The Kurd is the Word

Kurdiah-occupied area generated by C.I.A. (1992)

The Times reported on Robert Kagan’s New Republic piece, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” (5/26/14), (“Events in Iraq Open Door for Interventionist Revival, Historian Says” NYT, 6/15/14). The New Republic cover story has struck a chord, with ISIS on the outskirts of Baghdad. The Times commented “To Mr. Kagan, American action to stop the militants is imperative, but a continued military presence in Iraq and action in Syria would have avert the crisis. ‘It’s striking how two policies driven by the same desire to avoid the use of a military are now converging to create this burgeoning disaster,’ Mr. Kagan said in an interview.” But hindsight is always 20/20 and who is to say that the presence of US troops would have turned out to be anything more than an embarrassment, as it has been in Afghanistan, where all gains seem to be Pyrrhic and where the American military’s struggle against the Taliban can only be described as Sisyphean? Yes today everyone is crying for more troops and more bombs, but when we supplied troops and bombs and were getting no leverage in reforming al-Maliki’s partisan politics there was an outcry for an end to a struggle which was costing the US both lives and money. Have we forgotten the lesson of Vietnam? Every time we consider the use of force we seem to be on the event horizon of the black hole of interventionism. The US is out of touch and our real weakness is intelligence. It’s as true now as it was back in 9/11. The lack of intelligence concerning the latest ISIS surge is what the real problem seems to be and it’s truly confounding. Is a Johnny-come- lately employing airstrikes and drones going to weaken the impact of the writing of Sayyid Qutb the ideologist of pan-Islamism? What’s needed is not force, but thought. In this case clandestine intelligence, the kind that had proven so deadly to US Foreign policy in the overthrow of Mossadegh in l952, might be turned to our advantage if we place our bets on the right horse--and that horse might very well be Iraqi Kurdistan.

New Republic Friended

“New Republic Get an Owner Steeped in New Media” (NYT, 3/9/11) ran the story in the Media Decoder blog of the Times. Apparently The New Republic, the venerable publication that could be reached by taking a slight right turn at The Nation and a sharp left at The New Criterion will survive the social media revolution after all. The Times story recounted how The New Republic had been looking for a suitor and found a perfect match in Chris Hughes, one time roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, who had been one of the founders of Facebook, before he went off to devote his energies to the Obama campaign and other philanthropic pursuits. “The influence of The New Republic has often outstripped its small staff and its small circulation (around 50,000),” the Times commented. “Founded in 1914 by the political journalist Walter Lippmann, it has long been a part of the liberal movement, counting presidents as readers, including John F. Kennedy, and luminaries as writers, including George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth.” Hughes' idea is simple, as reported by the Times. The long form of journalism which is The New Republic's credo should find it’s home on the tablet. Naturally, The New Republic is not the only magazine that specializes in in depth and original reporting and criticism. The New Yorker is naturally the epitome of this kind of publication, but it already has a highly developed digital presence. In addition The New Republic is really a link to the old style broadsheets of the past (many of them like The New Leader and I.F. Stone’s Weekly now defunct) which were the stomping ground for the great maverick intellects of their day. In a world which values style over substance, the medium over the message, Hughes acquisition is significant in that it again values and guarantees to bring to a vastly larger audience a certain level of erudition. Many publications are acquired by moguls with huge cash troves. The Daily News and The New York Observer are respectively owned by Mort Zuckerman and Jared Kushner whose wealth derives from real estate, but Gregor Mendel couldn't have picked a more potent cross-breed in The New Republic's new buyer. The fact that Hughes wealth come not just from media, but from social networking is huge.