I have deep respect for Roger Cohen as journalist, despite his irritating need to write everything in the most complex way possible. But today's article sets a new low for florid nonsense.

After confessing that a "confused and mystical idea" about gyres has inspired him, Roger decides to share his poetic hallucinations in a 5000 character stream of incoherent babble that does nothing to help explain Arab politics-- ostensibly the purpose of his piece. His high point is the bold proclamation that "no foul volley of bullets from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad can stop the convulsive movement of the gyres". Yes, that's a direct quote.

Seriously, how can the anyone, much less the NYTimes, publish this crap?

p.s. to the editors, "helixes" is not a word, the plural of "helix" is "helices". (and yes, I know that we make a million mistakes here, but this is a blog)

Inspired by suffering in his homeland, Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi’s piece “Blessings Upon the Land of my Love” is an incredible memorial to the sacrifices of thousands of nameless demonstrators across the Middle East over the past months. 

Video from the BBC here.

Claire Berlinski's colorful dispatch from September 2010 hits all the important points about Turkey’s worrying political trends, and why the AKP is not quite the “model” that many in the West want it to be:

Turkey's Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials as the AKP, came to power in 2002. Journalists struggle to find the right catchphrase to describe the nature of this party, usually settling on something like "mildly Islamist" — to which the party's critics reply that this is like being mildly pregnant. The ensuing theological debate quickly crowds out what is perhaps the more important observation: whether this party is mildly Islamist or gravid with a mullahcracy, it is in its instincts, and in keeping with Turkish tradition, profoundly authoritarian. It is no different from other Turkish political parties this way.

The difference, Berlinski goes on to explain, is that Erdogan, by pushing the military out of politics, has convinced the Western media that the AKP is ushering in a new era of democratic politics in Turkey. However, replacing military rule with demagoguery is not democratization. I highly recommend you read the whole thing.

H/t to Cagdas

In 2008, a Georgian-Russian war made the obscure autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia into household names. The few people who knew about these provinces beforehand could point to the fact that both resisted inclusion into independent Georgia in 1918, and rebelled again during the fall of the Soviet Union. So was the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia inevitable?

Contrarians will point out that the Georgian-speaking Muslims of Ajaria, who enjoyed autonomous status during the Soviet period, and lived under Turkish rule from 1614-1878, submitted to central Georgian authority without an outbreak of violence.

What "separates" the Ajaria case from that of Abkhazia and South Ossetia? Thomas de Waal isolates an important factor:

…Another reason for the lack of conflict is that Turkey, Ajaria’s old Great Power patron, did not want to play the Ajaria card against Georgia, while Abkhazia and South Ossetia could still look to Russia for support. This reveals a lot about how the idea of so-called ancient hatreds in the Caucasus must be taken with a pinch of salt. Over the broad sweep of history, Georgian-Turkish relations were much worse than Georgian-Russian ones.

However,

…When the [old Soviet-Turkish] border reopened, Georgian-Turkish relations actually got off to a very good start. In the case of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Russia there were much more real and recent grievances.

Of course, Russia’s policy of supporting separatism in Georgia stopped when it reached a Muslim province—even Putin is not that cynical.

Srdja Trifkovic (some Serb who obviously has some bones to pick) makes a cogent critique of humanitarian interventionism:

“[H]umanitarian intervention” is a pernicious concept which…undermines the concept of collective security and…undermines international law as a system of commonly respected norms that are binding upon all states. Its arbitrary nature is evident in the failure of its most vocal practitioners to invoke it when the violator is too powerful (e.g. North Korea subjecting its people to famine and terror), or too insignificant (various African despots, in Sudan, Congo, etc.), or considered a partner…Far from being “moral,” humanitarian intervention is inherently a tool of situational morality.

According to Jason Pack, the most effective rebels in Libya are the army units from Cyrenaica that defected wholesale. Next come the Islamists, many of whom cut their teeth fighting America in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bulk of the fighters are just ragtag civilians:

The most prevalent form of unit organization is ad hoc: a few brothers or friends sharing gas money, a few rifles, a rebel flag, and a pickup truck. Occasionally, whole villages or subsections of tribes have joined the rebels as a semicoherent unit. Yet even then, village headmen or tribal sheikhs do not appear to be leading or orchestrating the fighting. In fact, military leadership at the front, inasmuch as it exists, is entirely spontaneous. In late March, for example, the top military brass in Benghazi strongly advised the fighters not to push past Ajdabiya when it was retaken due to coalition airstrikes. The fighters did not obey orders and were quickly routed by Qaddafi's counterattacks.

Indeed, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the revolutionaries can defeat Qaddafi by military force alone. Lacking an effective chain of command or training, they have not yet learned to employ guerrilla tactics, siege tactics, or any formal coordinated military maneuvers. Arming the rebels with more sophisticated munitions will not help them congeal into a coherent fighting force. Training them might help, but it would take too much time.

Thomas de Waal discusses the unintuitive history of the South Caucasus, a beautiful land at the historic crossroads of the Russian, Persian and Ottoman empires:

A century ago, neither Tbilisi (Tiflis), Baku, nor Yerevan had a majority population of Georgians, Azerbaijanis, or Armenians, respectively. Tbilisi can lay claim to being the capital of the Caucasus, but its Georgian character has been much more intermittent. For five hundred years it was an Arab town…[until] the medieval period, [when] the city was taken over by the [sic] Armenian merchant class…..Baku became a metropolitan city with many different ethnic groups from [in] the late nineteenth century. Russian became its lingua franca.

…[U]p until the First World War, Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, had a Persian flavor and a Muslim majority population. Its major landmark was a blue-tiled mosque, and there was no big church.

How did these capitals become nationalized? The same way that Europe built its nation states: with a lot of killing and forgetting.

Anyway, it’s an extremely well-researched book well worth your time. But boy could de Waal use a better editor.

Sullivan points out the obvious--that humanitarian war is like welfare:

When you see nation-building as a very expensive and usually counterproductive form of international welfare - you can see why its logic never ends. Intervention creates dependency which prevents departure. Like government programs, these wars have a life of their own. Afghanistan seems as ineradicable as the mohair subsidy. And it develops its own constituency: the Pentagon that doesn't want to be seen to fail, the NGOs and contractors that follow in a swarm, and the fear of any president that he might be seen as a defeatist or weak if he truly pulls the plug.

It is worth adding, however, that America's domestic entitlements have a chance of helping you or me, and involve a lot less death.

The ultimate issue is that we live in a world where evil not only exists, but often triumphs. Humanitarian intervention seeks to change this sorry state of affairs, by tipping the balance in favor of good. Yet, regardless of intentions, playing God with the destinies of foreign societies is a foolish endeavor, even for the most powerful nation on earth--not the least because we too are ignorant, corrupted and selfish.