact that the Karimov regime is one of the most horrific rights abusers on the planet." Now I'm not sure what the US would do without the NDN, but ever since the new rapprochement there has certainly been no formal complaints about human rights issues, even when real and/or fake people were being punished for Facebook activism. But this week it's gotten far worse.

Three Germans (or people who temporarily lived in Germany, it's all a bit unclear) have been charged with being members of terrorism groups. Two for IMU, one for IJU. That's weird, but hey, people become terrorists, it happens.

Weirder still is the story of Jamshid Muhtorov. Immediately after the story of "man arrested for hanging out on the wrong side of the internet," Sarah Kendzior noted that a man of the same name was a refugee from Uzbekistan for his work as a human rights activist. Her and many others are questioning the FBI's assertions here, and for full disclosure, I'm one of them.

The further reading one does, the more it seems like Muhtorov was arrested for having a beard and an internet connection. The subtitle for the local story is ""Jamshid Muhtorov Grew Beard, Stopped Wearing Western Clothes"and quotes a federal complaint (a legal document purporting evidence required to arrest) saying "'wedding' is code for terrorist event or attack." Muhtorov was on his way to Turkey.

Let it be known that there are far more Uzbeks in Turkey (some of which happen to get married) then terrorists in Turkey. If there was strong enough evidence to arrest Muhtorov in the US, I am very surprised that the US didn't want to follow him up the string to see who he met with in Turkey. The MIT after all is probably very interested in pursuing nasty folk in its territory, as they were victim to al-Qaeda bombings more recently than the US has been. It's more likely that the evidence wasn't strong enough to get Turkey to act or to give more names to pursue, so they just kept him in the US.

The FBI is claiming that Muhtorov gave material support to the Islamic Jihad Union mentioned above, but there's a slight problem. The IJU may not exist. I've written about them before, how the Uzbek government initially blamed them for the Andijon massacre before word got out that this is a terrible thing to say. My nutshell version is:

So all in all, we still don't know what the IJU is about after looking into assertions on what the IJU is about. It's certainly possible that they want to turn the entire Dar al-Islam into a caliphate capitaled at Samarkand. It's also entirely possible that they only exist in the failed state between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that any pan-Turanian branding is just that, branding.

Everything in the entire Muhtorov story is ill-defined, and instead of pursuing the man to give shape to it and to see just precisely what sort of crimes we're talking about, we're just going to arrest a man for internet perusal and un-American fashion activities.

Muhtorov is certainly the prime - and most widely-covered - example. But since ratcheting ties with Uzbekistan, the US government has arrested one and put the hit out on three others for being anti-Karimov. This is not enough to make a pattern, I admit. But it is absolutely frightening to think that as part of the NDN bargain , the US has decided to begin rolling up on anti-Karimov individuals.

Who is Muhtorov likely to know? Other dissident Uzbeks, to be sure. Any implication by him suddenly cracks into the entire Uzbek opposition in exile and links them to a terrorist group. Any communication, exchange of money, or organization with Muhtorov will be considered liaising with a terrorist in the eyes of the United States if Muhtorov is found guilty. These arrests are worth being followed skeptically. The US counter-terrorism establishment could be given carte-blanche to destroy or at least de-legitamize an opposition movement against a man and an apparatus that "...is one of the most horrific rights abusers on the planet."

It's not there yet but it's worth keeping an eye on. And it's a hell of a bargain for the rights to use a highway.

Credulity at Arm's Length - The Met and Islamic Art

2012-01-24T17:49:00.000-08:00

Long overdue, of course. Over winter break I spent some time in New York, where I have friends, family, and a 1-year-old niece that supersedes either category. New York is also home to the new exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum. I know it's an exhibit of Islamic art, you know it's an exhibit of Islamic art. But there, it's titled "New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia." The title is indicative of the whole experience. The folks at the Met tried real hard to do something big here - they saw it as their onus to bridge West and East in some way. The metaphor I think of initially is a first date; the Met made sure their hair was just so, they were wearing the shirt that brings out their eyes, all of that. But they spent so much time thinking of how it would make the Met appear that they forgot that the purpose is to educate the audience and elucidate aspects of the exhibited culture. And there they missed on what could've been a great opportunity.

The biggest problem with the Met is that it isn't the Aga Khan. The Met doesn't have the Aga Khan Museums' resources, networks, or devotion to a single purpose, and it shows. Rather than AG's devoted galleries and lengthy contextualizations, we have square rooms and flash cards in New York. Everything is segmented and instead of seeing the breadth and depth of Islamic Art, we shuffle from room to room to stare and nod in approval.

It's difficult to get too upset about it. After all, the Met is handcuffed by their environment and their donors. There's only works from where the Met could get works: lots of Iran, a little bit of North Africa. And although there is a small room to describe the collectors, there should really be more. What were they doing in Iran? How did they get these things? What is the provenance, what are the storylines? Instead of those stories, we get...flashcards. It's de rigeur, I suppose, but it could've been much more.

There are two stars to the collection. The first is a copy of Ferdowsi's Shahname which, while impressive, lacks the dynamism of Aga Khan's version. The Aga Khan used page flip technology, had translations in English, Turkish, and Arabic, and had wall-sized screens to turn the miniatures into tangible parts of life. The Met had postcards.

The second star is more telling - the Damascus courtyard in the center of the exhibit. Unlike the rest of the works, the courtyard has context and a story: workers coming into New York to build it out of stone, the importance of a courtyard in traditional life. It had pictures, videos, and lots of context...but not a lick of historicity. And yet its the one getting most of the critical (or at least pop critical) attention.

This may all sound a bit critical of "art for arts sake" and the like, but what I'm trying to do is ask what the museum sees its purpose as. This is a question that my sister could handle far better than me, but I'll still try to answer it.

If the Met only wanted to throw some works on its walls, that's precisely what it would do - and precisely what it has done for other exhibits. Was this new exhibit on Islamic Art supposed to be something new? Something unique? If so, it likely failed. It is perhaps the most sophisticated permanent exhibit in the Met and the most credulous Islamic Art exhibit in the US. But all the same, the art is kept at arm's length. The audience is handcuffed into a system of pointing and gawking rather than interacting with the art or personalizing it. Who are these artists? Why did they feel compelled to create? Meh.

The killer is that the Met knows what they're doing. The neighboring exhibit on Indian painters was incredible. It introduced its audience to the individual painters and their styles, allowing us to see how they portrayed scenes and why those scenes were chosen. Fascinating stuff to be certain.

But the Islamic Art exhibit? If you can't get out of the US, then by all means, its worthwhile. But Toronto's just a short flight away. Check out the AK instead.

Good opening stanzas

2011-12-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

I'm not one for poetry, to be honest. Not like I have anything against it, but I just wasn't raised knowing anything about it.

But these two sentences are how you open a story:

Go there.

The situation is unpromising.

Via this link via someone on Twitter and I honestly can't remember who.

Half Awake in this Fake Empire

2011-11-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

Arabia! How I love my new neighborhood: Sand, nondescript, non-color buildings framed by piles of dirt, and the sounds of calls to prayer! You are truly a beauty to behold! Up next: pix of razor wire, machine gun nests, more sand/dirt, and neon lights...And of course, more pix of me in my abaya. Must laugh...

...via Facebook.

Goodness. This...what have we done?

Turkey: Before all of this politics mess

2011-11-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

This is turning into far more of a microblog than anything of substance, but if you care about all things Turkey and/or photography and/or me, you should check out LIFE's photomontage of Turkey of yore.

Finally. Thousands of Words on Turkish Soccer.

2011-11-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

I'm not totally enamored with Gulizia's writing or the fact that Batuman is cut off mercilessly by a paywall. It's literally thousands of words about soccer in Turkey, in the context of the Middle East and in the context of the 1980 Coup. You should read them both and embrace how wonderful the sport is in Turkey.

On being a sixteen year-old son (edits)

2011-10-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

As I try to turn this into a Real Thing, I'm going to do public editing because, hey, why not?

I lost my virginity when I was sixteen. It isn't a particularly great story, or one I particularly felt like sharing, but I feel it's pretty zeitgeist-y for that age. I remember driving (I was driving! In a car! Me!) back to my house after watching a high school football game on Friday, getting caught waiting at the train tracks while going home. My parents were out of town for the weekend and my girlfriend was coming over the next day. I remember thinking to myself, "Hey! I could have sex tomorrow! How cool would that be?"

I don't talk to that girl anymore. No good reason why not, other than "16 year-olds are idiots." It may seem obvious now, but at the time telling her, "I thought there was no way a girl like you hadn't had sex already" was a really dumb and cruel thing. But that's ok. Life moves on. Teenagers are well known for making poor decisions at full speed. The best we, as a society, can hope for is that they'll finish growing up with a minimum of bodily and mental injury. That's often as much a matter of luck as it is of parenting or being part of student government or whatever. Having sex for the first time is a synecdoche of the teenage years; close your eyes and just hope that you get through it without any long-lasting negative consequences. Life will go on.

And it's true, life does. I'm still amazed that, despite all the evidence I gave them to the contrary, my parents decided I was well enough worth keeping around. That age-sixteen year I went on two different college tours. I went on an east coast swing where I visited about a dozen schools, including Maryland solely because my sister thought I would be able to find a suitable girl there. After seeing who I ended up dating at UMd, I wonder if she ever regrets that suggestion. As the youngest in my family, I had a lot of hopes and dreams imprinted upon me, that I would become the son/brother they hoped for. I never really did become what they expected of me when I was sixteen, but they loved and still love me all the same.
Later in the year, as the spring showed up - in typical Midwestern fashion, a month or so late - me and my father took a road trip in a big loop around. It was another ostensible college tour; UCincy and Vanderbilt, I guess, but it was really an excuse to be around each other. We went to the Louisville War Museum, the Louisville Slugger Bat Factory, a half-dozen good restaurants, at least three Graeter's, and a Reds game. My beloved Reds had one of those years when they were in first place on June 7 and would finish the year 29 games out. Because I was sixteen, I just knew, at the time of that trip, that this would be their year. Sixteen year-olds are gullible like that.

Looking back on it, I am impressed with how my father treated me. He always treated me as the son he expected me to be, not the son I was. I remember throwing a temper tantrum one day because of something Halloween-related, and he just glanced over at me, told me I was being immature, and to stop being immature. He let me make my own decisions, especially around the college deal. He was alright with me pursuing ROTC, considering West Point, and all of that. I think a lot of this was because he was comfortable knowing that my role models, him, his father, his father-in-law principally, were good ones. Like most sixteen year-olds, I was both horrified to follow and inexorably drawn to my father's path. It never occurred to me that he could be incorrect back then. Not because he said he was infallible, but because most children find their parents infallible.

Even now, at the ripe old age of 24, when I should know better, traces of that filial belief in infallibility remain. Despite being confronted by any number of monsters and jackals in the legal community at my father's funeral, I stuck around law school. Despite all evidence pointed contrary, I stayed awake through the October evenings in 2010 to watch the Reds roll their way past the Phillies in the playoffs. Despite anything I know he would've said if he was still around to tell me, I don't think I'll ever be able to be the father he was.

Without knowing much of him, I doubt Anwar al-Awlaki was half the man my father was. My father was a lawyer who could have spent a lot of hours golfing or whoring or whatever else partners at law firms do. Instead, he built a pro-bono program to help people fight their way out of debt without going through the crippling and humiliating bankruptcy process. Al-Awlaki gave speeches on who to murder and how.

Given that, though, I don't know what al-Awlaki's son, Abdulrahman, thought of his father. One can be a bad person and a great father. One can be a bad person and a worse father. They are two independent variables. In They Would Never Hurt a Fly, Slavenka Drakulic has a story about Ratko Mladic's relationship with his daughter. He doted on her and did everything he could for her, including sending her abroad for a better education. When she learned in school that her beloved father was the mass-murderer responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica, it took her years to process how that could be the same man who she saw eating sausages and rooting for Red Star Belgrade. She was much older than sixteen when she killed herself with father's prize pistol, knowing she would never be able to confront him with how she felt.

We will never know how Abdulrahman got along with his father; whether they argued about America's role in the world, where young Abdulrahman should go to university, or maybe even about the Rockies chances in the upcoming year. Abdulrahman was born and partially raised in Colorado, after all. Sixteen year-old Abdulrahman was killed in a drone strike along with his father in Yemen.

He may have grown up and become another virulently anti-American idealogue like his father. He could have also gone to med school and become a pediatrician. When I was sixteen, I wanted to join the CIA and go after terrorists. Had I followed up on that dream, I could have ended up being part of the decision to kill Anwar, his son, and others. Instead I spent a sleepless night wondering how I was just a few seemingly-miniscule life decisions away from actively pursuing the trial-less execution of two American citizens, one of which was born in 1995 (a year that, until now, has always been shorthand for "the year Eddie George won the Heisman").

The youngest person executed in the United States, Sean Sellers, was sixteen when he killed a store clerk, his mother, and his stepfather in 1999. He was afforded a public trial and a full trip through the appeals process before he was executed by lethal injection ten years later. Abdulrahman was the same age when he was killed by a Hellfire missile that can be traced back to the secretive Join Special Operations Command (JSOC). Sellers had a trial, went through the juvenile justice system, and was given full opportunity to defend himself before execution. Abdulrahman likely did not know he was a target. US officials asserted that he was in his twenties, and needed to be refuted by the al-Awlaki grandparents sending a copy of his birth certificate to the Washington Post. If Abdulrahman was having lunch with friends and family - even vehemently anti-American friends and family - in his hometown of Denver, he would be put through juvenile justice and likely have nothing on his permanent record. But since he did the same in Yemen, a country the United States is not at war with, he was targeted and killed.

To say Abdulrahman was executed in a manner befitting a just system is not something easy to say with a straight face. The teenager was killed blithely, without regard for his guilt other than by association, without regard for his demographics other than his lineage. If Abdulrahman did indeed have anti-American feelings, and if JSOC indeed has a national security interest in executing every teenager with anti-American feelings, there wouldn't be enough missiles to kill them all. Teenagers are supposed to be the ones who think that their beliefs, hopes, and dreams are matters of life-and-death, not the Armed Forces.

I have no idea what Abdulrahman's political views were and how much of a threat they posed. He was given less rights then someone arrested for triple murder. He may have sworn to dedicate his life to destroying America. He may have sworn his allegiance to Tim Tebow and the Broncos, also. His ideology, the only reason he was killed, is locked away as a state secret. His quite malleable ideas may now be spattered on the ground, but they're not a matter of public discourse.

Sixteen year-olds are foolish. There's a reason we don't let them vote, go to war, drink, or any of that. We don't expect them to make good decisions. We don't expect them to be fully grown-up, with a life plan that is inflexible and unchangable. We expect them to love their parents and trust them. And we - you, me, and everyone else with a navy blue passport - killed one of them, one of those gawky, foolish, teenagers, for doing just that.

Ashgabat is well on its way to being the 21st Century version of the Land of Ozymandias

2011-10-19T23:20:00.000-07:00

That is all.

On being a sixteen year-old son

2011-10-19T19:28:00.000-07:00

I usually hate getting publicly political. I still do, actually. But considering that this blog isn't actually used for anything anymore, I figure I may as well use it to try out writing again.

I lost my virginity when I was sixteen. It isn't a particularly great story, or one I particularly felt like sharing, but I feel it's pretty zeitgeist-y for that age. I remember driving (I was driving! In a car! Me!) back to my house after watching a high school football game on Friday, getting caught waiting at the train tracks while going home. My parents were out of town for the weekend and my girlfriend was coming over the next day. I remember thinking to myself, "Hey! I could have sex tomorrow! How cool would that be?"

I don't talk to that girl anymore. No good reason why not, other than "16 year-olds are idiots." It may seem obvious now, but at the time telling her, "I thought there was no way a girl like you hadn't had sex already" was a really dumb and cruel thing. But that's ok. Life moves on. Teenagers are well known for making poor decisions at full speed. The best we, as a society, can hope for is that they'll finish growing up with a minimum of bodily and mental injury. That's often as much a matter of luck as it is of parenting or being part of student government or whatever. Having sex for the first time is a synecdoche of the teenage years; close your eyes and just hope that you get through it without any long-lasting negative consequences. Life will go on.

And it's true, life does. My junior year in high school was a whirlwind of SAT tests, lacrosse, and the worst teacher I ever had. This English teacher was one of those tyrannical liberals who believed that independent thought was only effective when subservient to an agenda. That class turned me towards the neocon parts of the web; I started reading James Lileks (who, to be honest, I still enjoy the non-political writing of) and was as pro-W. as a non-voter could be. I remember printing out some article Lileks wrote about how Michael Moore and Bowling for Columbine was full of shit, and showing it to my mother. She was disappointed by me, for sure, but I remember her telling me that despite any window dressing, Bowling for Columbine's message of "Not Killing People" was a good one. I agreed, I suppose.

But Moore's resemblance to that English teacher still rubbed me raw. At the end of the year, that teacher told me not to even try for AP English, that I was not a writer with any potential. Because I was sixteen, I believed him. This bastion of liberalism made me understand that my thoughts were not worth sharing with the world.

Thankfully, my parents believed in me. Still do, as far as I'm aware. I'm still amazed that, despite all the evidence I gave them to the contrary, they decided I was well enough worth keeping around. That age-sixteen year I went on two different college tours. I went on an east coast swing where I visited about a dozen schools that wouldn't let a lazy kid with good test scores like me in. I visited Maryland solely because my sister thought I would be able to find a suitable girl there. After seeing who I ended up dating at UMd, I wonder if she ever regrets that suggestion. As the youngest in my family, I had a lot of hopes and dreams imprinted upon me, that I would become the son/brother they hoped for. I never really did become what they expected of me when I was sixteen, but they loved and still love me all the same.

Later in the year, as the spring showed up - in typical Midwestern fashion, a month or so late - me and my father took a road trip in a big loop around. It was another ostensible college tour; UCincy and Vanderbilt, I guess, but it was really an excuse to be around each other. We went to the Louisville War Museum, the Louisville Slugger Bat Factory, a half-dozen good restaurants, at least three Graeter's, and a Reds game. My beloved Reds had one of those years when they were in first place on June 7 and would finish the year 29 games out. Because I was sixteen, I just knew, at the time of that trip, that this would be their year. Sixteen year-olds are gullible like that.

Looking back on it, I am impressed with how my father treated me. He always treated me as the son he expected me to be, not the son I was. I remember throwing a temper tantrum one day because of something Halloween-related, and he just glanced over at me, told me I was being immature, and to stop being immature. He let me make my own decisions, especially around the college deal. He was alright with me pursuing ROTC, considering West Point, and all of that. I think a lot of this was because he was comfortable knowing that my role models, him, his father, his father-in-law principally, were good ones. Like most sixteen year-olds, I was both horrified to follow and inexorably drawn to my father's path. It never occurred to me that he could be incorrect back then. Not because he said he was infallible, but because most children find their parents infallible.

Even now, at the ripe old age of 24, when I should know better, traces of that filial belief in infallibility remain. Despite being confronted by any number of monsters and jackals in the legal community at my father's funeral, I stuck around law school. Despite all evidence pointed contrary, I stayed awake through the October evenings in 2010 to watch the Reds roll their way past the Phillies in the playoffs. Despite anything I know he would've said if he was still around to tell me, I don't think I'll ever be able to be the father he was.

Without knowing much of him, I doubt Anwar al-Awlaki was half the man my father was. My father was a lawyer who could have spent a lot of hours golfing or whoring or whatever else partners at law firms do. Instead, he built a pro-bono program to help people fight their way out of debt without going through the crippling and humiliating bankruptcy process. Al-Awlaki gave speeches on who to murder and how.

Given that, though, I don't know what al-Awlaki's son, Abdulrahman, thought of his father. One can be a bad person and a great father. One can be a bad person and a worse father. I don't know, I mean, they are two independent variables. In They Would Never Hurt a Fly, Slavenka Drakulic has a story about Ratko Mladic's relationship with his daughter. He doted on her and did everything he could for her, including sending her abroad for a better education. When she learned in school that her beloved father was the mass-murderer responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica, it took her years to process how that could be the same man who she saw eating sausages and rooting for Red Star Belgrade. She was much older than sixteen when she killed herself with father's prize pistol, knowing she would never be able to confront him with how she felt.

We will never know how Abdulrahman got along with his father; whether they argued about America's role in the world, where young Abdulrahman should go to university, or maybe even about the Rockies chances in the upcoming year. Abdulrahman was born and partially raised in Colorado, after all. Sixteen year-old Abdulrahman was killed in a drone strike along with his father in Yemen.

He may have grown up and become another virulently anti-American idealogue like his father. He could have also gone to med school and become a pediatrician. When I was sixteen, I wanted to join the CIA and go after terrorists. Had I followed up on that dream, I could have ended up being part of the decision to kill Anwar, his son, and others. Instead I spent a sleepless night wondering how I was just a few seemingly-miniscule life decisions away from actively pursuing the trial-less execution of two American citizens, one of which was born in 1995 (a year that, until now, has always been shorthand for "the year Eddie George won the Heisman").

The youngest person executed in the United States, Sean Sellers, was sixteen when he killed a store clerk, his mother, and his stepfather in 1999. He was afforded a public trial and a full trip through the appeals process before he was executed by lethal injection ten years later. Abdulrahman was the same age when he was killed by a Hellfire missile that can be traced back to the secretive Join Special Operations Command (JSOC). Sellers, for better or worse, had a media circus surrounding his execution. He had a trial, went through the juvenile justice system, and was given full opportunity to defend himself before execution. Abdulrahman likely did not know he was a target. US officials asserted that he was in his twenties, and needed to be refuted by the al-Awlaki grandparents sending a copy of his birth certificate to the Washington Post. If Abdulrahman was having lunch with friends and family - even vehemently anti-American friends and family - in his hometown of Denver, he would be put through juvenile justice and likely have nothing on his permanent record. But since he did the same in Yemen, a country the United States is not at war with, he was targeted and killed.

To say Abdulrahman was executed in a manner befitting a just system is not something easy to say with a straight face. The teenager was killed blithely, without regard for his guilt other than by association, without regard for his demographics other than his lineage. In Gettysburg, the 1993 Civil War film, Jeff Daniels intones that in America, "[W]e judge you by what you do, not by who your father was." That seems to not hold water today. If Abdulrahman did indeed have anti-American feelings, and if JSOC indeed has a national security interest in executing every teenager with anti-American feelings, there wouldn't be enough Hellfire missiles to kill them all. Teenagers are supposed to be the ones who think that their beliefs, hopes, and dreams are matters of life-and-death, not the Armed Forces. Unlike we may for a sixteen year old, we would not expect JSOC to send a 10-pound Hershey's Kiss to apologize to a girl they offended.

I have no idea what Abdulrahman's political views were and how much of a threat they posed. He was given less rights then someone arrested for triple murder. He may have sworn to dedicate his life to destroying America. He may have sworn his allegiance to Tim Tebow and the Broncos, also. His ideology, the only reason he was killed, is locked away as a state secret. His quite malleable ideas may now be spattered on the ground, but they're not a matter of public discourse.

Oscar Wilde, of course, said it best, "I am not young enough to know everything."That said, sixteen year-olds are foolish. There's a reason we don't let them vote, go to war, drink, or any of that. We don't expect them to make good decisions. We don't expect them to be fully grown-up, with a life plan that is inflexible and unchangable. We expect them to love their parents and trust them. And we - you, me, and everyone else with a navy blue passport - killed one of them, one of those gawky, foolish, teenagers, for doing just that.

US anti-terror establishment just straight making things up at this point.

2011-07-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Kucera noted how Kazakhs and Turkmen are among those given special, anti-terror, screening if they run into immigration troubles. Meanwhile, Kazakhs say that its Kavkatsii people coming into West Kazakhstan, not Kazakhs themselves, causing problems. IWPR also has a very neat interview on how the Kazakh government is trying to clamp down on terrorism; basically just persecute and prosecute anyone who doesn't follow state-sanctioned religious bodies.

Besides the sketchiness of treating Hizb-ut Tahrir as a terrorist organization, Kazakhstan treats the prospect of terror just as I'd expect: lots of distrust and random jailings, but no outright violence. I'm not sure what American-sponsored WARNING SIRENS are really hoping to do.

I'm really lazy and really have other, more pertinent things to worry about. But the problem of "Islam-related terrorism in the CIS" tends to all boil down to "Chechnya be real messed up and have some serious funding behind its insurgency." But that's not as much fun as nefarious global networks and 5th columns and all of that stuff.

All of the News

2011-07-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Not a real post. Just a real excuse to link to this article for nefarious future purposes.

Wired's Danger Room had a huge expose/longread a bit ago about how DARPA was getting its hands dirty in quantitative analysis in the Afghanistan war effort. It's an interesting read for many purposes; politically bureaucratic squabbles, the efficacy of data in counterinsurgency, the efficacy of COIN, and the like. But there's a great big gaping whole in the article. It never explains why the DARPA program will help. How will knowing traffic patterns, stability of markets, and possible targets help "win" the war? What is the desirable end state? How will targeted executions help get to that end state? How will stable fruit prices help get to that end state? How will knowing traffic help get to that end state?

All of the program's goals have been goals for a while. Those goals have not seemed to matched with the overarching goal. It sounds like explaining "we can win the baseball game if we get a touchdown and maybe have some luck on set pieces." I just have a very difficult time seeing the connection, and this link is assumed without being proven. Maybe I'm just cranky, or maybe its really disconcerting.

Much better and more illuminating is this AREU piece on land rights in Afghanistan. It sets up the background, the problem, what is being done, and possible solutions, all very quickly and all without getting too technical. Its an interesting, relevant, topic, done well.

I'm not even gonna touch NYT/WaPo/CNN style reporting. There's just nothing of substance there. I'm sure there's room for attractive, simple, changes. I'm not sure on how to go about them.

The Land Under Their Feet...Amen!

2011-07-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

The story of the protection of religious minorities in Georgia is quickly turning into my favorite of the summer. Giorgi Lomsadze is doing great work and is keeping me, personally, highly entertained. And it just keeps getting better.

Not only does Georgia have the Caucasus' highest rate of Facebook penetration (which is not surprising) but the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Bartolme Pirtskhalashvili, is one of the most popular people on it. And how is he spending his time on Facebook? By cursing - literally - the lawmakers who are protecting minorities.

May the head on their shoulders be damned, the shoulders above their chest, the chest above their waist, the waist above their thighs, the thighs above their knees, the knees above their shins, the shins above their feet, the land under their feet … Amen!

I love the idea of curse-via-internet. A curse is only as good as its audience, and Facebook gives one as good an audience as any. I'm not sure I would curse Georgian soil, myself, but that doesn't seem to stop Father Pirtskhalashvili now, does it?

It's all very American, I think. Like just because Sakashvili is so American, everyone else in Georgia is following his lead. I'm, um, not sure I'd use the US as my role model if I was a Caucasian country, but I'm not, so I won't.

As much as the Orthodox Church is a bastion of Georgian life, it seems odd to have it be such a politicized thing. But I guess that acknowledging minorities is a bit of de-religifying Georgian culture, so the Georgian Patriarch has to come out against it, in some sort of Kabuki theatre. But to curse Georgian soil? Really?

They fall on people and then those people are dead, you dumb motherfucker!

2011-07-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

Title courtesy of Peter over at Sorry, everyone. While I'm not as gung-ho as he is, I certainly appreciate the sentiment.

People die. Everything turns brown and rots and goes back to Earth unless it's made of some sort of fucked up chemical. One of the greatest advancements I've made in my own life is being okay with this. I used to be stuck awake at nights imagining my eminent demise. Now I'm stuck staring at the havoc I've wrought, intentionally or unintentionally, and how it affects others. Much better.

Though not an expat anymore - even if Denver should really count - I have a bit of that lifestyle tattooed on my brain. I'll be back out of Los Estados before the next president is sworn in, to be sure. One of the attitudes of expat lifestyle that jabbed at me was the ability to willfully disconnect oneself. To start talking about bacon and music that speaks to us as a lost generation, man, instead of staring at the fire surrounding. Let alone getting out some water.

The latest news coming out of Turkey has been all Fenerbahce (let them burn, signed xoxo yabancarslan) and the recent election (AKP is at this point as newsworthy as the sun rising). Which is just another reason why I've fallen in deep, deep, love with Mashallah. Their most recent piece, eaning on the work of Yaşar Adanalı and Fatıh Pınar is pretty spellbinding.

Istanbul will burn. The overheating GDP is one thing, analyzed expertly by, erm, expert Aengus Collins. But the rapid beige-izing of Istanbul: Conventions! Condos! Creperies! destroys the lives of the individuals with promises of future growth. Future growth that will be empty if it exists at all.

Istanbul is only a few years away from toppling into its own peculiar form of Gulag Archipelago, much like the one Southern California has become. It won't be because of Islam, it won't be because of the West or the East or oil money or some cock-eyed notion of Browns not understanding capitalism. It will topple in a way much similar to Ireland's recent Stuka of a fall: real-estate driven growth.

Michael Lewis' bit on Ireland was published a bit ago, and is certainly worth a full read. Here's a sample pullaway:

[M]ore than a fifth of the Irish workforce was employed building houses. The Irish construction industry had swollen to become nearly a quarter of the country’s G.D.P.—compared with less than 10 percent in a normal economy—and Ireland was building half as many new houses a year as the United Kingdom, which had almost 15 times as many people to house. He learned that since 1994 the average price for a Dublin home had risen more than 500 percent. In parts of the city, rents had fallen to less than 1 percent of the purchase price—that is, you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month. The investment returns on Irish land were ridiculously low: it made no sense for capital to flow into Ireland to develop more of it. Irish home prices implied an economic growth rate that would leave Ireland, in 25 years, three times as rich as the United States. (“A price/earning ratio above Google’s,” as Kelly put it.) Where would this growth come from? Since 2000, Irish exports had stalled, and the economy had been consumed with building houses and offices and hotels. “Competitiveness didn’t matter,” says Kelly. “From now on we were going to get rich building houses for each other.

Sound familiar? But at least Ireland is small; smaller than Istanbul. Mashallah looks at how the rejiggering of the urban fabric doesn't just leave room for shifting, it leaves great big gaping holes that are expected to be filled because of Growth! and Enthusiasm!. This will not work as well as optimism would have it.

I'm generally bullish on Turkey and think things are going to work out. Most things I've read to the alternate have been based more on "Well, I dated a Turkish guy and he was an asshole," than statistics. This Mashallah piece is the first genuinely new, interesting, and affecting news I've read in a long time about Turkey. The attached videos are also spot-on. The maps are readable and influential and they actually talk about real estate developers in Istanbul like they're humans with strengths and foibles, not some Titans of Industry made of granite and Wall Street Journal columns.

The more I read of Mashallah, the more I start to think that most for-profit journalism in the region is choosing Option J instead of positive, forward-pushing, work. And there a few good blogs, but most of them are trash (or, in the case of Istanbul Alti; compost).

So this is what I'm getting at. The growth of Turkey being paraded around, the "Westernization" the "you can get Starbucks here!" and the general bemusement of it not being the same place it was in the 1980s is the sausage, and one shudders to think of how it's made. Much like how we run our cars, our ferries, our Levent on the crushed corpses of dinosaurs and supercompressed trees, the above-ground life of Istanbul is anchored by the crushed dreams of family men and their starved infants. The bar one frequents with the dreadlocked Germans used to be someone's home. It's always nice to look in the mirror and reify that.

Barring that, go to Mashallah to be able to identify a few of the ruins in the rubble.

Well, at least Georgia makes me happy. Sure ain't making the Azeris grin.

2011-07-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

I literally just wrote about the hilarity of Georgia giving kinda/sorta anyone who wants it Most Favored Religion status. The Caucasus Muslim Board, "a body set up in 1937 with semi-official links to the Azerbaijani government, has operated an office in Tbilisi, ostensibly to advocate the interests of Muslims in Georgia." doesn't really agree with me.

The EurasiaNet story goes into detail, but basically these folks think that THEY are the true arbiters how Muslim life in Georgia, but the new committee created by the Georgian government, for the Georgian government, will likely usurp at least a bit of their power.

I'd consider coming out pro-Caucasus Muslim Board, if for nothing else than because its chair is named Allahshukur Pashazade, which is a pretty danged fantastic name. But I don't see how giving Georgian Muslims their own avenue for intra-state issues is going to do too much damage to the Ummah. Sure, it'll probably knock the Caucasus Muslim Board down a peg, and political organizations exist to justify themselves politically and that's why they're upset. But you'd think that the Board has enough issues on their plate. If Georgia thinks that they need to shake up their religious structure, it'll probably be worse for the incumbent religious organizations than said organizations' adherents.

I'm pretty sure the whole thing is ado about nothing, but it at least is worth getting looked at a little bit closer. It's good to know that PACs work in Tblisi like they do in Washington: for themselves, not each other.

Georgia Continues to Make Me Smile

2011-07-05T21:22:00.000-07:00

Georgia can make me happy like few other countries. Not because they necessarily always do things right, but because they always do things differently. By trying to find clever solutions to their problems, they make themselves into a fun little test-case. Saakashvili's patent disregard for internal protests in order to appease the Washington money chute may appear in the goofiest of ways. I find it really endearing.

Take a new law coming up, giving protected status to minority religions in Georgia: the Muslim and Jewish communities, the Roman Catholic Church, Armenian Apostolic Church and Evangelical Baptist Church.

This is weird because Georgia is 84% Georgian Orthodox, 10% Muslim, 4% Armenian Orthodox, and 1% Catholic. The rest is a hodgepodge of Jews, Baptists sure, but also Old Believers, Yezidis, Lutherans, et al. While I'm a pretty big fan of religious tolerance, I find it amusing to see how people pick and choose their tolerances.

These six groups were chosen because they have "deep historic ties" to the Georgian land, if not the Georgian state (which is Georthodox above all, as any skyline of Tblisi could show you). But Evangelicals? Really? They came in after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Misha's Georgian state apparatus is smart. They know that a lot of their reputation isn't just standing up to Russian authoritarianism, whatever that means. And its not just fighting terror, Pankisi Gorge besides. But it's also being a model republic in a checkered land, and THAT means protecting the check-box minorities. Absurdistan (which, it seems, has a purty new cover) does a hilarious send-up of "We are friends of the Jews!" but Evangelicals are just as important if you're trying to get money from certain establishments. A friend of God is a friend of the US, of course. It's amusing to see Georgia kowtowing to that.

The Finest Gozleme in all of Turkey

2011-07-02T00:49:00.000-07:00

Gozleme in and of itself isn't all that remarkable. Crepe-thin dough wrapped around a layer of [spinach, potato, ground meat] warmed over the buttered bottom side of a pan. But the purported etymology of the word, "göz al-melek", or "eyes of an angel" betray its value. Gozleme is travel food at its finest; simple, warm, filling without being rich, and simple to make. Kindly ignore the old women in Sultanahmet windows slaving over their electric griddles. Gozleme is food for the soul that comes from the soul, it asks far more from its maker.

Get out of Istanbul. This is usually the best way to start a story of an American in Turkey, you can only learn so much from a cramped quarter of Cihangir, jewel of the world and cubic zirconia of the Facebook. Turkey is very big and we are very small, and to find good road food, one must find the roads. For as much respect THY has earned in bolstering their in-flight menu, you won't receive anything of repute in the puddle-jumper to Erzurum, to Diyarbakir, or to Trabzon. There are those that swear by trains, and while I respect it, I am not one of them. Trains are alien impositions to Anatolia, the magic of the Texas Eagle appears as hokum once you get east of Ankara. The train will be populated by the grim and its canteen is stocked with the grimy.

But the buses. Say what you want of a militaristic society, the roads are paved and hue of fine slate, perfect for 12-wheeled Mercedes or 2-treaded Abrams. A modern bus will stop every few hours for refreshments, have a dutiful attendant and all the reading light one can ask for. Ethyl cologne is the perfect refresher after a 16-hour journey, along with a Styrofoam cup of tea.

More importantly, however, is the bus' role as the last remaining conveyance of anonymity. What with airline security, jocular taxis, and officious engineers, the private bus company's clerk is a stolid and unenquiring soul. Pay with cash, most likely the type with Kemaleddin on the reverse. Have your foreign-sounding name dutifully recorded as "Adı Soyadı" and be on your way. Invisibility and quietude follow you on your trip, though perhaps a dubbed Kurt Russell movie will as well. Introspection is a gift.

Don't get to used to the somnambulance, though. Once the bus stops for fuel and food, you'll be thrown into the last vestige of terrain travel, the rest stop. Expect to be charge 75 kurus for the bathroom and 8 lira for a doner. What you're looking for is something to quiet your stomach and contain the warmth to lull you back to sleep. What you're looking for is gozleme.

Though you'll be tempted to eat at each stop, that is the fool's decision. The best meals defeat the best snacks as assuredly as paper beats rock, and you'll want to eat hardy at your destination. What's more, modernity has stripped most of the peculiarities from place. It's no easy task separating Karaköprü from Karaağaç, Şımşrpınar from Sarıyaşı. The OPETs will guide you to your destination, but not to your happiness. The cleavage between the two is the stuff of yearning.

But if you ask any Southern American gentleman where to find the best Southern American food, his eyes will light up and he'll tell you of the gas station with the pit smoker out back. A friend of mine - only slightly bilingual - once tried to convince me that the "gas" in the American "gas station" is a corruption of the German "Gast," that the point is not to refuel your car but to stoke the coals in your heart with conversation and rib-sticking food. On the bus to Tatvan, my seatmate told me at the Acıpayam stop that he was returning home to Lake Van, where he had not been for seven years. When I asked him what he missed most, he didn't respond for the rest of his cup of tea. Before lighting up his third cigarette of the break, he said, "the old buses."

Apparently, it was not just the roads and autos that modernized with Ozal's Turkish Tiger. The entire rest stop system was razed and built anew. Village kaymakams and muhtars realized the steady stream of revenue a refuelling spot in their town represented, they crawled over each other for the opportunity to grovel in front of the Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Karayolları Genel Müdürlüğü. Especially in the east, they promised more captured "PKK" members, more Village Guard recruits, more urbanization, less Islam. Winners and losers may have been selected arbitrarily or no, but it seemed my Tatvan'li compatriot felt something was amiss.

At Bitlis, just west of our destination on the shores of Lake Van, my seatmate Kurban told me I should get off. I doubted he was interested in the ancestral home of William Saroyan, so I left with him at an hour just a shade too early to be called morning. "Gülselam may not be living," he told me, "but I am sure her family still cooks."

Kurban and I waited 83 minutes for a bus to pick us up, a rust-and-blue affair with a handpainted sign promising Baykan in our future. We wouldn't stay long enough to see the bus hold up its end of the bargain, as I followed Kurban off shortly after settling in, thanking my good sense for packing a light bag and trusting the boyish smile on his craggy face to make this all worthwhile.

The three-legged stool's homestead equivalent welcomed us. A porch of a sort, surrounded by rugs of a kind a Grand Bazaar tout could buy a car on and a morose-looking Kangal were all I could see in the gathering light. "Where are we?" I asked my seatmate and tour guide. "The map says Tatlıkaynak," was his reply, a bit more ambiguous than I would've hoped.

As he walked into the house I stayed outside. Always unfamiliar with the etiquette of strangers, the sounds of Kurmanci gave me an even better excuse to get in a staring contest with the dog. I was squatting next to the fella in a crease of sunlight when a shadow blackened our dirt. I look up to see a vest I could use as a hammock topped with a beard and kaffiyeh.

"Hamidullah Kazanlıoğlu," Kurban gestured me over. "He speaks even worse Turkish than you, but he has gathered that you are hungry."

Our conversation never got far beyond that, even over strong tea. As gracious as a host Hamidullah Bey was, he couldn't wrap his head around the concept of an American student studying abroad nor could I mine on what exactly he did for a living. His insistence on using "talib" to mean "student" and my casual mix-up of "yayla" and "ayla" certainly did not help matters. The smell of melting butter was tantalizing, however, as Kurban and I kept glancing at each other and smiling, as if we just landed dates with the two prettiest girls in school.

While talking (or to be more exact, staring) with my new friends, a woman who could've been anywhere within ten years of my age came around to place three square folds of dough on the low table. I roll my eyes along with most when I hear of Flaubert or Loti's obsession with the headscarved, silent, woman. It is a disgusting trope that speaks of fantasies of submission, of in-utero colonialism, and of gross disrespect. However, when a woman comes to my table to serve food, make eye contact, offer a puzzled look of, "you're not from here, are you?" and then walks away, it is only human to have my curiosity piqued. I feel less shame than shrug about that.

Forks and napkins are clearly out of the question. Plates do nothing that rugs cannot manage. Eating a piping hot origami of butter, dough, and sharp white cheese with dirty hands is best done artfully, rather than with tact or skill. The science of gozleme only adds to this. It's outer shell crisps and browns in spots but only in spots; less like a crepe and more like a $25 pizza. To avoid losing too much of the interior, an eater must choose when and where to eat the crisped parts and where to go for the chewy. Saying the filling is "white cheese and herbs" is akin to saying mountains are rocks and dirt. The cheese is crumbly and tangy. Less of a slap than feta, to be sure, but the greenery (greenery that the Turkish language, in a bout of hand-waving, labels as "grass") adds depth and a nice Spring-y aspect. The gozleme fills me with warmth and genuine enthusiasm. If something this simple can taste so good, my own simple self may be able to accomplish something. Kurban's historiographically-dubious explanation of the history of gozleme, something to do with shepherds and empty pans and the long horsetravel along the Anatolian steppe, gets drowned out by my reverie and suddenwistfulness.

After finishing the last bite and squinting at the hills trying their best to cover up a brazen autumn sun, Hamidullah snaps me out of my catatonia. "When are you going back to America?" He asks.

And just like that, I remember. This is not my home, this is just a vacation. I stand less of a chance of becoming a True Turk than Apo himself. Just another suburban boy off trying to define himself through the myriad life choices of others, trying to collect cool stories to tell skinny girls when I return to DC-area bars.

"I drive back tomorrow," I say. "After I get some rest and find some dessert."

"Do you mean you will fly back?" He says, after a brief consult with Kurban in Kurmanci, making sure he at least half-understood me correctly."

"No, I meant to say drive. I need to tell everyone from here to Istanbul to have breakfast with you one day."

We were then able to see the beard and kaffiyeh split into a canyon-wide smile.

Truth Windows

2011-05-26T22:41:00.000-07:00

As I often do, I'll lead with BLDGBlog:

[I]f we could simply scrape aside some paint and plaster and see, for once, the truth, the Real, the scaffolding, the code that makes and sustains the everyday worldly environment; though, I suppose, any attempt to over-literalize such a thing—even the portentous, Frodo Baggensian name of a "truth window"—would come out as, well... exactly like an architecturally themed remake of The Matrix (perhaps resembling the unwatchable film Dark City).

He's wrong - Dark City is a fantastic movie. But everything else about Truth Windows is fun and fascinating.

I've written about the unders of Istanbul previously, and I still think it's worth a mention again. I love the optimism of the term "truth window" as in "ah yes, we've finally understood it." If we see the scaffolding of Istanbul, we understand Istanbul. Or, if we can make fun of the zaniness of Almaty, we'll come that much closer to solving Kazakhstan.

Beirut has come somewhat towards this assumption. The real, real, interesting story of Le Maison Jaune is taken as a symbol for Beirut itself. From its sumptuous beginnings to its noble heritage to its bloody, terrifying, use during the Civil War. It is a symbol and a birthmark at once.

Istanbul? Well, Istanbul still sells itself as the city of Paleologues and Sultans, of Ancient Greeks and the mysterious harem. If locals know the truth, there is certainly less opportunity to celebrate it. Honesty doesn't seem to work as well in buildings as it does in books.

Maybe it's because Turkey is too optimistic in its self-image. The forward glance, looking upward and ever-onward conflicts with the cockroaches that would show up if truth windows were set up. It's odd, even though Brazil uses it on their flag, "Order and Progress" would fit Turkey an awful lot, as well. Order & Progress fly in the face of the inchoate, anarchic underpinnings of cities like Istanbul. They give a pat on the head and make cooing noises about industrialization and GDP to the very real and very serious environmental problems that occur.

Well most every government does, I suppose, and it's a problem for all of the G-20 states (and quite a few that fall in below there). But if nobody takes my idea before then, I'm going to have periscopes in the sidewalks in time for Istanbul Bienale 2037.

Blame it on the Business Cards

2011-05-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

Been on a long, unexpected, absence from the internet for the past few months. Maybe you noticed, probably you didn't, but it's about time I get back into this thing. In the past few months I've gradually made my way westward until I've ended up in Colorado studying water allocation for the summer. The intention is to use Colorado as a case study to see how water gets divvied up in the US (Colorado is a headwater state for about 20 million people. It's like the Kyrgyzstan of the Mountain West, but with less NGOs). While I'm here I'll be studying up on Islamic Law, and I'll move on toward post-Socialist models in the fall. On that note, if anybody has any suggestions beyond Wael Hallaq's A History of Islamic Legal Theories, be kind enough to let me know.

All I've been doing is reading books and retweeting @RickMuscles for the past few months. Now that's about to change. I'm going to be keeping a research log of sorts up on here if Istanbul Alti's server continues to be obnoxious. I'll be keeping on looking at Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia and natural resource law. I'll be keeping on giving my unsolicited opinion. Istanbul Alti seems to have died the death of apathy; the result of having life goals that supersede enthusiasm. I hope it returns, but there are other projects in the meantime.

But until then, I felt more attention shoulda been brought to this EurasiaNet article on a Turkish arms dealer being the power behind the throne in Turkmenistan.

First: ordering translations of Rukhnama. Genious. It may be my new favorite slimy toady move: demand the honor of translating the unhinged ramblings of the man you want to curry favor with.

Second: "It's been eight months. We hear good words (from Berdimuhamedov), but we see no actions. Nothing has changed -- except they've taken down Niyazov's pictures and put up Berdimuhamedov's. Turkmenistan cannot recover from Niyazov and become a relatively normal country without democracy, an open economy, and rule of law." aka "They don't trust me anymore. So I'm going to mention the 'Western-oriented reformer' bullet points."

Third: "The US was most keenly interested in getting Chalik's assement of Berdymukhamedov's readiness to get Turkmen gas flowing to the South Caucasus, and mentioned a feasibility study of that era. Chalik replied that Berdymukhamedov, while interested, was non-committal, and probably because he "cannot make this decision on his own" -- an intriguing claim about the figure everyone on the outside sees as indispensable to every deal." aka Chalik knew that Nabucco was a dead, stupid, misguided deal and didn't want to be the one to tell the U.S.

There's something about Central Asian Republics that make individuals feel like they can come in and change it in their image. No doubt Chalik was influential to the Niyazov regime: if I was running an atavistic security state, Turkish ex-military dudes are right up there with South African and Israeli ex-military dudes, but without all of the baggage. Chalik got stuff done, and is clever enough to do mention grave concerns about backsliding and a security-run administration. Of course it's a security-run administration, any transitory country relies on the whim of the men with guns. Chalik should know this, assuming he was in Anatolia in 1980.

I love the story of a shady arms-dealer who built his way up to Richeliu stature, only to be removed by the sudden death of his sponsor. As insinuated by my reference, there's something delightfully 18th Century Europe about it.

Garbanguly is relatively young, only 53. Assuming status quo (which is a relatively safe assumption for Turkmenistan, though I said the same thing about Libya not so many months ago) nothing dramatic will change in his regime. But as more schools get built - even if Fethullahcilar get shut down - and the internet gets built up, there should be something interesting going on a couple decades out. Especially as the Communist old guard die out and people brought up through folks like the Turkmenistan Civic Value and Youth Foundation get responsibility.

The Turkic Spring is still some time out, but it'll be a blast once it gets started. As long as shady militaristic types like Chalik stay near the fringes of it.

Book Review: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2011-04-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

I'll get back to writing about real things at some point, I promise. But until then I'm going to keep up the book reflection part of this blog while I watch Bashkortostani public access news because that's what there's to do in Cleveland. I'll start when I start. Until then, well, books.

As I write this I realize, I'm not born to be a writer. I might be able to turn a phrase, to tell a story, but I will never be able to really weave something true to life, or even a gross enough approximation. You might think you have style, maybe some class, and then you look up and compare to - not even Tolstoy - but Grann or Tyler the Creator and realize that it is hopeless to start. All you'd be doing is beating against the current.

Heaping praise on War and Peace isn't even an attractive thing to do. It's a goddamned classic of literature, it hardly needs my validation. But it is relevant. If you happen to be unemployed for a decent stretch of time, it's worth picking up.

Why did I pick it up? Because I was told to, and I listen to my elders. A Real Person Writer told me I ought to get into Russian fiction, so I asked him what. After going back and forth between his collection and what I could find in the Cleveland house, we settled on W&P. So what I'm trying to say is, I did it to try to impress, to try and validate myself. Not sure if it worked, but at least I picked something up along the way.

The plot is simple, actually. The setting is Napoleonic, from Austerlitz in 1805 to about 1820. There are 5 major families, but really 4 main characters: Natasha and Nicholas Rostov, Andrew Balkonsky, and Pierre Bezhukov. Everyone has their favorites, I'm sure, but Natasha is a Audrey Hepburn-type, Nicholas is a headstrong man who wants to have a rustic/heroic streak. Andrew is an older, wiser, Nicholas and Pierre is Tolstoy's mouthpiece, a man who falls into money and then fences with the consequences. They all have their pros and cons (I'm #teamandrew) to be sure, and the side characters are just as full and often more interesting, like the dastardly Dolokhov or probably my personal favorite, the speech-defected Denisov. It's fairly enjoyable that Tolstoy feels no need to wrap up everybody's story and make sure we have a Fugees-esque finality to everyone, even if there are two wholly separate epilogues.

It's about more than Napoleon, of course. Tolstoy takes his time, going on monologues to destroy the 1860's concept of greatness, attempt to reconstruct historiography, or prove that God exists and there is no such thing as free will. All heady stuff, for sure. And it's difficult to pretend these are all some soft subtleties, Tolstoy hits you over the head with these things and talks like a college professor for ten, twenty pages at a time. The book is certainly one of those big important books, and again, I wish I was a better writer so I could take some lessons of the craft from Tolstoy. The way he describes characters, the way he continually talks through people's heads is fun to read and interesting to look at.

But as I said, I'm hardly a writer. All the same, using rich people as a lens through which to view history is a more interesting plot device than it sounds. Tolstoy says straight off, "I don't know the serf classes and I will not pretend to" in one of his monologues. And with rich people you can travel, speak French, and do a whole lot in that sort. And the protagonist of the book, Pierre, is an only moderately opaque version of Tolstoy himself. And all of the war scenes are of officers riding around, taken from Tolstoy's Caucasus years into the steppes west of Moscow.

W&P is probably most known for its war scenes, widely lauded as some of the most accurate in the history of literature. I wouldn't know, of course, but there's lots of interesting looks at the concept of bravery, the indefinability of glory, and such and sundry 19th century concepts that still live on today. It's interesting to read about how these concepts were tired and irrelevant in the 1860s, and yet we still use them today. How we still talk of Napoleon's glory, of the pomp of battle, like we're still marching out in red wool coats in a line of battle, shooting 3 shots a minute under Major Sharpe.

Tolstoy refers to the guerilla war in Spain at the time, and talks degradingly about the Russians' version of the same. It's clear that he didn't like how war was, but certainly doesn't care for where it's going. Making Dolokhov a guerilla was probably not a coincidence.

There's lots to talk about, about war, about class, in War & Peace. I'm not going to pretend to be the Spark Notes version, though. It's a good book to read if you have a month or two to kill.

Book Review: Passage to India by E.M. Forester

2011-04-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

If you're as big into Central/South (or really, Cool) Asia as I am, you are probably reading some of the good stuff that Jonathan Shainin writes, or what he posts on his Twitter feed. One of his larger rages in the past week or so has been against the Guardian, that ol' English rag that apparently has been celebrating the British Empire and all of its good.

That wasn't all that much good. It's fun to look back wistfully, of course. When I first set off for Central Asia, I was with a bunch of Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians celebrating the triumph of their spirit. It's, well, sometimes a bit off from the truth.

Probably the seminal novel of British India is Passage to India, which came out in 1924 at the sunset of the British empire. Forester was pretty pissed off from his experiences in India, or at least upset enough to write a fictionalized account (there is no Chandrapore) of how Indians and Anglos interact.

Passage to India is a great read because it's an easy read. It reads less like a Merchant Ivory production, which I was expecting. For being nearly 90 years old, the characters are fresh and their English is very easy to understand. They're each sketched out individually, and for having the whole Anglo vs. Indian divide, it's not Sharks vs. Jets, its a feud that develops into a race war. None of the main characters are entirely good or entirely evil. Some of the side characters may seem it (particularly the Nauwab Badhur) but you realize they're just following their own path. I remember getting into a long talk with some older gentleman in a hostel in Split a month ago. He was very proud of finishing his first book and was explaining that, "the funny thing about characters is, they don't always do what you want." I couldn't really believe for anything I've ever written, Lord knows, but I did believe it here.

Like any very good book, Passage to India is just as much about the human condition as anything else. The characters are set down their paths by external coincidences, unable to stop themselves from fulfilling some certain destiny. The fate of the country can be seen in the fate of the characters, and the whole fate/God/reason thing comes into play as much as the reader allows it to.

There's a reason why Passage to India is one of the triumphs of the English language. I was lucky to pick up an aged copy at a book exchange for free, and it was one of the better accidents (OR FATE OMGZZZ) I stumbled into the past year. So yeah, worth checking out.

Linkages to various things on Islamic Law online (Afghanistan version)

2011-03-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

All credit goes to Tim Mathews for finding all of these. I just wanted to have them for posterity for myself and whoever else would be interested.

Following is a quick 4 sources for Islamic Law online, in English, about Afghanistan. If you're into those sorts of things, you ought to check them out.

Rebuilding Civil Law in Afghanistan

Legal Education in Afghanistan Prior to the Soviet Invasion

Library of the International Islamic University (Malaysia)

The Legal System of the I.R. Afghanistan

Come on, Karimov. You're not even trying anymore, are you?

2011-02-18T06:59:00.000-08:00

A dark spectre is haunting Uzbekistan, according to Karimov. There exists a force, slippery yet destructive, that is out to destabilize the most stable country in Central Asia, according to Karimov. This group of Islamicist Terrorists coming to destroy us all? The Jihadists.

Seriously. This is even lamer than "The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan."

Whenever somebody tells you about the nefarious Muslim plan to take over the world, remind them: you don't want to turn into Uzbekistan.

I'll hopefully add more, but I've been attacked by a pretty bad case of the lazies.

Book Review: History of Danish Dreams by Peter Hoeg

2011-02-18T01:55:00.000-08:00

There's a pretty rad book exchange off a side street in Asmali Mescit neighborhood here in Istanbul. Full of old folks who tell awesome stories and let you take books from 'em for free...yeah, it's a good deal.

And I was sitting there, trying to find some more books, when I stumbled upon The History of Danish Dreams. Considering I have Danish friends and turn into a deaf mute whenever talk gets going about their homeland, I figure it would be a good introduction. And the author apparently is an ex-mountaineer, ex-fencer, and ex-ballet dancer, so he seems like the kind of dude I'd patronize.

So the book follows 4 generations or so of a family tree from Denmark's medieval feudalism into the 1970's. Apparently most of that change happens in the 20th century, and the book could be better called "Denmark in the 1900's: a novel"

There's some likable characters and some fun quotes. The 1920's were an awesome time to be rich, apparently. And lawyers and the law make for terrible people, but if you ran in my circles, you'd know this already.

And honestly, I finished this book a few weeks ago and it didn't make that much of an impression on me. Maybe it was a mediocre translation, who knows? But let's just move on and start talking about Central Asia again sometime soon.

When all you have is a hammer

2011-02-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

Trite sayings aside, Joshua Foust cleared up why, no, military solutions to everything under the sun do not actually make sense.

In the realm of the military, he did everything right, including seeking local confirmation of where to hand out reconstruction money. But the realm of the military is wrong—it is structured wrong, and it provides the wrong incentives.

I remember listening to a talk given by Dr. Nazif Shahrani back in the day about the numerous different solutions that are possible to deal with Afghanistan. And instead there's a lot of "ARP! Kill Terrorists! ARP!" Which sounds great, it really does, but it doesn't always match up with reality.

Not much more because Mubarak's about to speak. But hey. There's this. And remember: if al-Ikhwan has a place in the new Egyptian government EVERYONE STAY CALM

No, [Country] Does Not Exist for you to Imagine a Sandbox Full of People You Like

2011-01-29T10:17:00.000-08:00

I started writing this about Tunisia, then put it to rest. I decided to pick it up again about Egypt. I initially wanted to entitle it "What we talk about when we talk about revolution" but Gawker dissuaded me of that.

So Tunisia exploded, ever-so-quietly. One day Ben Ali was doin' his thang, and then a week later, he's cooling his heels in the Gulf. Which, much like Kyrgyzstan before it, provoked a great reaction by people who have no clue what they're talking about. And in the absence of facts, it has been then decided to project wildly and uglyily.

Clearly, Wikileaks or Twitter or somesuch technology isn't responsible for the revolution. Tunisians are. Food costs skyrocketed, people were starving, and people didn't like that. This is not a tricky story. Ben Ali wasn't particularly nasty of a dude, but there was lots and lots of corruption and eventually enough middle class people didn't care for it. Again, this is not a shocking story.

But different analysts have taken to this revolution to explain why their worldview is correct. And in doing so, they've rejected any sort of agency by Tunisians themselves in order to explain - pedantically - how the world works. There are literally dozens of examples of this, but I'm going to latch on to two because, well, I can.

Ian O. Lisser explains that, you see, Libya and Algeria are in much more precarious positions then Tunisia:

Like Tunisia, Algeria has been unable to offer a viable future to masses of unemployed or underemployed young people. Unlike Tunisia, the sheer scale of the problem in Algeria is much larger, Islamism is the leading force of opposition, and the political culture is more intolerant and violent. A new revolt in Algeria, should it come, holds the potential for another protracted and bloody conflict between extremists and a military-backed state.

Yes, Algeria and Libya are much larger than Tunisia. They are also all next to each other. That's about where the comparison ends. You can criticise Ghadaffi all you want, but the fact is, he keeps people fed. It's a socialist state there, and thus a bit more resilient until the top really comes off. Which, thanks to energy wealth, will be a long time coming (unless Ghaddaffi does something bizarre, which, you know, wouldn't actually be all that bizarre).

Algeria has been at a low-level civil war for a while now. This is not new news. This is not relevant to Tunisia.

This may need to change. Europe has an obvious stake in the future of the southern Mediterranean, not least because of the large North African communities in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere, and the direct links to European security. As in the Balkans in the 1990s, an effective response sometimes requires a new geographic frame. If the last decade underscored the importance of the Gulf to the future of the Middle East, the next decade may be just as much about the Mediterranean as a place that matters. Strategy toward the Mediterranean—Europe’s near abroad—is likely to be an increasingly important test of European Union foreign policy and transatlantic cooperation.

King Leopold's Ghost? More like Albert Camus' Zombie. Mr. Lesser runs some "Mediterranean Advisors LLC" company and has some sort of background in Portuguese and Middle East and Turkey and North African advising. Hey, I'm all for making your own way in life, but inventing a map and them co-opting life events to fit that map is a bit of a stretch. That said, he seems like a smart enough dude. He views things through his lens, a lens that un-ironically incorporates the term "Near Abroad" but hey. Reasonable minds can differ. But note the lack of a Tunisian voice besides "mass of Tunisians." I'm going with something here.

The hooligans over at Ricochet, though, well, are something else. Ms. Berlinski published the bizarre "most frightened people in the Middle East" picture which includes Abbas of Fatah (someone I can assure you she does NOT want ousted out of power popularly) and al-Assad (who will lose power...how exactly?) and some other guys I don't really recognize because let's just say, they're not that far up the Hottest Heads of State Power Rankings. It's charming in its own way. Because this happened once, it will happen all over! Everything has been fine in Lebanon since the Cedar Revolution! Palestinians voted in Hamas which was universally respected and not at all complicated!

The follow-up went from endearing to creepy-crawly. "You're on your own, but you can do it" wraps it up pretty well actually. This went from revolution to cute little kid on the jungle gym while parents watch.

But then I think about the suppressed premise. Are the Tunisian people really so mindless and childlike that absent a sign that the West is interested in promoting democracy in Tunisia, they'll just lose their enthusiasm for democracy and hand their country to the Islamists? If so, I doubt democracy has much of a chance in the first place.

This paragraph makes me indescribably angry. Ms. Berlinski writes the excuse - that these people aren't ready - in order to hedge her bets on what happens. We are pro-democracy, sure. But not so much that we'll take responsibility if the democracy isn't the democracy we like. It's the most equivocal of all equivocalities. We'll like you if you look like us, but express concern if you do not.

And that's just it. Equivocality. Mildly worded messages. One of the things I, personally, struggle with is the divide between how much I care about these places and how little they care about me. At the same time, it's quite rewarding. I can write, I can talk...but I don't have a stake. This offers me a lot of freedom. At the same point, I write for a foreign audience. I struggle to see why a Turk should listen to me.

Which is why the "you can do it!" rhetoric is...bizarre. It puts the foreigner up as judge and jury of the revolution. But not the executioner, the foreigner is too equivocal.

The Americans, in particular, who travel and opine tend to come through the International Relations/Political Science/Diplomacy educational rigmarole. Taught how to express yourself in polite, measured, tones so as to appeal to a base and to avoid having to take a stand. It's an excuse to be uneducated, and if educated, it's an excuse not to go on a limb. Rather judge the Arabs then make a stand that can be judged.

The Foreign Policy type of media is giddy, of course. It gives them excuse to be Important and to rush to judgments. "Egypt's burning", "Falling Pharoah" and some such. Never mind that al Jazeera is running circles around all of them. Nathan Brown is someone I can support, though:

While in the 1980s, Mubarak's "stability" was welcome, today it reeks of stagnation, cronyism, sycophancy, and slow decay.

Sycophancy needs more print in these sorts of things. More fightin' words, more creative thinking. More of the sort of thing that actually involves investing yourself in change, not investing yourself in analysis.

Instead, there are eyeglass-adjusters and belt-lifters. The sort of people who are dismayed and shocked that the AKP has power, that al-Ikhwan is a political player, that Tunisia exists outside of Roman ruins. It's all quite boring.

The fun of the internet is that everyone can be an expert, everybody can give their point of view. But the explosion of analysis comes at the lack of actual news. This is, again, not a new or thrilling revelation.

Us expatriates do more than our fair share. Wearing our passport pages like armor, the places we've been allow us to give opinions. The exoticness of our friends' names, the snarkiness of our Facebook albums make up our new CVs. "Can YOU believe the barbarousness of the locals?" "That they would do things so DIFFERENTLY than us?"

We get off on telling people how cool we are, how we are in fin de ciecle Paris or 1920's Berlin or other such romantic notions. We abhor the thought that this does not make us interesting. That our foreignness doesn't make us special, just desperate. Frightened by our insipidness at home that we must take refuge in a place where our existence makes us interesting.

But the locals are never good enough for us. We give due pittance and sympathy to the people who die in the revolutions, only to imagine what the revolution means. At the first sign of foment, of froth, we begin dreaming of a country full of people like us. That because we understand the country better, we can make a better country. Nevermind what people think, we seem to know what they truly believe.

So continue with the even-handed outrage, the meek-mannered thunder. The coy protest and the put-down of the locality. Our transnationhood makes us more worldly and more knowledgable. Because I took a course in college, y'know, I know the right path for Egypt, for North Korea, for Timor Leste. It's more than wanting to be around people like us, it's wanting people around us to be more like us. Egotism masquerading as charity, tapioca pudding, but free-range, all-organic, Whole Foods tapioca pudding. Instead of taking bold stands, we boldly stand elsewhere.

It's boring, it's terribly trite, and its just rich white folks convincing themselves it's more than just imperialism. More than just expressing our own dreams in ways that gets other people killed, puts other people in jail.

And I know I'm as guilty as anyone of this, and that I shouldn't be like a law school Kanye, putting out my soul in poorly-worded internet broadcasts. I'm not sure what I should do, I'm not sure what you would do. But the status quo is pathetic enough to keep on going, which mild words and tut-tutting proceeding.

Sayyet Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood. Or; It's Complicated

2011-01-09T03:56:00.000-08:00

Qutb spent a long time in prison. And, to paraphrase Office Space, not nice, white-collar, conjugal visit prison (not that he would take much advantage of the conjugal visits, it would seem).

After World War II and the British Empire's decision to stop being an empire, the Free Officers Movement deposed the Egyptian King and set up a socialist republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser. I'm skipping a lot of history here, and I'm always fascinated by how the Egyptian military, fresh off of being embarrassed by the nascent Israeli state, was able to retain power, but we'll have to move on.

As one could guess, an Arab Socialist State wanted little to do with the Islamic state preferred by MB. From 1945-54, there's a whole lot of instability in Egypt, something that it is hard to absolve the Brotherhood from or to implicate them in. It all really depends on which lunatic fringe of the internet you'd prefer to read. The fact is, Brothers fought Israel, Brothers fought the Egyptian state, Brothers fought the English, Brothers fought Brothers...again, instability. It's very difficult for Americans to understand the anarchic panic of an unstable state. Say what you want, but Nasser at least brought stability. He also brought tens of thousands of Brothers into jail. Qutb was one of them.

Prison, as it goes, changes a man. Qutb was never that charismatic before, but he became morose under the beatings, torture, and general Kafka-sity of prison life. When talking about Qutb, its always fun to read his things before imprisonment:

It is necessary for the new leadership to preserve and develop the material fruits of the creative genius of Europe, and also to provide mankind with such high ideals and values as have so far remained undiscovered by mankind, and which will also acquaint humanity with a way of life which is harmonious with human nature, which is positive and constructive, and which is practicable.

...and...

On the whole this theory [Socialism] conflicts with man's nature and its needs. This ideology prospers only in a degenerate society or in a society which has become cowed as a result of some form of prolonged dictatorship. But now, even under these circumstances, its materialistic economic system is failing, although this was the only foundation on which its structure was based. Russia, which is the leader of the communist countries, is itself suffering from shortages of food.

This is the sort of stuff that would get you a pat on the head from your Sunday School teacher today.

Prison...changed things when he was sentenced in 1952. He became far more pessimistic and found a Utopian religious society to be the only way out. Needless to say, before he realized this plot, he was hanged for being part of a plot to assassinate the Egyptian President under what could charitably called a show trial. This was 1966.

There are two major gaps here: The first is that as an inmate, Qutb was unable to take part in the Brotherhood and was sidelined by MB leadership for being, well, an unstable prison-bound author. It warrants mentioning, of course, that he has no formal clerical training and really seemed to strongly dislike Imams, al-Azhar, or any form of religious life. He joined MB not as a youth, but in 1951, at age 45, as a propagandist for them. He used the MB as a political opportunity to lash out at Egypt's encroaching socialism. He was a member for less than 2 years by the time he was arrested. He would've been a footnote to history if he didn't have to go and get martyred by the Egyptian state (though writing beautiful Arabic would've certainly helped him stay in the Area Studies curricula of the universities that a certain type of Ricochet-li loves to fume about).

So how much he actually was a member of the Brotherhood is dubious. Also, remember that end date, 1966. You know what part of the 1966 world order is still relevant in 2010? Pretty much none. He didn't even get to get upset over the 6-Day War, or to see what real Islamic Revolution looked like in Iran, or to see Sunni hardliners take over Mecca.

Qutb was a writer and a philosopher. Not a politician. His works have been seized by politicians to make their points. The "Islam as an underdog locked in struggle with the West" narrative pushed by al-Qaeda makes use of his prison writings, which are full of plaintives for a better world and fumations at the world as it is. The Muslim Brotherhood also takes advantage of his writings. They cite entirely different paragraphs.

In much the same way that EVERY American politician has a favorite Founding Father, every Muslim politician (and I include bin Laden as a politician because after all, he is trying to change the political scheme of the world. Bin Laden gets lots of other titles as well, I'm sure) promoting an Islamic way of life has a favorite Qutb quote. The Muslim Brotherhood's leadership has very carefully tread between embracing Qutb and keeping him at arm's length. They published a book, Preachers not Judges which can best be said to be a very polite refutation of Qutb's writings as related to politics.

As I mentioned earlier, I would strongly, strongly, urge you to read Nathan Brown's "The Muslim Brotherhood's (and Egypt's) Qutb Conundrum" in Foreign Policy. He is far more well-read on this subject then me. The dude knows his Islamic movements. He concludes with this:

Since its re-emergence in the 1970s and 1980s, the Brotherhood has gradually stepped up its social and political engagement, working not to create a tiny countersociety but to persuade all of Egypt to follow its path; the goal has been reform of the entire society along Islamic lines. That strategy has led to a very uneven but still quite real political maturation; it has also led to a mix of successes and frustrations. Qutb speaks to the frustrations. Those who find the society too distant from Islam are less likely to prioritize engagement in the short term. They will seek instead to focus on the faithful and perhaps to reform the society not through broad social and political work but through a more elitist approach.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political movement, a political party. Much like how Sarah Palin and Lindsey Graham are both members of the Republican Party but speak to different wings of it, Qutb and, say, Ali Sheikh-Ahmed do similar for the Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb speaks to a part of the Muslim base that the Brotherhood wants to expand into, and they would be fools to villify Qutb. In fact, it is a very, very, powerful argument that MB adheres to a more pacifist definition of Qutb's works and brings people eager to join a violent Jihad to instead choose the Brotherhood's "Great Jihad" of charitable works. This would not be a bad thing.

So, Ms. Berlinski, what shall we cover next? The Brotherhood and Palestinian Territories? Their greater transnationalism? The role they've played since the fall of the USSR? And meanwhile, Hizb ut-Tahrir is wondering just who you have to publish in order to get an audience in the United States these days. Their branding experts are REAL upset they didn't go with a simple English translation like al-Ikhwan did.

The Muslim Brotherhood: A History, A Counterpoint.

2011-01-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

Claire Berlinski has started a "history of the Muslim Brotherhood" that I did not sit well with.Teleological to the maxx, it looks at the Muslim Brotherhood through history in order to explain how it got to where it was today. I was a bit discomfited by the original post, but Ms. Berlinski was gracious enough to let me get into a formal debate. She gave me membership privileges on her site, but as you will see soon enough, I had a lot more than the 200 word limit to say. And besides, I feel that the master-pupil relationship that comments sections make for are usually inappropriate and turn what should be a give-and-take into a classroom environment. So I have posted my full response here, and I hope that, if you come here from Ricochet, you will be kind enough to read it.

Thank you for inviting me into a debate, and I'm sorry that it took so long. I got held up at work doing work-like things and the lot. But I think it's a debate worth having because, as you intimated, there are a lot of Muslims out there, and it is worth understanding branches of political Islam so the wrong one isn't barked up.

To understand the Muslim Brotherhood, one has to look at the context in which they began. We will move on to the post-war Brotherhood tomorrow, as you say. The context involves the Islamic context, the geographical context, and the chronological. First, we need to establish some ground rules when we talk about Islam.

Islam is an evangelical religion. Some branches more than others. It seeks to convert non-believers and asks its adherents to act as ambassadors for the religion and to live their lives religiously. It is no different from Evangelical Christianity in this regard. Both groups seek to turn the world to the "true" religion and have a similar millennial scenario that involves everyone on Earth being in the true religion or very, very, sorry they're not. But there is no reason to be more skeptical of one form of evangelism than the other. Religions are allowed to seek converts. It's always amused me how it's the most religious people who are frightened of the evangelism of others. If you're right, what's the harm of the other guy? (For the record, I am religious, and am neither Evangelical Muslim nor Christian).

Also, the different schools of Sunni Islam, and the different qadis and scientists and what have you, all have different judgments of "great" and "small" jihad. This concept is totally different then the concept of "Jihad of the sword" (Jihad bil Sayf) that may only be pursued via fatwa. It used to be only the Caliph could command Jihad bil Sayf, but then the Caliphate fragmented (and was never really whole to begin with) and now any grouch with good handwriting can issue the perquisite fatwa. Note that al-Banna goes out of his way to not use the term "Jihad bil Sayf" - he makes no claim to Caliph. He also rejected violence. MB has rejected violent means from its inception in 1928 (4th graph from bottom) until current day (election of Badie as leader).

The Muslim Brotherhood is very much a conclusion of its geography and the time of its birth. It was born as a transnational, anti-Western, religious movement when all three of these things had very different definitions then they do now. Al-Banna has a theological connection to Muhammad 'Abduh, the 19th Century reformer who was a fascinating mystic, journalist, and lawyer who "wanted to make Islam compatible with 19th-C secularism." Both al-Banna and 'Abduh studied Jamal-al-Din al-Afghani, who was one of the first people to successfully unite Muslims -at least theoretically - from Indonesia to Morocco under a modernizing ethos.

Al-Banna's anti-Westernism is quite similar, in fact, to Woodrow Wilson's anti-Imperialism. He promoted democracy and parliamentary rule as an alternative to the heavy-handed policies of British Egypt and the corruption of the Ottoman Empire. He took notes from the failure of the Khalifat Movement of India and the Jadidism of Russia to create, as Berlinski said, a slower, more gradual shift to power. One could make a comfortable analogy from al-Banna to Gandhi, Nehru, and the other heroes of the Indian Independence movement. He just wasn't as good a politician as them.

That said, he was an interesting man. He started the Muslim Brotherhood at age 24 with a few friends. He preached in coffeehouses and flophouses, to the poor that the al-Azhar clerics wouldn't make eye contact with. His group went from 800 in 1936 to 200,000 in 1938. He was on to something.

The Muslim Brotherhood emphasized (and emphasizes) social justice and aid for the impoverished and punishment for the corrupt. This has led the group to make many political decisions that people on a center-right blog would disagree with, in terms of aid programs, escalated taxing, and the like. These programs, however, are hardly outside the barn of political debate. Welfare is something to be argued about, not shot over. In addition, many of the Muslim Brotherhood's aid policies are just as similar to YMCA or the Salvation Army as they are to Hezboallah. Soup kitchens, education (through a religious lens, of course), and work programs. This is not the reinvention of the wheel.

The demise of the Muslim Brotherhood under al-Banna, pre-war, is linked to that anti-corruption stance and the enormous growth I mentioned earlier. A break-off group was formed that rejected al-Banna's peaceful stance, which forced him to make a compromise in order to regain control, promising the formation and training of "battalions." But 1940 happened first. The Desert Fox Rommel was embarrassing British forces and Africa seemed lost. Tom Bradby's God of Chaos gives an idea, though its set in 1942. The British set up martial law based in Cairo, and the Muslim Brotherhood was in contact with the dozens of Nazi spies in the region. This is 1940: the U.S. was still in touch with Nazi Germany, for the record. And the Brotherhood played both sides, shutting down the battalions and setting up "families" instead, and giving out aid to families injured in German bombing raids. For the rest of the war, the Brotherhood kept an uneasy truce with the British-backed Egyptian government. As promised, we'll get into post-war later.

So if we're talking about the Muslim Brotherhood as a group, we're discussing an explicitly anti-violence organization that fell along the vaqf tradition of Egypt, but trying to bring it in line with 20th century determinationist and nationalist movements. It was a natural course of Islam and Egyptian history at that point, and it was sparked by the, well, whatever you want to call him, certainly energetic al-Banna. The translation and propagation of Mein Kampf and The Protocols is nasty and certainly regrettable. But I'm not ready to string Lindbergh up, either. It stands to mention that anti-Jewish violence in Egypt wouldn't take off until the Israel-Palestine wars. In fact, despite the fact that Brotherhood members were arrested for violence, well, again. Context. It was a violent time. Cairo was under martial law, and the Muslim Brotherhood was made up of some of the most desperate Cairenes. Al-Banna tried to have cooler heads prevail, and was largely successful. Things got a lot worse after his assassination and after the Israel-Palestine...unpleasantness.

Keith Ellison would not be born until 1963.

Book Review: Memed, My Hawk (Ince Memed) by Yashar Kemal

2011-01-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

There's a fantastic review of Absurdistan I once read that said:

Just unbutton its shirt and let it bare its chest. Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself.

And yeah, I think that applies to Memed, My Hawk a whole lot more than it applies to Shteyngart's work. It's rare when you can write a classical legend in 1955. It's a John Ford Western except that it is just as relevant to today as it was in the '50s and unlike the John Fords, it took place in contemporary times. Yashar Kemal owns. He made me forget my Turkey and start living in his for a few hundred pages. I'm not sure what else I could say but that.

The book is about the titular character, believe it or not. As a boy, Memed runs from home, finds the world outside is pretty interesting, but ultimately is drawn back home. His family, seemingly longstanding enemies of Abdi Agha, the ruler of Degirmenoluk and four other villages, is punished for his transgressions. Years after this continual punishment he runs away with his beloved. That works out poorly. He then takes to the mountains and becomes the bravest brigand the Cukurova has seen.

Although it itself is a legend, it also discusses how legends are made. The tiny, boyish, Memed becomes a monster to his enemies and a haughty animal to his companions. The book is about how expansive Turkey is, it makes the land east of Ankara seem as expansive as the Midwest plains that hold the stars I still recognize as home. I'm not nearly as clever a book reviewer to discuss how Kemal writes how he does. So just read it and enjoy the ride.

Kemal was a complicated figure. And while you hear some biographers say that with concern, for me, I think it just means that he was interesting. Oh, gee, wow, he didn't have a clear-cut position on socialism. That's not being difficult, its avoiding the drab talking points of his era. The man's story is fantastic. He loved telling stories as a kid growing up in rural (RURAL!) Turkey, but he was distraught when he woke up one day and couldn't remember the words to his favorite story. He decided he would have to learn to write in order to be a better story teller. There are then stories of him getting a job in the library so he could just read all day and other such fantastic things. They matter less as factual vignettes than as a mythical image of Yashar the author from the hills. The Nation's article on him is fantastic and is a must-read. I went from "OK, I ought to read Kemal" to "I must read him" solely because of that article.

I love how far removed the book is from Istanbul. So many foreigners coming to Turkey focus on Istanbul. And I admit to yes, living here and yes, finding it quite nice. All the same, when I read about how "Istanbul thrives as the new party capital of Europe" all I can think of is "Istanbul is pretty much the most boring city in Europe." Oooh, more couchsurfers looking for love (and/or friction)? Sounds great! Bridge East-West! Live your exotic fantasy without having to learn a word! The fact is Turkey is so much more than Istanbul. And now that Istanbul has welcomed a generation of internal immigrants, the rest of Turkey is coming to Istanbul. This has caused far more panic and fear than a welcoming of a whole new side of cool.

In this book, near none of the characters have names that smack of Turkey. Ok, sure, there's a Memet, an Ibrahim. But even "Ali" seems rare these days. And I have yet to come across an Iraz, a Hatche. Let alone an Abdi or Jaffar. Memed comes to "the big city" that is likely smaller than Adana. Maras is the big town. Nomads make up a significant plot point. We're a long ways from Reina, and I love it. This is as much Turkey as anything else.

While Turkey wrestles or whatever with its identity, it gets turned into an Evren v. Erdogan affair. The rise of Turkey's east, it's businessmen and its politicians is just as important. And it goes far beyond the Kurdish and Armenian plot points. Kemal gives life to the humans on the fringe that have made Turkey grow in its Republican days. He has created the image of the Turkish lower class that Fatih Akin and Nuri Bilge Ceylan have latched on to.

More to the point, Memed, My Hawk reads like a campfire tale told by Cool Grandpa Yashar. There are good guys and bad guys. Beautiful women and wise old crones. For being entirely too realistic, it reads like magical fantasy. Taunts at gunfights, single-minded men, families pushed to their limits...these are not the things of history, these are the tales of now.

Memed, My Hawk is about Turkey and, to paraphrase a friend, says "Bastards!" to Istanbul, says "Bastards!" to Ankara. It thumbs its nose at the foreign correspondent, it would do worse to the modern-day blogger if one could imagine Memed understanding computers. Kemal writes about Turkey and is wrapped up in its legends, its myths, its identity. The American coming in to Turkey can never understand it, especially not from a stone's throw from the Bosphorus. It doesn't matter how strongly they arch their eyebrows, how perfectly they tent their fingers. Kemal, one can say, claims Turkey for the Turks through literature (though he may hate to hear that expression used for him).

All we do is try to explain our impressions to other foreigners. The narratives that we all try to force Turkey into, the way we cram-pack Menderes and Davutoglu into one timeline, are all ways of reflecting what we want Turkey to be. Meanwhile, here's Yashar Bey, flaunting the Turkey we all wish we could capture.

Gazistan in Real Life-istan

2010-12-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

I'm not very good about being loud about these sorts of things, but I just wrote an article on Iranian refugees living in Turkey.

The flood of Iranians coming westward, according to many refugees, includes spies and Revolutionary Guard informants. Even in Afyon, the refugees rarely talk to each other, not knowing who to trust and who to avoid. This is why, on one of the most important and family-centric holidays on the Islamic calendar, a lonely Iranian can find himself singing Ghazals, a form of Persian poetry, to anyone who will listen.

Check it out on the Babylon & Beyond blog.

WaPo shrieks "AIEEEE! Muslims!"

2010-12-24T04:34:00.000-08:00

I've been a bit skeptical of Washington Post's "On Faith" section for a bit. It's a "conversation on religion and politics" written by and for mainstream Christian thought. Their front page on Dec. 24 may be misleading, sure...but yeah. We're not dealing with a lot of different thought processes here. Not even black churches, which are pretty darn Christian.

So God help us all when they deign to talk about the Muslim world.

The beginning of the piece based in Tatarstan starts warmly. It's the trope about the lost young man who has left a life of trouble to find God. We all know it.

Rustam Sarachev should have had a hangover the first time he set foot in the central mosque here. He had wanted to throw a raucous party the night before, a send-off for himself on his way to Islam. But the guys he was with had mocked him for even thinking about the mosque, and had gone off drinking on their own.

Of course, Sarachev made the mistake of going to a mosque, not a church.

They learn at the mosque that Allah is punishing Iraqis for their heresies. They learn that 9/11 was carried out by American agents, or maybe agents from somewhere else, to provoke a war against Muslims. But they learn, too, that those who want to go and join the fight in Afghanistan, or Pakistan - and young men who aimed to do precisely that have passed through Almetyevsk - are in error. This is not the time. Islam needs them here, in Russia.

Sigh. There's also plenty of Life-in-Russia sketches that are less Dostoyevsky - or even LeCarre's attempts - and more like this particular gem.

Tatar Islam is a fascinating thing, and one completely ignored by this piece. No mention of Jadidism, the late 19th century Islamic revival that was cut down by Communism.No mention of Ismail Gaspirali, the Crimean intellectual who spread the printed word among Muslims and did more for them then these oh-so-scary Saudi-backed Imams ever could. We're certainly not going to mention the quixotical, fascinating, quest of Ismail Enver and his journey through exile into an impossible new world order. And certainly not the powerful force and the steely gaze of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was part Johnny Appleseed, part Cotton Mather. You could at LEAST give a shout-out to the most Tatar of all Tatars, one Charles Bronson.

This is all on wikipedia, too. I'm not requesting more than a few hours of reading before this story is written. Maybe Mr. Englund could also look up the article on Jihad.

Being a Muslim in Russia is no fun. Grozny is enough of a disaster, but thousands of migrant workers and you know, people who are in their hometowns, get persecuted all the damned time.

And the pictures...no maps, no context. Just..."Geeyah! Muslims!"

I don't understand the fear of some teenager turning from a life of crime to one of, what seems, just kinda chilling at the mosque all day.

The piece objectifies Islam, objectifies Tatars, and just basically paints them all as a bunch of weirdos we could never understand. There's no context of what Sarachev now believes, how he goes through life, or anything like that. Oh, and we have our standard "Ewwww, Kurban Bayram" bit too with the sacrificed goats. And no mention of Ibrahim/Ishmael = Abraham/Isaac.

It's just another missed opportunity to try and draw a picture of Islam that American can understand and be sympathetic towards. Instead, it's something different and scary. "On Faith" is, pretty much, "On Our Faith" to the exclusions of those out their whose last names are not Meacham or Quinn.

It's too damned bad that this counts for a puff-piece in one of the biggest newspapers out there.

Merry Christmas.

Huh?

2010-12-13T02:09:00.000-08:00

"There goes the caravan of bearded ninjas screaming down the street in their jihadimobiles, yelling slogans about the liberation of Palestine."

Damn, I'm pissed off nobody told me to meet Nir Rosen when he came to town.

I'm in the middle of something truly bizarre here. Like that scene in Sean of the Dead where Sean's all "when I was a boy...he touched me." and then his mom is like "no he didn't" and that's that.

So more to be written when I have a firmer grasp.

ADDITION: and more, yet completely unrelated, from the land of great writing. Edited, though, to make it about ME ME ME ME ME.

I remember stripping off layers of sweatshirts that had begun to take on the unmistakable scent of rowing, throwing them into the corner of someone else's apartment, and talking about whatever the hell felt like the most fun to talk about, feeling like the only bitterness in the world was from the cheap beer.

I miss crew :-(

There is No Good Reason to Read Robert D. Kaplan, I Must Make that Clear

2010-12-06T06:20:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine, a really sharp journalist, nice & funny guy, and generally someone I've always liked, told me to go buy him Robert Kaplan's new book when I took a trip to the states last week. I was pretty against this, and told him as much, but as I said, he's a nice guy. So I got it for him. And then he was all "What's so wrong about Robert Kaplan, anyways?"

I told him how Kaplan just kinda makes stuff up, doesn't research well, and finds facts to support his theses. He's also kind of creepily paternalistic and all foreign women are "girls". Really, I should have (and am now) directing him to Tom Bissell's fantastic excoriation. But I also decided to write my own after reading the latest of RDK's in the WaPo.

The thing about Kaplan is that he's actually a decent writer, especially as a travel writer. What he says isn't necessarily true, but it sure is evocative. It's a far way from, say, Tom Freidman's literary gymnastics that tend to end with faceplants. Kaplan writes well, but he uses words for how they sound or what they evoke, not for what they mean. He's a great travel writer and a miserable policy writer. Because his beliefs are more grumpy-old-man then actual policy. So shall we begin?

What is the cause of such turbulence? The absence of empire. During the Cold War, the world was divided between the Soviet and U.S. imperial systems. The Soviet imperium - heir to Kievan Rus, medieval Muscovy and the Romanov dynasty - covered Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia and propped up regimes in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The American imperium - heir to maritime Venice and Great Britain - also propped up allies, particularly in Western Europe and East Asia. True to the garrison tradition of imperial Rome, Washington kept bases in West Germany, Turkey, South Korea and Japan, virtually surrounding the Soviet Union.

His "imperial ancestors" have less to do with truth, more with evocation. He invokes exoticism and trade, sure, but he'd be just as accurate saying "heir to the Roman Empire and the Mongol Hordes," or even "The Malinese and the Hothian Empires." For either. There's also the question of propping up "regimes" vs. "allies" and to ask whom surrounded whom. This whole paragraph is really just a recitation of Civilization V details that sound erudite but really aren't.

The breakup of the Soviet empire, though it caused euphoria in the West and led to freedom in Central Europe, also sparked ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and created millions of refugees. (In Tajikistan alone, more than 50,000 people were killed in a civil war that barely registered in the U.S. media in the 1990s.)

Somewhere in Australia, Christian Bleuer weeps.

The Soviet collapse also unleashed economic and social chaos in Russia itself, as well as the further unmooring of the Middle East. It was no accident that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell, just as it is inconceivable that the United States would have invaded Iraq if the Soviet Union, a staunch patron of Baghdad, still existed in 2003. And had the Soviet empire not fallen apart or ignominiously withdrawn from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden never would have taken refuge there and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, might not have happened. Such are the wages of imperial collapse.

The causes of the invasion of Kuwait are kind of complicated, and y'know, it maybe was just a coincidence with the Berlin Wall thing. Besides that, the U.S. had a history of invading Soviet client states. Oh, and bin Laden was in Afghistan before the Russians left. He had a big part to say in getting the Russians to leave. This is pretty really basic history.

Now the other pillar of the relative peace of the Cold War, the United States, is slipping, while new powers such as China and India remain unready and unwilling to fill the void. There will be no sudden breakdown on our part, as the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, is sturdily maintained by economic and political freedom. Rather, America's ability to bring a modicum of order to the world is simply fading in slow motion.

Really? China and India don't want to be superpowers? Do we have any sourcing for that whatsoever? Or is that just a trope we're gonna see repeated? Oh, and you know that nobody saw the USSR collapsing, which was why the Berlin Wall was such a seminal moment. So it could, conceivably, happen unexpectedly again. That's what "sudden breakdown" means. And let's not mention "economic freedom" and "no sudden breakdown" in the same sentence. That'd be awkward.

Then there is America's military power. Armies win wars, but in an age when the theater of conflict is global, navies and air forces are more accurate registers of national might. (Any attack on Iran, for example, would be a sea and air campaign.) The U.S. Navy has gone from nearly 600 warships in the Reagan era to fewer than 300 today, while the navies of China and India grow apace. Such trends will accelerate with the defense cuts that are surely coming in order to rescue America from its fiscal crisis. The United States still dominates the seas and the air and will do so for years ahead, but the distance between it and other nations is narrowing.

Wait, I thought that the whole "new way to wage war" thing was about a non-reliance on simply military might, because simple military might is fallible. Really, I thought if we learned anything since the Afghanistan invasion, it's that big militaries are not infallible. Also: an attack on Iran is a really, really, bad idea and I hope is not a given. And: the US still spends pretty much more than every other country combined on its military. And: there's reason to think that the Reagan era contributed to the current crisis, and is not the polar opposite of it. Kaplan just states trite things without giving reason to support it. It's like when Grandpa Bill talks about fighting the Nazis when you're watching baseball. I hate the Cubs too, but lets be serious.

Terrorist acts, ethnic atrocities, the yearning after horrible weaponry and the disclosure of secret cables are the work of individuals who cannot escape their own moral responsibility. But the headlines of our era are written in a specific context - that of one deceased empire that used to be the world's preeminent land power and of another, the world's preeminent sea power, that finds itself less able to affect events than ever before, even as it is less sure than ever of the cause toward which it struggles.

Hey smart boy, you like puzzles? Here's two sentences. Diagram them. (my attempt: individuals who are slaves to their morals do things like terrorism, ethnic atrocities (what the fuck is an "ethnic atrocity?"), pining away like schoolchildren, and tell secrets. Headlines are written under the understanding that a land power and a sea power are unable to affect events, the understanding is unsure of why it struggles.)

WHAT. DOES. THIS. MEAN? WHERE. IS. HIS. EDITOR?

This is no indictment of President Obama's foreign policy. There is slim evidence of a credible alternative to his actions on North Korea, Iran and Iraq, while a feisty debate goes on over the proper course in Afghanistan. But there is simply no doubt that the post-imperial order we inhabit allows for greater disruptions than the Cold War ever permitted.

It kinda reads as an indictment, but hey, that's fair. But why are we suddenly cool with the Cold War being a good thing? The Cold War kinda sucked for a lot of people, we don't need a sepia tone to it. But this is what I mean, Kaplan uses nice words with absolutely no meaning behind them.

Husbanding our power in an effort to slow America's decline in a post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan world would mean avoiding debilitating land entanglements and focusing instead on being more of an offshore balancer: that is, lurking with our air and sea forces over the horizon, intervening only when outrages are committed that unquestionably threaten our allies and world order in general. While this may be in America's interest, the very signaling of such an aloof intention may encourage regional bullies, given that rogue regimes are the organizing principles for some pivotal parts of the world.

Which leads me to ask: how do you expect us to get to a post-Iraq and a post-Afghanistan world? How will a "lurking air and sea force" prevent future Iraqs and Afghanistans? Did the U.S. not have a lurking air and sea force before Iraq and Afghanistan? Or would this force instead be a signal of aloof intention (whatever that means), in which case would it be a good or bad thing for these "organizing principles" in "pivotal parts of the world"? When reading this graph, I can almost see Kaplan biting on the lobe of his glasses in a pose of studied thoughtfulness.

During the Cold War, North Korea was kept in its box by the Soviet Union while the U.S. Navy dominated the Pacific as though it were an American lake. Now China's economic dominance of the region, coupled with our distracting land wars in the Middle East, is transforming the western Pacific from a benign and stable environment to a more uncertain and complex one.

Man, Japan is gonna be sooo mad they weren't relevant in the Pacific. Indonesia, too. How soon we forget the 1980's meme that we're all gonna be speaking Japanese soon. How soon we forget the spectre of an unaligned Sukarno. This whole paragraph translates to, "Say, you know I have a book coming out about the western Pacific?"

With its improving mine-warfare capability, seabed sonar networks and cyber-warfare in the service of anti-ship ballistic missiles, not to mention its diesel-electric and nuclear submarines, China will make U.S. Navy operations more dangerous over the coming years.

...if it wants to, that is. They probably won't start bombing American ships for funsies.

As for Taiwan, China has 1,500 short-range ballistic missiles pointed at the island, even as hundreds of commercial flights each week link Taiwan with the mainland in peaceful commerce. When China effectively incorporates Taiwan in the years to come, that will signal the arrival of a truly multipolar and less predictable military environment in East Asia.

Will the incorporation be violent or not? Isn't that really interesting to discuss? And there are a lot of variables at play. Again, this is just a gloss-over without mentioning any tactile facts, just making a supposition, then jumping to a conclusion based on that supposition. Like saying, "I asked my daddy for a pony for Christmas. I can't wait to see it race in the Kentucky Derby!"

In the Middle East we see the real collapse of the Cold War imperial order. The neat Israeli-Arab dichotomy that mirrored the American-Soviet one has been replaced by a less stable power arrangement, with a zone of Iranian influence stretching from Lebanon to western Afghanistan, pitted against both Israel and the Sunni Arab world, and with a newly Islamic, and no longer pro-Western, Turkey rising as a balancing power.

If you think the Israeli-Arab dichotomy was neat, boy, I have an Iran-Iraq war from 1980-88 to sell you. I could also mention the Untied Arab Republic, the invasion of Mecca, the Muslim Brotherhood, and more. Let's not even touch the issue of Palestinian Refugees. This happens to be the one paragraph that I really know things about, and thus the one, to me, that he comes off the most ignorant. Kaplan refuses to let facts get in the way of what he wants to prove.

And I'm gonna drink some 1 Euro beers tonight just to laugh at the idea of an Islamic Turkey. then I'll work on a German advertisement at work to laugh at that not-pro-Western thing.

Yes, empires impose order, but that order is not necessarily benevolent, as Iran's budding imperial domain shows. U.S. threats against Iran lack credibility precisely because of our imperial fatigue resulting from Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of self-interest we will probably not involve ourselves in another war in the Middle East - even as that very self-interest could consign the region to a nuclear standoff.

And here is where I'm not sure if Kaplan knows the difference between "empire" and "diplomacy/trade".

One standard narrative is that as we recede, China will step up as part of a benign post-American world. But this presupposes that all imperial powers are the same, even when history clearly demonstrates that they are not. Nor does one empire sequentially fill the gap left by another.

Then why did we have that whole, "heir of the Kieven Rus and the New York Giants" thing in their previously?!?! That wasn't all that long ago!

While the Soviet Union and the United States were both missionary powers motivated by ideals - communism and liberal democracy - through which they might order the world, China has no such grand conception. It is driven abroad by the hunger for natural resources (hydrocarbons, minerals and metals) that it requires to raise hundreds of millions of its citizens into the middle class.

I'm pretty sure China stands for something to themselves, even if not to Kaplan. I'm beginning to doubt he can find it on a map, though, so maybe not.

This could abet the development of a trading system between the Indian Ocean, Africa and Central Asia that might maintain peace with minimal American involvement. But who is to fill the moral void? Does China really care if Tehran develops nuclear weapons, so long as it has access to Iran's natural gas? And Beijing may not be entirely comfortable with the North Korean regime, which keeps its population in a state of freeze-frame semi-starvation, but China props it up nevertheless.

I love how "analysts" are always somewhere between "ancient trade routes! silk road!" and "dusty deserts full of benighted tribesmen" when describing the non-white realms. And the entire concept that we can talk about a "moral void" with straight faces when discussing imperial strategy seems a bit...facetious.

It can be argued that with power comes moral responsibility, but it will probably be decades before China has the kind of navy and air force that would lead it to become an authentic partner in an international security system. For the moment, Beijing gets a free ride off the protection of the world's sea lanes that the U.S. Navy helps provide, and watches us struggle to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan so that China can one day extract their natural resources.

Peter Parker over here isn't sure if China counts as a partner, but then uses more weird logic. There is very little protection of world sea lanes, because there is very little need for it. Piracy protection as it is now is too expensive, so unless a magic-bullet solution is found, just sending cruisers into the Straits of Molucca is a fig leaf. I'm not sure why Kaplan is demanding China throw good money after the U.S.'s bad. And I don't think he realizes how much China is investing into Central and South Asia.

Looming over all of this is the densely crowded global map. Across Eurasia, rural populations have given way to megacities prone to incitement by mass media and to destruction by environmental catastrophe. Lumbering, hard-to-deploy armies are being replaced with overlapping ballistic missile ranges that demonstrate the delivery capabilities of weapons of mass destruction. New technologies make everything affect everything else at a faster and more lethal rate than ever before. The free flow of information, as the WikiLeaks scandal makes clear, and the miniaturization of weaponry, as the terrorist bombings in Pakistani cities make clear, work against the rise and sustenance of imperial orders.

I like how "incitement by mass media" is a bad thing. Dammit, we want our masses uneducated! It's also worth mentioning that the only "overlapping ballistic missile range" is the new NATO one projecting into Syria and Iran. And I don't think you can even play Six Degrees between Wikileaks, weapon miniaturization, and the Pakistan insurgency. My favorite part of this, by the way, is his shoe-horning of Wikileaks into a discussion of military spending. So he can be "trendy" instead of "hawkish."

The American empire has always been more structural than spiritual. Its network of alliances certainly resembles those of empires past, and the challenges facing its troops abroad are comparable to those of imperial forces of yore, though the American public, especially after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, is in no mood for any more of the land-centric adventures that have been the stuff of imperialism since antiquity.

Great, now you went and upset Sarah Palin, too with that "spiritual" bit. And I'm pretty sure you said earlier that all empires are different. Rome didn't have F-16s, Alexander didn't face Taliban with wireless communications. NEITHER were democratic and saw the politicizing of war like the U.S. does. And I think using "land-centric" as a qualifier is a bit specious. I don't think anyone is going to be all cool with a naval/aerial war instead because either a) it won't work or b) it won't be just naval/aerial. Drones don't solve it all.

And it warrants mentioning that a naval invasion of Iran is going to be kind of impossible, because the U.S. will be all penned in like Salamis in the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian Sea is, well, inland. So I'm not sure how that would get worked out, but what am I? A Grand Strategist?

Americans rightly lack an imperial mentality. But lessening our engagement with the world would have devastating consequences for humanity. The disruptions we witness today are but a taste of what is to come should our country flinch from its international responsibilities.

Though this reads as a conclusion, it's really anything but. He just spilled hundreds of words talking about the American Imperial Mentality, then now says it doesn't exist. Without ever defining what it could possibly be. He says we shouldn't become disengaged, but never previously mentions disengagement. He never attempts to link (or, for that matter, define) disruptions to a lack of American engagement. In fact, it would not be too hard to link things like Islamic-framed insurgencies, Wikileaks, a yell-tastic Iran, to American engagement done sloppily.

So, this is my beef with Kaplan, and why I believe he should not be read. His thesis, I suppose, is that America must act as an empire. But his conclusion states that Americans don't have an imperial mentality. He doesn't really define either. All of his examples, all of his actual foreign policy and his contextualization, solely exist to prove his thesis that America should act as an empire. Any examples to the contrary are ignored. And everything is so poorly researched and lazily sewn together.

This is all kind of expected in a op-ed, though. What really gets my goat is the slight-of-hand of it all. The conviction of an expertise lying in weasel words and non-attribution. His viewing of history through hater-blockers, then open-mouthed awe at any possible disagreement. He says things that sound smart to the non-experts, giving them ammunition to quote, creating this vicious circle of insipidity that leads to really bad decisions. Because nobody, all of the sudden, knows how behind the 8-ball they really are.

Mr. Kaplan reminds me of Nashville. Not the aboreal, bbqful, Nashville. But the beige, corporate, Nashville of country music infamy. My favorite writer on the internet, Orson Swindle, once dedicated a few paragraphs to Nashville music, and I suggest that you read them to get a feeling of where I'm coming from. This, my dear Kaplan-reading friend, is the sort of journalism you're after:

Originally country music was written by men and women who barnstormed up from the electricity-free rural cowplots they were born in, and who alternated writing songs about drinking and fighting and fucking with songs about drinking while fucking, fucking while fighting, or about combinations of the three that happened while driving semi-trucks.
You know real country singers because they are either now all dead or semi-retarded from years of excessive alcohol and drug abuse. They did not have six-pack abs and did not manage their money. They died in fiery plane crashes and holding bottles of liquor; they clutched their hearts and fell to the ground when whole pieces of fatback clogged their arteries after years of eating vile road food. They were not pretty.

Just replace "country music" with journalism and this sounds like the life you would love to read about, learn what they had to say.

Kaplan's idea of journalism? Well, it's more like this:

You and the entire industry cranking out music that tells people exactly what they want to hear about themselves and their lives.

A more fitting epitaph for Robert Kaplan's writing cannot be found. Under the window dressing of "telling the hard truth" he just reaffirms what middlebrow politicians and their staff want to hear about American power, moral imperialism, and the like. And he won't let truth get in the way of an op-ed or a book deal.

It's not researched fact, it's just a truth that you want to hear. And that's why there is no good reason to read it.

Book Review: Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco

2010-12-03T04:45:00.000-08:00

I've never really actually seen 300, but I always got a giggle with the line, "This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this." This is less because I find rape funny, more because I found the Slate review of the movie fantastic:

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the "bad" (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

But I came here not for 300, but for The Island of the Day Before. Similarly, though, it was very long, and I did not enjoy it. Which is odd, honestly, because I loved Eco's Foucault's Pendulum - one of my favorite books. This one was a whole lot more like, well, slogging through 500 pages written by a Semiotics professor.

The plot is kind of fantastic, though. A man gets shipwrecked, latches onto a raft, and then washes up onto an abandoned ship. He can't swim, so now he's shipwrecked on a ship. this ship, of course, is riddled with secrets.

And then, lecturing ensues. It's all about Renaissance thought and the shaky move from Godly knowledge to secular knowledge. Again, this sounds really interesting, but somehow it wasn't executed that way. I think Eco tried to get a little too clever with his story-telling, going for the non-linear narrative, but its just not all that well executed. That said, Jules Mazarin makes an appearance, and its always nice to see him. A major plot point is the sheer inscrutability of the International Date Line and the complexity of Longitude, which is a Thing, I guess. My favorite explanation of Noah's Flood comes up in the book (the flood is full of yesterday's water coming into today), which is really neat also. Seriously, ask me some time to explain this flood theory to you, it's great stuff.

But unlike the other Eco books I've read, this one isn't more than the sum of its parts. I just never got into it as much, and I doubt I would've been able to read the whole thing if I wasn't traveling so much. So I don't have a great verdict for this one, go ahead and skip it.

The Blog Roundup Where Wikileaks and Good Writing Provide Entertainment

2010-12-01T02:14:00.000-08:00

I am welcoming myself back to the internet after a couple of vacations. One traipsing through Central Turkey and the other through Ohio. The former involved lots of desserts, the second involved terrible movies and lots of deserts. But now I'm back to far milder and far more interesting climes.

That said, I'm just into getting back into things and catching up. But I'll start with this pretty awesome bit from Slate on a Baghdad Holiday. It gets to the point of what it means to be conflicted about Iraq. Even people who really really care, who are really really focused on the country, have no clue what to do. I'm not as focused; my attention lies eastward, as you may have gathered from this blog. I generally leave Iraq to the people who really get what's going on there in a way that I don't. That said, this is more about life and political belief and imperialism than it is about Iraq itself. Worth a read.

And then there's Wikileaks. Probably the most interesting story going on right now, and I'm just getting caught up and have no clue what to say about it. Yet. There's plenty of voice for or against what the Assange-ites are doing, and plenty of good and bad things to say about it. That said, my take at the moment is that there are just all of these fantastic hidden narratives that have come out of it. So many little stories that could be entire full-length features. I wish I had any hand in fiction so I could steal them. My two favorites:

The epic Daghestani wedding tale. Featuring fireworks, Kadyrov, and a 5-kilo lump of gold.
The badass 75-year-old Iranian dude who went from Tehran to Ankara on horseback. Somewhere, Peter Hopkirk is impressed.

There's plenty of other stories, including the gradual and inevitable truth that there are invented Islamicists and Terrorists "running" around Central Asia. I fully expect NewEurasia to be on top of that as time goes on.

So yeah, it's a great story that's only going to get better. I'll have more to say on it when there's more to say on it.

The One Where I Agree With Religious Nationalism

2010-11-22T18:55:00.000-08:00

This dude tried to write a LOLified story of how ridiculous a religious cleric is in Georgia. I don't think that he succeeded.

Here's how it goes, and stop me if you've heard it before: The spiritual leader of Georgia, one Patriarch Ilia II, raised a protest about a Buddha statue in Tblisi, saying that it would be unallowable in "a holy land" and reminiscent of the Persians (who, y'know, were not cool with the whole Buddha thing themselves). It's a ridiculous quote on it's face, I won't argue that.

But the Patriarch's got a point. The writer of this EurasiaNet piece, Mr. Lomadze, writes how The Buddha Bar is a part of " a posh recreational space in the city's historic downtown" and mentions that hey, there's a mosque and a synagogue downtown. As if Tblisi just needs some urban renewal, like Baltimore or something.

It's disingenuous to mock the Patriarch for this. I can wear my "I've been to Tblisi" hat, here, y'know. Tblisi has a little island of "posh recreational space" inhabited by expats and Misha's select, and then there's acres and acres of slums. Because of the inscrutable goofiness of the Georgian language, there's no intermingling. You have the Anglophone or, at best, Russophones, who talk with the well-educated Georgians. And the rest are just fodder.

I was grossed out in Tblisi because I was smoking cuban cigars and drinking high-end vodka, listening to Manu Chao sing of torching the fat cats, and in a country where I didn't understand one word. I'm hardly a bloody-heart sort of guy, but I did recognize the inherent creepiness of it. That bar area is like a FOB of businessmen. The Buddha Bar is a symbol of these, to pardon the phrase, capitalist leeches who don't give a fuck about Georgia. People who are doing their time to build up their exoticness cred, maybe cover a little war or somethin' about sticking their thumb in Ivan's eye, and then go back and REALLY start making their money. Misha's mistake was thinking that these guys were the America who'd support him, and not the actual rest of the people who were a bit more realistic then them.

Georgia, of course, ain't that exotic. And it's getting far less so. Misha's latest machinations involve a series of hotels on the Black Sea and other things that made me write:

There's too much room for corruption and graft. Too much of an excuse for Americans to talk about "helping Georgians" and not giving a damn which ones they help. Lots of rich, connected, Georgians will benefit. Lots of poor Georgians will be disillusioned.

I'm pretty sure this falls into the same category. People see the country as place to make a quick buck, and they don't really care about the long and complex history of the region. It's not full of people, its full of sales opportunities! I know this may sound overly snarky, but I am very concerned here. It's really disheartening for me to see, after all the digital ink spilled by Joshua Foust and the gang over at Registan, that absolutely nothing positive has come out of Afghanistan. That things are completely and utterly fucked with a minimal sense of accomplishment in Afghanistan. I'd hate for Georgia to follow that path, and the Buddha Bar reminds me of the "drinking in Kabul!" stories of old and new.

Book Review: Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917 by Austin Jersild

2010-11-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

"Gunib is high. Allah is higher. And you remain below."

Yeah, so it's not from Orientalism & Empire and is actually just a quote from Shamil, who, by the way, was captured/surrendered at Gunib.But it does a good job of giving you a frame on how awesome the Caucasus are.

Jersild's book is hardly a history of the Caucasus, and reads more like a story of the end of the Tzars and the end of an Empire. If you don't know your Avars from your Ingush, your Cherkez from your Chechen, you'll probably get lost in some of the details. And I have to admit to not knowing my Georgian kings or really the history of Georgia at all, so there was some frantic wikipedia'ing at the beginning of this read. But kind of like how you can tell the truth better through a novel, this snapshot of the Caucasus does a better job than trying to fit in a thousand years of history into 160 pates.

There are lots of fun stories. There's the story of James Stanislaus Bell, an Englishman who fought against the Russians in the 1800's, less for Britain, more for the difference of it. He is sadly not on wikipedia, but he does make an appearance on Gustavus von Tempsky's page, who was something of a Central American, Prussian, less interesting Bell. There's fantastic stories of revenge and blood feuds. And this isn't even touching the actual academic stuff.

The actual academic stuff is, of course, very interesting.There's a chapter on Shamil in exile and how he was paraded around as Le Grand Kavkaze, including how the Russians tried to turn his children into good Russians, and were shocked SHOCKED that his son fought for the Ottomans in the 1900's. There's stories of how the Kavkaz muhajirs to Turkey then got Turkified by Ataturk and the Republic and became Turks, while the ones who stayed in the Caucasus kept their identity a bit stronger, which came to an interesting turn when the two peoples began to meet in the 1990's. Who was the "truer" Kabard, or something like that. And even though the book doesn't cover the Soviet times, there is a whole discussion on how the Russian Empire tried to get Kavkazi to turn back to their cultural roots, but not their religious roots. Because, y'know, they are two different things and all. And the Georgia stuff, well. If you've not been paying attention before 2006, you wouldn't realize that Georgians and Russians worked together for centuries. Long story short: the Kavkaz is COMPLICATED, yo. And it's hard to do real service to that.

So there's some great stuff in there. Also, it does a fun little bit on the legal system(s) of the Russian Empire, which you know I'm a sucker for. And everything is very well-cited and there's an immense bibliography. I read it for fun, sure, but it absolutely works as an academic book. It's well-written and can be breezy to read, but is jam-packed with information.

So if you're at all a nerd about the Caucasus, especially Georgia, it's worth a read. And to both of my readers, I have a question: I need to read more on the Caucasus besides this and Yoav Karny's Highlanders. So if you have any suggestions...please, let me know.

Book Review: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

2010-10-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

For a book published in 1998, Amsterdam is remarkably out of date. Like any good O. Henry novel, it gets most of its plot push from a lack of access to cell phones. Between that, mention of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and a charming use of a post card, it's all so...Britishly quaint. Which is amusing because the 24-7'ing of the news cycle is another major point of the book.

I'm not complaining. You wouldn't complain of similar issues in a Dickens novel, so I don't see why you should here, either. Amsterdam is probably the first book I've read that won the Booker Prize, and it's an incredibly well-written book. The characters are all human and all interesting, the dialogue is realistic, and it's a pleasure to read in the rainy, gloomy, weather we've been having in Istanbul recently. In October/November, Istanbul turns into London, and it was fun to be transported there by a book. McEwan is good at that.

Don't be alarmed, however, at the amount of death, funerals, evil greedy sadistic people and the like. It's a dark book full of dark people. It ain't the sort of thing that will reaffirm your faith in humanity. Amsterdam is more like what the world would look like if everyone was a Christopher Hitchens clone.

And its a thriller. You are aware that bad decisions will be made, but not quite sure how. Like waiting for the killer to strike in a horror movie, you're stuck waiting for the decision to be made. It makes for page turning for sure.

That said, it was a good read. It's relatively short and I read the vast majority in one night when I couldn't be bothered to leave the apartment. I'll be on the lookout for the rest of McEwan's books that I've heard such good stuff about. It's rare you find discussions of love and loss, hate and friendship, vanity and vaingloriousness in 170 pages. But it was a great 170 pages.

Why the Rubber Bands? They Representin' the Struggle, Man.

2010-10-26T05:47:00.000-07:00

Not only is the title topical, but its from one of the awesomer rap songs of the decade, in my opinion.

I've gotten a lot of questions for what the deal is with my twitter personality. The truth is, it's just a little illustrator doodle I did a couple of years ago. This guy:

...probably should hold a very strong resemblance to this photo by Woqooyi Galbeed of a Somali man. I just changed some colors and made his skin color a bit more pan-swarthy.

And I deleted the gun from the image, making it just the cut-out image of a gun for a reason. But it turns out the reason got lost under the ability to go, "oooh! Gun!"

Fortunately, C.J. Chivers is writing a book about, well, The Gun. He's a fantastic writer, of course, and he gave an interview with Foreign Policy recently that did a great job of explaining why I kept the cut-out of the gun, and not the gun itself.

And in that interview, he explained the symbolism of the AK-47:

As the rifles have moved about the world, they have been appropriated by all manner of combatants to have all manner of meanings. The rifle's evolving iconography is a fascinating subject because it shows how both governments and combatants view themselves...This is a rich and rewarding line of reporting. In it is a pantheon of modern war. Saddam Hussein handed out rifles that were plated in gold; they were strongman party favors. Bin Laden has made a point of being photographed with the version of the rifle carried by Soviet helicopter crews in the 1980s, a clear case of the rifle, almost like a scalp, signifying martial cred. (In this case, he might be trying a little too hard, because there is no credible evidence I know of that he was ever involved in downing a Soviet helicopter.) We'll see more of this. To governments and combatants alike, symbols matter, and the Kalashnikov can be assigned an almost infinite array of meanings.

That was a huge quote, ok. But the gist is: it's not a gun, its a symbol. And what i was trying to get at with the illustration was that it's ok to get rid of the gun and keep the symbol. Let the symbol of revolution ride (albeit, in my case, a bit sarcastically) without the gun. It's a bit hokey and pie-in-the-sky, yeah. But I enjoyed the way it was executed, so I kept with it.

And I'd love to say that the Urdu writing is because of this guy or something, but truth be told, it was just that I was learning Urdu at the time and thought that it would be cool. So it translates as "This is your revolution," meaning that the operative "you" should replace the gun with, well, whatever you want to be revolutionary about.

So basically, it's one of those half-serious, half-revolutionary things that 21-year-olds are wont to do. And yeah, I just think it looks really cool, so I kept it. I can't take myself seriously enough to think that its actually a serious, through-provoking, move towards freeing our minds, man. I just think it's cool. Hopefully you do, too.

The Blog Roundup where we all stand in awe of the power of facial hair

2010-10-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

It wasn't that long ago that I was writing about the meaning of the moustache in Turkish history. Today we leave Turkey and discuss the far more important category of facial hair: the beard.

This is all inspired by a discussion I've had with the hirsute yet well-coiffed friend of mine who told me of my need to grow out my beard. "A man is only a man once he has a beard," says the friend, "and the belly? Well, you can't have a beard without having a belly below it."

Inspiring stuff. Made only more so by my discovery of the greatest picture I've ever found of the Black Keys. Ohio? Retro typography? An out-of-place Masjid? Dan Auerbach's beard? Check x 4:

The fun only continues when another friend of mine found an out-of place flag at the Istanbul Marathon. As she was walking across the bridge she found a flag that she couldn't recognize. Red-and-white stripes on the bottom on a green field, complete with a Takbir. I had a hunch it was Caucasian, and what do you know, it's the flag of the Islamic Emirate: Caucasus Edition.

This is important, of course, because man, flag of the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus? In Istanbul? Too cool, too cool. Doesn't get much more obscure in a militarist sense than that. Unless there are some Free Aceh folks running around. And of course, you can't mention the Caucasus without mentioning the beards. Even though I just discovered that Chechnya has (at least of Feb. 2009) an Ethnographic Museum. Complete with the Chechen version of a Civil War Reenactor:

And finally, and really, what you're all waiting for...a pictoral history of the sociology of beards in Iran. The pictures are all interesting, but I found this one particularly beautiful. It's like the Fairey "HOPE" poster of the Islamic Republic:

I don't care about the politics one way or another, its a beautiful piece of art.

There is also a link in that above piece on an ancient book of Pogonologia which, I mean, YEAH.

So I've long since disposed with the narrative of this blog, as it now just contains everything not-Turkey-enough for Istanbul Alti. But beard posts in time for OPERATION WINTERFACE should be good enough.

Rusya'dan Cin'a, Turkestan yoksa

2010-10-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

There's a saying that has followed the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline that I don't remember the exact Turkish phrasing of. It might have been like the title of this, but I don't remember exactly. I'm good that way. Anyways, the idea behind the pithiness was "From Azerbaijan to Turkey, but not in Armenia" to reflect the political realities of the time.

Well, similar sorts of things are going on in the East. Russia is currently bidding and building a pipeline that goes into China. It skips the Amur entirely and comes into China from Manchura. Which is really inconvenient and a pain to build, but hey, it keeps those persnickety Uighurs away from it. This here is another break they can't catch after, well, they haven't caught many.

This sort of thing is actually pretty standard. And its a drop in the bucket in costs compared to the whole lots of major issues that can go wrong with sloppy security on pipelines in Siberia (link is to one of my favorite Cold War stories, btw). So yeah, its cynical, its wasteful...but it theoretically works. Until some dude gets pumped up about Buryatia Azadi or something.

But its fun to see this sort of thing. Buck-passing and shrugging about big nasty problems because hey, we have money to make. It's not rare or at all newsworthy, but I like mentioning it anyways.

And in semi-related news, Columbia University has discovered Central Asia. It's worth a read, for sure, so check out their bit on water ish, bad formatting and all. It only begins to get at some of those problems and doesn't even mention Roghun. But still, lets give them the pavlovian response they expect from CAsia nerds.

Caucasus Slap Fight!

2010-10-13T05:07:00.000-07:00

My posting here has become very slapdash and incredibly not-on-point as I move from Central Asian/Caucasus issues related to natural resources and architecture to my new Internet Life, the only independent newssource of Turkey. That said, Gazistanesque is my first and main love, and I am still following everything I can coming out of there. And my links on the right hand side are fairly busted by now, I realize (sorry Steve LeVine!). But once the Alti gets up and going, I'll be able to dedicate more time to this. So bear with me in the meantime.

I just wanted to remark on the hilarious flame war going on in the Caucasus Emirate. The problem with a loose confederation of various power brokers in a small region competing over resources and infamy is that they generally act like bands on a tour. Who gets what hotel room, who gets to be the headliner, and who gets choice of beer. Or, uh, something like that.

Admittedly, they look like a Yiddish ZZ Top

So some of the - admittedly translated - quotes are kind of fantastic

- "...When we equalized what we have in our souls with what we have in our tongues, Muhannad exposed himself as an opponent of the Emirate."

-"there is no one who has been at his side longer than we have, or who knows him better than we do.... We thought about this for a long time, we prayed to Allah so as not to destroy the accord among fighters." But they finally concluded, in Vadalov's words, that "we do not have the right to follow evil.""

-"Gaziyev defines their goals as "cleansing our country of the enemies of Allah, establishing Shari'a law to defend the poor and disadvantaged, and bringing up our future generation in the Muslim faith." Their rhetoric, however, is less aggressively jihadist that that of Umarov's faction."

So its important to remember then whenever terrorists or other somesuch violent separatists are represented as these uncommonly evil Sauron's without humanity...well...they probably still have some humanity. People are people. They are subject to the same jealousies, whims, and foibles as most every other of the 6 billion of us. They forge friendships and alliances just the same way the rest of us do, just with different goals in life.

Also, props to Long War Journal for a) making their work impossible to quote and b) cheerleading rather than reporting. Classy, guys. There's a reason you're mocked by the people you try to reach out to. And a reason why RFE/RL and Eurasianet are trusted and you, well, aren't.

Central Asia Matters (or Hey, I'mma try to get back on point)

2010-10-08T05:32:00.000-07:00

Drezner Bey wrote in the increasingly-irrelevant Foreign Policy Blog that Central Asia doesn't matter. Steve LeVine then responded that, well, yeah, it kinda does. You can probably imagine which camp I fall into.

What the brown sandal militia in Washington often forgets is WHO things matter to. For example, the midterm elections don't matter to me. I know I'm an American, I know that there's this whole third political party thing happening...but man, I'm not in the US right now. I have no clue who is doing what. I'd have no clue who to vote for. So, y'know, I won't.

But you know who Central Asia matters to? Central Asians. So yeah, putting blinders on other human beings' cares, wants, and desires is pretty darned ugly, no? Do I REALLY need to link to NewEurasia again? Guess so. And if real people with real families and real hopes and dreams don't matter, here are eight quick things that I had in my reading list about Central Asia, and why they're important to you, John Q. Publick.

Jihad! For all the consternation about rising tides of Islamic law/rule/vaguely frightening things in Central Asia...it's mostly nothing. That said, the article I linked to is fascinating for lots of reasons. Joshua Foust, the Mullah of Registan (Nathan Hamm would be the emir, of course. And Michael Hancock is the goofy Hoca who is debating whether or not we can call Hamm "Khan"), has written a lot doubting the existence of Chechens in Afghanistan. And, well, I believe him. But if there are proven Daghestanis in Tajikistan, then Chechens in Afghanistan is really not all that far off. It's not the same thing as proof, but at least its reasonable suspicion. There may be something to this "Global Islamic Threat" after all...But can we stop using Jihadi? I just found a book this week that called Isa Yusuf Alptekin a "Jihadi for the Turkic world" and I mean, really?
Central Asia is a virtual sandbox for corruption. I realize including Afghanistan here may not be perfect, so, I dunno, lets talk Roghun instead. Either way, the steppes are littered with the carcasses of good causes and the wastes of corrupt people. This has, in the past, led to Real Big Problems for the U.S. and will continue to do so in the future. There are good lawyers on the ground, and it's worth working to help them.
Journalistic freedom is important. Even if you don't think the story is worth hearing, you can't deny that every story has a right to be heard. You don't have to have the window open, but people are allowed to yell. Freedom of the press is an issue in the Caucasus and Central Asia (Turkey, too!) on a very basic level. If you don't think that my first three sentences here are true, there are 75 families who may disagree.
Nobody has any clue what's going on in Afghanistan on a very basic level. "Empire Gone Mad" is about as well-put as possible, there's lots of talk of change but nobody knows what to change to or from. Afghanistan may be excepted from Central Asia because of the past 30 years of history, but its still very much a patch in the Central Asian quilt. It's not quite as pat as, "understand Central Asia and you understand Afghanistan" but there is a whole lot to be learned from the Turanic and Persian influences on the country.
The environment there is falling apart. You probably know about the Aral Sea, massive strip mines, desertification, and the maw of hell in Turkmenistan. The planet is changing, and it is REALLY changing over there. So, you know, that's a thing.
And on the same note, there's heeyuuuge natural resource wealth in Central Asia. Afghanistan's gotten some news for it recently, but well, it's a common, continuing, trend.You should read about it.
The rise of private military companies is...interesting, at least. There's lots of grumbling stateside about contractors like Xe and the like, but there is sometimes some well-reasoned debate as well. And sometimes you just run into something so sketchy (to quote, " In 2007, their armoury of Kalashnikovs was seized by the police despite their documentation being in order, the company believed that the raid was orchestrated by competitors in the Ministry of Interior to seize parts of their business.") Books have been written about PMC's, but The Book has not yet been written. I know a good professor over at UMd who wants to write comparing the PMCs of today to the Swiss Mercenaries of yesterday. So you could contact him, I guess.
I'm one for aphorisms, and one of my favorites is, "Every day you wake up, thank whatever God you believe in that you were not born in Grozny." The place is a Bartertown-esque wildland, and only the more so for being completely ignored by not-Russians. I'm not sure what you could do to change that, I'm not sure what I could do to change that. But I know it could start by caring.

So hopefully that's enough reasons for you, Drezner, to care about Central Asia. And if you don't care about something, well, that's alright. As I've mentioned, there are many things I don't care about. But demanding ignorance is displaying arrogance. And it's pretty darn foolish to do both as American policy.

The USA may be on the downswing of empire, and is not an omnipotent God by any means. And all the money and caring in the world aren't going to fix any of the myriad of problems in Central Asia. But maybe, little-by-little, something could be put together. Eventually, starting with little design projects, or doing locality-centered development work, you could help a couple of dozen lives. It's better than nothing. Nothing, in fact, is a terrible policy.

Whereas I make an attempt at long-form writing and, quite literally, come up short

2010-09-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

1,500 words. None of them too great. This is my first time writing something remotely creative since, oh, high school, so any criticism is very very much so welcome. Let it be known that I haven't even edited this sucker.

I should start my Sarajevo story with how it ended. On the flight back to Istanbul when 7:53 Sarajevo time hits. I smell Bosnak Borek. Not the timid, limpid kind you get at Simit Sarayi that needs a few healthy lacings of sumac, but the spicy, snappy Sarajevski variety. Ripe with fennel and pepper, tasting more like Italian sausage than kiyma. It’s Iftar time at ~10,000 meters. Come ye brothers and enjoy our meat.

I spend a lot of time in Istanbul mocking the “East v. West” tropes. The same trope exists in Sarajevo, sure, and it’s just as tired. It’s like Samuel Huntington somehow mindwormed into all of us and convinced the world of its own polarity. The world is shades of grey, and all the more wonderful for it. When I was fresh out of high-school, I remember running into a man who, looking back on it, couldn’t be much older than my current twenty-three. He was out hiking where I was hiking, taking some time to cool his mind after a friend committed suicide. He wasn’t there to lecture, of course, but he said something that stuck in my mind. The guy warned me off of any form of extremism. Apparently nobody told Doc Huntington. And I don’t mean this to be wistful and preachy, I mean this to say that describing Sarajevo as any sort of dichotomy gets you wrong from the start. There’s more to these places then who has planted their flag there. There’s more to Sarajevo them bombs, tunnels, and roses.

There is Ottoman stuff. The stuff I can’t live without. Learn about Gazi Husrev Bey by wandering his mosque and medrese. The mosque is a ways away from the imperial masonry of Istanbul, Edirne, or Bursa. There is as much woodwork as stonecutting and as much enamel as pearl. There are a few mosques and other such religious buildings in and around the old city, Bascarcija. The scale is far more human and there is certainly a vernacular touch to all of it. And unlike some of the bigger Turkish sites, the Ottomanica in Bosnia is a bit more alive. The old houses have laundry hanging from them, not menus. The mosques are inhabited by old dudes with beards, not young blondes with Leicas. A tremendous amount of money has come from the Gulf and from Turkey to rehabilitate the Ottoman buildings and create a more vibrant Islamic life in Sarajevo. A lot of this could be construed a bit suspiciously, and I will say that I was a bit stranged out by the green flags and Shahadah on a black flag. The latter is typically used to symbolize an Islamic outpost in the Dar al-Harb. Seeing it in a tourist mosque in Muslim Sarajevo was a bit strong. But the newly-minted medrese within the Ottoman Gazi Husrev Bay Medrese compound was tastefully executed and shiny as all-get out. They even humored me with Turkish. And it should go without saying (but it won’t) that the Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish buildings were all well-maintained and well-mapped. The New Synagogue, from c. 1904, was as loud-and-proud as I’ve seen a synagogue outside Israel. The new Orthodox Church was right on the main square and flanked by a group of men commenting on two of their kind’s match on one of those comically-oversized chessboards. You couldn’t ask for a more heavy-handed picturesque of Eastern Europe.

There is food and drink. I could detect hops in the beer, a far cry from the Natural Light masquerading as Efes in Turkey. There’s widespread and cheap espresso. I’m no coffee drinker, but I was informed by my Bosnian agent that what one does in Sarajevo is sit in a café on Ferhadija and drink espresso. So I did. It was better than it sounds, and just as pretentious. The food was meat-and-dairy, but I’m young and brash enough to have no problems with that. Zeljo in Bascarsija was the place to go for cevapi – sizzling kofte in oven-fresh bread, covered with kajmak (not kaymak) and served with a side of “hell yes!” Simple grills, done well, will never steer you wrong. There are a few variations on the meat-and-bread sort of thing, and I suppose one could get sick of it on a longer stay. I was also pleasantly surprised by the sopska salata when I had it. It’s your standard cucumber-tomato-onion-pepper sort of salad, but occasionally topped with an absurdist dollop of sour cream. It’s as good as the ingredients are fresh, and they were plenty so in my case. I’ve already discussed the burek and don’t need to go further. Cevapi, though, is really the start of the show. I like to assume that it comes from the Turkish cevap, or answer. As in, if someone asks you a tough question, you just answer by handing them cevapi. I wrote a thesis-y thing on Balkan foods, and I think cevapi was the answer to that, too.

There’s nature. The Miljacka really isn’t it, it’s too wimpy to be considered much of anything. But if you wander to the far side of town from Basarcija, you get to Vrelo Bosne, the spring of the Bosne river. It’s kinda bucolic vernal paradise. Also highly recommended, particularly in the summer, when the weather is cold and the patio restaurant serves a mean desert that’s basically just apple pie filling covered with ice cream. Once you get past the children playing and the dogs chasing frenetically after ducks, Vrelo Bosne is quite peaceful. I caught a nice hour-long catnap in the shade of a linden, and if anyone thought I was a drifter, they were at least nice enough to keep it to themselves.

There is history. I won’t bore you with the Ottoman stuff, and honestly, the museums won’t either. The whole Ottoman thing is treated more as an occupying force than 300 years of history. But the modern history museum confronts the Balkan wars unflinchingly and evocatively. What struck me the most was a sign marking “Uniform of a Sarajevan Militia Member” to a vest, jeans, and a pair of Adidas. If Mladic tried to argue that there were no innocents in Sarajevo, there were certainly no professionals, either. The fighters – on both sides, it should be mentioned – were far more “dudes with guns” than anything resembling the Yugoslav Army of 5 years prior. There’s not as much Tito worship as I expected, I regret to say. There is, however, a Tito Café that has “SMRT FACIZMU” banners. And another museum that was a bit negative on the whole Cetniks thing. So it’s not as if the Time of Josip Broz was entirely forgotten. Just lost in its own aftermath, I suppose. But the museums are cool. As long as you don’t have your heart set on looking at the actual Sarajevo Haggadah, not just an interactive computer demonstration of the Sarajevo Haggadah, because the real thing cannot be sullied by non-diplomatsonphotoops eyes. But at the same museum, there’s awesome natural history on display, including raging taxedermied otters.

There are mountains. I mean, people from Colorado would probably call them hills, but I was duly impressed. Sarajevo is, compared to my expectations, pretty small; only ~300,000 or so people live in a valley carved by the sputtering Miljacka. And above the valley are steep-enough rises that give a view of the whole settlement. The guide books warn sternly that irregulars of the Republika Srpska used these hills to rain down mortar fire on the town, writing about it half-gawking and half-tutting. But the pines are odiferous and the views are spectacular, even if the steadily eroding gun emplacements are more than a bit unsettling. I was convinced I would hike to the top of one of the mountains before realizing that, my God, I have a flight to catch. I was still able to grab lunch at some chalet about 2/3 the way up. There are hiking paths and guest houses abound up there, I’m optimistic I’ll return and conquer.

And if I conquered, well, I’d hardly be the first. Calling Bosnia a “Crossroads of Empires” is probably not as accurate as “a relatively low-lying place that stands between geographical chokeholds (hi, Poland!), but it still gets said anyways. Bosnia’s got its own thing going on, for sure. There’s certainly lots of influences from all sorts of places, but it’s still…Bosnia. And Herzegovina. They even have their own coat of arms and anything.

It’s a real place, not just the projection of Huntingtonists and their ilk. Real people live there, and they’re more interested, I would imagine, in hanging out with friends and falling in love and that sort of thing then serving some sort of post-imperialist vision. Let it go, learn about the place for what it is, not for how it may or may not represent your views of what you want it to be. I’m not a Balkanologist. I’m no Mazower. But I’m no Robert D. Kaplan either. Sarajevo isn’t the epicenter of this Medievalized European concept. It’s just a place. A pretty place, if I may say so myself. One worth checking out sometime.

He's got real estate that's better than that

2010-09-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

Some of my first writing that I actually still find readable was my first few views on Georgia. I still love the place, and I still recommend everyone visit it. And now, apparently, Sakashvili wants to make it at lot easier for you.

These two stories aren't at all unrelated. On one hand, Trump is buying real estate in Tblisi and Misha is opening up the Black Sea coast for tremendous new development. On the other, Georgia turns to English as its secondary language, away from Russian. The second is pretty straightforward. And yeah, I predicted it, but it wasn't like it was that difficult to discover. Columbia-educated Sakashvili has been turning towards the US for nearly two decades. This was more a formality than anything else...though I'd be interested to hear how far-ranging the decree is. Will students away from Tblisi be doing English as well? I really don't know how far their reach is.

The development bit is more interesting. Some of the stuff sounds really, really, dangerous. To wit:

Specifically, the government is offering hotel developers 27 plots on 11.3 hectares of undeveloped, state-owned Black Sea-area land for $1 per plot. Under the program, overseen by the Autonomous Republic of Achara, any investor willing to invest at least two million lari (approximately $1.1 million) in a beachfront hotel zone will qualify for an array of business incentives, including free utilities and no sales or income tax for 15 years.
To qualify for the tax holiday, participating hotel projects – each having a requirement that a building cannot be taller than seven stories -- must be completed by August 1, 2011.

So yeah, that's not what I would call safe, planned, development. In fact, I would bet that means shoddy construction, cheap labor, and all sorts of cut corners. And lots of money going back to Tblisi and New York more than anything else. Bascially, the ugliest points of tourism. God help us all when the developers discover the mountains. There is a back-pat about it, the whole "but no trees can be taken down" but lets be serious. This is going to be a tremendous renewal project. And I'm not optimistic that it will be done well. There's too much room for corruption and graft. Too much of an excuse for Americans to talk about "helping Georgians" and not giving a damn which ones they help. Lots of rich, connected, Georgians will benefit. Lots of poor Georgians will be disillusioned. Sakashvili is smarter than me, so maybe he knows what he's doing here. But as I said, I'm pessimistic. I'd hate to see the country piss away its natural beauty to get 15 dudes a few more million.

And finally, there's separatism in the North Caucasus. You probably knew this already, and you probably knew that Russia thinks that Georgians, Americans, Saudis, and everyone besides Chechens are to blame. It's a well-written article. So for those of you that are complaining that this isn't a navel-gazing travel blog, and those of you that have no clue what I'm talking about when I go full-Kavkaz, read Vatchagaev's piece. It's pretty danged good.

So yeah, I owe a report on Sarajevo, and I'll get to that eventually. I'm trying to do long-form, but that's just totally not happening so far what with work and all. So I'll let you know how that goes.

Read about the Caucasus until then.

Call me Causobon because I make things up

2010-09-20T02:33:00.000-07:00

When Taches d'Heiule is quoting DFW, things have gotten weird on the internet. And since the internet happened, we can really write whatever we want to on it. So in the interest of saying whatever I want, I'll run through a DFW-style thought experiment, and one that flies in direct opposition to what I said in my last post.

Instead of talking about the future of Islamicism, what if the entire concept of Islamicism didn't really exist? What if, because it is so difficult to really define a movement that is so disorganized and de-centralized, we can see if the movement exists at all? If its not, instead, a teleological explanation of numerous different disparate movements?

I'm not just saying stuff to be all Hipsterrunoff, I swear. The main crux of my argument is that Islamic governments and movements don't help each other out without a good reason. Kosovo, for all of it being the Muslim Outpost in Europe that all Muslims are supposed to want, has gotten very little aid - or even recognition, from other Muslim countries. Kashgar, a metropolis in Xinjiang/East Turkestan, the Far East of Islam, has been similarly ignored. Simply put, the sort of people who are big on the world stage don't want to upset Russia or China unless they absolutely have to. Growing the Caliphate and sticking the white flag all over does not qualify as worth it.

And on the same point, the folks that do want to stick it to Russia have no problem supporting political Islam in one way or another. Definitely-not-Muslim Poland recently sorta-arrested-but-then-didn't a Chechen separatist. And there's a wikipedia list of places that are named after Dzhokar Dudayev. Guess where they are.

Islam as a political movement is, of course, complicated. The whole uncited mess that is "Iran donates to AKP's Campaign" makes little sense from an economic standpoint ($25,000,000? For what?), from a diplomatic standpoint (why are only un-named Foreign Service officials the ones talking about it?), and also from a Islamic-axis standpoint (why is a Twelver supporting Sunni orthodoxy?). If true, it only makes sense from a political standpoint, that is, Iran is supporting their neighbor and trading partner. Religion, honestly, doesn't apply. If its true.

Islamic Finance has fascinated me for a while now. It is presented as not just a morally superior way to bank, but also a corruption-free way to bank. Which is, of course, awfully nice but may not always be true. Corruption is as corruption does. Corrupt dudes (and chicks) live all over the world despite any purported religious leanings.

So on my quest for finding the underpinnings of Islamic Banking, I kept on running into the same answer. Islamic Finance, according to those who know, is a fig leaf. As one of those experts said:

...engagement with the [Islamic Banking] industry can only lead to one of two outcomes: (i) co-option and corruption if one remains engaged and perpetually engaged through incoherent justifications, or (ii) frustration, demoralization, and eventual disengagement.

So they're just like any other bankers. Cretins. Jackals. Makes sense, actually.

This is where my train of thought leads. Purportedly Islamic actors still act for their own gain, not any particular Muslim leaning. They do what will help them gain/retain power (I mean politicians here, not Imams, Hafiz, or any other sort of legitimately religious person. Just politicians). Selling "their own" down the river is done just as often as, well, anyone else does. Window dressing may be different, but the underlying shittiness of politicians is the same.

And until someone can convince me otherwise, I'm going to go with the current understanding I have of Islamic finance. That its just an excuse for dudes who want a lot more money to do so under the name of Islam. Makes sense, actually. So I'm sure (and I welcome!) someone will correct me, yeah, this at least makes the argument cohesive.

If you believe all of the following, political Islam is a paper tiger. Sure, there may be some really bad dudes who use Islam as a rallying call, but that's hardly new news. And if political Islam is a paper tiger, then real, religious, Islam, is nothing to fear. And thus articles like Andy McCarthy's make no sense.

Terrorists get pointed at as terrorists solely because they fall under the scope of political Islam. Which is a logical fallacy if you subscribe that political Islam doesn't exist as a movement. And thus conversionaires who are doing their task to convert people to Islam aren't just creepy proselytizers, but instead nefarious masters-of-dark-arts who are destroying America. There's a whole entire diabolical conspiracy there that involves labelling any Others as, well, Others, that there's really a strong argument against existing.

And I should reiterate that I'm not completely convinced that everything I just wrote is true. It's much more of a Foucault's Pendulum assemblage of facts into something that looks like a coherent theory but may not be.

But its food for thought. Not saying that you should believe it, but saying that if you run into Andy McCarthy, you can say "well, but I read this thing once..." and have fun with it from there.

The way forward for Islamicism

2010-09-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

Well, the referendum happened here. And now one could, I suppose, reasonably construct an argument that the government of Turkey is turning towards Islamicism. And when I say "reasonably construct" I mean make a thin argument, but not quite "Saudi Royal Family is Jewish" thin. But depending on who the new court appointees are, depending on the trajectory the Evren trial takes...yeah, things could be done in a way that it could arguably be construed as quite possibly something that smells like Islamicism. And even then, its not Islamicism as it is demonized in the US. Because Islamicism, in all of its shades, is no more constricting or structural a political ideology than, say, "Realism" or "Libertarianism"

And you will hear / have heard plenty of mischaracterizations of Islamicism if you're in the US. Which I mean, of course. There are too few Muslims and too many political points to be scored by vilifying the concept. And considering that the only people who really understand the concept are academics who wouldn't be caught dead running for office, you have a lot of misunderstandings. And I should note, I'm not one of these academics. I'm in professional school, and taking a break from that, for Christ's sake. So that's the US. What I think is neat is that you can run into people in Turkey, full of 70 million Muslims and run by a nominally Islamicist government who have no clue what Islamicism means. And you can run into people whose jobs it are to explain Turkey...who have no clue what they're talking about. I was mocked today for being idealistic and all, and perhaps my idealism is dying a slow, strangulated death. But come on people, this is on the internet. It ain't that hard.

So you can find any amount of hatred of Islam online. Really. Start with Martin Peretz and go from there. Or, yknow, just stick with Martin Peretz. But that's easy. And boring. So let's find stuff that shows how Islamicism works. How will I define Islamicism? Lets just say that its politics motivated by Muslim religion. State-building through your religion. Which happens to be Islam. To be fair, we can easily say that the Bush and Obama presidencies are definitely shaped by Christianity. So it would follow that Muslim countries, with Muslim leaders, may allow Islam to shape their leaderships.

And there are people who study this, believe you me. And they aren't necessary the people who live on bases and play hockey. And not to get Foustcu, but no, not you Matthew Hoh. I'd lean more to, y'know, a dude studying Islamic Law in application like Jeff Redding. Or maybe one day, even me ::bats eyelashes::.

But to finally get to my point, looking at the world as a Muslim does not make you an extremist. At the most, it makes you human. And there is something that is easily forgotten by those of us within an incredibly rational albeit unintentionally hilarious court system...Islam is a rational religion and operates through a set of structured, if flexible, rules. It's a guideline for life, of course. Which is more than can be said for any sort of backwater oligarchy or kleptomaniac chaos.

So when you see reasonable arguments for installing a but more Islamic Law in the (Islamic Republic of, don't forget) Afghanistan, realize that it is not about "installing a system of law" but it is about codifying law that people are following anyways. The question of what type and kinds of law ISAF are going to allow is interesting, and is worth following. As is of course, most everything going on about Afghanistan. But just remember that unless whole entire education system is revamped in a matter the Soviets could not manage/stomach, its a matter of finding laws that fit the culture. And not in a gawking-at-silly-CAsians sort of way, but in a stupid-laws-get-broken way. The political system is screwy enough as is, even if it will change markedly after 2012 or so. But don't forget that a little bit of Diplomatic outrage can't solve too much. As Mr. Foust has so eloquently said before:

The crime here is not that a law is being passed to normalize a routine practice; it is that this was a routine practice and we chose not to care about it in the first place.

Tajikistan is not Afghanistan, of course. And Islamic Family Law is so so so much different than other courses of Islamic Law, so its tough to even really encompass it in the same blog post. But its my blog, so I can. Shari'a as it affects family disputes, simply, works. And it's not nearly as scary for women as it is sometimes construed to be. In fact, women tend to bring up divorce cases in Shari'a law because they actually get results, where as in civil law cases tend to disappear into the aether. Again, don't take my word on this, take Mr. Redding's. India is of course not Tajikistan, but its a whole lot easier to find information on, so you should check it out.

And Islamic Banking? Man, don't even get me started on Islamic Banking. After the whole catastrophic meltdown of the Afghanistan Central Bank, Islamic Banking sure looks mighty good o'er there. But, um, let us not forget. Islam is not a forcefield of perfect.

And to finally come back a bit closer to home. This article, about how the PKK is killing imams, makes no sense whatsoever. The PKK stopped killing Kurds way back in the '80s. Of course, since Apo has been imprisoned, the PKK as we knew it splintered. But I suppose the dead imams may not be Kurds. And I suppose one could make the argument that imams are being killed because they are representatives of the state (in Turkey, imams are selected and distributed by the State-run Dept. of Religious Affairs).

But it just doesn't make sense. It would make more sense, I think, that Zaman is just getting some knocks in at the PKK and pimping their Islamicist vibe. They need to talk about the plight of Believers in Turkey in order to appeal to their financing. But with the Fundamentalist funding that the PKK has received lately...they don't look too good killing imams. I don't know. It's weird. I don't get it, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence for it. I'm not calling for a look into conspiracy, y'know.

Post-Referendum, there's plenty of talk about Turkey "Turning Islam" to some sort of degree. But when you can talk about people killing imams in your country...yeah, probably not. And it's hardly like that's the only reason why not. But Turkey is hardly Afghanistan and Tajikistan.You probably don't need me to tell you that. But even the degree of Islamicism that the AKP adheres to is a completely different degree of a completely different flavor of Islam than in the above examples.

So I wrote this to give an offer of the flavors of Islamicism and Islamic law we're talking about. And as you can see, there really isn't a terrific thread weaving it all together. That's not solely the fault of my writing style, that's the fault of the "rising tide of ISLAM" theory as well. It's just too disjointed of a theory for that. You won't even see any Islamicist International like the old Communist Internationals of yore.

Well thought-out, properly-executed, careful application of Islamic practices to statecraft are really nothing to be afraid of. And when it's done with a goal in mind...it usually works. Sloppy yell-Islam isn't going to do anything good, of course, but any sort of sloppy ideology usually sucks. That's not new or only for Muslims.

Applied Islamicism is going to happen. There's just too much excitement in it, teeth-gnashing under Neo-Classical columns aside. So it doesn't seem to make sense to be afraid of it. Seems to make more sense to see what one can do to help it be done well. It'll take an awful lot of regional specialists, lawyers, architects, designers, and other some-such young professionals to do. And lets face it, we ain't getting employed otherwise.

Travel writing on Turkey in a single .gif

2010-09-15T15:23:00.000-07:00

Pardon me while I fix myself into an apoplectic rage.

Book Review: Roads to Quoz by William Least-Heat Moon

2010-09-14T04:31:00.000-07:00

Between moving 3 times in the same city, taking two trips out of country, and actually having a job, this one took a while to read. The fact that it weighs in at 608 pages didn't hurt, either. But what a 608 pages it was.

Roads to Quoz is about William Least-Heat Moon's travels around the U.S. It's really six different books in one, as he goes to the Pine Belt South, Southeast, Southwest, Northeast, Great Plains, and Mid-Atlantic. All the trips are different and are quite stand alone, and they are all a lot of fun together, as well. As much as I appreciate his missives about places I've been, like Columbus, OH or Baltimore, MD, I enjoy the exotic parts a bit more. And to be honest, I didn't enjoy the Baltimore bit at all. He enjoyed Baltimore way too much and didn't understand how bored and white-bread that city is. But maybe that's just me.

My favorite part, I suppose, was his writing on the Great Plains. He does a good job of showing just how alien and hostile to Yankee life it is. Which is also, of course, why its fantastic. And the stories he has from his time out there are some of the greatest stories I've heard.

So it's a fun book. It'd a good beach read / travel book and there are enough bits in it for everyone, from screeds against development to snippets of married life to stories about him growing up and trying to find a job as a young somethingorother. And to be honest, pretty inspiring, all in all. While reading it, I was more-than-a-little convinced to go back to the states and just...backpack. Hit the road. Something like that. I even hinted at such earlier in this space.

And now that its looking that I may stick around, after all, its nice to have wistful books about America. Or maybe not America as it is, but definitely America as I'd like it to be. Small-town. Mostly flat. Full of interesting people and stories. Toqueville's America is a good America, I have to say. One worth coming back to, at the least.

And in addition, here's a great interview with LHM. And, if you go down the left sidebar, its an interview with just about every other fantastic author as well.

Texts from Last Night: "Tsentoroi is burning."

2010-08-31T05:07:00.000-07:00

More interesting stuff coming out of Chechnya from RFE/RL. And more proof that the region is a noir film, although this part was kind of like the final gunfight in LA Confidential.

Nothing more to add, really. Just keep on reading this stuff, its about as interesting as a story you're going to find these days. And, somehow, some of the least biased, too. Because unlike in Afghanistan, nobody has a dog they want to win in this fight. Unlike, you know, Afghanistan (Gooooo Gul Agha Sherzai!)

Forget it, Jake, This is the North Caucasus

2010-08-31T01:59:00.000-07:00

I love mountains. I never really had any interaction with 'em until I graduated high school, but I still think they're fantastic. And they're a bit of what got me into this part of the world...ironic considering that even the Caucasus, the Tarsus, and the Balkans are only the borders of the vast plains of Anatolia and, well, the steppes.

OK, that said, the Caucasus are awesome. Fascinating. Responsible for the best art collective in the world. Responsible for one of the best sayings in the world, "Come back, Imam. But this time, smile." But yeah, I would never want to live there. Because nowadays, Chechnya (and its neighboring republics) look like a film noir.

This article by RFE/RL shows best what I'm talking about. Magomedali Vagabov comes out looking like some sinister mix of Osama bin Laden and Keyzer Soze, which is probably somewhat accurate:

The biography implies that Vagabov was behind the creation of several new jamaats between 2007 and mid-2009, but gives no details of his other activities during that time. Specifically, there is no mention of any further contacts with Khalilov (who was killed in September 2007), or of Vagabov's role in, or response to, the proclamation by Umarov of the Caucasus Emirate in October 2007.

What's more, none of the information about Vagabov's activities prior to 2008 can be corroborated by searching the archives of kavkazcenter.com, the main insurgency website. And the key figures who might have shed light on his activities in Daghestan -- Maksharipov, Khalilov, and Rasulov -- are all dead.

So here we have a now-deceased guy who was probably the creative mind fixing up new assault groups and getting funding from abroad. And maybe, maybe, but certainly most-interestingly, the dreaded Chechen-Afghanistan link that has been asserted but never proven. And I emphasize the probably. I doubt the NKVD even knows too much about the guy. Other than that he's dead. Maybe.

And the place is just full of these guys. C.J. Chivers' fantastic article on Beslan has numerous references to the "nihilist" Shamil Besayev. With his bald head and missing foot, he was right out of a Dick Tracy cartoon.

Dzhokar Dudayev, of course, looked and acted like the Errol Flynn of Grozny.

All this is to say, the recent attack on Ramzan Kadyrov, president of Chechnya, may not be business as usual, but is at least frighteningly ordinary. Ramzan's father, Akhmad, was killed in a bombing at the Grozny stadium during a parade. As for the 19 people killed in this recent attack? Well, the Kadyrovsty are the closest thing you'll find today to a Varangian Guard. Dudes know how to kill, human rights abuse or no (but probably yes).

An HBO series on the area would never be able to get launched for being too bizarre, too bloody, and too devoid of good guys. In about a year, you will hear lots of tongue-clicking about having the Olympic games so close. Despite all of the many differences between the West and East North Caucasus (and please, I don't mean that as an "East v. West" trope).

But things will be interesting, of course. And for us in our air-conditioned apartments with our wireless, all we can ask for is that things be interesting. Just remember, "Every morning you wake up, thank whatever God you believe in that you were not born in Grozny."

Making up facts to fulfill our theses.

2010-08-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

The internet is a great place. You can just...say stuff. And people take you seriously. Especially if you can get onto Small Wars Journal and throw some acronyms into the mix.

A constant challenge faced by the Coalition Forces in Afghanistan is the ability of the Anti-Coalition Forces (ACF) to steadily reinforce its ranks through the recruitment of a seemingly unending supply of fresh human reserves. Though the Taliban , et al are known to recruit from a variety of sources (e.g. particular madrassas and more fundamentalist villages on both sides of the Durand Line), among the most lucrative hunting grounds are those places where refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) languish in political and geographic limbo.

The Ph.D in indigenous issues and the MBA in cultural affairs don't instill confidence either. But yeah, that's a whole lot of dumbing-down, a whole lot of de-humanizing, and a whole lot of lack of knowledge that's been gussied up with some acronyms and vocabulary (Madrassa! Fundamentalist! Durand Line!). And honestly, what makes a village fundamentalist?

So ok, bad writing about Afghanistan. Nothing shocking there. And nowadays, the good Mr. Foust has taken on the Caucasus. I like him a lot, but I think he simplifies things a whole lot and misses complexities. He doesn't really bring anything new to the picture besides his writing style. All the same, he's a good analyst. But what happens when bad analysts take on another mountainous region full of dozens of languages and a whole lot of confusion? Think you can take a guess?

Unfortunately, other, more interesting, Caucasus-related things have happened since I started writing this down. So following are my notes. Mock the STARTFOR folks with me, will you?

Crossing point: Eurasia - ME and therefore conflict?
Border between Russia and Iran, IRAQ??, and Turkey
Russia needs mts as defense?
"Turkey needs to settle dispute w/ Armenia to project power" ummm, no. They have GA and Azbj.
Kavkaz + Caspian are where Iran fights Russia. Ira
n deals w/ Armenia to protect against Azeris....no
US joins with GA and Azbj....but WHY?
Two games. ugh. "regional actors" like azbj + hayat, Ga v Rs, and northerners.
local concerns draw in players...ITS 1914 ALL OVER AGAIN
"very carefully? HA"

Philippines: Eyewitness Report

2010-08-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

Beautiful Beaches. Creepy post-colonial feeling to the whole thing. I could live without ever hearing another “Yes sir. Thank you sir. Please, could I do anything else for you, sir? I will be there for you sir, just tell me what you want, sir.” It made me feel like the narrator of Gunga Din.

That said, the beaches are fantastic. Snorkeling is a whole lot of fun. And the one museum I went to was very interesting. Very nationalizing…”We are Philipinos” not just “We are from ___ island or ___ island.” And I wish their nationalist front in the 1800s was NOT called the KKK. And I wish when I was in school I was told about the US’s presence there in any way shape or form. Sure, our AP US teacher gave us a few little quotes, but that was mainly because his wife was Philipino. The US did a whole lot of funky – some would say terrible and be pretty accurate – things down there. It’s too bad they’re not owned up to.

That said, what is up with the whole “Filipino girl and White guy” sort of thing? It’s definitely a trend, and I’m not nearly enough of an anthropologist or sociologist to know anything about it. So I’ll do some googling to find something out, but I find the whole thing a bit weird. Maybe because there’s a navy base or something on the island(s)? And geeze, I sure got to learn a lot about the whitefolk in Korea. I have to say that my law school friend who did That Sort of Thing said it best, “It is just like summer camp, where you only have a few hours of work in a day. Except in this summer camp, you can drink. You can go out until 6am. You can really do whatever you want without anybody stopping you. Including forcing the locals to interact with you on your terms! And the whole fact that all of the whitefolk are either English teachers or military folk, that is, two different stereotypes, is also fairly entertaining. Someone can easily write a sitcom about that.

So that is my month-late Philippines recap. Sorry for the delay, but I have about 10 different things up in the air now, and I had a friend visit, and I love making excuses. Leave it to the Sarajevo airport, with their utter lack of activity at the Customs/Passport Control desk, to give me a reason to finally write this down. My Bosnia report will be far more involved, far more interesting, and far more recent.

The Blog Roundup where I confirm all of my preconceived biases

2010-08-15T23:43:00.000-07:00

Nothing new happening these days. Just plotting my casual takeover of the Istanbul scene, stuff like that. A trip to the Philippines (uncomfortably PoCo, if real, real, beautiful) for a bit. Work for a bit more. I'd hate to say that I've stopped doing interesting things, but it certainly seems that way.

That said, be sure to read my discussion of Turkish moustaches. And hopefully some of the things I'm talking about here will make their way into fuller-length pieces, but I need to get a few things settled first. Unfortunately that's been the theme of the summer so far. Thus the more navel-gazing and less analysis.

That said, here's what's going on while Turkey confuses itself for the Ciller years of the '90s.

Obama breaks out the speechin' stick. Zaman breaks out the Hagiography Camera. Fun ensues.
Joshua Foust over at (my techinically-still-affiliated-with) Registan shows what's up with corruption in Central Asia. Both Afghanistan and some decades-old Kazakhstan ish. And no way to blame Karzai or Nazarbayev for this, these sort of things are straight out of USAID and DOJ. So yeah, kind of an awkward chink in the armor for us blue passporters. And I received a random e-mail from the author about this article, because seriously folks: there is no rising tide of Islamism of the scary variety in Central Asia. So cool your jets, thy non-experts. I trust de Cordier more than you.
Also, the Tajik government goes dada, decides no praying on mosque. Next up: one can only wear shoes when not walking, can only take showers while clothed. Considering that I always shrug my shoulders when it comes to Tajikistan, leaving the Parsiphone country in far abler hands, that's about the extent of the analysis I can offer.
Linked to me from a real-life friend, okcupid has some of the most fascinating stats out there, though not related to CA, energy, or anything else...you'll still like them, I promise.
As I am now cruising my way through this guy's work, I'm getting more than a lil' nostalgic for the homeland. And after some brief wikipediaing, I've decided that I will, at some point, live along this road. Preferably in this most American of towns, beside this most American of dams.
And finally, along the lines of my self-righteous screed earlier this week, here's all these conflicted whitefolk complaining about how to discuss travel. Followed up with this screechingly awful bit on White Privilege straight out of Hipster Runoff.

Is it significant to you at all that you can choose to think about this or not to think about it and it will not necessarily have an effect on your life?
Can you continue to ignore race politics and theory without having it bother you one way or another?
Is that significant?

Yeah, I'm kind of done with Matador. In fact, I think I'm done with any sort of travel discussion. I'll try to stick to my academic forte from hereon out. The next post will be my first, I realize, but I need to get back on point here in order to get the real life stuff figured out as well.

Through the Roof and Underground

2010-08-13T05:19:00.000-07:00

This needs no introduction, really:

Harem Nesin, a Turkish journalist for the Istanbul newspaper Dünya Gazetesi, began photographing concealed buildings in Istanbul sometime in 2007 for his personal records. The buildings captured by Nesin had recently been destroyed by a fire or evacuated due to some other instability of the structure, and were later covered by scaffolding, tarps, or screens. Nesin correlated his collection of photographs to a map of Istanbul, indicating the location of each abandoned building. Through the mapped locations Nesin discovered a triangular geometric pattern across a portion of the city on the European side, from the Golden Horn to the Bosphorus. Nesin used the Galata Tower as a place to survey the buildings in question, indicated by his collage of aerial photographs taken from the Tower. Additionally, in his observations Nesin recorded the means of concealment (tarp, wood, fence, screen) and the address for each structure.

And what did Nesin find?

"Harem Nesin's map reveals strategic locations used by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality as injection points for Bacillus Pasteurii, a microbe able to transform sand into sandstone by depositing calcite (calcium carbonate) throughout the granules, fusing them together."

The authorities, in other words, were earthquake-proofing the city from below, in "the first application of the bacteria, which had been under development since the mid 1970s through joint research between Germany and the US."

This secret government project, finally completed just a bit too late, is an ingenious way to solidify the landmass under Istanbul before another earthquake comes using interconnected isosceles triangles. However, not everything is rainbows and unicorns. Nesin disappeared shortly after publishing the maps, and all memory of his publications and work has been destroyed.

All of this is courtesy of BLDGBlog and all of it, unfortunately, is 100% fictional (I changed the date from 2017 to 2007 in order to add a patina of conspiracy). What it actually is is an architecture project. Students were told to "investigate[s] potentials for future design through the creation and analysis of hyper-fictional documents. These document sets create evidence for future scenarios that string together a specific history of political, social, and technological developments." This is an academic way to say "invent a historical dataset for the city you'd like to exist."

There are a few interesting angles to this. The first is probably my favorite. If I walked around Istanbul explaining to people (in my butchered, Yankee-patois, Turkish) that the government has been injecting a bacteria into the ground throughout building sites in the city in a careful and top-secret bid to solidify the ground and God knows what else...I'm positive people would believe me. Gossip flies fast 'round here, especially without any real believable news sources. Government and anti-government conspiracies are taken as a matter of course. No matter what your political beliefs are, there is a shady organization with ties to someone in the government who is trying to subvert you. This much is assumed, and the Nesin Map easily falls under that.

Most interestingly to us here at İ6 is the fact that the Nesin Map is a map of what is literally under Istanbul. This is an old, old, city built of layers like a Jenga tower, and just as ready to collapse. One of the most memorable (and mocked) scenes of From Russia With Love is when they take the cisterns under the Russian Consulate. A lot of people make fun of this because, yeah right, no way you could go from Yerebatan to the Consulate. And they're right, of course. Yerebatan is on the peninsula. But in a city that had so much smuggling going on for the past few thousand years, a city that 100 years ago had separate jails for European nationals and Ottoman subjects, a city that still has resource monopolies and the black market that goes with, a city that is literally the hub of heroin transport from Kabul to London (read this fantastic interview when you get the chance)...well, there is no way you could convince me the only way from Tünel to Beşiktaş is by bus. There have to be maps, in peoples' heads, tattooed on backs, written on napkins that are just fascinating. I'd love to see 'em. Even if a few were fake.

Finally, I'm hardly a sci-fi sort of guy, but Istanbul is screaming for some sort of set-up. The reason I, for one, love this city is its healthy sense of "where are we going." Say what you want about Neo-Ottomanism, but it is certainly more "Neo" than "Ottoman." One of the first things I noted when I came here the first time around was that there's this exciting feeling of optimism abound, the feeling that the city will be completely different, and hopefully much better, in only a few years. Coming, as I am, from a dying empire, it's awfully neat.

And of course, in order to construct a future, one needs a past to base it on. That's the idea behind the Nesim Map, and the reason I have no problem pouring out so many words for it. The Nesin Map is a detailed explanation of what never happened. Should a shadowy government agency doctor the bedrock of a city of ~15,000,000? Yeeeeah, probably not. But by entering an idea to the historical record, an argument is being made. There is so much going on in this city, be it officially, criminally, culturally, or whatever that even Istanbullus have absolutely no clue about. Yabancis don't even stand a chance. News is in the eye of the beholder, and even if people are connected by geography, by identity as an Istanbullu or even *snort* taxpaying, there are many more divisions in this city than there are unifiers.

The Nesin Map, with its elegant triangles and clear evidence, represents a much more coherent city than the one Istanbul truly is. So in another way, its a unifying map of the city. I, for one, would much rather be able to explain "I live in Triangle 43e" than "OK, so you go to the Iskele, then uphill, past Kuzgun..." It is a map of, quite literally, a more stable Istanbul. But that wouldn't be very much fun, would it?

NOTE: If this sort of thing (futurism, design, magical realism as history) is also your sort of thing, check out the Istanbul Design Week, going from September 9 to October 3 at the Beyoglu end of Ataturk Koprusu. Check it out.

Random Blogger named "Ampotan" Nails It

2010-08-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

A bit earlier, I groped at the concept of what I'm trying to get at while traveling. Or maybe more precisely, what I am trying to leave. This blog is clearly about me and my personal beliefs about what I experience, but I want to have some universalizing theme here so that other people (and not just the spammers who have eaten this site alive) read it. But I don't want to talk about how Turkey has just opened my eyes and made me into such a person. Because it hasn't. I have made myself through my experiences, and Turkey will do whatever the hell it wants without me.

I haven't found a good way to express this, but fortunately, two different articles came my way (thank you, Mrs. Nesterov and Mr. Foust) that get the nail hammered on the head. My recent trip to the Philippines only emphasizes the thoughts that these people had.

First off: Jezebel. No, I don't read it. But I will when someone links me to it. Apart from the fun in the comments thread on when Bali was ruined (my vote: Muslim conquest). The article itself is a quick enough read, but here's my pull quote:

Ubud's strange post-Gilbert scene is about to get even more odd, seeing as there are now ostensibly two Gilberts: the author herself, and the author as depicted by Julia Roberts. Roberts stayed in Ubud during the filming, but the film's locations and real-life counterparts don't all match up. This may very well double or triple the must-see sites on a tourist's itinerary. You can go to the restaurant Gilbert ate at in the book, the restaurant "Gilbert" ate at in the movie and the restaurant Roberts herself ate at when she wasn't filming. I fear that once the movie opens, this whole area will turn into a far-flung Magnolia Bakery line, with women typing frantically on their blackberries and snapping photos of menus and street signs as their bored boyfriends gaze off into the middle distance.

I got into trouble a few years back when I openly laughed at a girl for having Eat Pray Love on her bookshelf. I can't help myself, it's the sort of affirmative pap that isn't actually about anything. Hey! If you have money and time, eventually you'll find someone that'll love you for it! And if you can do it in a heart-renderingly beautiful place, all the better! It's 200+ pages of a country song, telling you everything about yourself that you want to hear.

Island tourism works the same way. It gives you the opportunity to "meet locals" and "experience the culture" all within a safe, hermetically-sealed, arena. You can't do anything too bad on an island vacation. You just experience what you are told that you are supposed to experience. I can't complain about some of this stuff: snorkeling rocks. But there is, potentially, something just a bit off about the whole experience. It's all out there to explain to you how to feel. Not enjoying it is simply not an option, unless you're just trying to Chris Hitchens it or something.

The second thing is something I pretty much fell in love with. But before I go on, there are well-thought out rebuttals to it which I will link to first. Complicated issue is complicated and all. And again, more fun in the comments section:

the point is that third world nations tend to attract the lowest quality whites, like those you can find happily partying around in Pattaya or Koh Samui.
When those douchies find out they didn’t land in another place where people make a living dancing to shitty top 40 in go go bars but they just spend their days commuting to their office/factory and they have hence very little tolerance for buffonesque behaviour, well that’s when the whining ensues

The actual article is far more interesting than expat mud-flinging. Which is saying something, because expat mud-flinging is fantastic. This quote is what I've been trying to say myself for a while now.

Another factor–in Japan at any rate–is that they feel cheated because the Lafcadio Hearn experience is no longer open to them. They’re disappointed that time and traffic doesn’t stand still because they happen to be walking down a street filled with people more interested in the concerns of their own lives than their proximity to ~~a member of the Master Race~~ Mr. Global Adventurer from a country Far Across the Sea. Yet another is that it gives them a cheap excuse to bask in the sunshine of their superiority.

The whole denigration of locals (unless they'll sleep with you, of course), or other foreigners (same) for your own sake of superiority...that's the rub. The whole "I am better because I am living abroad" thing, that's the rub. Because as all your friends know...you're not.

And I really shouldn't use the second person, because Lord knows I'm no better at this than most other people. I'll be very upfront about my weaknesses: my Turkish is passable and declining rapidly, I came here for the simple reason of running away, and I still like the food. I'm not perfect. I deserve all sorts of criticism, especially for what I write.

This other quote gave me the shudders:

But I’ll bet he drank it anyway–with other foreign friends who sniggered at his stories and then told some of their own.

The fraternity of expats lives on this. Drinking with friends while mocking the culture that we leech off of. Look, my job description is basically, "speak English." I only am working here because of accident of birth. I wouldn't have a chance here if I was born in, say, Malawi instead.

I'll make fun of Turkish culture more than my fair share...wait for my upcoming article on moustaches and facial hair. But I'm thankful for the opportunity that I stumbled into. And to bring the country metaphor back full circle, you can call me Trace Adkins, because I'm trying.

Unlike all of you jerks, right?

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2010-08-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start keeping these short, because they're not very interesting. But on my flight to the Philippines I read The Road, which I picked up a while ago on one of those "Hey, they made a movie about it, so it has to be good" sort of hunches. It's about a father and son traveling in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It reads as such.

So it was a well-written book. Certainly fits the mood and all of that. I'd read more by McCarthy, sure. But my feelings can kind of be wrapped up by this blurb of a gchat session.

me: just haven't slept in two days
  and read Cormac McCarthy's the Road on the flight over, which was a TERRIBLE IDEA
AD: my god
  I happened to be home when my dad was watching that movie
10:46 PM and he was like "shit. this is bleak"
me: dude, I am like the exact opposite of the target audience of that
AD: WTF DID YOU EXPECT?
me: I DONT KNOW IT WAS CHEAP AND I HEARD IT WAS GOOD
AD: what, people who are looking forward to the end of the world
me: people who can handle post-apocalyptical father-son tales
AD: or who are not easily affected by shit
10:47 PM ugh. yeah
  I'm a pretty big wimp. I hear ya. shit's depressing
me: I feel like its easy to get emotional on flights
10:48 PM I've gotten really vindictive over chick-flicks

So yeah, that's what we're dealing with. Sorry if that was a bit difficult to follow, but you get the idea. If you are the person not easily affected by shit, this is the book for you.

This is the AP, reminding you: The muzzofolk don't count.

2010-08-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

Fun lil' article by a dude almost named Turchia in the AP I found through Facebook. The Pera Palas, which I work a stones-throw from, is reopening next month. It was supposed to open in January, but, well, work delays happen. Especially hotels. Especially especially in historically protected hotels.

Oh wait, no, I'm sorry, it wasn't the wilting economy and general, these-always-happen delays. It was "Business interests and a lack of political will". Also, don't mention that Beyoglu was a cesspool of organized crime in the 1980s and '90s, and that Tarlebashi is still gang-ridden. Rather note "Many local residents fled deadly unrest or moved to outlying areas, leaving neglected stone facades to brood in the narrow, trash-filled streets."

This really deserves the full Fire Joe Morgan treatment.

It was the last stop on the Orient Express, a grand hotel with Istanbul's first electric elevator where artists and aristocrats sipped champagne beneath chandeliers as the Ottoman Empire dissolved and the world drifted toward war.

It was actually just a hotel. Sirkeci was the last stop on the express. Well, not really. The train ran all the way to Baghdad. That's why Agatha Christie wrote a book taking place in Baghdad. She went there on the Orient Express.

Mata Hari, accused of spying and executed in France in 1917, stayed at the Pera Palace Hotel. So did Greta Garbo, who played the shadowy dancer in a 1931 movie. Ernest Hemingway checked in to report on war between Turks and Greeks. Agatha Christie is said to have crafted "Murder on the Orient Express" in Room 411.
Then, like the empire it outlived, the hotel slid into decay.

Get yer intrigue! Get yer intrigue rite here! Yeah, sure, interesting people stayed here. And that little war Hemingway wrote about? Oh, the Turkish War of Independence. And also, will there be an Ataturk-figure for the Pera Palas to rescue and revolutionize the hotel?

On Sept. 1, the state-owned Pera Palace will reopen after a two-year restoration that cost 23 million euros ($30 million), seeking to capture the lost sparkle of what was one of Istanbul's most prominent landmarks. It is no longer the lone luxury hotel on a hill above the Golden Horn inlet. The former Ottoman capital teems with high-end accommodation, some in restored imperial mansions along the Bosporus Strait that divides the Asian and European continents.
Pinar Kartal Timer, general manager of the Pera Palace, believes fabled guests of the past will bestow new glory on the hotel, which held its opening ball in 1895.

There he is! There's our Ataturk! With the fantastic name of "Falcom Timur", too!
Also, its not like Istanbul ever lacked for hotels. And yes, the Ciragan and the Kapinsky are nice. There are lots of nice ones here. This isn't fucking Lagos. Former capital, now just your standard 15 million person city that is the economic powerhouse of one of the most powerful economies in the world. So lets leave Sir Richard Burton, Puritan Speeches, and your sorry-ass tropes out of this.

"These people have left their traces in this hotel," Timer said in an interview in the 115-room hotel Wednesday. Major structural work and painting was complete, but the old ballroom was empty and the mother-of-pearl bookshelves had not been installed. Workers hammered, and layers of cardboard and plastic covered some balustrades and marble-floored passageways.
The Pera Palace mirrors the revival of the surrounding Beyoglu area, historically known as Pera, which comes from the Greek word for "beyond." It was nicknamed "Little Europe" in the late 19th century, an enclave of Greek and Armenian entrepreneurs, along with European diplomats and businessmen who imported luxury goods from capitals to the west.

Smart Businessman is smart. But pity they didn't break out the bookshelves and marble before finishing construction. The writer's girlfriend-cum-photojournalist-with-a-coolpix is not impressed.
And did you read beyond the first paragraph on Pera in wikipedia? This was the Genoese city, the Greeks had Fener, the Armenians had Balat (generally...they lived all over the place, as did Jews, Romani, Italians, Arabs, French, English AND EVEN ANATOLIAN AND BALKAN MUSLIMS). And again with the "luxury goods," because there ain't much else in this entire empire but damascene scents and rugs, right?

Many local residents fled deadly unrest or moved to outlying areas, leaving neglected stone facades to brood in the narrow, trash-filled streets. In the last decade, shops and restaurants flooded the central neighborhood as economic fortunes and pride in Istanbul's heritage blossomed.

There hasn't really been deadly unrest since the 50's, but hey, lets make this sound scary. It is the east, after all. And I love the "pride in Istanbul's heritage blossomed" bit, because as anyone who's talked to an Istanbullu knows, they certainly had an issue with being too humble about their city.

Mehmet Karaoren is a partner in an architectural firm that snapped up a dozen Pera buildings, restoring them and selling or renting the refitted apartments. In some years, the prices of their properties have doubled.

So what happened is that this Mehmet Bey took 200 words to say "we've bought 12 buildings in Beyoglu and restore them. We've doubled the property prices sometimes." Journalism 101.

A commission linked to Turkey's Culture Ministry bars changes that would taint the historical integrity of a structure, though allowances are made for reinforcement against earthquakes and the installation of elevators in tall buildings with dimly lit, winding staircases.

Why use "linked to"? Has that ever been used in such a non-nefarious circumstance? Would it be because you knew the law existed, but didn't want to look up who? Or is it just because you wanted this to sound like a dark, evil, way for people to ruin old buildings by...making them standing and livable. Huh?

Business interests and a lack of political will have sometimes trumped the work of conservationists. Istanbul, home to relics and monuments from the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, is at risk of being placed on a list of endangered cultural treasures by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee. That would be a serious embarrassment since the European Union designated the city as its "cultural capital" this year.

Already made fun of the first part. And the second sentence doesn't make sense. The entire city will be an "endangered cultural treasure"? Or was it just that you found this article and only read the headline, not realizing that it is just poorly-translated into English? Because here's the endangered list, and if you notice a trend, its places of political unrest and environmental issues. Neither are relevant here. And note how he has been unable to prove that there are business interests against building up the Pera Palas. That's because there's not. He just asserts stuff and says "embarrassment".

David Michelmore, an international conservationist, said unrestored sections of old Pera were at risk of demolition, and he compared the area to London's Notting Hill district in the 1960s, a shabby area before its successful rehabilitation.

Of course unrestored sections may be demolished. Tarlebasi is a slum in a city of 15 million people. Are you worried about titling rights for impoverished folk? No, you just want to make it seem like the state hates the idea of becoming a tourist wonderland. Which is funny when your source says that,

"It's not tourists mostly, it's Turkish people who are going there," Michelmore said. "Historic centers have a huge capacity for serving purposes of recreation and relaxation."

So it looks like its these Turk fellas afterall who are doing the fixing.

Nobody will sleep in Room 101. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army officer who founded Turkey in 1923, once used it as a base. The room will house a museum of items belonging to Ataturk, including hats, slippers and dignitaries' gifts.

Ah yes, Ataturk entered the equation. Founded the country in the war that *Ernest Hemingway* covered. We discussed this war. Maybe you should've changed the paragraph order a bit.

The hotel hosted spies as well as statesmen. Kim Philby, the British-Soviet double agent, was nearly unmasked in Istanbul, and the agent codenamed Cicero, valet to the British ambassador in Ankara, visited as he sold secret documents to German agents in World War II.
A witness to tumult, the Pera Palace became a target in 1941 when a bomb exploded at the entrance shortly after the arrival of a British diplomatic party from Bulgaria, which had sided with the Nazis. Several people died.

Wait, this is interesting. Especially the second bit. Were they British, or Bulgarian? Who did the bombing? What about Turkey's pretty-fascinating neutrality in WWII? Ah, forget it, we have Papa Hemingway to discuss.

Hemingway drank at the hotel's Orient Bar in the early 1920s. In his story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," the main character, a writer, recalls a brawl over a woman with a British soldier in Istanbul. He slept with the woman that night:
"...and he left her before she was awake looking blousy enough in the first daylight and turned up at the Pera Palace with a black eye, carrying his coat because one sleeve was missing."

Ah, Hemingway. No snark here, I love how the man writes. And I love how he's seemed to have a drink in every bar in the world.

So my favorite part of all this? The only mention of any aspect of Turkish history in all of this is how "Oh, you can't sleep in one of the rooms. This dude from Salonica got there first."

The gates of Europe are apparently at the front door of the Pera Palas. It is an outpost in the dark heart of the Mediterranean, and the locals may only be peered and leered at. It's garbage writing, even if its for a bland piece on tourism. I will rail and rail against the false separation of East and West. Not just because its wrong, but because its lazy journalism. It reinforces the acceptability of "The local culture is just a lens for me and my friends to view ourselves."

The view you have from the Pera Palas is the view hundreds of people have had, wherever they were from. Men stashed their mistresses in the room when it was a garconniere, waiters snuck their girlfriends in when it was at third-capacity, and couples have argued and thrown plates while looking at that Halic sunset. To only focus on the Westerners of the city ignores how much there is on offer from the Istanbullus themselves.

All of those 15 million Istanbullus have lives that only tangentially revolve around you finding your own fulfillment. Lets not forget that all of them have interests, and some of them are actually interesting. The awkward Orientalizing clashes so viciously with what the city really is, so lets push to change the cliche.

We're being taken for a ride again

2010-07-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

I've been obsessing over the free Wifi here at Abu Dhabi Int'l Airport, and its been nice. Instead of burning through my book before the Manila leg, I've gotten to be able to get some writing done. And because this is my first time in (the airport of) non-Palestinian Arabistan, I have ignorant things to say about it. Harking to John Le Carre's comment that you can only write about a place if you just got there and everything is coming at you at 100 mph or if you've lived there for 20 years, here's my version of the former.

As an airport, holy Moses it's better than Newark. The airport is a great ad for Abu Dhabi itself...I certainly want to come back to scope the scene. It is clean, the staff is friendly, and everything work at a fundamental level. I got decent sleep and good coffee (Costa Coffee, for the record). I wholly support all of this. Self-confidence without the end-of-an-empire shab that Newark had.

That said, there is a distinct Euro-Gulf-Subcontinent-East Indies divide. People hang out with their sort in a painfully obvious way, but I supppose at least the hierarchy isn't too obvious (besides in screening lines). Except that everyone seems to have a pet Afghan. The NYTimes ain't alone in that.

Everyone who cares whos spent time here has something to say about the master-servant of it all. And does that exist? Yeah, probably. But again, at least one isn't beaten over the head with it. Swept under the rug, but I'm sure still there for some rights-bro to get worked up about.

Although as foreign to me (if not moreso) then when I plopped into Ashgabat, it is certainly less confrontationally foreign here. And am I going to hold myself back before I do a frightening disservice by comparing things to Syriana? Yes. Yes I am.

But the bottom line is...I like it, ok? The joint is well-run and I'd like to come back. And besides, the desert beckons. Just looking out into that void (and the awesome control tower that stands in it) makes me excited. There's something cool out there. Something worth seeing and doing. In related news, I wanna go falconing real real bad.

And in a final note, it is worth noting how little we, as a culture, know or care to know about the Gulf. The bubble ideal of "The Gulf" exists, but even this layover is enough to get me asking 40 different questions. I know nothing of this 'hood. I would like to change that. Because I can see myself liking it. From a really morose and lachrymose trip over here, I've become overwhelmed with brotherhood and companionship for my fellow man. Ummmm that's weird.

So those are my cringe-worthy thoughts that I will surely look back on one day and laugh. Or, more likely, have held against me by someone who actually knows what they're talking about. I've been played enough on this year, might as well set myself up to be played again. At least the ensuing stories ought to be more interesting than the current ones.

Food Crush: Semiz Otu

2010-07-27T04:53:00.000-07:00

Humid at morning, tourists take warning.

I've always thought that the Princes' Islands of Istanbul where the best exile you could get. We're in the middle of a nasty humid snap here, a snap that's taken the whole summer really. A snap that, along with a sudden, ugly, raise in Southeastern tensions (best documented here) has led to a grumpier summer than most. It was time to make like Snake and escape from the mainland. A reverse Theodosia, if you will.

And I was fortunate enough to be invited to Burgazada by a travel writer and historian who I can safely liken to a Byzantine Rain Man. You know, walk past an old building and he goes "Paleologue...definitely Paleologue. Probably Manuel V" and the sort.

As you well know, the Islands are fantastic. Break of humidity, salty sea air, and riots of blooms. All fantastic stuff. But what needs to be shared is the semiz otu. We stumbled into a Greek joint named "Barba Yani" for mezes and raki to stabilize us for our climb. Nothing prepares for a mountain jaunt better than a couple double-rakis, believe us.

Called "Purslane" in English, semiz otu is a clover-looking weed that just happens to be delicious and pure summer. Bitter and full of greenyness, they're fantastic raw and really shouldn't be cooked. The freshness on a nasty summer day is key here.

Some folk may want to chop it up and put it in a salad, I'm a fan of mixing it with yogurt and cucumber. You can get it for free at most grocers in this town. I've already gone through one bunch...the older we get, the more cold-blooded we get, and the more cold, crisp, things get us through to August.

So whether you're getting your crampons out for Uludag or just sitting out in the sun all afternoon, find some semizotu. Mix with yogurt, cucumber, and an equal amount of raki. Dabble in both and pontificate on the death of old empires and the rise of new ones. Now you, too, can be unemployed and an ostensible writer-sort like our Burgaz guide.

Or ourselves

/Cries

/Pours another raki and breaks out more semiz otu.

The Blog Roundup where I just discovered Twitter

2010-07-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

This Twitter thing. Fascinating. It will probably be the single greatest destruction to me productivity, since now I can just flit through fascinating articles instead of doing things. Well now, this is what I'm reading, and my take on it.

State Department has watched Gangs of New York, says "We don't have a gang, we have an army."

I'm not wholly comfortable with non-military contractors doing military things. Not for the OMG Security Nation! thing that WaPo is pushing, because that's a completely unsurprising non-issue. But it makes the money easier to hide, removes huge chunks of oversight, and isn't, you know, proven to be legal. The people quoted are right, there is going to be a lasting presence in Iraq one way or another. That's another unsurprising non-issue. But hiding the same guns under a different hat makes the invasion one step closer to imperial occupation. It makes the military that much more permanent by putting under State, which will, of course, always be in Iraq (and any other country with a US embassy, for the record). So as a carrier of one of the blue passports, it means that I'm that much closer to being an imperialist. That's kind of disconcerting.

Africa: Confusing, complicated, and not able to be dealt with comfortably in legislation.

I'm not going to act like I understand Congelese issues (except for Baloji, who is actually Belgian but hey), but I defer to Texas in Africa when I do. And this is, for me, the takeaway quote: "They don't understand why the overarching focus on minerals has come to dominate international discourse on the region while the vexing problems that actually drive the violence there - land tenure rights, citizenship rights, and the state's inability to establish a monopoly on violence - continue to fester." That is, with conflict minerals, the issue is the conflict, not the minerals. Minerals are going to be extracted one way or another, and it helps to be involved in some regard in order to guide the extraction to be somewhat sane. But that takes patience, a strong hand, and deep knowledge of the region. All of which are, of course, lacking. Really, its pretty similar to the Craig Murray and Uzbekistan drama, which I have been able to follow pretty well, and which there are two pretty distinct camps on. I'm firmly in the Hamm/Tucker "engagement is necessary" side, but there are plenty of smart people who aren't.

There's some dude with a Russian passport hanging out with the PKK

How Russian (versus vaguely Caucasian/Central Russian) with a name like Dadaev is up for debate, but its still one of those "huh weird" sort of moments that happen in the mountains. And hey, Zaman wants to tell YOU about Ergenekon!

Reporting from Afghanistan: Canada's doing it right

Interesting article about "Team Canada", some sort of armed NGO hybrid. It's an interesting read that makes you realize that there are no dichotomies in Afghanistan whatsoever so stop writing like there are because there's not did you hear me there's not. Plus, the "Afghanistan is basically just Manitoba" is one of my un-sarcastic favorite quotes out there.

Sunday School with Beards. It's still Sunday School

I'm sure somebody would love to spin this in some asinine way, but I love these sort of articles. Life in Exotic, Oriental, Central Asia...just kind of goes. People grow up, have kids, and want to raise their kids with intrinsic moral compasses. So they go to Sunday School and Summer Camps. This seems to be part of Schwartz's CyberChaikana project, which is pretty cool. And again, Tajikistan for Tajikistan's sake. Not everything that happens there is about their foreign policy. Sometimes kids just want to learn to read and ask if God has a big toe.

So that's the far-ranging reach of Twitter. Enjoy it and enjoy the weekend. More blogging, and more Big Happenings, coming up shortly. As well as some actually-well-written stuff and not the garbage that I've been spewing for a bit. Journalism ensuing, I swear.

White-boy shuffle! or, the Sec. State Human Centipede

2010-07-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

I have just been introduced to "The Cable", which is Foreign Policy Magazine's deep look into how the US Foreign Policy sausage is made. My views of FPM in its online version are pretty cynical. Then again, I am an acolyte at the Church of Yell. But I suppose somebody has to breathlessly report insider deals, so lets look at the ones that affect Turkey.

Josh Rogin is informing us that a battle is brewing over the new US ambassador to Turkey. The candidate is

...Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr., is a 32-year veteran of the Foreign Service who most recently served as the deputy ambassador in Kabul. He's served in Ankara in the past and speaks fluent Turkish. Ricciardone also played a role in organizing the Iraqi exile community before the 2003 U.S. drive to Baghdad.

Which is quite the resume. I see one big steaming failure, one huge mark for, and one accomplice-in-a-miscegnated-attempt-at-empire-building. In short, an insider is on track for one of the most insidery jobs of all. This should not be a surprise.

We are also told, however, that Ricciardone was ambassador to Egypt in 2005, during this "Arab Spring" thing that I missed the first time around. Basically, because Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq had some elections, that meant that everything was supposed to go alright for the US. Except that Palestine elected Hamas, Lebanon has a Kafka-esque parliament system that helps Hezboallah succeed, and the term "Mission Accomplished" was about 2 years past being funny. So somehow its Ricciardone's fault that in Egypt, Mubarak did exactly what everyone thought he would do: chafe at giving the Muslim Brotherhood any voice and continue his autocratic reign. In short, we should be upset, maybe, that Riccardione didn't do the single most amazing diplomatic job since Camp David.

Look, there are two bullshit quotes in this article:

"the tenuous state of Turkey's relationship with the West."- GOP aide. What the hell does this mean? Will there be another earthquake, and the Bosphorus is going to widen by 200 miles, and the bridges will snap? Or does it mean that because it's not the Cold War anymore and Turkey has relationships with their non-NATO neighbors means that they're all wearing Turbans and shouting "Allah'u Akbar!" Turkey is as much a part of the West as the Chronicles of Narnia and Cheesecake. Stay focused on those mid-term elections
"Let's face it, there hasn't been much of an Obama effect in Turkey, so having an ambassador there who can get out among the people could be very useful." - Steven Cook. There's an old story about Turkmenbashi wearing a fake beard and being driven around Ashgabat in his State Limo. He goes up to Turkmen and asks them what they think of the way the country is going. Since Turkmenbashi's picture/statue is everywhere in Ashgabat, and nobody has a state limo besides T-Bash, the Turkmen he interviews have a good idea of who's asking, and what they should say...what I'm trying to say is, the Obama effect isn't real and ambassadors don't get a feel of the country by chatting up a kebabci.

Better quotes include, from the comments section, "wordpress is predictably hostile to the people of the United States, so look forward to your comments/remarks simply being passed over." I'm on Blogspot! USA! USA!

And my personal favorite: "'We don't need to put up much of a fight because things are moving so slowly anyway,' the aide said." Diplomacy...thunder made of slow. A buzzard eating the carcass of a sloth. You get the picture.

And just because I'm not done mocking this ridiculousness, here's the follow-up article.Boilerplate terms, assurances that Turkey, like Israel is a friend of the US, and that complicated issues are ahead. Throw in some "blah blah terrorism blah blah" and "Hey, the dude who has brought the gossip tense to anglophone journalism is going to Iraq" and you almost have enough filler for a story.

This right here is a lot of written words. It's all about nothing. If you're looking for a personality-driven field, it ain't diplomacy. The names of these guys doesn't mean anything...its all white dudes from old stock who are there to replace others who look like them and went to the same colleges as they did. And then they'll say the same thing. Diplomacy is only interesting when its done creatively. This is just silverbacks posturing. Do not be alarmed, shocked, or even give a wooden nickel about the stuff that FPM finds newsworthy.

What's so funny 'bout Volleyball and Construction?

2010-07-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

Turkey is an awesome country with one of my favorite foreign policies. Not because I agree with everything...that's hardly the case. But mostly because they're so damn interesting. Not zany in the Ghaddafi sense, but also not close-vested either.

Lest we forget, Turkey is a real place. They are displaying this through their "Hey, we build stuff internationally! Almost as much as the Chinese" articles coming through the grapevine. And its pretty fantastic indeed. All of the booming construction in Central Asia and the Middle East is coming through Turkish construction. Which is pretty awesome, considering the history of Turkish construction. Lost in all of the questions in ABC or CNN about "the Turkish direction" is the fact that Turkey's done a very good job of constructing a Near Abroad for themselves. And every single one of these huge construction companies has ties with the government, the military, and all of that. Halliburtonism is not an American monopoly.

That said, these things happen as well. And while there is no clear "Directive from Erdogan caused this" sort of thing, well, I mean, Turkey has taken the initiative in turning the Turkish-Israel relationship into what it is today. And I mean that with all due care.

Thats why its fascinating. how Turkey can act so much like a Real Important Country on one hand and be involved in these petty squabbles (Volleyball!) on the other. And its why I could never see things like the PKK issue happening in the US. Turks get so much money from construction in Kurdish Iraq...as cynical as it seems to bomb the countryside to boost the cities that're being built...that's a lot more sinister and a lot more clever than I'm willing to give anyone credit for. Its much more likely to be disjointed and clumsy.

Because that's where Turkish Foreign Policy is right now. Dancing across the line between "brilliant and deft" and "disjointed and clumsy." Poor Mr. Vela got his interview with Karayilan tortured by the Telegraph. Not only do we not spell "Recep" as "Recip" but also

A triple-bombing struck the resort of Marmaris in 2006, while a year later a suicide bomber struck a popular shopping street in the capital, Ankara.

does not a pattern of bombings in make. The "oh scary terrorists make things go boom" part of the PKK is passe. Their smart maneuverings are more of the

He said the PKK would soon declare "democratic autonomy" in Kurdish regions of south-east Turkey. "If Turkey does not accept this, it is their problem," he said.

variety. Declaring your own autonomic republic, cutting off taxes, and thumbing your nose is a much more effective revolution than killing foreigners. The PKK is in no position to rely on the Barzanis and Talabanis in Iraq any longer, not with all of that aforementioned construction. So they're much better off burning bridges and calling it autonomy.

And Turkish foreign policy is still trying to figure out their internal policing. For all of Davutoglu's genius, he hasn't been able to make a singular theory of foreign policy yet. And until then, its the jerk-stop-leap of the AKP years past. I'm not as smart as Davutoglu, I'm not able to think of anything clever enough to serve them in the future.

And in unrelated news, congrats to Turkmenistan for finally getting their own blog on EurasiaNet! For a newssource focused on Central Asia, its about time, so go to Sifting the Karakum for all of your sand-sifting and source-divining on the land between the Caspian and the Kopets. This reminds me how badly I need to update my blogroll...

You, too, can live in the future at Santralistanbul!

2010-07-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

There are few things in life worth taking a boat to a boat to a cemetery, then getting a private boat at that cemetery to get to. Fortunately, Santralistanbul is one of those things.

Equal parts energy museum, exhibition space, and steampunk throneroom, Santral is the old Ottoman Power Plant from the 1910's that got used until the 50s or so. They just recently - a decade or so, I think - turned it into what it is today, without changing too much. It has all of the gee-whiz technology stuff of the Museum of Science and Industry. All of the unabashed coolness of the StL City Museum. But with the addition of the "need to know" basis of esoteric transportation, being part of the campus of a Design School of Bilgi University, and having a couple really hip bars right there, its even better.

Sacrilege to my brothers and sisters in the 314, I'm sure. But Santralistanbul is the coolest tech/futurist museum I've been to. I haven't even mentioned the Magical Musical Box or Whatever. Which won't load because computers frighten me.

That said, they're really missing something here, in my mind. There could've been something fantastic with future energy...hydrogen, rare earths, hydropower, etc. I hope they expand into that. Watch this space...if they can turn this Santralistanbul into 21st Century Istanbul that keeps on getting talked up in some circles, it could be (even more) fantastic.

"...The God that you do not believe in has blessed our president with victory."

2010-07-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

Title courtesy of a Matt Tiabbi interview, because, y'know, he'd have something darkly sarcastic to say, too. I've kind've run into a cynical streak that comes with reading too much eXiled and too many books that talk about "being on the front lines of an Empire you don't know exists" and all of that. But look. As a self-referencing, egotistic, obnoxious blogger, I have an important message for all of you about to begin a travel blog.

The country you are about to visit does not exist for your self-actualization. Authenticity is Complicated? Nooo. This? Stupid. That? Wretchingly awful. Lets discuss.

"Sure, travel companies will charge you a lot of money to offer up a “real” experience, but what you’re purchasing is no more or less authentic for its exclusivity." Travel companies also speak the local language and get you hooked up with events you would never find otherwise. If you're traveling for a week or two, you're not going to wake up one day and speak Thai. This is ok. You're traveling to take pretty pictures and tell cool stories. If you wanted to experience life as a Thai does, you'd burn your passport and somehow shade those baby blues. So deal with the fact that your a foreigner and are seeing a country through foreigner's eyes. That isn't going to change.
"Coffee is not just coffee when it is a glass mug of Malay espresso and sweetened condensed milk, served on a sticky 85 degree day in a Kedai Kopi in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, with a steaming bowl of lahksa." Ooooh, look at the lady who went to Indonesia! Did YOU go to Indonesia? Well, I guess you wouldn't understand. It's not just coffee, its sooo SENSUAL. I'll make you some right now, but you won't GET IT, will you? You just can't be in BORNEO if you're in Columbus. Listen, you don't want me to take details for granted? How to do that, make 120-photo Facebook albums and update my Fbook status every 15 minutes from my iPhone? What the blue fuck? Some of us may not have time on our pleasure-cruises to take copious notes on everything we've done with eyes open. We have lives to attend to as well. Live in the fucking moment once in a while instead of impressing people back home.
"‘Existential migration’ is conceived as a chosen attempt to express something fundamental about existence by leaving one's homeland and becoming a foreigner." Looks like someone read their Walden. What exactly are you learning about existence, pray tell? Is it that English-speakers can get paid the world-over? That getting drunk in fascinating locales makes for wonderful stories and ugly tattoos? That nothing bad can happen to white people, no matter how different the local people look? That you can get some solid strange if you're a dude with a black baby in your Facebook picture?* I love how this study came from the US...I wonder if Mujahidin count as existential migrants? Or Gulenists and Jesuits? Or is our study sample solely suburban volk?

"But Aslan Juhayman," you may ask, "aren't you a foreigner who has left home to live in a foreign place? Twice?" The answer, my friend, is yes. I am a suburban dude who left home. I had my reasons. They are, at the moment, intensely personal. I am, I would wager to say, not perfect. And I also wouldn't include Third-culture kids in this snark, because that's a whole other interesting phenomenon.

I'm a huge fan of travel. I love what de Botton has written on the subject. I sincerely think that everyone should, at some point, get out of the neighborhood they grew up in, and not just to kill someone from a different neighborhood, either. But let's not wear ourselves out with the back-patting. The Study Abroad of us are incredibly fortunate. We have the opportunity to do some really cool things. But just having an opportunity doesn't make us special. As the saying goes, waking up on third base doesn't mean you hit a triple.

So don't let me stop you from taking pretty pictures and writing funny stories. I should hasten to add, however, that there are lots of interesting angles out there about framing narratives and the such. I'll even be writing about them in the future. There is a lot you can learn about yourself by traveling, of course. All I ask is this: remember that the country you are visiting doesn't give a damn about you. The country does not care whether you live or die, have a great time or are caught in the rain, fall in love or catch the clap from a hooker. In Turkey, for example, 70 million people will go about their days tomorrow without caring if I can figure out this damn OpenERP at work tomorrow.

I am not important because I'm an American. I'm just lucky enough to have one of dem blue passports. But that passport won't protect me if I get drunk and punch out a Turkish dude. That passport won't open doors (except for the consulates). I'm also fortunate, in a way, that I don't get looked at as an American often. I'm lucky that when I open my mouth, people seem to think "wow, that Turk dresses funny and talks like an absolute moron" as much as they think "that American knows six verbs, we should congratulate him!"

But when all of us objectify the locals as allowing us to see ourselves better, its disgusting. They don't care about us, in a way. Each individual Turk (or Thai, or Afghan, or whatever) has their own individual needs and cares that cannot be boiled down into a "Turks feel ___ about Americans" or "The people are so courteous" in any ingenuous way. Complex issue is complex. And that American passport, and the visa you paid for, is all about you finding yourself out, and has nothing about you changing lives or Opening Rare Windows. If you want to do Anth, get a degree. Otherwise take pretty pictures and write snarky posts about tourists.

*=does not apply if you are black, obviously. Then people just assume you have a Baby Momma.

A Good Walk Ruined

2010-07-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

You would think that it would be easy to get from Arnavutkoyustu to Arnavutkoy, right? You start at the top of the hill, and then you walk downhill.

I did that and ended up in Levent. And ended up walking uphill. It's like I crossed dimensions somewhere around Ortakoydere.

One thing I did stumble into, that was pretty cool, was the Arnavutkoy Jewish Cemetery. Pretty neat-looking joint at night, definitely looked like the Ruisdael painting. But it's awfully embarrassing to catch a cab on a deserted street, ask to go to Arnavutkoy, and then have like, a 1km, 4-lira, taxi ride.

.
Shoddy execution, but worth it for the cemetery. I feel kinda dumb for having an adventure when I'm just trying to sleep, though.

Here's the navel-gazing and OMGIstanbul stories you get from this blog. Fascinating, huh?

The Pole is Raised. The Doors are Opened.

2010-07-12T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Guardian is reporting on the opening of the Khan Shatyr in Almaty. For as much as we here tend to smirk at Nazarbayev's grandiosity, I do have to say that the Khan Shatyr is a lot more successful of a building then anything else he's built in Astana.

In construction, it looked like part Apollo Program, part Aggro-Crag, and part towering hymn to neo-Constructionist Architecture. The Guardian focuses more on the people at the opening and their own Troubling Questions about Nazarbayev then the building itself, as one might expect:

The Khan Shatyr is the latest vanity project initiated by Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's increasingly autocratic president. Its opening ceremony, launched with a performance by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and closed with a burst of fireworks, was timed to coincide with Astana day, a new holiday to celebrate the country's capital. It was attended by Nazarbayev, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, Turkish president Abdullah Gul and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, among others.

But as much fun as Kremlinology and star-gazing could be, the article doesn't do the structure justice. Some of the Astana-based folks here would know better than me whether this is truly public architecture, made for the people to live and play in during the winter (my vote is for "no, definitely not" if you're curious). But the buzz within Kazakhstan is truly remarkable. And this a whole lot prettier and more coherent than anything else built in Astana (or Ashgabat, or Tashkent...) any time recently.

Michael Hancock went into the details about 18 months ago, so I'll just link to him rather than rehash 'em. Yup, they got the carpark and every other amenity promised shoved in there. And there are even more pretty pictures now. Is it the most munificent use of natural resource funds? No. But it is capable of being a symbol of the new Central Asia that'll deflect rote sayings about the Silk Road and swarthy Muslims. It's a step in the right direction.

Even if, as Geoff Manaugh so eloquently puts it,

...the building cuts an unlikely profile in its only semi-urban context. At dusk, through Webster's lens, it looks less like a structure parachuted in from the future, than the shell of an old expo whose excitement has long since faded.

Even plastic-topped, beach-holding super structures can't defeat a summer evening's ennui.

...it's called Project Mayhem

2010-07-07T02:30:00.000-07:00

John Robb is up to his usual insanity. And I say that with nothing but kindness. He notes how insurgents in Afghanistan are targeting contractors working on large-scale projects. He says that

...this type of targeting increased costs by 50-100% and seriously delayed (or fully stopped) projects. This is typically much more effective than an attack on military personnel, although it appears that in today's attack DAI got lucky.

This in a vacuum is not much more than a statement of fact. But this is John Robb. Nothing ever sits in a vacuum.

Yet, in modern western societies, this elite group and their specialists are able to dissociate themselves from jobs when it comes to their private lives. They live unencumbered within our impersonal society. This window of vulnerability creates a yawning opportunity for innovative forms of disruptive non-violent protest.

He then goes on to describe turning a "coercive tool" like the Chinese Human Flesh Search Engine into an "online game". He emphasizes the non-violent aspect of this, but the backbone is awfully similar to the contractor attacks in Afghanistan. It's really just open-source intelligence gathering. It's studying a target and finding out where his weaknesses and your strengths can be best leveraged. In Afghanistan, it's violent attacks on contractors in the open ground when they're out of their compounds. In the internet, it's targeting weak links in their online identity. In all honesty, it sounds a whole lot like Fight Club.

There are two different angles I'd like to take on this. The first is that the heavy-industry contractors are some of the most gloriously imperialistic folks in the whole Mission Civilatrise. I realize that sentence sounds a bit more politically inflammatory than I meant it, but its still a lot of white-folks building white-folk stuff for white-folk use. The whole "OMG MINERALS!" aside, there's been an awful rate-of-return on the projects going on in Afghanistan. Using attack-magnets to build huge projects doesn't help (which is why I'm such a huge proponent of seeding the country with small projects).

Secondly, Mr. Robb's "game" sounds an awful lot like a pet-project I've been wanting to run for a while (and was Plan A for a bit this summer until I stumbled into Istanbul instead. It's the sort of thing that NewEurasia would be wonderful with (and that its founders I'm sure would not be interested in); creating a database of corruption in Central Asia. Create a list of the corrupt cops, bogus mayors, and other such scam artists anonymously in order to scorn and shame them. Think of it as the complete and utter opposite of Registan's "The Murdered Journalists of Central Asia" Memorial. It's the sort of extra-legal, non-violent, thing that an anonymously attended blog hosted in a foreign country could do great things with. I'm not sure how to conquer the culture of fear, but I think that fighting back (to a reasonable extent, of course) is a great place to start.

Both of these are theories that I'd love to flesh out in the upcoming weeks. Watch this space.

The Internet is on Our Side. We Will Bury You.

2010-07-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

Josh Foust just posted an article by an ex-golfer (ha! I bet Mr. Daly's never heard that) on the Truth of what's going on in Kyrgyzstan.

I'm sure Josh can understand a bit of skepticism coming his way after all of the skepticism he's launched in the past. And as sure as I am that Daly's a great guy with great sources, I don't see the Neville Chamberlain comparison. No politician would be caught dead today with saying stuff about "far away people in a far away land."

Daly's upset that Maxim Bakiyev is filing for asylum in the UK, despite an Interpol warrant for his head. And yeah, this is sketchy. I fully believe that Maxim is an awful bit corrupt and a good bit sinister. But that's far, far, away from the ensuing character assassination:

Maxim subsequently met with Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan representatives in Dubai while Janysh brokered deals with Afghan Taliban and Tajik fighters, commenting: “The transfer of militants to the south of the republic was made on the eve of the June events from Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province via Tajikistan’s Khorog and Murghab districts. Cooperation in transferring [militants] was made by a former Tajik opposition commander and drug baron, whose contact was Janysh Bakiyev.”

If you're going to bring up the IMU bogeyman, you ought to prove that they, y'know, exist first. Because just saying stuff like "Oh yeah they met with these bad dudes in Dubai" doesn't prove anything. And the tape that...

purportedly details Maxim Bakiyev and President Bakiyev’s brother, Janysh, who still remains at large in southern Kyrgyzstan, discussing plans to arm groups to spread chaos across the south of Kyrgyzstan in June, seeking 500 “bastards” to foment unrest.

"Purportedly" is an awful big term. Much like Schwartz (and every other sane purviewer of events, I should mention), I'd rather see a lot more evidence than a videotape and a dude with an axe to grind before I send the Lawyin' Lynch Mob over to Maxim's pad in London.

And even more amusingly...are we seriously expecting the legal system to run its course and bring up a result that the Crusaders for Good and Justice in Kyrgyzstan will like? It's not that I'm NOT a CGJK, but I highly doubt that Maxim or Janysh are going to see the inside of a jail cell. At this point, its just a matter of whether they take refuge in the UK, in the US, or somewhere else. Just as long as it isn't Kyrgyzstan - or, in the interest of regional security, anywhere else where they understand Russian.

The kind of firepower that Maxim is hiring, legal-wise, is going to overwhelm any umbrage that Daly tries to use. Especially if he doesn't have any stronger facts then what is published there. I'm not going to pretend I have a better idea of what happened in Kyrgyzstan then Daly or really any of the fine people at Registan (which is why I haven't written anything there in a while), but I'd like to see answers before accusations. Even if accusations are part of the process as some may see fit, I don't think that'll help Kyrgyzstan one bit if it looks like the playpen of kleptocrats. These grenades of accusations don't do anything positive.

Book Review: Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

2010-07-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

This has taken quite some time to get thrown onto the internet, mostly because I've been working and moving into new, not-disgusting, digs (i.e. OMG YES ARNAVUTKOY). As I start getting into more of a schedule, more interesting posts will be put here. So there will be more than just going to Galata Evi with Ben.

As much as I'm not a fan of satires, I had to do a balancing act with Absurdistan. Yeah, its told from the point of a sorta-Russian, sorta-American joke of a human being. Yes there's the awkward rapping and pathetic 'hood queen. This is what bad books are made of. But with a Caspian setting, mockery of the American military-industrial complex, and lots of funny little Turkic and Kartveli men, it's actually kind of awesome.

Whenever I read a good book about the region, I find myself thinking, "my God, somebody actually did their research here!" This is no different, Shteyngart definitely did his research here. He knows enough about Azerbaijan and Georgia (and Daghestan, I think) to use them to create his fictional Absurdsvani. And he's a good enough writer to pull off the satire with as few cringe-inducing moments as possible. This is a good thing.

The best thing, though is a chapter which is just a grant proposal for a Holocaust Museum entitled "A Modest Proposal." Pretty much my favorite chapter I've read in a really long time. Its honest enough to be hilarious, and cagey enough to bite. I'm a huge, huge, fan.

So again, very funny book. A bit too esoteric, maybe, but the New York Times got it and loved it, so maybe not. And putting in himself as the antagonist was a pretty fantastic touch. There are probably enough bits for everyone to like it (I, for example, am a deaf-mute when it comes to New York references) so maybe...everyone will like it. I at least did.

City is through the eye of the beholder

2010-07-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

"Cities will be things you have delivered to you, like pizza, and they and their residents will be treated just as disposably." - BLDGBlog on Small Businesses with crazy dreams.

What causes "sense of place"? How do we know that we are Here instead of There, when we can pay and do both?

So now I'm here, working on this. The tourism industry is an interesting thing...the trick is to convince people they are somewhere else, somewhere exotic, without them having to sacrifice anything. Or instead, have them sacrifice just what they want in order to impress their friends back home. In a city like Istanbul, there are hundreds of iterations of the same ideal, and people can kind of tell when you're just selling something to them. So it's more fun, I think, to embrace the adventure, explore with them, and tell them just how exciting everything could be.

My job, in short, is to deliver a city. Because the same city can be given in different ways (LOL @ DesignObserver, heart @ the DO for doing Bukhara to begin with). I can hardly know the ins-n-outs of Istanbul, I just need to know the sorts of stuff that people want to see. Delivering an Authentic city on a week or two's notice...just-in-time Architectural History.

One of the most important lessons I've learned from history classes is that nobody really cares about the people. Especially in situations like this, they're background noise. And living here, its tough not to be an expat, tough not to have a couple of "My good Turkish friends" up on a stage for your old friends' approval. Its weird. There was a line in a book I read recently along the lines of "We're on the front line of an empire we don't even know exists." Be it about English teachers or whatever, we're all little minions in the American, Anglophone, empire. May as well be up front about it. The big question when living outside the home culture is basically "Am I trying to make people like me or am I trying to be like them?" And even though that introduces a dichotomy, the answer is always, yknow, complicated.

So it isn't the worst thing to do. There are other projects building up, and I get to say stuff like "Lets get this to the Albanians by the end of the week." And I get to leave my other, Bohemian, pied-terre for a new one on the water. Even if I lose a month's rent doing it.

So all of this running around means few posts. And especially few posts on what I want to be writing about. I hope to be changing that in the next couple of weeks. Just hang on and listen to the navel-gazing until then.

"He may be a conciliator, but he is no moderate."

2010-06-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

Neat article I stumbled on, courtesy of Istanbul Calling, about how Hamas is doing business. While the dude who writes it is a bit Doo Rah Gaza! for my tastes (I'm not sure how one describes Gaza City as "...a bustling and cosmopolitan downtown.") it's an interesting look into how a not-quite-country does business. They smuggle, they work with NGOs. They hide stuff in John Kerry's briefcase and hold up pictures of Erdogan. If they won't be treated as a real country, then there's no reason to go about your standard diplomacy. May as well get creative with it.

Gaza is probably a bad example, what with the loaded philosophical and essentialist questions of the place. But I just stumbled into some "Turkic Friendship Festival" thingy yesterday, and Bashkortostan was pimping the hell out of themselves. I considered myself a stan-expert, and I had no clue where that was...it turns out its a Republic within the Russian Federation...a minor thing they left entirely out of their materials at the festival. But they can keep on telling people that they're a real country until it actually comes true. Putting the Nation Branding before the Nation, as it were. Get Christopher Hitchens to write 800 words on your oppression or something.

On the same line, I love how the tunnels and insurance payments are brushed off as no big deal. Corruption is business. It's more than just "one hand washes the other," the entire system is built off of paying some dude because taxes aren't taken seriously. How can you fight corruption when corruption is the system? Yeah, sure, put some dudes behind bars. See how that solves anything. It seems to me that it makes no sense to punish the individuals at a state-system scale. It makes more sense to adjust the definition of corruption to fit local standards.

I'm hardly a libertarian, I don't think. But I like the creativity it affords. No sea trade? Build tunnels. No diplomats? Go guerrilla. No borders? Get expansive. And no matter what you do, get hooked up with the IHH.

We're living in a time where "International Standards" are just fences that self-appellated Legitimate Folks hide behind. They complain about the rules without even understanding what the rules are. As mentioned previously, I firmly hope that creativity and guile can win the day. Lets hope for Bashkordostan that they can.

Book Review: Rebel Land by Christopher de Bellaigue

2010-06-06T04:52:00.000-07:00

These book reviews are really not worth reading any more. Even when the books are. Rebel Land actually reminded me a decent bit of Power Faith and Fantasy, which you probably wont hear from many other sources. As much as de Bellaigue says that this is a book about "the History of a Turkish Town" it really isn't. I couldn't help but be nagged by the fact that he cared an awful lot more about the PKK then he did about much of anything else.

And while I did enjoy reading the book, even when (especially when) it challenged my own preconceived notions and biases. I'd love to take de Bellaigue out for tea at some point in my life. He has rabble-rouser tendencies, but I figure that's pretty much what you want in a journalist anyways. And his biases show through, sure, but as I said, its journalism. So why not? The PKK is certainly fascinating and Deniz Gezmis is worth writing a book about. So write a book about him. And while knowing that the Armenians just kinda...stopped being around one day is important, and while knowing your Alevi divisions is important, I just felt that it was just window dressing for the book de Bellaigue wanted to write.

All of that said, viewing an issue as it relates to a particular town was pretty cool. Like a Source for only a hundred years. And with grownup writing.

I should reiterate, however, that I don't agree with this books politics. If I've going to be hanging out in Istanbul, I should reiterate that I'm not nearly well-versed enough to take an actual, political, intellectual, stand in the Armenian or Kurdish or Alevi issues, and I'm not about to publish what I feel about an issue. That'd be stupid. So yeah, depending on how you feel about an issue, and how strong those feelings are, you may like this book. If you like righteous indignation, you'd love this book. If you just like people telling you why you're wrong because of what you're reading, you'd have to get this book.

There's Always an Excuse When You Need One

2010-06-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

Three weeks into Istanbul and I've found a job and a place to live. The place to live is nice, but there are a few too many unidentifiable bugs in the kitchen. Such comes with the bohemian lifestyle. And I'd complain a bit louder if I paid rent.

Note that I'm being charged rent. Just not paying yet. Let us, um, see how long I can pull that one off.

Other than that, it's just days full of translating and nights full of being a tout. Lots of, "Hey, my American friend. I have knowledge of great restaurants, and you can trust me because I am another American. Isn't this true, friend?"

So not exactly the world-changing, life-altering Experience. Yet. But I've never actually worked before, so that is sort of a novel concept so far. I'll have to try being entrepreneurial. Not what I expected to be doing, but it will be fun to try. But it'll be neat to see if this is something that I'm good at.

Meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan is devolving into bloodshed, torture, and Event Horizon-esque horror. And the most I can do is...sit here. Lovely. I don't even have time to write about it, even when all sorts of people can be paid to write about it. Even when the possibilities for their writings can become even more impressive. Even when there are avenues with whom to write. Nope, for now my fate is in Istanbul, and I'm not sure what I can do from here. It'll be up to July to find out. So I'll leave it to the fine pens of Ms. Kendzior and Mr. Schwartz to fill you in and their respective comments sections to entertain you. In short: everything is really complicated. There is no such thing as an Evil People, and there's a lot of blank space to be filled between the Anthropology of Kendzior and the Evil Studies of Schwartz. I'm not really sure there's a good way to fill that gap, but hey.

Things happen in Central Asia. This particular one, of course, was bad, but it is awfully important to note that this is a rarity, not the norm. Mass violence has never been the norm. We haven't moved into Barter Town quite yet. And Osh is almost certainly not where it would start.

It's a common theme here, but remember: most speakers are qualified to do nothing of the sort. I absolutely include myself in that categorization. The Ferghana Valley is an agonizingly complex place, but that doesn't mean its a tinderbox ready to explode. Manhattan is an agonizingly complex place, but even the Bernie Goetz's have been largely phased out. So what I'm trying to say is...let's gentrify Central Asia!

I'm going to start looking at Central Asia through a Turkish lens through this blog, that's the hope. It goes with the whole Neo-Ottoman, Pan-Turkic viewpoint of the current regime (though obviously less of the latter. There's no Ozal to be found currently). I'll also, depending on how work works out, try to get a view of the ugliness of the NGO world. I had a good talk over a football match with another American about the make-work and the short-sightedness of the NGOs that us do-gooders love, and I'd love to look at more of that through my personal scope.

"So if you're gonna mock governments and non-governments," you may ask, "then what's your answer?"

Underemployed young creatives, mostly. Yeah, you got it, I think that other jokers like me can make a difference. I'm not completely serious when I say that, though. Mostly because, I mean, what am I doing? Am I going out there and being Change? No, of course not, I have too many excuses why not. I can blog while Osh burns.

Dostanbul: These protests are ruınıng my entrance

2010-06-03T05:07:00.000-07:00

OK, I feel that those who care would like to know that Im safe and sound ın Istanbul. Nothıng eventful has happened yet, besıdes someone eatıng the dots on all of my "ı"s. Ill try to keep up a somewhat onlıne, somewhat publıc dıary for those statesıders who care. If you dont care about the analytıcal bent I take here, then just keep the "Dostanbul" tag bookmarked (Mom...ıf you dont know what Im talkıng about, ask a daughter).

Oh, and I hope you lıke my Spanısh-or-Urdu puns more than you lıked the Turkısh pun at the ol' Eest-ahn-boo-loom Day-Eel.

So not much has happened yet. The trıp over was easy enough. The flıght to Brussels was on an Indıan aırlıne, so I had Indıan food. I also watched Parıs 36 (taglıne: Lets all sıng "Foux de Fa Fa" and fall ın love wıth waıfısh gırls) and the new Sherlock Holmes (Anachronısm Orgy). But Jet Aır ıs fun. The ads ın theır ın-flıght magazınes are full of Indıans aırbrushed ınto Brıts, and you know I love cultural self-loathıng.

Istanbul aırport ıs stıll nıce. Brussels aırport has the sort of tıered racısm that youd expect from Northern Europe: the Schengen flıghts are ın the pretty, clean termınal. The flıghts to 2nd-level locatıons are ın a shoddy-but-full-of-wındows termınal. The flıghts to Afrıca are off ın T Termınal. I ımagıne a tarpaper shack wıth a wındow fan.

Newarks ınternatıonal termınal, on the other hand, ıs comıcally awful. It has Former Empıre style opulence wıth ex-Sovıet amenıtıes. At least budget aırlınes have a smırk when they show that youre flyıng for cheap. Newark expects you to be honored by ıt.

I took the Istanbul Metro ınto town, whıch ıs my favorıte (and the cheapest) way ın. Gave unwarranted tourıst advıce to a couple from Vancouver on the rıde and complaıned about the BP oıl spıll. The taxı from Kabataş to Hisarüstü got delayed by traffic apocolypse. Istanbul stıll has the road system from when ıt was 5 mıllıon bıg, but now ıts 20 mıllıon. My taxı drıver was quıck to tell me that the delay was because of protests at the Israelı Consulate. Ill let Yılgal Schleıfer explaın the goıngs-on there so that I dont get polıtıcal on the ınternet. But basıcally: people are protestıng at the consulate. The synogagues, the Jewısh quarter, the cemeterıes are all beıng left alone. Thıs ıs a good thıng.

Thats about ıt so far. I owe a revıew of the latest book Ive read, sure. But I also need a job and a home. Im goıng to get on those fırst. So take care untıl I collect enough stores where onell be worth postıng.

TurkLOListan

2010-05-19T19:32:00.001-07:00

Well, word has come to Berdimuhamedov and his inner circle that Turkmenistan needs multiple-party politics in order to be Taken Seriously by The West or something like that. Eternal Remont, among others, is not impressed with Berdimuhamedov's decision.

In a nut shell, it seems the two-party system will be the existing party, just in two branches. The branches won't be in opposition to each other at all. Just complimentary really.

So even if the new party is more than just window dressing, it is being created solely as a Agricultural Party, it is much more of an Agricultural Department of the current Democratic Party than it is a sort of current iteration of the BANU or other such Balkan parties built on agrarian principles. Daikhan will exist “to explain and implement the state agricultural policy,” which doesn't sound like a loyal opposition in any sense of the term.

Chronicles of Turkmenitan's Farid Tubahtullin goes on to note that Berdimuhamedov's good friend Dadaev will likely have a large role in Daikhan. Tubahtullin also goes on to compare Turkmenistan to Uzbekistan uncharitably. I'm a bit more optimistic than Tubahtullin, but then again, I'm receiving information second- or third-hand from him. At least the creation of Daikhan shows a change of focus from an energy-based economy and at least purports to defer to the will of pastoralists and farmers. Of course, putting a chicken-farmer like Dadaev in charge means that it'll just be a way for agribusiness and cotton produces to stand on somewhat more equal footing with the gas sector, and welcome in Monsantos along with Gazproms. Either way, its diversification for a leader who's been adept in playing one foreign interest off another.

And all the while, the creation of a "Farmer's Party" in 2010 does smack of being out-of-touch on the world stage. If Berdimuhamedov is creating this party to appeal to the west, it still seems to appeal to the Borat-as-Central-Asia motif that gets pasted on the region. I almost feel like they should just create a "America-hatin' Islamicists Party" and "Crippling Misogyny Party" just to complete the image. I bet someone is already working on Eastward to Tatary II mentioning how the moving of the Arch of Neutrality (note the referring to Niyazov as a "cult leader" and the quoting of Ozymandias, respectively...and last I heard the Arch is still in the city center. This still true?) and the creation of Daikhan represents a Bold New Shift in Central Asian statecraft.

It isn't.