Friday, March 07, 2003

[Colin Glassey] We can Fight Iraq Without Turkey News that the Turkish Parliament turned down the U.S. proposal for basing U.S. Army forces inside Turkey prior to an invasion of Turkey has been seen by some as a cause for alarm. I'm not at all sure it is a problem for the U.S. or for the people of Iraq, specifically the Kurds. In late 2001, Will Safire proposed a thought experiment in which he suggested we allow divide Iraq into multiple regions. The northern region of Iraq would be given to Turkey, the southern region given to Kuwait, and the central area would stay "Iraq". This was the "take out Iraq on the cheap" option. We don't (yet) live a world where the countries are carved up like slices of cake like they were 100 years ago. So, the U.S. Government never made this offer to Turkey and instead we told Turkey our forces were going into Iraq and they needed to stay out. Turkey seemingly didn't much like this proposal (nor the 25 billion dollars in direct aid and loan guarentees), or at least they didn't like it enough to pass the authorization in parliament. Is this bad? I think not. The truth is that 15% of Iraq is already free from Saddam, its under the control of the two Kurdish "mini-states" (this is a map of both "mini-states"). These Kurdish mini-states have their own armies, governments, press, internet cafes, and not too much political repression. To some degree democracy has already sprung up in Iraq, and Turkish troops in northern Iraq would only cause trouble. This is a (now rare) good editorial from the New York Times on Turkey and Kurdistan. Bottom line: Turkey should stay out of Iraq and if the Kurds (like the Kosovars in souther Serbia) want to live independently of a nation that has in times past brutally treated them, we should not prevent this. 12:42:13 PM     [Colin Glassey] Camille Paglia on Religion in the United States Paglia has a long, somewhat rambeling essay on religious cults in the United States, starting with the 1960s. As is usual for Ms. Paglia she is facinating to read and has an unusual take on history. In summary Paglia compares the 1960's cultural movements to the Mystery Cults that permiated the Roman Empire. The Mystery Cults have largely vanished from knowledge but they were real and quite significant in the lives of people 2,000 years ago. The major mystery cults were those of Mithras, Dionysus, Demeter, and Isis. Here is quote from Camille's essay: Yet a major source of cultic energies in twentieth-century America was the entertainment industry: the Hollywood studio system, cohering during and just after World War I, projected its manufactured stars as simulacra of the pagan pantheon. Frenzied fans (a word derived from the Latin fanatici, for maddened worshippers of Cybele) had already been generated by grand opera in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when castrati sang female roles and were the dizzy object of coterie speculation and intrigue. Modern mass media immensely extended and broadened that phenomenon. Outbursts of quasi-religious emotion could be seen in the hysterical response of female fans to Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. Eroticism mixed with death is archetypally potent: there were nearly riots by distraught mourners after Valentino’s death from a perforated ulcer at age thirty-one in 1926. The rumor that Elvis lives is still stubbornly planted in the culture, as if he were a demigod who could conquer natural law. 12:00:06 PM     [Colin Glassey] A Short History of Modern Arab Governments This is an excellant essay on the history of Arab governments since 1919 by Amir Taheri. Mr. Taheri is an Iranian living in Paris writting from the Jerusalem Post. He wrote another article today on the nature of Iraq's army. Sorry to say the Jerusalem Post requires (free) registration. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link. This is an exerpt from early in the essay: Most of the states where the model developed had come into being in the aftermath of the First World War and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. In every case, Britain and France, the two European colonial powers that had inherited the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, played the central role in shaping the new states. These new states, at times described as "Sykes-Picot" offspring, were almost invariably shaped as instruments for protecting and/or furthering some specific strategic interest of the colonial power concerned. Iraq, for example, was created around the oilfields of Mosul and Kirkuk. The Egyptian state's task was to help protect the Suez Canal. Lebanon was carved out as a state to safeguard the interests of the Christians of the Orient under French protection. Transjordan was a British military outpost with the task of keeping an eye on the Arabian Peninsula to the south and east, and providing a base for intervention in the Levant. 11:52:34 AM

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