noteworthy wrote:

With every passing day, Johnathan Rapley's conception of the New Middle Ages seems increasingly likely.

Decius wrote:

I don't follow how this comment relates to the context. Most of the news out of Iraq seems positive. Of course its complicated and fragile, but clearly this is progress. Worrying that too many refugees might return is a good problem to have.

I am somewhat at a loss to understand you, but I will attempt to highlight a few things that are not quite so positive. (As Packer noted, the war is Kaleidoscopic, and the lag is really bad. It's like we are watching a war in a galaxy half a light year away.)

1. Amar has taken justice into his own hands, vowing to avenge Jafaar's death 100 times over. Amar 'works for' (gets paid by) the Americans, who have no idea he is a massive serial killer on the side. Deception abounds. No one trusts anyone.

2. The people in charge are warlords, not police. Presently, the violence is suppressed, but the underlying forces are unresolved. With an eye on the clock, the Americans have resigned themselves to arming and training their former enemies, so that at least someone is in charge, knowing all the while that no one can be trusted. Increasingly, America's only leverage is its impending departure. In the vacuum that follows, power will accrue to the two-gun-toting maniacal warlords, not to the technocrats, whose most notable recent accomplishment is a restaurant opening, apparently. (Never mind that people are generally unwilling to travel or be outside after dark.)

3. Most displaced Iraqis do not want to go back to their homes. They have given up on Iraq. Still, the returnees are not "a good problem to have", because many of their homes are now occupied (illegally) by people from opposing sects. Mrs. Aasan's family fully expected to get attacked when traveling after dark. She was "thrilled and relieved" that they managed to cheat death that night.

In regard to the Rapley reference, I was pointing in particular to these:

The country is drifting "towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state."

Ameriya is a closed zone, surrounded by high concrete walls. Only pedestrians are allowed through the two Iraqi army checkpoints out of the suburb. The "knights" are the only authority inside.

"This is Ameriya, not Iraq!"

Biden ... who has been praised by his rivals as a thoughtful voice on Iraq, ... frames discussions ... around his plan to create strong regional governments in Iraq ...

So here you have a collection of autonomous city states, strongly opposed and intermittently warring with each other. Although the central state nominally controls the countryside, in practice it is a no-man's land, with no expectation of safe, free movement from city to city. Inside, the cities are ruled by authoritarian gangs, and corruption is rampant. There is no law -- only the whims of the men with guns.

Decius wrote:

I also don't understand George Packer's comment that these developments were "unanticipated by almost everyone on the American side of the looking glass."

He should have addressed that in his next post. Read it and see what you think.

I agree that calls for immediate withdrawal are unhelpful at best, and quite possibly much worse.

RE: Must Read: Iraq Round-Up

This one is for the fans of Terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists.

I'm Rudy Giuliani and I Approve This Message

I have never met anyone who likes Putin as a person. One answer to the riddle of his electoral success is quite simple and quite sad. For virtually the first time in history, Russian citizens were given the primary instrument of political democracy: direct and competitive elections. But they do not know why they need this instrument or how to make use of it. Eleven hundred years of history have taught us only two possible relationships to authority, submission and revolt. The idea of peacefully replacing our ruler through a legal process is still a wild, alien thought for us. The powers-that-be are above the law and they're unchangeable by law. Overthrowing them is something we understand. But at the moment, we don't want to. We've had quite enough revolution.

Why Putin Wins

I last mentioned Zizek in April and May.

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy ...

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’

The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

In other words, stop talking about "energy independence".

Slavoj Žižek: Resistance Is Surrender

What should be done if one can-not accept the Byzantine system of power? Retreat into the catacombs? Wait until enough energy for another revolt has been accumulated? Try to hurry along revolt, thereby posing another "orange threat," which Putin and his allies have used, since the 2004 Ukrainian elections, to frighten the people and themselves? Attempt to focus on the demand for honest elections? Carry on painstaking educational work, in order to gradually change citizens' views?

Each person will have to decide in his or her own way. I imagine -- with both sorrow and certainty -- that the Byzantine system of power has triumphed for the foreseeable future in Russia. It's too late to remove it from power by a normal democratic process, for democratic mechanisms have been liquidated, transformed into pure imitation. I am afraid that few of us will live to see the reinstatement of freedom and democracy in Russia. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that "the mole of history burrows away unnoticed."

Why Putin Wins

Thus the second decade of the American Negro’s freedom was a period of conflict, of inspiration and doubt, of faith and vain questionings, of Sturm und Drang. The ideals of physical freedom, of political power, of school training, as separate all sufficient panaceas for social ills, became in the third decade dim and overcast. They were the vain dreams of credulous race childhood; not wrong, but incomplete and over simple. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defense, and as a guarantee of good faith. We may misuse it, but we can scarce do worse in this respect than our whilom masters. Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek;—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think. Work, culture, and liberty—all these we need, not singly, but together; for today these ideals among the Negro people are gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the unifying ideal of race,—the ideal of fostering the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack.

This essay appears in The American Idea.

Strivings of the Negro People | W.E.B. Du Bois | August 1897 | The Atlantic

As the number of places on the planet grows where power really resides in the people, the world will become more, not less, complex. Democracy, which is simple in concept, is in practice an exceedingly complex system.

Following the thread of hope for Pakistan:

It is dangerous to stand up to a military dictatorship, but more dangerous not to.

I recall the words of President Bush in his second inaugural address when he said: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

Excellent. (Perhaps Benazir Bhutto is learning from Maliki.)

Musharraf’s Martial Plan

This classic essay appears in The American Idea.

"If there were a Hall of Fame for influential public-policy ideas, then the 'broken windows' thesis would probably have its own exhibit."

In the 1960s ... order maintenance became, to a degree, coterminous with “community relations.” But, as the crime wave that began in the early 1960s continued without abatement throughout the decade and into the 1970s, attention shifted to the role of the police as crime-fighters.

The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control. On the other hand, to reinforce those natural forces the police must accommodate them. And therein lies the problem.

It's interesting to observe how, in the popular image, the police are overwhelmingly depicted as "crime solvers" rather than "crime preventers." There must be more to this than a (questionable) intuition about what makes for "good television." Something about a deep-seated need to submit to authority, and an unbounded (and unrealistic) faith in the power of experts.

What has happened to the sense of responsibility?

The automobile.

Sprawl.

Exurbs are the new West?

Broken Windows | James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling | March 1982 | The Atlantic

Those YouTube debates are such a waste of time; just move everything to HotOrNot ...

People asked to rate the competence of an individual based on a quick glance at a photo predicted the outcome of elections more than two-thirds of the time.

Nearly 300 students were asked to look at pairs of photographs for as little as one-tenth of a second and pick the individual they felt was more competent.

The participants were shown photos of leading candidates for governor or senator in other parts of the country, but they were not told they were evaluating candidates. Those who recognized any of the photos were not counted.

When the elections took place two weeks later, the researchers found that the competency snap judgments predicted the winners in 72.4 percent of the senatorial races and 68.6 percent of the gubernatorial races.

That's the AP story.

Here's the abstract of the technical paper:

Here we show that rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. To ensure that competence judgments were based solely on facial appearance and not on prior person knowledge, judgments for races in which the participant recognized any of the faces were excluded from all analyses.

Predictions were as accurate after a 100-ms exposure to the faces of the winner and the runner-up as exposure after 250 ms and unlimited time exposure (Experiment 1).

Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and reduced the predictive accuracy of judgments relative to both judgments made after 250 ms of exposure to the faces and judgments made within a response deadline of 2 s (Experiment 2).

Finally, competence judgments collected before the elections in 2006 predicted 68.6% of the gubernatorial races and 72.4% of the Senate races (Experiment 3).

These effects were independent of the incumbency status of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective judgments of competence from faces can affect voting decisions.

Also online at PNAS (including supporting information).

Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgments