These have not been good days for the self-made man. The very phraseology offends: in an age when even corporate titans ritualistically affirm the value of teamwork, “self-made” sounds unseemly. “What’s wrong with the ‘self-made’ theory? Everything,” says Mike Myatt, a prominent CEO consultant, in a 2011 article in Forbes, a publication where one might expect to see such a figure affirmed. “If your pride, ego, arrogance, insecurity, or ignorance keeps you from recognizing the contributions of others, then it’s time for a wake-up call,” he admonishes.1 In the 2012 book The Self-Made Myth, authors Brian Miller and Mike Lapham define the phrase as “the false assertion that individual and business success are entirely the result of the hard work, creativity, and sacrifice of the individual with little outside assistance.”2 Such objections do not even begin to broach the difficulties of a phrase like “self-made man” in a postfeminist era, when any generic citation of “man” is at best a faux pas. Given the institutional, much less biological, realities that govern our lives, the very idea of the self-made man sounds like a contradiction in terms. No man is “unaided” because every man is some mother’s son.

more from Jim Cullen at Hedgehog Review here.

Over at Tablet, a podcast:

Questions of character shape public discourse. From Paula Deen to Edward Snowden—the choices people make and actions people take raise questions about free will, personal responsibility, and morality. And yet, researchers in sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are increasingly asserting that the independent self that we are all so attached to doesn’t really exist. What’s more, there are philosophical traditions dating back to Aristotle,Maimonides, and Spinoza that may offer more useful ways of thinking about how to foster ethical behavior and moral societies.

In The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will, Heidi Ravven, a professor of religious studies at Hamilton College, examines these questions. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry on the podcast to discuss how the myth of free will took hold, what Spinoza had to say about it, and why if you want to be a moral person, the last thing you should do is surround yourself with like-minded people. [Running time: 24:52.]

Dhruv Malhotra in The Morning News:

India's prevailing image is one of noisy animation—development, overcrowding, and horrible traffic. In comparison, Dhruv Malhotra's night-scapes of urban India capture the life, or lack thereof, that darkness conceals.

The Morning News: Who are the sleepers?

Dhruv Malhotra: The sleeping human figure, in the context of the larger urban landscape surrounding it, is the metaphor I use to address my own self and the world around me. Usually intentionally obscured, the sleepers are the people in my images who choose to sleep outdoors, for a variety of reasons, and are often guards, migrants, and construction workers, amongst others. The specific person doesn’t much concern me, as my intention is to use the human figure as a metaphor and a point to explore my concerns about the urban landscape.

TMN: If sleepers awaken while you’re photographing, how do you react?

DM: Usually I just speak to them. Some are a bit surprised at being photographed sleeping, but most go right back to sleep after minimal persuasion, once their sense of threat and alarm is allayed.Many of these moments of awakening have translated onto film as ghostly shapes emerging from sleeping bodies—moments of awakening glimpsed along with the dormant potential of the sleeper.

More here.

The Entertainment of War

I saw the garden where my aunt had died

From Scientific American:

The gut bacteria of obese mice unleash high levels of an acid that promotes liver cancer, reveals one of the first studies to uncover a mechanism for the link between obesity and cancer. The research is published today in Nature.

“Obesity in general has many different types of cancer associated with it,” says Eiji Hara, a cancer biologist at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research in Tokyo and one of the study authors. But in the case of liver cancer, he says, “I never expected the microbiome was linked.” Hara and his colleagues initially set out to study how dying cells influence obesity-linked cancers. Cells that are irreparably damaged or pre-cancerous can become senescent — meaning that they stop dividing for overall health of the organism. But before senescent cells die, they can spew out chemicals that may cause inflammation and promote cancer development. To examine whether senescent cells are involved in obesity-induced cancers, Hara and his colleagues worked with genetically engineered mice whose cells emit light upon becoming senescent. They then primed the mice by exposing them to a carcinogenic chemical, a process that Hara says may be similar to humans’ exposure to environmental toxins, such as air pollution. Researchers then fed the mice either a normal diet or a high-fat diet. After 30 weeks, only 5% of the lean mice developed cancer — in their lungs — whereas all the obese mice developed liver cancer.

More here.

Richard J Williams in Aeon Magazine:

Morningside, a late-Victorian suburb on the south side of Edinburgh is an extremely good-looking place, possessing an architectural integrity rare in Britain today. Never threatened by wartime bombs, post-war developers, or the vicissitudes of the housing market, this suburb has a direct line to the ‘Victorian city’ — and its morality. Its moral character is there for anyone to see: in the bay windows watching over every inch of street, the church on every corner, and the sheer solidity of the stone. Morningside is propriety in built form.

The suburb’s respectability was a huge attraction for me at the anxious moment of buying a flat. But after a few years of living there, that same respectability had become a bore. Then it became oppressive. The buildings began to represent a desiccated social life, defined by emotional reserve and obligation. Patrolled by curtain-twitching killjoys, Morningside seemed determined to put a stop to fun of any kind.

In retrospect, Morningside itself probably had little to do with it. Moving there coincided with the moment at which my wife and I became fully grown adults. It was a structural problem. With two careers, two kids and no money, there was little time for pleasures, sex included. Of course, we bore it all stoically and, after a while, we learned together that this was simply what adult life was like, a mess of contradictory demands, with neither the time nor the space in which they might all be satisfied. We were hardly alone: every other couple we knew seemed to find themselves in the same situation. Still, our feelings were real enough, and being an academic, I set to reading about them.

Elizabeth Stoker in the LA Review of Books:

IT BEGINS with a once-promising student and a number of contributing factors that could perhaps have been tolerated in isolation, but in their confluence bring about horrific crimes.

The student is “a strikingly handsome young man, with fine dark eyes, brown hair, and a slender well-knit figure, taller than the average.” He lives alone in a city of thousands, and unbeknownst to his distantly located but eminently involved mother, he has abandoned his schoolwork. His ideological commitments have become increasingly extreme and convoluted, and despite evidently having maintained at one time a rational, moderate worldview, he has “recently become superstitious.”

He is poor, disenfranchised, and angry, and he is planning cold-blooded murder. The target is a matter of concentrated rage and coincidental opportunity. Though he has meditated upon murder for some time, his plans are expedited when it becomes clear to him that the perfect set of circumstances have arisen for him to carry out his attack without detection.

His reasons are in equal measures strange and sober. They represent grotesquely extreme incarnations of “the most usual and ordinary youth talk and ideas”: a distaste for greed, a disgust with the tyranny of the powerful over the oppressed, and a general sense of personal obligation to defend the world from its infectious elements.

In a tiny apartment lodged in a building of low-income housing units, he prepares himself and his instruments to carry out murder. It is a painstaking process that he approaches meticulously, but is nonetheless sped along by chance. With all of his materials and nerve mustered, he merely awaits his chosen hour.

The Nobel laureate on Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, a new biography of South Africa’s revolutionary couple.

Nadine Gordimer in Guernica:

Joe Slovo and Ruth First. We are entering their paths.

Both grew up unbelievers in Jewish or any religious faith. They met when Ruth was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Joe just returned from the South African Army in the war against Nazi Germany. His motivation for volunteering, eighteen years old, unemployed, lying about being underage for military call-up—his early alliance with communism, and so to the Soviet Union under attack—was decisive in the act. But there remained the devastating racial dilemma in South Africa. He wrote: “How do you tell a black man to make his peace with General Smuts—butcher of Bulhoek and the Bondelswarts? ‘Save civilization and democracy—must have sounded a cruel parody. And fight with what? No black man was allowed to bear arms…if you want to serve democracy, wield a knobkerrie [wooden club] as a uniformed servant of a white soldier.”

Joe Slovo’s appetite for the pleasures of life is brought face-to-face with his political humanitarian drive when at the end of the war he took a holiday. From Turin to Cairo he went, and with other decommissioned soldiers somehow got to Palestine although travel was restricted because of Zionist resistance to British occupation; on to a kibbutz where “looked at in isolation, the kibbutz seemed to be the very epitome of socialist lifestyle… it was populated in the main by young people with the passion and belief that by the mere exercise of will and humanism you could build socialism as one factory or one kibbutz and the power of example will sweep the imagination of all… worker or capitalist.”

More here.

Matt Bieber in The Wheat and Chaff:

When I was 18, I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Since then, I’ve occasionally considered writing about my experiences, but I’ve tended not to trust my motives. Writing about my experiences, I thought, would be a way to redeem them, to justify an early adulthood that hadn’t measured up to my adolescent hopes and dreams. I may not have been happy in my twenties, I thought, but at least I’d have a book – and perhaps the beginning of a writing career – to show for it.

It was a cracked notion, of course. I was so caught up in the grip of OCD – and in my flight from it – that I could never have written about those experiences. I didn’t want to spend any more time with them, didn’t want to be anywhere near them.

But at some level, I felt like I was owed. I’ve had to suffer day in and day out for years. Maybe I can cash in on that suffering. This didn’t feel like the noblest of impulses, of course, but I was floundering: what else was I going to do with myself? I was in my mid-20s, moving around a lot and working a series of jobs that didn’t mean much to me. I hadn’t found much direction, and when I looked, OCD was usually in the way.

As I came to see, however, the idea of cashing in on my suffering was itself compulsive – a way to feed an insatiable feeling of insufficiency, to measure up to some external (and endlessly receding) standard. I wanted to write a book because of what it might teach me or might allow me to express, yes, but also because I suspected that lurid stories of suffering would sell, and because I couldn’t imagine how else to feel good about myself. When I saw this – that part of my desire to write was a product of OCD – I decided to treat it that way and did my best not to give in.

More recently, though, things have shifted.

More here.

In “Ghatashraddha,” an early story by Ananthamurthy, a little boy enters the woods at night to search for a friend, accompanied by a man who bears a burning torch. In the brooding darkness, he wants to hold the man tight to dispel his fear. The man dissuades him, saying “You cannot touch me.” Overcome with fright, the child runs away. The story frames one of the most complex and stereotyped aspects of Indian culture, the practice of untouchability. The boy, a Brahmin, reaches out to his Dalit companion for comfort, in poignant violation of the strict ban on physical contact between them. Despite his position in the social order, the older man becomes the arbiter of ritual and purity to a child of the priestly caste, forbidding the touch that would ‘pollute’ the boy. The theme of touch recurs throughout Ananthamurthy’s work with a frequency bordering on obsession—one he has himself acknowledged, and attributed to an abhorrence of untouchability dating back to his childhood days. The power of touch to twist destinies, and the symbolic transformations that such a gesture can undergo through desire, fear, and denial, hold real experiential meaning in his fiction. It is the outgrowth of the author’s own early experiences.

more from María Helga Guðmundsdóttir at Quarterly Conversation here.

From The Guardian:

When F Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was, in the words of his biographer Matthew J Bruccoli, “an unemployed screenwriter”, whose fiction was largely ignored, if not entirely forgotten. The Great Gatsby had sold only seven copies in the last year of his life, and his complete works had earned him a grand total of $13.13 in royalties. Not long before his death, Fitzgerald scrawled a list of sources for each of Gatsby's nine chapters, in the back of a book by André Malraux. Some of these notes are slightly mysterious: decades of digging by Fitzgerald scholars has not revealed who exactly “Mary” was, or what precisely the phrase “the day in New York” might mean. Others are readily comprehensible, such as “Gt Neck” – Great Neck being the real-life version of West Egg, the location of Gatsby's Long Island mansion and the narrator Nick Carraway's rented cottage.

Sarah Churchwell's new book uses this list as a starting point in her attempt to “piece together the chaotic and inchoate world behind Gatsby”. It's a sprightly, enjoyable and slightly strange book: part “biography” of the novel, part sketch of the roaring 1920s, part brief account of the second half of Fitzgerald's life. Churchwell is perceptive and well-informed. Gatsby enthusiasts – and what person with a brain isn't one? – will enjoy her reconstruction of the various fragments drawn from life, books and news stories that Fitzgerald combined to make his masterpiece. Great Neck plays a central part in the story. When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald moved there in late 1922, it had recently been invaded by newly rich, showbizzy New Yorkers (Gatsby's love, Daisy Buchanan, regards West Egg as an “unprecedented 'place' which Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village”). The old money had their grand summer houses on the other side of Manhasset Bay, at Sands Point – East Egg in the novel, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan's white palace sits, with its dock and famous green light, shining across the bay. Zelda later suggested that the main inspiration for Gatsby was a Great Neck neighbour called Max Gerlach, “who was said to be General Pershing's nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging”.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist and philosopher-king of quantum theory, once said that great truth is a statement whose opposite is also a great truth. This pretty much captured the spirit of those elusive rules that govern the subatomic world, where light can be a wave — no, a particle — well, actually, whatever you need it to be for your particular experiment. It also seems to me to sum up much of the history of science and philosophy, in which the learned consensus keeps swinging between the yin-and-yang theories of existence: free will and fate, change and eternity, atomicity and continuity. These bipolar themes have been on my mind lately. This spring the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin published a new book, “Time Reborn,” reopening a debate supposedly settled by Einstein and his acolytes a century ago: whether time is real or an illusion. Meanwhile, other physicists have been arguing recently that the only way to understand the dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, and perhaps the mass of the newly discovered particle believed to be the Higgs boson as well, is to postulate that our universe is only one in an almost infinite ensemble of universes, each with different properties. The reality of time and the plurality of worlds are only two of the eternal (so to speak) questions. Bob Dylan once wrote a song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” that consisted entirely, he said, of the first lines of songs he thought he would never have time to write. In that spirit I’d like to blurt out some of the Bohr-like questions about this vat of stars that I’ll never be able to answer before my own time runs away.

Is nature discrete or continuous? Is the universe infinite or finite? Is life inevitable, or is it a lucky accident? Will we ever find company in the cosmos?

Is the truth of the world to be found in the ways things change, like the river that you cannot step into twice, or the ways they remain the same, like the law of gravity or, indeed, the name of that river?

I could go on all day. Feel free to write in with your own. A final answer to any of these questions would be a landmark of human progress. But it might be in the nature of being human that we will never answer them but have to hug them both in a kind of Hegelian surrender. And so we live in the tension between opposites.

More here.

Birmingham River

Where’s Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it? Two. More or less.

History: we’re on tribal ground. When they
moved in from the Trent, the first English

entered the holdings and the bodies of the people
who called the waters that kept them alive

Tame, the Dark River, these English spread their works
southward then westward, then all ways

for thirty-odd miles, up to the damp tips of the thirty-odd
weak headwaters of the Tame. By all of the Tame

they settled, and sat, named themselves after it:
Tomsaetan. And back down at Tamworth, where the river

almost began to amount to something,
the Mercian kings kept their state. Dark

because there’s hardly a still expanse of it
wide enough to catch the sky, the Dark River

mothered the Black Country and all but
vanished underneath it, seeping out from the low hills

by Dudley, by Upper Gornal, by Sedgley, by
Wolverhamption, by Bloxwich, dropping morosely

without a shelf or a race or a dip,
no more than a few feet every mile, fattened

a little from mean streams that join at,
Tipton, Bilston, Willenhall, Darlaston,
Read more »

Simon During in The Immanent Frame:

Is absolute secularity conceivable? The question arises from the paradoxical intuition that the secularization thesis is simultaneously both right and muddled. Perhaps the most fundamental problem with the broader secularization thesis (which I take to claim that, over the past half-millennium or so, Western society has undergone a systemic diminution of religious practice) is that it isn’t clear what the non-secular is. After all, it can be extended from those beliefs and practices that avowedly depend on religious revelation to those that affirm some form of transcendentalism, though they may make no room for God as such. But for a long time both radical atheists and Christian apologists have argued that what looks as if it is secular through and through may not, in fact, be secular at all. From this point of view, important elements of enlightened secularity in particular can be understood, not as Christianity’s overcoming, but as its displacement. Thus, for instance, in his Scholasticism and Politics (1938), Jacques Maritain, following Nietzsche, speaks of the “Christian leaven fermenting in the bosom of human history” as the source of democratic modernity. Here the secular, political concept of human equality is seen to have a Christian origin and to bear a continuing Christian charge, even though its purposes and contexts have changed.

Numerous applications of the displacement model of secularization are current, but here I will point to just one. It concerns philosophical anthropology. The argument is that certain post-Enlightenment concepts of the human (or of “man”) remain Christian in their deep structures. Of these, the most important is the philosophical anthropology of negation (to use Marcel Gauchet’s term), according to which human nature is not just appetitive but necessarily incomplete, that is to say, inadequate to its various ecologies and conditions, and for that reason beset by fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and so on. For those who accept the displacement model, this anthropology, even in its modern forms, remains dependent on the revealed doctrine that human nature as such is fallen. Philosophical anthropology is important for thinking about secularization because the secularization thesis often becomes a proxy for the argument that secularity places human nature at risk.

J. Bradford DeLong in Project Syndicate:

Back in 2011, I noted that finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP in 1950 compared to 8.4% of GDP three years after the worst financial crisis in almost 80 years. “[I]f the US were getting good value from the extra…$750 billion diverted annually from paying people who make directly useful goods and provide directly useful services, it would be obvious in the statistics.”

Such a massive diversion of resources “away from goods and services directly useful this year,” I argued, “is a good bargain only if it boosts overall annual economic growth by 0.3% – or 6% per 25-year generation.” In other words, it is a good bargain only if it collectively has a substantial amount of what financiers call “alpha.”

That had not happened, so I asked why so much financial skill and enterprise had not yielded “obvious economic dividends.” The reason, I proposed, was that “[t]here are two sustainable ways to make money in finance: find people with risks that need to be carried and match them with people with unused risk-bearing capacity, or find people with such risks and match them with people who are clueless but who have money.”

Over the past year and a half, in the wake of Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef’s estimate that 2% of US GDP has been wasted in the pointless hypertrophy of the financial sector, evidence that America’s financial system is less a device for efficiently sharing risk and more a device for separating rich people from their money – a Las Vegas without the glitz – has mounted.

John Holbo in Crooked Timber:

Whenever I teach Philosophy and Film, I lecture about this film [the H. G. Wells-scripted/William Cameron Menzies-directed Things To Come (1936)] at some length. But some semesters I haven’t bothered to give it one of my screening slots because the DVD quality was meh. You can get a free meh copy from the Internet Archive. I’ve often told students they might as well just watch on their laptops. But now! But now!

Let me give you the short version of my previous posts about why this film is awesome and interesting.

First, you can see that the visuals are insane. All kneecaps and curtain rod shoulders and Darth Tweety helmets. ‘Nuff said.

In terms of the history, this film goes with Metropolis. It was Wells’ response to Lang’s film,which he hated. It was supposed to do everything intellectually right that Lang did intellectually wrong. But, in the end, it wasn’t enough fun and Metropolis turned out to be closer to the template for sf film success (even though Metropolis itself stunk up the box office.)

Things To Come is a big budget sf extravaganza that rigorously refuses all the standard, easy satisfactions of the genre. It is a sleek modernist lumberyard of missed opportunities to have more fun, in service of a hare-brained high-concept. That concept is: liberal fascism triumphant! Why don’t we make a film about a bunch of arrogant know-it-all scientist-types who force regular people to behave themselves better – because the scientists know what works, and the regular folks have screwed up the planet! – and it actually works! And in the end there’s a right-wing talk radio uprising, but it is easily put down. Buncha yahoos! I kid you not, that’s the plot.

I call it ‘liberal fascism’ because that actually was Wells’ term (that’s where Jonah Goldberg got it). Curious? Read my original post on the subject.

Anyway, the film is also the first modern zombie movie – in the Dan Drezner sense. (I talked about it here.) It contains a zombie outbreak that is a thinly veiled international relations allegory. It’s the first film in which, instead of a few zombie slaves in the swamp, there are deadly roving armies of the things. So why doesn’t anyone know this? Why isn’t it famous as such? Because it isn’t really a zombie film – not in the emotional sense. It contains all the elements but refuses to do anything fun with them, because that would make the audience sympathize with the ‘wrong’ characters.

Dear Reader,

We are very pleased to collaborate with the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG) to bring to you quarterly online symposia on topics of international peace and justice. This is the fourth in this series of symposia; the first three can be seen here, here, and here.

DAG is an organization which discreetly assists government, inter-government and other actors to confidentially manage national and international mediation efforts. Among their publicly known activities is DAG’s involvement in verifying the ETA ceasefire in Basque Country and the decommissioning of the weapons of INLA, a dissident Republican armed group in Northern Ireland.

DAG is directed by Ram Manikkalingam who also teaches politics at the University of Amsterdam. He advised the previous President of Sri Lanka during the peace process with the Tamil Tigers and prior to that advised the Rockefeller Foundation’s program in international peace and security.

In the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia internationally recognized figures will debate challenges in conflict resolution and human rights. One (or more) author(s) will present a thesis in the form of a short essay and then the others will present critiques of that point of view. Finally, the initial author(s) will also have an opportunity to present a rebuttal to the critiques.

The topic this time is whether the Iraq war helped or hurt the spreading of democracy in the middle east.

The distinguished participants in this symposium:

• Kanan Makiya is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He was a prominent member of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein and an influential proponent of the 2003 Iraq War. His books include Republic of Fear (1989), The Monument (1991), Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993), and The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem (2001).
• James L. Gelvin is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of five books, including The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (2012) and The Modern Middle East: A History (2011), along with numerous articles and book chapters on the social and cultural history of the region.
• Azzam Tamimi is the Director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought (IIPT). He has been a visiting professor at Kyoto and Nagoya universities in Japan. His books include: Power-Sharing Islam (1993), Islam and Secularism in the Middle East (2000), Rachid Ghannouchi a Democrat within Islamism (2001), and Hamas Unwritten Chapters (2006). He is a regular commentator on a number of Arabic satellite channels including Aljazeera and Alhiwar and frequently makes appearances on a number of English channels as well.

I would like to thank the participants as well as Ram Manikkalingam, Fleur Ravensbergen, Michelle Gehrig, and the indefatigable Amanda Beugeling of the Dialogue Advisory Group for working closely with me in organizing these symposia. The logo for the symposia has also been designed by Amanda Beugeling.

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

Yours,

S. Abbas Raza

NOTE: DAG and 3QD wish to acknowledge the generous contribution of the Dutch Stichting Democratie en Media toward these symposia, as well as the support of our readers.

THE SYMPOSIUM

[Click the links below to read the essays.]

1. How did the 2003 Iraq War both contribute to spreading the idea of democracy in the Middle East, and discredit that idea at the same time? by Kanan Makiya
2. Here's What Actually Happened by James L. Gelvin
3. Makiya's Theory is Farfetched by Azzam Tamimi
4. Response to Gelvin & Tamimi by Kanan Makiya

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Please leave comments about any of the essays in the symposium in the comments area of this post. Thank you.

by Kanan Makiya

Did the violent overthrow of the first Arab dictator to lose his hold on state power in more than thirty years, Saddam Hussein in 2003, have any kind of domino effect on the fall of other Arab dictators in the succession of events popularly known as the Arab Spring that started in Tunisia in late 2010 and continued through 2011? And if so, can it be said that in spite of all the blunders, misjudgments and hubris that accompanied the American-led Western coalition of armies that ended the regime of the Ba'th party in Iraq, its actions nonetheless contributed to the beginnings of a genuine democratization process in the Middle East, albeit one whose end is still not in sight? Finally does any of this have a bearing on what the US should or should not do in the horrific civil war that is today raging in Syria?

My contention in this essay is that there is a close connection between these two major cataclysmic events, one that has been overlooked due in part to the understandable hostility that the 2003 Iraq war has engendered in Western and Arab eyes, a hostility that was for the most part not there at the time of military action in 2003. A prime consequence of this hostility is the fact that none of the prime Arab actors on the ground during the Arab Spring be it in Tunisia, Egypt or Syria—and by actors I mean the brave young men and women doing all the protesting, and the dying—themselves saw a connection, or have been willing to even admit the possibility that there might be one.

The story of the 2003 war has its roots in an earlier war, and in an earlier uprising against tyranny directly linked to that war, that it behooves us to remember. The events in question began on August 2, 1990, the day that the Ba'th regime in Baghdad marched into Kuwait, an action that resulted in the first Gulf war of 1991 the uncompleted nature of which gave rise to repeated Western military intervention in 2003. On the heels of the ceasefire that followed the 1991 Gulf war, Iraqis south and north of the country rose up against the regime of Saddam, and were crushed within a period of 6-8 weeks.

What was this first Gulf war against Iraq in 1991 about? Remarkably, given where we are today, it was about a restoration of the Arab state system, a system we all know was set up for the most part artificially by the Western powers after WWI and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This system had been grossly violated for the first time in 80 yearsfrom within, by Saddam Hussein, when he invaded, occupied, annexed and systematically raped the state of Kuwait for nine months starting on August 2, 1990. Nothing like this had ever happened in Arab politics before. The first Gulf war enjoyed the support of the Arab regimes in whose name it was waged, but not of its peoples. Even Hafez al-Assad's Ba'th regime in Syria joined in the 1991 effort to oust its sister Ba'th regime out of Kuwait.

Read more »

by James L. Gelvin

Confirmation bias: In cognitive science, the tendency for observers to interpret data in a way that confirms their preconceptions; e.g., “The Arab Spring Started in Iraq.”

Kanan Makiya's knowledge of Arab history is, at best, spotty. In The New York Times iteration of this article he places the 2005 presidential election in Egypt in 2006; here, he gets the date right but now concludes that an election in which the incumbent purportedly received 88.6% of the vote was “contested.” Again in the Times he locates the roots of the Lebanese Cedar Revolution in the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq two years earlier; here, he correctly cites the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri as the trigger, but then fumbles the ball again by imagining two Cedar Revolutions when the rest of the world witnessed only one. These and other mistakes might be deemed minor lapses by someone who just does not know or care much about the Arab world beyond Iraq. However, there are major lapses as well. It is a major lapse that after at least four published iterations of his argument Makiya still provides no proof beyond post hoc ergo propter hoc that there was a relationship between 1991 or 2003 and 2011. And Makiya's disingenuous division of modern Arab history into two periods—one before, the other after the invasion—is not a minor lapse but sheer willfulness on his part.

According to Makiya, in the pre-invasion dark times Arabs had been lulled into a state of lethargy by leaders who fed them a steady diet of propaganda consisting of the twin romances of armed struggle and pan-Arabism and anti-Israel, anti-imperialist invective, which the masses lapped up. (Pace Makiya, pan-Arabism—the idea that all Arabs should be unified within a single state—had ceased to be a factor in Arab politics decades before 2003. And the fact that anti-imperialism still strikes a chord among Arabs is hardly unreasonable: After all, American sponsorship and support for the Iraqi sanctions that Makiya decries, as well as for autocrats from Mubarak to the Al Saud to, at various times, Saddam Hussein himself demonstrates that the United States bears no little responsibility for the misery Arabs have experienced.) For Makiya, the invasion revealed to Arabs that the autocrats who governed them were mere paper tigers, roused them to take matters into their own hands, and awakened them to the possibilities of living lives where human rights were respected and democracy might flourish. Hence, the Arab Spring.

Oh, really? Here's what actually happened:

There was no “Arab Spring.” Conservative columnists originally cooked up the term in 2005 to describe a non-event that they imagined was taking place in the Arab world as a result of George W. Bush's “Freedom Agenda.” That Arab Spring did not live up to its hype, nor did democracy come to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and yes, Iraq and Lebanon, where its cheerleaders had breathlessly predicted it would. The term was forgotten, then resurrected in 2011 after a string of uprisings that were in some ways similar and in other ways disparate broke out in the Arab world. “Arab Spring” is an unfortunate turn of phrase: By drawing on associations of hope and renewal that Spring brings, it raised expectations so high that it was inevitable they would not be met. More important, “Arab Spring” is an unfortunate turn of phrase because events in the Arab world in 2010-11 cannot be viewed as a discrete phenomenon that might be isolated within a single “season.” Rather, they were the culmination of decades-long struggles in the region that had begun long before America's misadventure in Iraq.

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