The Kicking In Of A Rotten Door. Part Three, The Shores Of Tripoli

Or the Wrecking Ball of History Takes Another Swing.

Sometimes I truly regret taking History as a major in college. It is not only that the job prospects with a history degree are anemic even in good economic times, it is also that I can see things that are painfully obvious to me, but whiz past 99% of my fellow citizens. Case in point: Libya.

Forgive me for beating on this dead and now throughly mangled horse dear reader but, we are living in a period of huge historical change. Some very large chickens are coming home to roost. Huge, monstrous, misshapen poultry the size of turbo-prop airliners have returned to the farm, and are about to kick bottoms and take names. The long suppressed dreams, wishes, ambitions, yearnings, goals and ambitions of millions in the Maghreb are being unleashed. What began as a small spark in Tunis has now become a wind-fed wildfire and is building in to a firestorm.

I had a feeling that Libya was going to be a flash point. No right thinking people could tolerate the corruptions and shear clown-car antics of Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi indefinitely. The man is a poster-child for the dangers of self-indulgence. He follows the pattern of most Tin-Pot Dictators and Pugilists in that he did not have the common sense to quit while he was ahead; he stayed on long past his prime.  There will be no palatial rest home on the Sinai for Gaddafi; no retirement at  Sharm el Sheikh.

The reason Gaddafi was headed for a fall is depressingly simple; in a word it is corruption. The man, the regime, has been befouling the Maghreb since 1969. That is just too long dear reader. There is no nice way to put this; he got sloppy and stupid in those forty odd years. He has become thoroughly invested in his own PR and his own oddball little world.

Do not underestimate the power of entropy in this sad tale; this regime has been in a death spiral for quite a long time. The signs were glaringly obvious to those who would look. Any leader who runs around with a Praetorian Guard made solely of virginal Amazonians has a serious disconnect with reality. The five hour long speeches to the U.N. were also a rather big hint. And the cloths, sweet Baby Jesus on a pogo stick, how could a person miss those cloths? The man was outlandishly dressed for a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, never mind the world stage. There is no propaganda in the world that can counter that kind of sheer idiocy and self-indulgence. The citizens of Libya had to be secretly fuming at the laughing stock their leader ( and thereby their nation) had become.

Add to that insult the injury that is routinely dished out by an autocratic state, and Libya was due to explode. When Egypt gave Mubarak the heave-ho it was almost inevitable that Gaddafi would be challenged. Once challenged, it was almost inevitable that he would react badly. The threat of Civil War by the regime was answered by the populace with a resounding “Have At You!” While there is no confirmation, I am sure that the military has fractured thanks to the heavy-handed machinations of Muammar and son. The best guess is that the lower ranks, especially the Captains and below, are the ones defecting. They are younger and less welded to the regime. They are the new generation. In them is the store of four decades of resentment, frustration and anger. They see no point in killing their own people for this corrupt, venial, and despotic regime.

Ironically it was the opening to Libya via the “Global War on Terror” that made some of this possible. With the opening to the West, Gaddafi’s regime lost its raison d'être. The army may have stayed loyal if Libya was still on the axis of evil. The fiction of Libya being a revolutionary regime in opposition to West could have been maintained. But thanks to a confluence of idiocy in D.C. and egomania in Tripoli, the ideological underpinnings of the Libyan regime were shredded.  For a becoming a client in the GWT, Gaddafi got a modicum of respectability. It looked like a good idea all around until a fruit vender in Tunisia set himself on fire as an act of protest and subversion.

From such small pebbles do mighty avalanches grow. Of course Washington, and the hermetically sealed chattering classes that rule there, was caught flat footed. It is only partly correct to blame 20th century thinking in a 21 century world for this failure of foresight. How to talk about this inconvenient truth? How to bring up some of the hard-edged facts on the ground without being branded an Isolationist or a Far-Left Loon, or both? This is not just an elite locked into a Cold War mindset. This is something more profound and much more unpleasant. This is Hegemony. More bluntly: this is Empire.

It is off-putting to even use those two words; Hegemon and Empire. We are supposed to be the good guys, spreading peace, prosperity, and democracy all over the world. Still, if it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, eats like a duck, and has the bill of a duck, it is at least some kind of water-foul. Our blind spots are the blind spots of a Hegemon. We value control and stability over everything else. We ignore any and every datum that contradicts our rational for overlordship. We refuse to believe that other people may want to do things differently, or more exactly to be separate from us. We refuse to see other cultures or other polities as legitimate. Most importantly we keep butting in were we are not welcome. It is called over-reach, and we have a very bad case of it.

The awful truth is that the U.S. is over-extended. We are attempting to run the lives of too many people in too many lands and we are paying the price for it. We are bogged down in two wars of choice; neither of which make any sense. We pointlessly invaded Iraq and handed that oil-rich state over to Iran. Prior to that, we charged into Afghanistan with insufficient resources, and then lost the whole thread of why we went into the graveyard of empires in the first place. Mission creep in both Iraq and Afghanistan has occurred, with Afghanistan that taking the prize for the worst example. Where is OBL and his unhappy al Qaeda campers? Not in Afghanistan anymore.  What to do? Let’s blunder into Pakistan with all the subtlety of a bull elephant in heat; that will gain us friends and influence people.

What is required, and what is unlikely to occur, is a total re-think of what the National Interest really is. I’m afraid that Obama does not have the mental landscape to accomplish this. He is mired in outdated concepts of power politics that died with the Soviet Union.

This whole GWT or whatever it is called now, is bunk. It is nothing more that an attempt to rehash and re-fight the Cold War. Only this time we are going to fight it “right” or at least in the way the NeoCons think is right. This time we are going to be perfect Barbarians; perfect berzerkers. We are going to swing our mighty axes, and damn the consequences. We have our freshly minted Yoo memo in our hands , and with this unholy dispensation we are out to crush some skulls, and a few naughty bits while we are at it. We are going to follow Dead-Eye Dick Cheney’s guiding star, and toss civilized behavior aside. We will allow ourselves to slip into delusion and mania.

I don’t see how in the present right-wing induced mania, and the toxic politics that it engenders, the US, how we manages to have a serious discussion about where our National Interest lies. We will instead have a side-show about how Obama “lost” Egypt or Bahrain or whatever. Our nation will continue to be the deer in the headlights, constantly run over by the Peterbilt of onrushing events. Even if Obama had a good foreign policy notion rattling in his skull, and he does not, he could never get it past the partisan hacks now in control of the Republican Party-- and sadly the Democratic Party too. What will never be considered is whether the particular nation under discussion was “ours”  in the first place.

My only hope, and what a oxymoronic and despairing hope it has become, is that the onrush of events outpaces any consensus the elites of D.C. come up with. As with everything else in the fever swamps of the Potomac, any consensus derived by those political idiot-savants will have no correspondence with facts on the ground. The D.C. consensus will be exact opposite of what needs to be done; no matter what it is. Our system of government is fundamentally broken. It is shot through with corruption and only serves the narrow interest of a very few, very inbred, very greedy, very short-sighted interests. When the tail of crony capitalism wags the dog of U.S. International policy, no good will come of the process.

But back to the original subject of this post, that of Libya. The regime is done for. There is no victory other than a Pyrrhic one for Gaddafi and company. All roads lead to ignonymity. The only question is whether the road taken is on the Interstate or on a slower, more scenic, secondary or tertiary route. My guess is most people will not want to watch the final end of Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi. This is not a man fated to die in his sleep. My guess is his will be a very nasty and bloody end; definitely not family viewing material. This is what happen when you cry havoc and let loose the dogs of civil war; quite often the dogs eat you. And on that very grim and macabre note I will leave you, gentle reader, until next time for part four, five, perhaps six. History is not done, not by a long shot.

The Kicking In Of A Rotten Door Pt 2

Musings on wrecking balls and other forces of history.

What to say about the events in Egypt on the twelfth of February of two thousandth and eleventh year of the Common Era? So many trivial events are labeled “historical” these days that when a true historical event occurs we are at a loss for words. Over sixty years of political process and failure created the events we witnessed over two weeks. History went into overdrive and the world has one less corrupt, evil, tin-pot dictator to kick around.

But this process is not over, not by a long-shot. Egypt is not some peripheral Maghreb state. It is not some oddball nation that last graced the notice of the United States in Ottoman times and only then because it harbored pirates. Egypt matters. Not because of the peace treaty with Israel. No, believe it or else, that is a peripheral issue. The peace treaty is obsession of denizens of the Potomac fever swamps. Egypt matters not only because it is the most populous state in all of the Near East but because it is Egypt.

This is the land of great memory and a glorious history. It the land of the Pharaohs. It it is the land of the Ptolemaic dynasty and Cleopatra. It is the land of Fatimids and their dynasty, It is the land of the Ayyubid dynasty, started by near mythic Saladin. It is the  land were pride of place and pride of history are palpable. To this day it a center of learning, the arts, culture, philosophy, religion and yes, politics. What Egypt does matters.

The collapse of the Mubarak Kleptocracy and the pivotal role the military played in it are critical to our understanding of what happened and what happens next. Small “d” democratic reforms stand or fall by the grace of the bayonets of the Egyptian Army. 

Yet the Army in Egypt is not the end of the discussion. The institution can only hold on to its privileged position by the consent of the Egyptian people. It knew this and acted accordingly when crunch time came. It first acted as a passive buffer between the populace and the regime. Then, when it matter. it acted as an active participant in the revolution.

Of course such events cannot happen without the requisite navel-gazing by the Beltway elites and their sundry mouthpieces in the Moron Media. I have never been so happy not to own a T.V. as I have been for the last two weeks. The oceans of spittle that have wash over most of my fellow citizens has passed me by. I have been blissfully unaware to ravings of Beck, Hannity, Sister Sara Palin, Tweety and the other palavering pundits that have been dumbing down the conversation for fun and profit. One more time gentle reader, what we, the U.S., do or do not do matters very little. Control is an illusion. Our opinion counts for very little when all is said is done. We operate on the margins when we operate at all.

Seriously, we have to get over our selves. The Hegemony of the U.S. over world affairs is way past its sell by date. This has nothing to do with the occupant in the White House. This is huge, impersonal forces of history on the move. No hare-brain conspiracies by dry-drunk Mormon crackpots needed. No need for Manchurian Candidate, Bedwetting, Marxist, Socialist, Fascist, Islamist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-American, Progressive (did you notice he’s black) bug-a-boos.  These forces are already aligning in Yemen, Iran, and Algeria; who knows what tomorrow or the next week may bring.

This is why all the sound and fury about Obama is really beside the point. Yes, the man got blind-sided by the events in Egypt; many did. Yes, the man could have gotten the messaging a little better, a little more coherent. I still find it hard to fault the man too much. He is merely a reflection of the muddle that passes for thinking in the fever swamps of the Potomac. Obama’s failures reflect the failures of the Conventional Wisdom.  D.C. still has not gotten the message; the rest of the world dose not give a damn what Washington insiders think is the correct process is. D.C.’s obsessions carry no weight with the developing world. D.C.’s obsessions carry no weight with reality. People are on the move. Cultures are on the move. Politics are on the move. Faiths are on the move. Nations are on the move. They are not going to bother with a mother-may-I; they are not going to ask permission from Washington DC. 

One more time with feeling; our options are a lot more circumspect, a lot more limited than we think. The best thing any nation or people can do when the wrecking ball of historical events gathers speed is to get the hell out of the way. Mubarak did not understand this brutal fact of survival and got plastered. 

I wish I could tell you, gentle reader, where this is all headed. Wither the Maghreb? Wither the greater Arab Middle East? I don’t have a clue. I will offer one pointer, one datum to look out for: corruption. The door that gets kicked in next will be the one that is the most rotten. While the rage of the populace gets tons of ink, no one bothers much with a much more important factor : entropy. These despotic regimes have a definite shelf life. Even when they have the benefit of an overarching ideology like the USSR, they eventually fall apart from shear exhaustion and corruption. Many regimes are hard up against this limit. The ideology of Arab Nationalism is, as pointed out before, deader than Marly’s ghost. The authoritarian regimes that were founded on this ideology have no legitimacy worth mentioning; they are held together by shear military force. Sooner or later there will be an epic fail. Sooner or later the entropy of corruption will play havoc with these illegitimate governments. A wiser U.S. policy would recognize this and understand that the “stability” it craves in the Arab world ( and in the larger developing world) is a Chimera. These governments are closed systems, and closed systems eventually fail. 

Such failure is not necessarily a good thing. It may not lead to any recognizable form of democracy. We could see some states devolve in to anarchy, or in to anachronism ,or  in to a combination of both. Still, the best option for the U.S. is to avoid the temptation to impose our will on these nation’s domestic arrangements. We are not nearly as smart as we think we are, and we could make a bad situation infinitely worse with our interventions. In this regard Obama’s natural conservatism has served him well. His no-sudden-moves default prevented him from getting on the wrong side of history with Mubarak. Personally I hope the man sticks to his natural inclination to wait-and-see.

Waiting and seeing is the best option for our interests. Sorry for being redundant but, huge historical forces are at play. The normal rules of regimes, foreign affairs, and politics no longer apply. Many nations in the Maghreb and in the Near East are about to undergo a severe challenge to the status quo. The populous of these nations is about to get very frisky, so much so that the ordinary institutions of repression and control may fail. This has little to do with social networking or Web 2.0. This has much to do with broad social movements that become irresistible forces. Facebook and Twitter are mere tools, they are not the technological end-all and be-all for these movements. Technology is just one more form of kinetic energy that is being added to the wrecking ball that is headed straight at these corrupt and failing regimes. Our best option as the United States is a quiet but firm support for democracy and democratic reform. We need to speak softly and leave our big stick at home.

Such low-key responses don’t sit well with many political observers. It especially does not play well with the professional Obama haters. That usual gang of idiots will use any brickbat handy to knock down the President. It gets tiresome. Obama was neither genius nor horrific with his handling of the Egyptian crisis. He was mediocre. He managed to muddle through. One hopes he ups his game because he will need to be much more coherent when the next flair-up happens. Consistency has to be key, he can not have one response for Iran and a different response to Bahrain. The people in the area will be able to sniff out hypocrisy with great efficiency and with dreadful consequences for U.S. diplomacy. Revolution is in the air; the Revenge of History has just begun.

The Kicking In Of A Rotten Door

Mark Twain once observed that history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes. One of those rhymes is how revolutions happens. Since the French Revolution these events have very often been the kicking in of a rotten door. That is to say the power structure that rules the land had become so corrupt, feckless, incompetent and clueless that all that was required for its overthrow it was for a small dedicated group to perform the act.  The best example of this was the Bolshevik seizure of power in October of 1917.

Looking at Tunisia, it fills the bill quite well. The regime was epically corrupt, it was hated, brutal, detached, and incompetent. There was a huge, yawning chasm between the rulers and ruled. The nation was a tinder-box just waiting for a spark.

Another of those odd rhymes is the obscure event or person that sets off the conflagration. Granted the political alignments of Fin de siècle Europe guaranteed that “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” could cause disaster for all. Still, no one would have picked out Gavrilo Princip to be spark that caused the fire-storm that was WWI. What an odd thing it would be if this very obscure fruit vender is the pebble that causes a political avalanche in the Maghreb and beyond. History aligned with serendipity can produce a very perverse iambic pentameter. 

The question, especially in Egypt, is exactly how rotten is the door that is being kicked? How bad is the damage being done by the termites of nepotism, fecklessness, corruption, venality, sloth, incompetence, cronyism, and so forth?

The rot is rather pervasive. The grand ideas first posited by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Arab socialism have fallen away. Even at the beginning, they failed to match the harsh realities on the ground. But as time rolled on, the progression of the Egyptian state has been ever more corrupt and authoritarian. By the end game of the Hosni Mubarak era, Egypt was on the road to following its former partner in the UAE, Syria; a monarchy by another name. The dirty not-so-secret that Hosni Mubarak’s son is slated to pick up the leadership reigns from dear-old-dad has got to be an affront to the proud Egyptians. 

A wrecking ball is headed right for the house that Hosni built; can it survive the blow?

It all depends on the Army. In Iran, the forces of counter-revolution, of repression, were up to the task; they were more than willing to beat, bludgeon, and kill their fellow citizens. But in Egypt it may be a totally different matter. There is nothing special about this; nothing unique about the ancient land of the Pharaohs. There is nothing more than time. The acid of corruption has had much more time to do its damage to the Egyptian kleptocracy. The question again is, “exactly how rotten is that door.” If the Army abandons Hosni Mubarak, it is all over, stick a fork in him because he is done.

If Mubarak is sent to exile, if he is tossed under the bus, a big if to be sure, it will be “bar the door Katie” for our efforts in the Maghreb. There are any number of client states that may show us the exit portal. The number of “pro-Western” states that do not reflect the wishes of a vast majority of their citizens is legion. Blow-back has been building up since the beginning of the Cold War with nary a relief valve in sight. We as a nation have been talking a good game about wanting democracy in the Arab lands, that we want rule by the people,but do we really have the stomach for what that may really entail? It could get very, very ugly. Remember dear reader, the most likely successors to these pro-Western states is a Hamas-like Islamic Republic. Exactly what is our response if the Maghreb breaks out in a rash of Political Islam? Do we do the diplomatic equivalent of prescribing a soothing ointment, and hope it goes away?

I don’t want to be all gloom and doom, but one of the rhymes of history is that Revolutions are always messy. There is lots of Sturm und Drang, lots of to-ing and fro-ing, lots of losers and ,quite often, lots of dead bodies. Revolutions are almost always a violent affair that release the darker passions of the nation. What will happen in Egypt if those passions that have been bottled up for the last fifty plus years are released? It is not a happy thought.

Not to get too Marxist here, but there is a central contradiction between the ruling elites of the Arab world,  the supposed reason for their regimes existence, and the reality on the ground. Pan-Arabism as an ideology has been dead for a long time and its rotting corpse is befouling the political progress and process of the Arab lands. Ditto for the Socialism that underpinned Pan-Arabism. This has left the masses totally unprotected from the ravages of Corporate Capitalism and its program of Neocolonialism. The question of push back has become more of when rather than of if.

So, to stretch a metaphor to the breaking point and beyond, where is this rhyme going? Are we going to something akin to the year 1989 in Europe? Is this going to be a parallel to the fall of the iron curtain? One thing for sure, we are, once again, going to be informed of the exact limits to our power and our attempts at hegemony. There will not much our most sacred lady of the tastefully appointed pant-suit will be able to do for good or ill in Egypt.  There will not be much President Hope and Change will be able to do either. All the important actors will reside in the land of the Nile.  Welcome, at last ,dear reader to the true post Cold War era. Welcome to the Great Thaw. Welcome to the Revenge of History.

I don’t know if the US ruling class has gotten message though. They have seemed to have latched on to the notion that the Global War on Terror is an equivalent struggle to the Cold War. Exactly how one manages to make an equivalence between OBL and his un-merry bunch of Pashtun campers to the military behemoth and existential threat that was the USSR is one of the greater mysteries of U.S. political thinking. Be that as it may, the rest of the world is not buying it. It is almost a decade since the twin towers fell and the rest of the world has moved on. Look for more events like the ones in Tunisia and Egypt. Look for more of these forceful challenges to the status quo.Look for Washington to be surprised and dumbfounded when this happens. Look for people all over the world to be kicking in the rotten doors of their regimes. 

A Sunday In December

An anniversary is creeping up on us. It’s an odd one, a red-headed stepchild to the anniversary that will happen next year to much hoopla. Sixty-nine years ago the U.S. was rudely awaken by the news that the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii had been attacked.

In that one day the Empire of Japan broke the back of U.S. Pacific power for nearly two years. The pride of the fleet, the battleships, were sunk at their piers. It was the worst day in the history of the U.S. Navy.  Never before and never again would the U.S.N. suffer such a one-sided and humiliating loss. Never again would they be caught so unawares.

The passage of time has altered much but not the sacred waters of Pearl Harbor.  Ships still pass and give honors to the USS Arizona. The ship is much more than the final resting place of the officers and men who died nearly seventy years ago. It also a marker.

The Arizona marks the end of an era. Not only did the era of the Dreadnoughts pass that day, but so also an insular United States. The creation of the Hyperpower that is the modern United States began on that awful day. It was a creation of the blood, sweat and tears  the sailors and airmen shed that day.

It is hard not to contrast the iconic image of that day, the explosion of the USS Arizona, to the iconic image of another day closer to our own times, the airplane strike into the South Tower of NYC’s World Trade Center. In two short years Pear Harbor was bigger, better, and more supplied with the implements of war. The replacement of the WTC is still a big hole in the ground. No indication of when the “Freedom Tower” will actually be up and running. There is good reason that the WWII generation is called “The Greatest Generation.”

As that generation slowly fades into history, as the soldiers, sailors, airmen, coast guardians, merchant mariners, and marines answer the last call. As these heros slowly muster out of our presence, let us remember them and all those who defend our nation.

Eleventh Hour Of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

It is Veterans' Day in the U.S. and more properly Remembrance Day in much of Europe. With the last living memory of the war that helped to create the holiday, World War One, almost all gone, it becomes even more important to remember the cost of all war but especially the war to end all wars.

The War was a gruesome introduction into one of the most violent centuries endured in human history. It was death on an industrial scale. It was  the end of 19th century imperialism, and the beginning of the end of European Colonialism. It  was the creation of an entire lost generation.

The ripples from that great conflict carry on even today. It is a somber remembrance. To truly remember the day purchase a poppy from a vet today and if you can visit a military cemetery. Remember the day. Remember the sacrifice. Remember our basic humanity. Pause, reflect and have a great Veterans’ Day.

Why I am never invited to parties: Ottoman History edition.

The passing of the great Anniversary of the end of WW1 is good as any reason to offer up a third article in less than seven days about the Great War. The last two articles were a rather Eurocentric affair only lightly brushing on the last Empire to get hit by that epic event.

Of all the Empires sucked into the vortex of the War To End All Wars the one that had the most peripheral interest in the machinations of Western Europe was the crumbling majesty of Osman’s realm.

The seed of destruction had been laid long before. The Europeans, fractured, bickering and disjointed had blundered into their salvation. Just a few decades after Mehmet II had achieved the goal capturing Constantine’s city in 1453, Portugal and Spain had run into the Americas. Stripped of the Mediterranean Sea, literally the ocean in the middle of the land, Europe, of necessity, focused its efforts on the bigger, nastier, more dangerous Atlantic.

In two generations Europe had found its way around the horn of Africa and had cut out the Muslim middlemen of Asia Minor. In 1492 a mad Genoese captain relying on terrible mathematics got seriously lucky and stumbled across a whole “new world.” Adding insult to injury Spain’s conquest of Mesoamerica flooded Europe with vast quantities of gold. As the Centuries passed Europe’s Colombian exchange slowly shifted the center of power to those nations that had cut their teeth on the Atlantic trade. It was Prince Henry the Navigator and his spiritual heirs that laid the foundations for Western European Hegemony.


The long, slow, systemic decay of the Ottomans began internally. Osman’s heirs succumbed to same dynastic dissolution that every other monarchy has suffered since the beginning of documentation. Sooner or later, the ruling family stops producing marvels and starts producing mere mortals. Those mortals are then succeeded by fools and incompetents. Self absorbed rulers let corrupt secondary personalities rule while they indulge themselves in debauchery. Worse for the dynasty are the centripetal forces that are allowed free reign. Finally the self-serving elites hamstring any ruler who has even the slightest notion of enacting reform.

It was Napoleon who laid bare the fecklessness of the Ottomans. Napoleon’s disciplined and modern infantry squares exposed the sorry state of the Sultans military strength. Only the strength of the British Navy spared the Sultan further embarrassment.

Still the 19th Century was one long trudge through humiliation for the former terror of Europe. The Janissary might of the Ottomans was not even a pale shadow of itself; it was mostly an internal threat to the Sultan who finally wiped it out in 1826.

The replacement army was not much better. One by one the Orthodox Christian peoples of the Empire slipped away from the Sultan. The first to go was Greece. Other nations followed. Beginning in 1877 and not really ending until 1913 Ottoman arms and Ottoman control were pushed out of the Balkans. In 1913 the Sultan only held a tiny sliver of land on the West side of the Bosporus.

Not only was Europe irretrievably lost but so too was the entire Maghreb. First local potentates had detached the land from Istanbul’s control. Then, like vultures on a fresh kill, the Colonial powers descended. Lands that had been part of Dar el Islam since the conquests of the Umayyad Caliphate now found themselves being under the thumb of Christian colonial rulers.

There was little the Sultan in the far off Topkapi Palace could do about it. A succession of ill advised rulers had literally mortgaged off their realm to those same Colonial Europeans. 80% of the tax revenue of the state was siphoned off to pay the debts the Sultans had racked up with European Bankers. Whole portions of the Ottoman economy were in the hands of foreign interlopers. Worse for the empire those portions of the economy not being run by external forces were run by non-Muslim Armenians and Greeks.

Other than Russia one would be hard pressed to find a political entity less prepared for the hideous pressures of a war of attrition than the Ottomans. It took one of the worst examples of British Diplomacy to mange to bring the armies of the Sultan into war.

Ever since Napoleon had crashed into Egypt the United Kingdom had been the Sultan’s shield. Brittan did this not out of any love for the heirs of Osman but to keep Russia and Austria-Hungry out of the collapsing Empire. Britain preferred the incompetent Ottomans controlling the Dardanelles to the ever expanding Russian Empire. The U.K and France even managed to temporarily put aside their century’s long antagonism to rob the Russians of the Crimea in 1858.

All this hard work in propping up “The Sick Man of Europe” by the British came to naught in the early part of the 20th Century. For all intents and purposes British Diplomacy gift wrapped the empire to the up and coming power of Germany. The real power in the Ottoman Empire, the military officers known as the “Young Turks,” had enough of the slights of John Bull and eagerly accepted the ministrations of the Germans.

Much to their chagrin the Young Turks' new found friends got them embroiled in a war that the empire had little chance of surviving. What was amazing was how long and how hard the Empire fought for its existence.

British contempt for the empire was fully reveled by the Gallipoli offensive. It was a mad campaign right from the start. The principles of successful amphibious landings were a full generation and one whole war away. It was the wrong tactic, at the wrong place, with the wrong technology, with the wrong enemy. To this day the Dardanelles Campaign is studied by military planers as an example of how not to run amphibious warfare.

WW1 was a war that favored defensive strategy and tactics. With the Ottomans entrenched with their backs to their capitol the result was a bloodbath for the Commonwealth troops. Dug into their trenches and holding the high ground the Ottomans mercilessly slaughtered the hapless invaders. The same horrible calculus that ruled the Western front accumulated the same numbers of pointless deaths for the attackers at Çanakkale.

Gallipoli was the last great victory for Ottoman arms. It was however a Pyrrhic victory. Coming through the Sultan’s back door, the British were able to use their superior arms and tactics to slowly grind the Ottomans into a powder. Even the land betrayed the cause. In Gallipoli the empire could use the terrain and the short lines of communications to win the battle. But in the Levant and in Mesopotamia it was a war of movement. Without the backstop of geography and entrenchment to aid the Ottomans the British slowly overwhelmed the Sultan’s armies. Indifference or outright hostility of the locals to the Ottoman cause was the last and superfluous straw added to an already broken back.

By the end of the war those structural failures of the empire were working overtime. The empire lacked critical resources of men and material. The corrosive ideas of self-determination and nationality ripped the social-political underpinnings of the empire. Islam was no longer an overarching identification. More local and parochial identifiers came to the fore. People like the Kurds began to dream of their own nation run by their own ethic leadership. No longer were they interested in the identity offered by the religion of the prophet. The long and incompetent rule by Sultan had too deeply poisoned that well.

The Muslim faithful no longer accepted the claim of the Sultan to be the Caliph of the religion. The arms of the prophet, while still hanging in the Topkapi Palace, no longer symbolized anything more than how far the heirs of Osman had fallen from the true faith. The disastrous 19th Century had evaporated any claim the Sultans had to being rightly guided guardians of Islamic world. The Sultans could not even prevent their Viziers from routinely deposing them. If the Sultan could not even keep his worthless palace servants in line who was he to try to rule over Dar el Islam? When the Sultan declared jihad at the urging of his German allies, the odd dog barked but the faithful studiously ignored the call. The very idea of Dar el Islam and its Caliph no longer held any sway. There was a new idea coming in from the infidel West.

That idea was nationalism. It was, and continues to be, the great bug bear of Dar el Islam. In the place of the rule of Islam, nationalism offers much more tempting and understandable prospects. People know their culture, they know their traditions, they know their ethnicities, they know their neighbors, they know their history, and they know their land. Nationalism revels in these particulars. Combined with secularism, the other bug bear of Islam, nationalism can deliver results. Power, Prestige, economic growth, and other benefits flow from nationalism. Islam could only offer vague promises in the afterlife and distant majesty that had no bearing on the present situation.

It was nationalism that saved Anatolian Asia Minor. Without the core idea of a Turkish nation and the man to lead it, the land would have been carved up into pieces by the Colonial machinations of Sikes-Picot. A huge, unsustainable Greece would control the coast while Kurdistan, Armenia and other creations of the fevered imaginations of far off Western Europe have left only a pathetic rump of territory to the Turks. Love him or hate him Mustafa Kemal, latter called Atatürk, saved Asia Minor that fate.

Islamists despise the man with good reason. Atatürk looking at the endemic weakness of the Ottoman Empire placed all of the blame for its sorry state on the concept of the Caliphate. When he gained power he went into secularist overdrive. What followed was nearly 75 years of the oppression of Turkey’s Islamic soul. The iron boot of a thinly disguised military dictatorship stood on the neck of a deeply religious and rural people. Western observers love to ramble on continuously about the “moderation” of Turkish Islam conveniently forgetting that it was “moderation” secured by a bayonet to the backside.

Turkish laïcité, brutally enforced by Atatürk and his heirs has been high price to pay for the salvation of the nation. Kemalist nationalism has also been a heavy burden on the non-Turkish peoples of the nation. The Kurds have been ruthlessly oppressed by Ankara and the Armenians have never forgotten there horrific slaughter at the founding of modern Turkey.

Still with all his faults Atatürk manage to do a credible job of saving something from the wreckage of the Great War. The late Ottoman Empire did not have the strength to survive that calamity. It had nearly insurmountable structural deficiencies. Reform, when it came, was always too little and too late. Even the modest and inadequate reforms were too much for the entrenched selfish interests driving the empire to ruin. Reforming Sultans were routinely and depressingly deposed by conniving, corrupt, conspirators who only cared about their own personal prerogatives. Court intriguers installed weak, incompetent rulers who only hastened the general collapse. The old guards were termites busily chewing away at the very structures that protected them. It is an old historical tale which repeats in many nations, many empires, and many cultures. It is the triumph of the mediocrities. It is the victory of the ants. Great cultures and great empires become corrupt, ridged, and unmanageable. At a point some great force of history comes in and kicks in the rotten structure.

The final death of the Ottoman Empire was both an accident of history and an inevitability. The social, political and religious underpinning of the empire had no real response to the huge, impersonal forces rising up to overwhelm it. The corrosive idea of nationalism had dissolved the structures of Europe that given it rise. The power of modern corporate capitalism had smashed the old ways of doing business. The ever accelerating speed of modern science and technology left the theological underpinnings of Islam choking in the dust of the past. Learned scholars, still trying to make heads or tales about whether the potato was haraam or not, could not adjust to the ever increasing novelties the West was dropping at their congregants’ doorstep. The Islamic scholars had no real response to fact that the infidel Christians had all the cool toys. They were left to splutter how evil, anti-traditional, and un-Islamic this all was but they had no real way to rectify the imbalance. All the angry Mullahs could do was to make the situation worse by stemming any and all reform. Totally tied to tradition, the empire was unable to cast off the unnecessary ballast and the ship of the Ottoman state was unable to steer to a safe harbor. Instead it broke apart in the treacherous seas that sunk all the other Empires of the early 20th Century.

Like their Christian counterparts the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the only way the Ottomans could have survived the Great War was to not participate in it in the first place. Unfortunately for the leaders of the empire they did not have the ever crafty and totally amoral Atatürk to lead them. In the next war Atatürk's successor had learned the lesson of his feckless predecessors and stayed coolly, calmly and resolutely neutral. Give the devil his due; İsmet İnönü , having learned at Atatürk’s feet, knew a bad bet when he saw one.

Cross Posted at History Is Not What it Used to be

Singularities in History

If one looks at history from the long view you will notice that certain times and certain epochs are denser than other. Take the history of France, the era of the Revolution and Napoleon has a density and a flavor that other sections of French history lack. Taking a long view one can see cultural, political and ideological forces coalescing into one point of hyper-importance. It is always hard to actually tease out the larger forces because they always collect around a singular personality. For example ancient Rome was tending toward absolute rule long before Julius Caesar ambled across the Rubicon but the specifics of the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Imperium are hard to imagine with out the central figure of Caesar and his overarching will to power.

The best way to understand these phenomena is to borrow an idea from astrophysics. Before starting down this path an apology is offered to any of the good scientists who labor in this field. Yes, a metaphor is going to be taken and run with far from its source material.

If one looks at the larger impersonal features of history they all have a specific heft and gravity to them. Economics, culture, religion, politics, society all have a certain gravitational pull to them. Just like the massive structures and forces in the physical world they too bend and distort the fabric of the landscape they reside in. As these forces move through time they interact with each other, attracting here and repelling there.

It is at very special times in history that all these forces will focus together and form a singularity. When the proper lynch-pin arrives, when the proper historical person appears, the whole fabric of human life changes.

Unfortunately just like their astronomical brothers these massive collections, these singularities of history, defy easy explanation. They have their own strange, chaotic rules. Just as no light can escape a black hole, the astrophysical singularity, no reason can escape a historical singularity.

Both phenomena are best observed at a distance. Get too close to either event horizon and you get sucked down a rabbit hole that has no exit. Good productive lives have been lost by people who have surrendered to the minutia of Napoleonic France for instance. The history of Hitler and the Third Reich is another massive reality-bending phenomenon.

Look one of the bigger of these events, WWI. Just as light bends and time unravels when passing a massive black hole in space, human events bends, twists and distorts around WWI. Before WWI colonialism was at its peak, after WWI it was mortally wounded. Before WWI the aristocracy and the bourgeois had reach an iron-clad social-political system that was self-perpetuating, self-regulating and kept the working class in check. After WWI the Aristocracy had imploded, the bourgeois were in a state of narcolepsy and the working class was grabbing the brass ring of power. Even the political map of Europe was radically altered by WWI. Four empires that had stood for hundreds of years had evaporated; the fifth empire of the UK was ambulatory corpse. Europe is still trying to adjust to the reality of the collapse of the Prussian, Austrian, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Granted it took the collapse of the Iron Curtain to finally seal the end of the Russian hegemonic efforts.

People forget how big a historical wrecking ball WWI was because it was so quickly followed by the second swing of that ball known as WWII. Even the effect of that massive blow was obscured by the false stability of the Cold War. With the political and ideological freeze of the Cold War over, the pent-up political, social, and other forces liberated by the thaw are running wild. With the end of the Cold War we are not so much witnessing the end of history as we are witnessing the revenge of history.

It is hard to say what type of singularity of history we are racing toward. With their heads stuck in the past historians make the worst predictors of the future. Still the easy prediction for the next critical event is the most depressing for the U.S. The next great historical act is the end of United States hegemony. We are headed for a fall from grace.

One can see the signs already, the pervasive political corruption, the rigidity of political discourse, the lack of good will, the failure in leadership, the lack of political inventiveness, and the willingness of large portions of the population to sabotage compromise. Most importantly one can see the loss of core values, no not sexual mores but core political values. For nine years now the political system and the citizens of the US have allowed grave crimes to go unaccounted for. Massive violations of our civil rights (FISA) have been allowed to continue. Massive violations of the norms of civilized conduct (torture) have not been punished. It is hard to say if like Rome in the fourth century or Byzantium in the fifteenth that our doom is inevitable.

The even bigger elephant in the room is the confluence of forces that will bring about what can only be described as the cleaning of the fouled nest. Our present global disorganization is headed for a wall. Capitalism, which was once symbiotic with our global society, has now become parasitic. Worse it has become a metastatic cancer. Population growth is unsustainable and we are slowly poisoning the earth with CO2 and other toxic substances. Left unchecked these forces will coalesce into a singularity that will make the fall or Rome and the following Dark Age look like a refined tea party. It all depends of the personalities of the leaders.

Our problem is that we have systemic issues in how we are lead. In short we suffer under what can be described as the Addams Contradiction. In his five book trilogy (don’t ask, just go with it) The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Universe Douglas Addams sarcastically pointed out the central failure of our leadership. Simply put any one who wants the job of leader, any one who for instance who wants to be President of the United States, is a person who absolutely can not be trusted in that position. More and more that idea appears to be more truth than fiction. Our present political system seems to reward the very type of leaders we absolutely should not have.
Meanwhile the people who could actually help us out of our current predicament are de-incentivized to lead. Our brilliant personalities, our stellar individuals, are quickly weeded out by the political process and we are left with go-along-to-get-along glad-handers and other mediocrities. Nothing truly challenges the status quo and conventional wisdom. We continue on our way despite all the systemic flashing red lights. Entrenched interests continue to push their narrow, short-term goals while the long term accounting only gets worse. Instead of the flexibility we need in our society, we seem to only get more rigid and hence more brittle. The politics of personal destruction rules with each side throwing low blows and bathing deeply in the waters of hypocrisy.

It is hard to determine where this is all this is going other than we are headed to another singularity of history. Looking at the forces involved it looks like a big monster. It looks like the historical equivalent of those huge astronomical black holes that hold galaxies together. Buckle up dear reader it is going to be one hell of a ride.