Daily Archives: March 24, 2011

The Libyan campaign: who’s in charge?

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Answer: impossible to say — as this sharp piece by Max Fisher argues.

On the fifth straight day of foreign, air- and sea-based attacks against Qaddafi’s forces, there is still no one leading the massive Western force. The U.S., as Pentagon officials frequently point out at daily press conferences, is not in charge. NATO, still deadlocked by internal disputes, is not in charge. The United Nations Security Council, which only gave enough authority to enforce a no-fly zone, is not in charge of the now far more aggressive campaign. The Arab League, which withdrew its support within hours of granting it, is certainly not in charge. It would be as if, in June 1944, the allied powers decided to invade Normandy at roughly the same time, but didn't bother to appoint General Eisenhower to command and coordinate the multi-national force.

Journalists trying to answer the question of who is in charge have been reduced, perhaps because no concrete answer yet exists, to speculating as to whether the U.S. might be willing to support France's proposal for a “steering committee” for the war, though it’s not even clear who would lead that committee or how it would delegate authority between the Western powers. Not only is no one in charge, no one wants to be, and no one has any idea who to appoint.

There appear to be two primary reasons for the confusion, both of which may also help explain why there’s no clear objective.

The first reason, Fisher maintains, is that all the states involved have different objectives. The most cynical is the frantic attempt by the French to overwrite the embarrassing fact that Sarkozy’s support for Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was deep, long-held, and consistent right up until the latter’s overthrow by popular protest. Italy needs Libyan oil more than most other states. And Germany, always reluctant, has become positively hostile to the venture — even to the extent of withdrawing four warships from NATO control in the Med.

The second reason is that nobody in Europe (or the US) is willing to take on a leadership role in a civil war in a fractured, tribalistic statelet.

As my mother used to say, never start something that you cannot finish.

“Information overload” — pshaw: that’s old hat

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Interesting interview in Inside Higher Ed.

Preamble:

As modern as the problem may seem, information overload wasn’t born in the dorm rooms of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (let alone Mark Zuckerberg). In fact, says Ann M. Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard University, the idea that more textual information exists than could possible be useful or manageable predates not only Project Gutenberg, but the printing press itself. In her new book, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Blair cites sources as far back as Seneca — “the abundance of books is distraction” — to show that the notion dates to antiquity.

While the book’s context is broad, Blair’s primary focus is on the information management strategies employed by scholars in early modern Europe, whose enthusiasm for and anxiety about textual overabundance may sound surprisingly familiar all these hundreds of years (and hundreds of millions of Google searches) later. Inside Higher Ed conducted an e-mail interview with Blair to find out more about information management in the Renaissance and today…

Tribes With Flags

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On March 21, David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote an interesting piece from Libya that posed the key question about all the new revolutions brewing in the Arab world: “Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?”

Yesterday Tom Friedman tackled the question.

This is the question because there are two kinds of states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens. They are Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more artificial states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial powers, kings or military dictators. They have no real “citizens” in the modern sense. Democratic rotations in power are impossible because each tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” — either my tribe or sect is in power or we’re dead.

It is no accident that the Mideast democracy rebellions began in three of the real countries — Iran, Egypt and Tunisia — where the populations are modern, with big homogenous majorities that put nation before sect or tribe and have enough mutual trust to come together like a family: “everyone against dad.” But as these revolutions have spread to the more tribal/sectarian societies, it becomes difficult to discern where the quest for democracy stops and the desire that “my tribe take over from your tribe” begins.

Friedman’s conclusion is that most of the remaining Middle East countries are mainly tribes with flags. in which case the prospects for democracy are, well, dim. He sees the Iraq experiment as just that — an experiment to see if an artificial country created by the straight lines on an imperialist’s pen can re-engineer itself into a democracy ruled by consent. “Enabling Iraqis to write their own social contract”, he writes, “is the most important thing America did”.

It was, in fact, the most important liberal experiment in modern Arab history because it showed that even tribes with flags can, possibly, transition through sectarianism into a modern democracy. But it is still just a hope. Iraqis still have not given us the definitive answer to their key question: Is Iraq the way Iraq is because Saddam was the way Saddam was or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is: a tribalized society? All the other Arab states now hosting rebellions — Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya — are Iraq-like civil-wars-in-waiting. Some may get lucky and their army may play the role of the guiding hand to democracy, but don’t bet on it.

Yep.