Greg Sanders

Contemplating a world disrupted by AI

I’ve been reading a lot and playing around a little with ChatGTP and Bing, guided by some helpful guest speakers at work. On the whole, I’m a curmudgeon, though not for reasons related to my sci-fi fandom or comp sci degree. Instead, I am leery as a reader because I do think these large language models (LLM) value answers but not thoughtful or factually correct writing. More selfishly I’m also risk averse and setting aside larger fears I do think it will be disruptive to my  field and others reliant on writing.

But there’s no running from automation. I think this effect will be mitigated by real constraints on time to read. Quality and trustworthy writing is more rewarding for readers at the same time cost, though I imagine this will strengthen winner take all dynamics and the importance of brands as the internet faces an ever growing tide of copycat mass-produced writing.

My biggest challenge as a scholar is the way LLM default to breaking the chain of custody for primary sources and ideas. This is a bit like wanting to identify the source tree for an individual bite of apple sauce, though Bing at least is experimenting in being able to cite. I think Tim Hickson does a good job of unpacking a range of issues in the AI art domain. One point that stood out for me is that Adobe’s generative art program and the Stable Diffusion music generator are explicitly limited to sources where they have rights due to public domain or arrangements with creators.

The scholarly dynamics for research and theory are different from art, although there are elements of both thinking and craft to unpack. I am glad not to be a teacher in this environment, because I find Paul Musgrave and Alan Jacob’s arguments persuasive and depressing. At the same time, I do think Dan Nexon is right to experiment with what the tools can and can’t do as well as thinking about how the demand for writers will change in each field.

So what are the opportunities and where does it add the most value? Starting with the big picture, there’s already more written material produced constantly than any of us will ever have a chance to read and moreover writing is a favored form of human expression that people make sacrifices to engage in. Same for visual arts and music. That said, customization is key; there are lots of places where people want middling writing or art: all sorts of promotional materials, a summary which zeroes in on a certain element of a large corpus of writing, a picture of your roleplaying game character. Quality is nice in these cases but a 33 percent solution at your finger tips could greatly increase demand.

In my work, I see three areas that are particularly promising:

• Low grade translation to identify promising documents. Credit to my colleague Alexander for this idea, but searching and summarizing documents with low fidelity can help us identify where to engage humans for high fidelity work. Timothy Lee recently wrote on how AI is changing the field of translation.
• Supervised categorization is not new to LLM, but may ease the utilization of large text fields in the process. This may enable myself and colleagues to put more work into defining taxonomies and adjudicating border cases and less work on easy but numerous calls.
• Search and summary within a particular corpus, in particular budget and oversight reports or policy documents or contract descriptions. Here AI may be able to do some scouting and I could then use that to inform my subsequent engagement with the primary sources.

All three cases involve existing applications of machine learning and other software tools. That said, open source tools such as those provided by the creepily named HuggingFace mean I can potentially be creating and refining my own tools rather than relying on third party services. But whether I make or buy I think these uses all help me engage primary sources rather than replacing my engagement.

So readers, is there anywhere you’re experimenting?

Review: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

From my youth I’ve been a Star Trek fan. Core to the appeal to me is the vision of a hopeful future, one with dilemmas and danger but no longer a prisoner to scarcity. The appeal has not faded since I’ve become an adult (happy belated 100th to Gene Roddenberry), and while I do enjoy Deep Space Nine and some nuance in my Trek, I think many attempts to make it dark or mature can miss the point. I was drawn to the Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, because Culture itself is a variation of a utopian Federation-adjacent civilization that explores a range of themes while still believing in the possibility of a diverse and abundant future.

The story starts with the tale of a ship’s computer, a Mind, seeking escape and refuge and only partially finding it. In Culture, the question of whether the Enterprise’s computer is alive is unambiguously yes. Indeed the hyper-intelligent life forms captain their own vessels which display their personality with  ship names like “No More Mr. Nice Guy” or “Prosthetic Conscience.”

However, while the quest to rescue or capture that Mind is the core quest of the book, its protagonist is not just a sort of human, but an ideological enemy of the Culture: Bora Horza Gobuchul. Horza is a skilled infiltrator capable of slowly changing his shape and more to impersonate another. He works for the Iridians, a tri-legged, potentially immortal species both smarter and stronger than most humans but also typically devout, giving rising to ship names like “The Hand of God 137.” There’s no place for other species in the Iridian religion, but he supports them anyways for reasons he explains when competing to win the loyalty of a planet while opposed by  Culture Special Circumstances Agent Perosteck Belveda.

“At least [the Iridians] have a God, Frolk. The Culture doesn’t. . .They at least think the same way way you do. The Culture doesn’t. . .”

“You want to know who the real representative of the Culture is on this planet? It’s not her,” he nodded at the woman [his opposite number], “It’s that powered flesh-slicer she has following her everywhere, her knife missile. She might make the decisions, it might do what she tells it, but it’s the real emissary. That’s what the Culture’s about: machines. You think because Belveda’s got two legs and soft skin you should be on her side, but its’ the Iridians who are on the side of life in this war.”

The novel is not directly about this debate; instead it is full of adventure, often set in epic speculative locations like the a massive ring station that sustains its own ocean and gravity with centrifugal force, or concepts like the absurd game of Danger where players can blast complex emotions at one another and fans will tune into to what players are feeling or be caught in the splash themselves. Whether or not you root for Horza, he is a capable charmer, and he needs to be as he and his rag-tag group of companions face a series of challenges that - despite a captain’s words to the contrary - are anything but “easy in, easy out.”

The tone of this first book is not Star Trek. It’s often satirical, regularly tragic, and frequently more focused on survival than exploration. The start of the story often left me discombobulated, intentionally so I think. One chapter after the one-third mark just put me off, testing boundaries without offering much to hold my interests. For me, the novel truly hits its stride as an ensemble comes together with relationships and competing loyalties shaped in adversity. Indeed, the perspective of the story broadens in the finale as suspense steadily builds and the casualties mount.

Consider Phlebas has its rough patches; at times I had trouble grasping the visuals of some of the settings and wonders, and it took time (and a handy list of names) for me to really come to care about some of the supporting cast. Similarly, as the epigram from the Waste Land that gives the book its title indicates, it helps to have some taste for the outré and the tragic. But for me the story is a triumph that kicks off the Culture series in a such a fitting way, by exploring the perspective of one of its enemies. (For a more critical take, see Abigail Nussbaum). I eagerly look forward to the next book in the series.

After the cut, some light spoilers and a bit of international relations.

Mistakes in Afghanistan, the U.S.’s and my own

I did not predict Afghanistan’s rapid fall to the Taliban. I had hopes that money without troops might give a fighting chance but sadly pessimistic takes were borne out. I knew many of the factors that drove it, but underestimated their magnitude. The challenges of corruption, dysfunction, and a lack of legitimacy raised in the Afghanistan papers were ones that were well known in the field. That said, stealing the salaries for non-existent “ghost soldiers” is a large problem but systematically failing to equip or provision actual forces is a precursor to collapse.

This failure is not the same as the Afghan National Army being unwilling to fight; as the Costs of War project reports, they’ve suffered 66,000 lost. However, it is a stark demonstration of no confidence in the fallen Afghan government and its ability to operate without U.S. military support. Kori Schake writes an apologia for this failure after $83 billion invested in training, and she concludes “We shouldn’t be surprised that many think the situation is hopeless after our abandonment and are surrendering. We should be amazed and respectful that any have volunteered to fight.” Even though I disagree with her on conditionality, I’d concur that we should not be cavalier regarding others’ willingness to face grave danger collectively for the chance at a better life. But the legitimate complaints of the Afghan Army underline our failure - after 20 years and 2 trillion spent - to have built a state with a political chance of sustaining itself or a military trained and structured to operate independently. My colleagues Anthony Cordesman and Grace Hwang put it plainly:

There are substantial official sources that show that Afghanistan was not winning against the Taliban before the [Trump] peace agreements, even with massive U.S. combat air and intelligence support as well as with the extensive support from allied forces and cadres of U.S. special forces, elite units, train and assist forces, and intelligence operators.

President Biden is correct the status quo was not sustainable. There had been a lull in U.S. casualties due to the Trump deal with the Taliban that promised withdrawal. While the Taliban held back as part of the deal, casualties had been rising in the years beforehand (though far below surge levels). Civilian casualties have been above 10,000 per year, with over 3,000 killed, for the last six years. A reliance on air strikes can result in a grim trade off between those two figures. Colleagues have suggested that approaches liked armed overwatch may have been able to enforce a stalemate while minimizing risks to U.S. troops, but I fear the humanitarian costs of such such an approach based on its antecedents in Somalia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

I do not think the war was doomed from the start, although there are many reasons it was inherently challenging. More important is that many of the worst and most lasting mistakes were made early on. Steve Saideman briefly outlines some of the bigger ones:

Who is responsible?  Everyone.  The US made big mistakes at the outset---relying on warlords, having too small of a footprint, sponsoring a constitution that was a very bad fit, distracted by Iraq--and other mistakes along the way--cycling generals and strategies, for example.  Obama made mistakes, Trump didn't help.  Biden's team has handled this endgame poorly. The allies could have done better (see our book for some reasons why they didn't).  Pakistan did so much to undermine the effort, and Iran and eventually Russia did some damage. The Afghans were served poorly by their own politicians. 

I focus most on the constitution because it is foundational to the challenges of building a state that can develop an independent legitimacy. While I disagree with some parts of his take, Shadi Hamid does a good job of elaborating on why the Afghan constitution, a centralized presidential system, was such a terrible fit: it alienated local and regional actors, it failed to support the rise of political parties or any checks on the President, and it raised the stakes on competition in a society riven with divides. In this early period the U.S. did have popular support within Afghanistan and far more diplomatic opportunities, but the political situation degraded over time especially as attention was distracted by the war in Iraq. No constitution will guarantee that power brokers like Abdullah Abdullah would not question the validity of the elections or force brokered deals such as the one with Ashraf Ghani after the 2014 election. However, there would have been a chance to channel more politics into coalition building and also allow for greater political variation between provinces if the governors were not all centrally appointed. The flaws in the constitution are a core reason I reject blaming America for an absence of strategic patience. When the fundamentals are flawed and many indicators are trending in the wrong direction, the limitations of perseverance are shown. We may be able to maintain a stalemate at a higher cost, but as Saiderman notes in his piece, it’s easier to break than to build.

I think a related mistake is that our often incoherent strategy, the oft lamented fighting twenty one year wars rather than one twenty year war, was frequently shaped by different U.S. factions compromising over means, enabled by in more recent years keeping costs in blood and troop counts low. I think our internal divisions contribute to our failure to apply incentives that both Mara Karlin and Rachel Tecott argue are key to successfully building a partner force. The limitations of security assistance is a longstanding topic of concern . I think we often fail to apply what my then-colleague Melissa Dalton called smart conditions. This is partially because conditions are hard for reasons Kori Schake outlined in her above piece, but also because I think our partners’ assessments of donor vulnerability are often based on the faction in the United States that considers recipient the most important. Condition based withdrawal might send the right message to adversaries but can also undermine our local partners’ incentives to address fundamental problems. Moreover, as Christine Fair notes in her harsh critiques suggesting betrayal by the U.S. and Pakistan, the actions of U.S. partners are often highly incompatible.

There are some larger issues I’m still grappling with, such as Jacqueline Hazelton’s argument that counter-insurgency involves truly ugly choices that are bad enough that the U.S. should largely stay out of them. I think we can do better on conditions, but this argument does at least help explain my surprise at the relative ruthless and criminal but ultimately more winning Syrian government counterinsurgency approach, which is in no way a model to emulate. However, I find myself more convinced by those that argue that we should have tried harder on corruption, from what Sarah Chayes argues in Foreign Affairs there was much we chose not try. I know at least one contractor facility we visited seemed disproportionately ornate for its minimal level of activity.

I also wonder about our approach to women in Afghanistan in general. In a Smart Women Smart Power podcasts, Lyla Kohinstany argues that we undercut efforts to give Afghan women a chance to participate in building security. On the peacebuilding side, evidence shows that women’s participation results in agreements that are more likely to hold. So I am skeptical about Shadi Hamid’s point on culture. I think backlash is a real phenomenon but simply trying to avoid it ties our own hands. Instead, I think the challenge is weighing backlash against both the breadth and depth of support in among Afghan women themselves. That said, in the present circumstances as shockingly courageous women protest against the Taliban and are suppressed, offering asylum must be a priority.

As for my own mistakes, three stand out:

• First, I failed to face the extent to which the U.S. had lost popular support. By 2009 the favorability in polling towards the U.S. had switched to slightly negative. I was able for some years to find related questions in the Asia Foundation polls but in the ones I’ve looked at in the past month they did not ask directly about some of the core questions of views of Coalition forces that I’d like to know. I don’t think the evidence supports the claim that “the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils.” However, I feel I underestimate how much support continued.
• A core finding from my 2011 trip to Afghanistan was that many of the Afghan vendors were happy, even eager to work with the United States or coalition forces. There stories were often inspiring, though of course that was a self-selected group. Those interviews supported the idea that using local vendors helped build the economy and built up the country in other ways, such as the entrepreneur that funneled her profits into a school. However, one of the hopes of the host nation first program was the eventual transition to a more independent state, and here the news was far less optimistic. They largely did not trust the Afghan government and, in at least one case, cited direct experience with corruption. I did not then and do not now know how to overcome that problem, but if I had paid more attention to it, I would have been more prepared for the difficulties of sustaining the Afghan government via financing.
• Building partner militaries is a naturally appealing middle ground in theory, but even as Obama embraced it there were many warning about its limitations.  Robert Farley’s summary piece concludes that we have had some success with special forces, but that in general the U.S. is good at building relationships but bad at building independent forces. I believe the U.S. can do more with conditions, especially because I think our strategic interests, especially in the Middle East, are often overstated and thus our donor vulnerability less of a problem than  conventional wisdom allows. However, when faced with repeated failure, analysts should be humble about their hopes for better results from better implementation not backed by structural changes. Tobias Switzer reaches a similar conclusion on humility for building air forces in particular, though as he notes our provision of ill suited equipment was a clear unforced error.

i think the biggest consequence of my own mistake was that my own attention stayed on vague hopes of a middle path rather than being one small voice trying to build up the Plan B. The number of Afghans withdrawn in August was a remarkable achievement and, as Gordon Adams notes, the U.S. was ill positioned, in part due to the timing of the Trump withdrawal agreement and an utter lack of prioritization of Afghan allies in planning or transition, to accomplish an evacuation sufficient to the need. The possibility of a longer delay was undercut by mistrust within the United States, but also would have meant both making a then uncertain Afghan collapse seem more likely and accepting even greater risks of U.S. casualties than occurred in August. It may have been worth doing anyway. Moreover, while I fear Charli Carpenter’s U.N. peacekeeping force was a longshot, I think it may have been one of our best shots for an Afghanistan not dominated by either the Taliban or years or decades more of civil conflict, especially if considered as part of an Obama administration endgame when the U.S. had more leverage.

My one hope is that for now, American popular support for Afghan refugees is holding. Future departures will depend on diplomacy than military force, but for those of us in the foreign policy community that feel we have both failed and that honor and humanitarian drives hold further obligations, there is work yet to do.

Images: A few selections from my trip. I would like to center the people of Afghanistan more but I fear showing those we interviewed or their hardworking employees would only bring them danger.

Closing bases in Afghanistan

With the closure of Bagram Air Force base, the U.S. departure from Afghanistan is picking up speed. My read had been that this is a top focus for the Biden administration, in particular driving the selection of Sec. Austin as someone that would get it done. Likewise I suspect it is largely taking precedence over attempts to use the FY22 defense budget proposal to shift policy and may have contributed to its lateness (along with the highly dysfunctional transition).

Even with that read,S I fell prey to status quo bias and so was surprised that Bagram air base has now been closed, as Dan Lamothe reports:

The transfer of Bagram air base to Afghan forces was completed with no ceremony or fanfare, a quiet end at a base that was for years the nerve center of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign across Afghanistan. U.S. Special Operations troops based there hunted al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Taliban and other militant groups in raids across Afghanistan’s rugged mountains to the east. Fighter jets, drones and cargo planes took off from Bagram’s twin runways day and night. Each of the previous three U.S. presidents visited the airfield during trips to meet the troops.

The base also was the site of detention facilities at which both U.S. troops and CIA interrogators tortured prisoners, according to U.S. government reports and investigations by human rights groups. The United States closed its detention center at Bagram in 2014, U.S. officials said.

Stripes also shared a quite surreal story about the Pokemon Go artifacts left behind as part of the closure.

I have been to Afghanistan once, and my part of the team went to not to Bagram but Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan, which closed in May. It had already been shrinking a few year later, with the remarkable boardwalk already winding down by 2013. Home of a TGI Fridays, a floor hockey rink, and local goods shops, it was a a remarkably non-martial outpost but one of many places where memories of earlier stages of the war could lead one astray in thinking of the post-surge mission.

Predictions of coming disaster are often used to argue for indefinite interventions and I think the negative assessments have been more likely to be rebroadcast. Sadly, most of the reporting seems negative as well. Denial appears to have hampered any move to a more achievable strategy by the Afghan government. Similarly, militias taking up arms against the Taliban does reduce the risk of a takeover but could lead to a greater factionalism and ethnic conflict. President Biden is willing to offer sustained financial support, and some remote operational options, but for better or worse the core burden is Afghanistan’s to bear.

I had long hoped there may be some third way. To accept less ambitious goals, move away from the idea of a centralized presidential state in a highly divided country and even to consider autonomous regions in a Taliban peace deal.  Charli Carpenter and David Cortright argued that U.N. Peacekeeping could be one such option, though I think peacekeepers from Muslim nations would be necessarily but far from sufficient to gain Taliban consent. I generally favor diplomatic and development surges but I do believe that for them to succeed the Afghan government will need to hold its own military. I think Michael Cohen goes to far in saying disaster for the Afghan people is inevitable and the U.S. will have little influence, but I think he is correct to say that we should not sugarcoat  the downside risks for the Afghan people. For that reason, I am particularly grateful that both war supporters and opponents have come together to emphasize the criticality of visas for those Afghans that worked closely with the United States.

I strongly suspect that dating back to at least the Obama administration there has not been a deal on the table that would have been acceptable to both the Afghan government and the Taliban. I’ve long pondered Dominic Tierney’s book the Right Way to Lose a War. He proposes a “surge-talk-leave” that draws on a variety of past conflicts including the polarized war of 1812 and multiple examples where coalition disagreements complicated matters. However, even as he acknowledges coalition challenges, I think his and other approaches to Afghanistan often treat it as a two actor game and do not do enough to consider the agency of the national forces. So long as it had public support in Afghanistan, I would potentially be comfortable with keeping a residual force at the present cost of treasure and blood if it seemed to be bringing peace closer. However, my theory long was that a willingness to leave may be what it takes to have a chance of convincing the Afghan government to consider the range of options that may be necessary to achieve a political settlement, and at best that could only even be a chance. I think politics and negotiation would be critical and an ideally tailored institutional design from on high would not be sufficient, let alone seen as legitimate. However, the failure of an actually occurring withdrawal to shift dynamics makes me wonder if such hardball ever had a chance.

If you told me just over a decade ago, as I stared out at the hills of Kabul, that this is how U.S. presence ends I would have been saddened but not, I think, surprised. Even now I can easily imagine worse options. I remain skeptical of a prior Biden idea of somehow staying but narrowing even more to the counterterrorism mission, so perhaps this is for the best. My visit was a minor one, nothing compared to those who live their of course or those that served in defense or military capacities. Even so, I keep thinking back to the co-educational school we visited, funded by the profits of an Afghan contractor working for the U.S. government, and wondering where the students, their teacher, and the founder are today. This is an analytical error of sorts. The founder was charismatic and her extremely compelling story is missing the counterbalance of other missions at abroad and at home that lost out to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Similarly, there are the stories of the roughly 857 U.S. service members that have died in that decade, more from the coalition partners and far greater losses among Afghan troops and civilians and who surely had all manner of opinions on the war in life. For now, I can just give it some measure of my attention and strive to be clear eyed in observing what happens next and learning for the future.

[Update: Revised penultimate paragraph for clarity.]

Is fiscal discipline a plausible way out of the U.S.’s strategic overreach?

This December, as part of CSIS’s National Security Bad Ideas series, I critiqued Adm. Mullen’s argument that “the most significant threat to our national security is our debt.”  The core of my argument is that in recent decades, persistent low interest rates and an economy recovering from a series of shocks mean that the debt is presently not at problematic levels right now:

In absolute and percent of GDP terms, the debt has grown over the last decade and especially under the Trump administration. The deficit was projected to hit $1 trillion in 2020 even before the pandemic occurred, but ended up near $3 trillion due to the ensuing economic recession and stimulus measures. Despite all this, there is no debt spiral, and an assessment of the cost of debt as a share of GDP shows that fears that the deficit would crowd out other spending and investment — while justified in the early 1990s — are misplaced. At its peak in late 1995, debt interest accounted for nearly 5 percent of all economic output. Yet the recent peak in the second quarter of 2020 was still under 3 percent and has since dropped.

I had the honor of a 35 tweet rebuttal from Chris Preble, co-director of the Atlantic Council’s American Engagement Initiative which hosts many great pieces and events. I’ve rolled it up here for ease of reading. His concerns on the deficit are not dependent on who is President, and he has been making the case for years that at the margins we should draw down conflicts and invest more in domestic spending.

Preble aptly summarizes my core point and gamely concedes that there may be particular cases where one can be overly focused on the deficit and that the research does not tie deficits to growth. He then gives a nuanced reading of Eisenhower's the Chance for Peace speech and his larger, balance-oriented governing philosophy. I’d encourage reading the speech, or at least the summary in tweets 6-11. Even if you know the highlights, the speech is quite bracing as one considers the Sino-U.S. security dilemma and the risk that we will both trade away a brighter future. He also captures Eisenhower’s larger philosophy of balance:

But that did not imply hostility to all forms of government spending – only spending that did not increase productivity, or which was not offset by adequate revenues. /15

— Christopher Preble (@capreble) January 22, 2021

Preble then develops the idea of fiscal discipline as a key strategic planning technique, a point also made by Gordon Adams. Strategy is about trade-offs, and if limitations are not front and center it is easy to overextend. Moreover, polling gives good reason to believe that budget-wide fiscal displace would favor domestic investment: butter, not guns. He accurately critiques way that Overseas Contingency Operations undercut the discipline the Budget Caps were intended to engender, and concludes that a sustained expectation of discipline might be the best way to prompt actual thinking and action to resolve present U.S. strategic insolvency.

Balance is the Wrong Approach to Recessions

I think Eisenhower's philosophy of balance makes a great deal of sense when large numbers of workers are not sitting idle. But after the blow suffered by the great recession and as we endure the pandemic and build back after vaccination, I think Furman and Summers make a good case for copious investment.

If you’ll indulge me in an analogy that was cut from my piece, in October I underwent surgery to remove a benign tumor the size of a grapefruit. The health advice I received once I woke up post-surgery strictly limited my exercise. Nothing more strenuous than a good walk for 8 weeks after the hospital. When it came to food, I was on a liquid and then a soft diet. When I tried light aerobic exercise, my doctor said I was scaring him. I cut back and not long thereafter my surgical wound finished closing. In that situation, exercise was bad and ice cream was good. A recessionary economy where interest rates are low, limiting the boost that can be provided by monetary policy, needs spending. As Furman and Summers argue, the Bowles-Simpson attempt at a grand fiscal bargain was the wrong approach:

The Bowles-Simpson plan would over time have represented about a 4 percent of GDP annual shift towards austerity by the end of the decade. Given that for much of the period unemployment was above its sustainable non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) level, this would have adversely impacted aggregate demand. For 5 years during this decade the federal funds rate was at its lower bound and at no point did it exceed 2.5 percent. It is therefore not remotely plausible that a lower rate path could have offset more than a small fraction of the reduction in aggregate demand the fiscal contraction would have produced. The result likely would have been even more economic slack and inflation further below target.

This is of course a hypothetical calculation. Had a major recession ensued, fiscal policy responses would surely have been implemented. The point is that with our current economic environment, fiscal policies need to be set with a view to maintaining full employment.

This would be best done by automatic stabilizers rather than what Matt Yglesias calls an ice cream for everyone party. But we live in a second best world, which brings me to my next point.

How to Sequence Discipline and Domestic Investment

If Furman and Summer are right, and the U.S. budget has slack even outside of recessions, let alone during them, then this strengthens the fiscal sustainability portion of Friedman’s and Logan’s 2012 diagnosis of “foolish but sustainable:”

But reason does not determine U.S. military strategy. Opportunities and constraints do. Americans tolerate waste and foolishness in the name of security primarily because we can afford it. It is not a great over simplification to say that we do what our wealth and relative power allow and call the product a security strategy.

Interest rates can explain why the peace dividend in the 1990s had endured at least in part through 9/11, despite a policy prone towards humanitarian intervention, but that 2013’s budget caps did not hold. Adm. Mullen does not explicitly invoke “debt spiral” when he makes his diagnosis, so I don’t know the exact mechanism he had in mind. But most using that rhetoric point to CBO projections of rising interest rates, which have consistently failed to materialize. I’d argue that the increasing exploitation of the Overseas Contingency Operations account was not so much a failure of will or drafting, but a side effect of the fact that the invisible bond vigilantes never decloaked.

As a result, in the present environment, the primary constraint on the U.S. fiscal budget is political, not economic. We are a sclerotic kludgocracy with many veto points, high polarization, and little trust. Moreover, with increasingly divergent swings between powerful executives, it remains quite tempting to wait out an administration rather than make hard choices. When the constraints are a lack of political agreement rather than true economic hard limits, credibly enforcing discipline is hard as there’s always the slack left in the budget. The magnitude of Ike’s tradeoffs remain stark, but if we want to, we can build both houses for 34,000 Americans and another DDG destroyer rather than having to choose.

I would propose an alternate mechanism that would both give the American people what they are asking for with the secondary effect of applying fiscal discipline via personnel costs: full employment. I think Karl Smith has a credible argument that President Trump came as close to re-election via the electoral college as he did because the economy approached full employment during his term and people remembered that even after the bungled the pandemic contributed to an economic downturn. If we could achieve any sort of bipartisan consensus, I think we should first use it to actually make domestic investments and let that set the stage for discipline.

Once our labor markets are not slack and we start making productive investments, then we will begin to encounter the most relevant of Ike’s observations on genuine limits on military capacity:

“This world in arms is not spending money alone.
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. 9/

— Christopher Preble (@capreble) January 22, 2021

In general, the national security enterprise is labor-intensive, personnel costs are disproportionately up, and Baumol’s cost disease cannot be overcome by services contracting alone, even if uncrewed systems improve productivity. A medic freed from wartime injuries could be treating the sick at home, anyone that meets the military physical health standards is likely well suited for a wide range of jobs at full employment, and acquisition types could get to address our horrendous transit capital costs.  Yglesias also makes plausible argument that policies I favor will likely raise inflation and interest rates over time, getting us back to a more conventional economic system and healthier and more fiscally disciplined place to hash out a better strategy. When economic rather than political factors are the constraint, the fiscal discipline is more credible and can be informed by a new edition of Preble’s The Power Problem, updating Ike’s trade-offs once again in a way that accounts for higher labor costs.

Count the votes and look to the democracies of Northeast Asia for victory against COVID19

I went to bed around 1 am last night, at which point it had been clear for a few hours that we would not have a result on election night. Biden already has a commanding popular vote lead but key battleground states are still counting votes and some places, such as Nevada, are already announcing we have to wait until Thursday for results. So be it, thankfully we seem to have avoided some of the worst fears of election day disruptions and while other developed democracies have made investments to count quickly, our forebearers had to wait much longer and accuracy matters more than speed. Trump’s attempt to disregard votes postmarked or otherwise cast by election day and his lies about our system is a disgraceful, but not surprising attempt, to steal the election. Delivering an accurate count of how citizens voted is a foundational requirement for a democracy and I have no intention of accepting systematic attempts to undermine the legitimacy of my nation’s vote.

Abiding by my own maxim for patience, I’ll largely avoid further commentary here with one critical exception. I find quite alienating the extent to which many my fellow American have accept that the U.S. has led the world in Covid19 related deaths and had a consistently high death rate, both of which a competent administration could have avoided (the extent of deaths that could have been straightforwardly avoided is debatable, I have seen estimates from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands). Many of those people were in vulnerable populations and may have been killed by complications rather direct symptoms of the virus, but reporting on excess deaths clearly shows how many more are dying that were a pandemic not raging out of control would be alive. Many countermeasures are painful and costly and it is no surprise that they prove controversial, but Mr. Trump’s failure to fund testing programs and send a clear signal on masks and other lower cost safety measures  has meant unnecessary sacrifice of the lives of the people in this country and an acceptance of defeat that I would have thought would have been anathema to my fellow citizens.

In the bigger picture, the relapse in parts of western Europe do show that merely competent is not enough. I have seen columnist I respect give in to grim conclusions as to our options but aspiring to be Germany and not France is not our only alternative.  The Republic of Korea, Japan, and Taiwan have all shown that better results are possible in democratic nations closer to the outbreak. I am most familiar with the response in South Korea, having recently supported a binational conference that looked at the strategic implications of scientific innovation. How have they gotten things so right? Because they’ve been through prior pandemics, including working with us with us to prepare for future one, and they put that learning into practice:

“South Koreans don’t comply with invasive contact tracing because they are Asian, they comply with it because they have been through pandemics before and they understand the severity of the danger,” said Jenny Town, a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan policy research organization.

I am no public health expert, but a similar dynamic holds in an area near and dear to my heart, mass transit construction costs. South Korea tunneling sets a global standard, and having had the chance to personally ride lines in Seoul and Busan, I’ve been impressed by both the quality and the the extent of coverage.  My fellow Americans, we have a choice between continuing to think we’re the best in many areas or in actually looking around the world and seeing cases where others do better and learn from them. I am deeply ashamed by the deaths we have accepted of our neighbors. The problems we face are hard, contexts vary, and no one country or political agenda is going to get it all right. We need to experiment and learn from others experiments. But we should be angrier about the ineptitude of our pandemic response and we should channel that anger not into cynicism but to innovation and saving lives.

Race and Defense Acquisition: Renaming the Stennis

When my field of defense acquisition comes up in present national debates about equality, it tends to be in terms of resources/national priorities or spillover effects and police equipment (see Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop or Spencer Ackerman’s upcoming Reign of Terror), or questions of minority owned small business promotion policies. I hope to write some on those topics in this coming year, but for now am thwarted from applying my quantitative analyst lens by my slow writing and a backlog of old reports I need to publish.

In the meantime, Rueben Green makes a compelling case for removing the name of renaming the carrier USS John C. Stennis:

Stennis, on the other hand, almost singlehandedly derailed the cultural changes being attempted by then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, as Zumwalt detailed in his memoir, On Watch. Stennis was vehemently opposed to black equality, and spent his entire career, both as a Mississippi prosecutor, judge, and state senator attempting to ensure it did not happen. He ordered congressional subcommittee hearings on “Permissiveness” in the Navy, led by Louisiana Senator Eddie Hebert, in a thinly veiled attempt to thwart Zumwalt’s initiatives.  . .

During a meeting on the topic, requested by Zumwalt, Stennis told Zumwalt, “Blacks had come down from the trees a lot later than we did.” The subcommittee ignored the mountain of evidence Zumwalt presented that showed systematic and pervasive racism in the Navy. Zumwalt still prevailed, however, with his seminal directive, Z-Gram Number 66, on equal opportunity, but the battle continues.

Green goes into additional detail and draws on his personal perspective as an African American naval officer (he’d written about the topic in his memoir Black Officer, White Navy). I think he makes a very compelling case as, like the critique of Woodrow Wilson in the context of the Public Policy school, this is based primarily not just on Stennis’ beliefs and words, but his use of power to the detriment of those serving in the U.S. Navy and civil service respectively.

I did a little searching and the most prominent defense of the name comes from columnist Sid Salter who lays out the case for the positive parts of Sen. Stennis’ legacy, in particular his role as a champion of the carrier program and opposition to Joseph McCarthy. However, neither Salter, nor the family members quoted in other articles I’ve skimmed, present any evidence to counter Green’s case.

Robert Farley, whose post first brought the Green piece to my attention, adds on a useful practical point in favor of renaming; “Nobody outside the United States knows who John C. Stennis was (most people inside the U.S. have no idea), and acknowledging the political role that aircraft carriers are intended to play demands an appreciation of how names affect the reaction of foreign audiences. “ An obscure name can educate, of course, but this is a name choice that seems aimed at a Congressional audience rather than the sailors who will serve on it or the friends and rivals who will note its presence in nearby ports or waters.

Finally, there has been some backlash to the recent resignation of a Boeing communications executive who had written a piece in 1987 that he renounced as “embarrassingly wrong and offensive.” I’ve skimmed the piece and agree with his current assessment. In particular, re: Personnel Management, I’d note that if male members of our military cannot be trusted around female colleagues, then they also cannot be trusted to interact with the local population on overseas deployments, interaction which is often core to counterinsurgency, hybrid conflicts, or maintaining alliances. Regardless, I don’t know any specifics of the Boeing case beyond what was reported, but I don’t think the two cases are comparable. Green easily clears the bar set by the Yale Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. Green’s case against Stennis doesn’t just rely on Stennis’ views and the terrible Southern Manifesto he signed along with all other Southern Democrats; it comes down to specific things he did with power that are directly relevant to the CVN-74’s ability to fulfill its mission today. The process to rename it should begin post-haste.

Review: Garden of Words, Makoto Shinkai

Together with my spouse, we’ve been watching through the collective opus of Makoto Shinkai, whose films Your Name and Weathering with You received theatrical releases in the United States. Shinkai has a hard-earned auteur standing, in part due to some common visual elements (weather,  trains, a certain sort of photo-realism settings) and thematic elements (distance, connections, and timing to name three). His work ethic is remarkable, as shown by Voices of a Distant Star, which is intimidating, although that’s also true of the whole anime industry.

Garden of Words is a novella of a film about a focused male high school student, with a particular vocational goal, and a tentative not yet middle-aged woman who share a habit of playing hooky on rainy days in Shinjuku Gyeon National Garden. It’s more literary in mood than in content, a character study that crosses age lines without forgetting the distinct responsibility of a student and an adult. In case you fear it sounds too serious, I should also reveal that the female lead starts out enjoying beer and chocolate under the gazebo, in spite of signs forbidding the former. It’s beautiful, and if the concept appeals, it’s a great place to start with Shinkai, as my spouse commented he’s really got his aesthetic at this point, and at forty-five minutes, it keeps a good pace while having the room to explore both lives.

One reason Shinkai sticks with his fans in part is because he has a remarkable blend of romanticism and pragmaticism. He’ll leave us wanting a connection to happen, sometimes desperately so, but also aware of why it couldn’t or even shouldn’t. There’s a melancholy to his work that’s recognizable, even if our barriers are perhaps not so high or our courage and commitment not so remarkable.

There are ways I’d love to see him branch out next, including having more room to explore adult lives. There’s more I’ll want to say about his works, but for now, I’ll just recommend this one and savor it for a time.

Image source: Film promotional poster via wikipedia.

[Update: Minor editorial fixes. Refined a bit after watching interviews in the extras]

Three pieces for the 70th Anniversary of the Hiroshima Bombing

As always, speaking for myself and not my employer.

I'll start with an in-depth discussion of competing nuclear strategies for the United States.

Project Atom: A Competitive Strategies Approach to Defining U.S. Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2025-2050

Clark Murdoch and his team are valued colleagues (though Sam has gone on to greener pastures). While I disagree with Clark on a good number of issues, I think his approach of using workshops and competing teams gets to the core of what think tanks do best, acting as a home for informed arguments. My expertise does not lie in this area, but my inclinations align with Barry Blechman and Russell Rumbaugh of the Stimson Center. The left can accurately complain that they're generally excluded from such debates in the national security sphere, but frankly I'm often relieved to find an argument at all rather than the low-end Kabuki that the Farley article describes. I'll always be grateful to Clark for stirring the pot from the audience at one of our events some years ago, providing some relief from a panel that was unexpectedly aligned rather than debating.

Do Iranian Nukes Matter?

Robert Farley of the Patterson school makes the controversial case that most of the hawkish and regional players don't care about Iran's nuclear program as much as they claim. I'm not sure I agree with the hard case of this argument, but the soft version seems quite robust to me. Those forces opposing the nuclear deal have revealed that, absent revolutionary changes to the Iranian government, they care more about maintaining an adversarial relationship than they do about minimizing the likelihood of an Iranian breakout. This is a multilateral deal, backed by Europe, Russia, and China. The alternatives opponents suggest would cause the multilateral coalition to fall apart and even military strikes would only delay Iran some small number of years. I think Farley goes too far to say various factions do not care about nuclear weapons; they just are lower on the priority list than advertised.

Magical Thinking and the Real Power of Hiroshima

I was moved by this piece by Jeffrey Lewis of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies on his visit to Hiroshima.

Over time, we’ve come to see nuclear weapons as Hersey saw them, as the ultimate expression of material and spiritual evil of total war. The bomb has come to represent the ability of our civilization to destroy itself and our nagging fear that our political and social institutions are inadequate to save us from the abyss.

This norm, really this fear, helps explain why nuclear weapons have not been used again in anger in the intervening 70 years. One might point to deterrence, but nor have we used the bomb against states with no nuclear weapons. Even Eisenhower hesitated in response to suggestions nuclear weapons night help relieve French forces trapped by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

I think the President and those directly involved deserve tremendous credit for the Iran deal. Even though the then-Senator Obama's intention to pursue such a deal was the deciding factor for me back during the 2008 primary, at best I'd figured it was a 50-50 thing. But I'll end with Lewis's closing words:

A visit to Hiroshima would be a chance for the president to get it right and to reflect on his legacy. Maybe he would be satisfied that he has done enough — he has done more than many — but Hiroshima is powerful place. Amid the meetings and motorcades, I think the reality of the place may sneak under the cordons and around the bodyguards. It might slip past that famously cool façade and tickle him under the collar. I think the place would ruffle him a bit, more than he likes to admit. And I think like anyone else who visits, he’ll wish he had done more.

Ascending Fushimi Inari 2014-06-01

Bedeviled by deadlines and anxiously seeking to persuade a Governor who seems deaf to the appeals of even the business community, travel blogging has long been on hiatus. A year ago today, we had already been in Kyoto a few days and that fact has cast our minds and hearts back. And though memory may cloud, it is fortified with over nine thousand photographs, a set of rails ever ready to take us back on a journey again.

The previous day, we had traveled to Osaka, but today our destination was much closer, a legendary shrine in the mountains surrounding Kyoto. We arose that morning, not early enough to outrace the heat, and caught a local train to Fushimi Inari, shrine to the patron Kami of rice and business. If you are not familiar with the shrine, then your first image, perhaps a series of ornate buildings in traditional Japanese architectural style and likely painted orange, is not wrong per se. It is just radically incomplete because behind those initial buildings is Mount Inari.

There is a trail up that mountain, one with smaller shrines, innumerable small memorials, twists and turns, steps, and troops of often paired fox statues, the later being the messengers of the shrine's patron. But remember, this is a lead shrine to one who blesses business in a country that for a time gave America a run for her money on commerce and that has been built up over a thousand years. Here devotion is not paid through a cavernous prosperity gospel mega-church but through thousands of torii gates surrounding pilgrims on the ascent to the summit.

Stay tuned for the hike itself, undertaken on perhaps the hottest day of 2014 we experienced in either Japan or the United States.

Osaka Nightlife Matsuri 2014-05-31

Our dinner of noodle dishes, tempura, and oyakodon refreshed us sufficiently to venture back out onto the streets of Dotonbori. The last post described the center of Dotonbori as resembling New York's Time Square, with a river, although it would be more accurate to say with river traffic instead of automotive traffic. The crowds thinned out due to nightfall and being at a slight remove from the main strip.

We meandered through more pedestrian malls and onto side streets with a variety of interesting traditional and modern architecture, including several pubs, one of which was designed to look like a train car. I doubt that the stone walkways or older buildings matched the age of similar paths in Kyoto, but nonetheless each new block and turn brought distinctive charms, from metallic wall art to sumo wrestler facades to a diorama depicting a drunken cat and two mice awaiting marriage.

As the night fell grew darker, we found ourselves drawn back to the river district, where everything from bridges to boats to billboards was lit with a variety of colors and shapes, creating a festival atmosphere that carried throughout the entire city.

The displays were more ostentatious to be sure, full of bright lights, no small number of mechanical elements, and buildings a few stories taller than those just a block or two away. Looking back, though, the levels don't quite seem to achieve the same heights as the skyscrapers in neighboring districts.

With one last visit to the district's most famous bridge and ad wall, we headed back to the station. The sites were less densely packed, with wide boulevards and highways playing a more prominent role. Even so, there were fascinating mixes of wood and stone-fronted buildings at a larger scale than in the side streets. I also don't think I'll ever forget seeing a sky scraper with a climbing wall part way up. The train station itself was calming by comparison, with classical artwork hung on the walls. A train came quickly to carry us to Shin-Osaka station, so quickly that its rush of wind startled a nearby family. The journey back to Kyoto went by quickly and despite the cramped accommodations we were glad to have a room by the station.

The case for selective engagement in the Middle East

Speaking for myself and not my employer.

Over the past years, starting with the war in Iraq and amplified by the failures of the Arab Uprising, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the underlying strategic logic of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. By this, I don't just mean the perennial debate about achieving stability versus democracy. I do think that can be a false choice, but the falseness of the choice doesn't mean we can always get both together. Instead, in many cases, U.S. intervention is unlikely to achieve either, thus I'm taking the opportunity to lay out my case after a recent piece in the new newsletter Evening CSIS “Strategic Partnership in the Middle East: Respecting Our Gulf Allies, Realism About Ourselves.” It's by respected senior scholar Dr. Tony Cordesman, and just as I'd hoped he lays out a strong case for a policy I disagree with. This is not something I've discussed with him, as he's one of our most senior and respected scholars, and if the opportunity ever arose I'd need to be conversant in a lot more underlying research. However, I am comfortable making this argument on my own personal blog.

Dr. Cordesman and I are in agreement that the war of choice in Iraq was a disaster and that we should acknowledge the real differences between countries the U.S. partners with in the region. However, we disagree on his characterization as several more recent policies as mistakes. This leaves me more supportive of policies of the Obama administration, but this isn't a matter of partisanship. In the 2008 primary race between Senators Clinton and Obama, I chose to support Obama because of his policies on Iraq and Iran.  Of course, I may still have been wrong then, but if so partisanship is not the reason why.

Rather than debate the specifics of choices in Syria and regarding the Arab Uprising, I'm going to focus on the differences in underlying strategic logic that results in my standing behind several policies that Dr. Cordesman characterizes as mistakes. That logic is U.S. strategic dependence on the Middle East.

As for the U.S. side of strategic dependence, the U.S. could not tolerate a military vacuum in a region whose oil exports were critical to world trade, the manufactured imports that support the U.S. economy, and limit the growth of energy prices. While U.S. petroleum imports dropped to some 8% of total U.S. imports in 2013 and are projected to drop further through 2030, the U.S. Department of Energy reference cases still projects that the U.S. will import some 32% of its total liquid fuels by 2040.

More significantly, indirect U.S. energy imports will continue to rise.  The CIA World Factbook indicates that total U.S. imports rose to some $2.3 trillion dollars in 2013, or some 14 % of a total U.S. GDP of $16.7 trillion. Some 86% of those imports came in the form of manufactured goods, and roughly 60% of those imports came countries dependent on petroleum imports and at least 30% from Asian nations critical dependent on Gulf oil and gas. No one can deny the advantages the U.S. has gained from increases in U.S. and Canadian oil and gas production, but energy independence is at best a myth that can only affect direct petroleum imports, and will not affect growing U.S. dependence on indirect energy imports in the form of manufactured goods.

The U.S. should be concerned about dominance of the Milddle East, not a "military vacuum"

If the Middle East was dominated by a single power, e.g. Russia, China, Iran, or even a unified Gulf Cooperation Council, then that power could substantially raise U.S. energy costs through sanctions. However, with the end of the Soviet Union and ongoing intra-regional rivalries, no great power is in the position to dominate the Middle East. By comparison, a "military vacuum" may result in price volatility, which does pose real problems to the global economy, but it does not pose a risk similar to the 1970s Oil Embargo. Avoiding a "military vacuum" is a remarkably ambitious objective because it requires the U.S. to act as a hegemon rather than prevent the rise of an opposing hegemon. The Carter doctrine recognizes this:

"Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." (emphasis mine)

Given the range of difficulties Dr. Cordesman illuminates elsewhere in his piece, I argue that chasing Middle East hegemony is a mistake and a distraction from Asia. This is not to say that successive U.S. administrations and Congresses do not place great value on particular partnerships in the region, notably with Israel, but advancing bilateral interests is also a lower bar than upholding hegemony throughout the region.

Imported manufactured goods are fungible

Dr. Cordesman is certainly correct that several major U.S. trading partners are dependent on Middle Eastern oil supplies, notably including China. However, manufactured goods have a wide range of inputs, in terms of the quantity and quality of labor, capital input, energy sources, etc. If Chinese goods get more expensive because of rising energy costs, there will be disruptions, but we can also buy goods from different countries that made different investments decades ago. There are also any number of substitutes available. People can pay for more maintenance services if cars get more expensive or substitute other goods. No doubt there are specific goods for which this is a larger problem, but our level of imports from oil-intensive economies in aggregate does not prove evidence of strategic dependency.

China has a common interest in avoiding Middle East volatility

Russia is admittedly an energy exporter that could benefit from volatility, but as Dr. Cordesman piece notes, the major East Asian powers would not. Specifically, China is a major energy importer and thus would likely be rather displeased by Iran mining the straights of Hormuz even if that also disadvantaged countries that are traditionally more aligned with the United States. The People's Republic of China is building its power projection capabilities, but they are not on par with the United States nor will they be in the next few decades. A rising China is a potential peer competitor to the United States because they are focused in on their region rather than engaging in Cold War-style competition across the globe. China is active in Africa and Latin America, buying resources and making connections, and if the United States does step back they will likely spend treasure, and perhaps blood, to enhance their influence there. However, China is a rising great power: they will be expanding their influence somewhere, and the range of complicating factors and schisms in the Middle East limit the marginal benefits of playing a larger role there.

Negative externalities from climate change reinforce the importance of moving away from oil

If we have a choice between spending a dollar decreasing the volatility of Middle Eastern oil prices or reducing dependency on oil, we gain a double benefit from the latter.

My conclusion: Selective engagement

I would argue that in judging U.S. policies in the Middle East, we should always consider the option not to act and should consider the husbanding of U.S. blood and treasure to be a mark of strategic success in its own right. Dr. Cordesman may well be right that more respectful partnerships with a range of authoritarian in the Middle East is the best way for the U.S. to actively prevent military vacuums in the region. However, I would argue that instead we'd be better off limiting interventions to those cases in which there is good reason to believe that we can achieve real improvements in human security in the region, be it through democracy or stability. This isn't to say that we should only act when it is a sure thing; a nuclear deal with Iran has long been a fifty-fifty shot at best. But in my opinion, either bargaining hard to stay in Iraq under P.M. Nouri al-Maliki or pouring weapons early into Syria were unlikely to achieve much good even if they would have pleased frequent partners in the region.

Discussing examples are debates for a different time that require support specific to the situation. I am laying out my strategic disagreement here because I disagree with a postulate held by many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. To often, such postulates go unstated, and I greatly appreciate that Dr. Cordesman lays out his case and evidence in detail.

Anti-democratic proxies in Hong Kong

We are likely now approaching the end-game of this round of protests in Hong Kong. The latest news involved attacks by thugs on the protestors, which should be highly reminiscent for those that followed the protests in Tahrir Square. As Daniel Davies then vulgarly summarized: "When it becomes a numbers game, there is only one thing that can save you.
And that is, a reactionary citizens' militia, to combat the revolutionary citizens' militia. Former socialist republics always used to be fond of buses full of coal miners from way out the back of beyond, but the Iranian basijs are the same sort of thing. Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren't interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, a#$%*@s." Obviously, the larger point about the military not having the numbers does not apply to Hong Kong, but as colleague John Schaus notes, the PRC, sensibly, knows that sending in the PLA will be costly and so they prefer other means.

Dan Levin of the New York Times gives a fascinating history on the triads that are the foot soldiers in the attacks. "According to Sharon Kwok and T. Wing Lo, experts on the city’s criminal underworld at City University of Hong Kong, the triads were originally a patriotic organization founded in the 17th century to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. They eventually contributed to the 1911 revolution, which saw the last emperor replaced by the Republic of China. Patriotism soon fell by the wayside, however." The triads worked with occupying Japanese forces and In 1993, just four years before Britain returned Hong Kong to Beijing’s control, China’s then-minister of public security, Tao Siju, said at a news conference that China was willing to work with triads if they were “patriotic and concerned with the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong.”

The People's Republic of China also sometimes has allies against democracy that wear far nicer suits. Back in July the big local branches of the four accounting firms took out an ad against Occupy Central (via Henry of Crooked Timber):

The big four global accounting companies have taken out press advertisements in Hong Kong stating they are “opposed” to the territory’s democracy movement, warning that their multinational clients may quit the city if activists carry out threats to disrupt business with street protests. In an unusual joint statement published in three Chinese-language newspapers on Friday, the Hong Kong entities of EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC said the Occupy Central movement, which is calling for electoral reform in the former British colony, posed a threat to the territory’s rule of law.

That moved was condemned by Amnesty International and even more importantly, as covered by Gregor Hunter, was condemned in a subsequent ad taken out by their own employees.

By Monday, another advert appeared in Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newspaper, purportedly placed by employees of the Big Four, which admonished the firms’ bosses. In white characters against a black background, the employees wrote: “hey boss, your statement doesn’t represent us”—a double entendre in Cantonese, as “hey boss” is also a mild vulgarity expressing angered disbelief.

This gets to the larger question of what outside observers can do. Ben Carlson convincingly argues in the Global Post that there's very little President Obama should say publicly. James Fallows nicely summarizes the issue: "What is happening in Hong Kong is not about foreign "interference" or meddling in China. But that is exactly how the government in Beijing would love to be able to portray it, and for them comments from an American president would be an absolute godsend."

Instead, for those seeking civil society approaches, I'd say focus on the long game and let U.S. and multinational companies know that collaboration in antidemocratic efforts, in China or elsewhere, will cause them problems in their other markets. As Henry notes:

Of course, this isn’t the first shameful decision made by Western companies looking to build business in China – see Bloomberg’s squashing of a story on corruption among family members of senior Chinese leaders, or, for that matter, Rupert Murdoch’s instruction to Harper-Collins not to publish Chris Patten’s memoirs. But this goes substantially further than quiet acquiescence, to public and active opposition to the pro-democracy movement, and the issuing of threats intended to stifle it. It would be nice to see Ernst-Young, KPMG, Deloitte and Price-Waterhouse Cooper put on the spot by US politicians and journalists about their Hong Kong offices’ unrepudiated public statements opposing pro-democracy protestors.

This was a particularly big deal for technology companies in the aughts. The price they pay for not playing ball with the PRC can be rather large, as recently demonstrated by censorship this summer. I have no problem believing that the ad in the Apple was taken out by employees of the accounting firms and that there are people at most multinational firms active in China that would prefer a first do no harm approach. Pressure from the outside, between crises, can strengthen their hands.

As ever, speaking for myself and not my employer.

Online video won't replace teachers, but it can help educate

I read a fair number of skeptics of massive online university systems, and they tend to be emphasize that the personal attention and labor of teaching cannot easily be automated. Most of us aren't autodidacts which is why public libraries themselves didn't make schools obsolete.

However, if you're motivated, you can learn things from books alone and I think that video courses, like the Ling Space by friend of the blog and Japan traveler Moti Lieberman, can add something to what we can learn from books. The recent episode on phonemes, the individual sounds that make up language, is a great example of this. Moti is an engaging speaker who actually has taught before, which is the equivalent for this medium of the way good writing can draw you in.

But that misses the real added value that comes from the video: incorporation of sound and images. In linguistics, sounds are very important. For those of us who don't know the international phonetic alphabet, we need someone to speak different pronunciations in languages we don't know for them to really sink in. Pure audio can help there of course, but much as teachers use blackboards or dry erase markers, video can help emphasize what concepts are related to the audio you're hearing.

I found this really valuable, in part because I'm a terrible student of languages. I have some French, less Japanese, and even less Mandarin despite having done classes of varying  duration in all three. I also went through speech therapy as a kid, so I have an intense personal connection with the way the t, and particularly the th sound is made. Language tends to impact us all, albeit in different ways. While I'll never be a full-on student of the subject, some prior parts of my life are making more sense now that I understand some of the underlying concepts. If you're curious at all, I think this might be a good place to start, as it shows what you can get from video that you might not from another non-classroom approach.

Programming note; Planning to resume travel blogging and soon to post on the protests in Hong Kong. I'm sorry for the break, it was driven not by the one night of LWV work but by a larger set of end of the fiscal year deadlines. Happily FY2015 doesn't look nearly so frantic.

The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein: Review

A Transylvanian named Attila Ambrus makes a daring escape from Ceaușescu's totalitarian Romania to try to make his luck in Hungary. Unfortunately, being a third rank goalie for a middling hockey club doesn't really pay the bills, especially as the Soviet Union falls apart and the nation begins a rough transition to a capitalist system. Fortunately, Attila is a charming and resourceful gentlemen and quickly finds ways to make end meet through pelt smuggling and a bit of bank robbery.

Rubinstein has found an amazing true story to anchor this non-fiction tale. Attila himself is fascinating and despite a variety of poor life choices has the pathos to provide this story its core. Critically, while no doubt a criminal, the man is a robber, not a gangster, which is why he became a widely adored Robin Hood-esque figure in his adopted land over the course of more than a score of often whiskey-fueled heists.

However, the book is more than just the superbly reported slice-life tale of a strangely compelling criminal. The book also follows the adventures of the police officers chasing him, but in a larger sense it tells of the triumphs and more often travails of Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Romania, as they chart a post-Soviet path. Suffice to say, Atilla is hardly the biggest crook in the country. This is a great story and an important one, as Prime Minster Viktor Orbán has been in the news in recent months for all the wrong reasons.

I would recommend the book for anyone with an interest in heists or contemporary Eastern Europe. But first and foremost, it is a character study of a fascinating man, by turns extravagant and self-effacing, who does extraordinary things in interesting times.

Source: Present from Moti, thanks Moti!

Osaka-jo and the Moti-Francis experience 2014-05-31

When the rest of the group went off to try tracking down the Transportation and Human Rights museums, Francis and I were taking our normal leisurely pace through the rest of the Living Museum, and we decided to branch off to try our own side trip. So after we finished up the museum, we took a walk to the nearest Osaka Loop Line station, Temma, and hopped over to Osaka Castle.

We came in the back of the castle area, where the JR station is, and walked up on a large number of people waiting around outside Osaka-jo Hall for a Porno Graffiti concert to start. It took a couple of beats to remember that this is a band, but they’re actually pretty good.

We made our way up past the concert venue area, and walked up towards the castle. Like many of the castles now standing in Japan, it’s a reconstruction, as the actual castle had been destroyed decades ago. Different from many other large castles in Japan, though, this one had been destroyed and rebuilt a few times over the course of its history. As the final main castle of the Toyotomi family, who briefly ruled over Japan before the Tokugawa shogunate, it has a lot of symbolic resonance.

  It’s also just stunning, rising up in the middle of Osaka in the middle of a still-open space. You can’t really tell that it’s a reconstruction from the outside. As you walk up the slopes and around the battlements, you can get clear views of the castle, and imagine how imposing it must have been to come there when it was still a seat of power.

Once we reached the castle entrance, we found out that the interior now is devoted to a history museum, largely focusing on the period immediately before the third shogunate and Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself. While I find Hideyoshi a very interesting historical figure – he was of very low birth and infamously ugly, so you can imagine how charismatic and skilled he must have been to become the leader of Japan – Francis was not very interested in seeing the inside of the castle, and the entry fee was fairly steep, so we just watched some buskers and had ice cream before heading out a different gate.

We then walked towards Dotombori to meet up with the rest of the group, and spotted some interesting buildings a  long the way, like the NHK building above and to the right, or this Luther hotel on the left, attached to the Lutheran church. The contrast between the castle and surrounding buildings, like the NHK station, is very striking, and both were different from Dotombori, where we ended up next.

Osaka Human Rights Museum 2014-05-31

While my wife and mother were cooling their heels at the the closed Modern Transportation Museum, I was at a different station, searching for the Osaka Human Rights Museum. It was a bit of a walk from the station, made longer by my misreading of the map. I ultimately gave in and turned on data roaming to pull down some digital navigation assistance. Thankfully for you, dear reader, I'm not subjecting you to another post (primarily) about wars, past or present. This museum is primarily focused on the human rights situation in modern Japan and many of the displays, including AIDS quilts and rainbow flags, were instantly recognizable even though the displays were in Japanese.

The first zone of the single floor of exhibits was entitled Shining Light. This section could be a bit sign-heavy, but there were pictures to help and I got both an English audio guide and a printed notebook with translations to help. The displays were also rich in photographs and pictures taking on issues of gender discrimination, LGBTQ rights, the rights of the disabled, and even a significant section on children. My comprehension level wasn't quite high enough to grasp how some of the displays might have been different than their equivalent in the United States, although I know that the struggle for gender equality in Japan is very much ongoing.

I dwelled the longest in the second zone, Living Together/Creating Society which focused on ethnic minority groups within Japan as well as other communities facing human rights issues, often for health or environmental reasons. Displays included rich coverage of Korean and Chinese immigrants, the Ainu people, and native Okinawans. In the Korean section, I found particularly affecting a set of captioned home videos on the post-War Korean community in Japan including a celebration in Kyoto of the liberation of the peninsula on the first anniversary of Victory in Japan day. The section on the Ainu and the Okinawans both focused on their living culture, although of course in the latter case the U.S. military base adds a whole different set of issues to the discussion.

One piece that did particular catch my eyes was a flag that was both instantly recognizable and unfamiliar. To the left is a was the banner of a Christian group in Japan, a red crown of thorns on a black field. The museum really did do an admirable job getting at the history of a range of groups and the last section on Dreams/The Future as well as the staffers in the front office and bookstore all left me feeling good about the Japanese activist community.

I left a bit before closing, rushing back to the loop train to try to get a half hour in at the Modern Transportation Museum, which unbeknownst to me had been closed this whole time. I somehow managed to miss Kate and Mom on the platform and wandered around the building once before running into them. Happily, we did have one fond train story coming out of that particular excursion. At the transfer station on the way to meet up with Moti and Francis we spied the poster on the right, celebrating the 110th anniversary of Osaka's transit system. One of the booth attendants saw us doing that and rushed up, but gladly this was not a fusspot of the paranoid American-style. Instead, the gentleman had just recognized us as transit geeks and gave us three post card copies of the poster to send out as we wished. That encounter brightened our day and took some of the sting out of the missed connections at the museum.

I am still unconvinced by the argument for direct U.S. intervention in Syria

As ever, speaking for myself and not my employer.

The New York Times editorial board and Kevin Drum do a good job of laying out the case that the President should seek Congress's approval before going to war in Syria.

In the end, aren't the president's personal convictions all that prevent any military operation from escalating?

It's a fair point, and I'm glad he brought it up. The answer, I think, lies in congressional approval for military action, and this is one of the reasons I think it's so important. If Obama is truly serious about not sending combat troops into ISIS-held areas in Iraq, then let's get a congressional resolution that puts that in writing. Let's get an authorization for war that spells out a geographical area; puts a limit on US troop deployments; and specifically defines what those troops can do.

Would this be airtight? Of course not... But nothing is airtight—nor should it be. It's always possible that events on the ground really will justify stronger action someday. However, what it does do is simple: It forces the president to explicitly request an escalation and it forces Congress to explicitly authorize his request. At the very least, that prevents a slow, stealthy escalation that flies under the radar of public opinion.

Presidents don't like having their actions constrained. No one does. But in most walks of life that deal with power and the use of force, we understand that constraint is important. Surely, then, there's nowhere it's more important than in matters of war and peace. And that's one of the reasons that congressional authorization for war is so essential.

ISIS did heinously execute two Americans that were already in Syria, and they should be punished for that. However, as Zack Beauchamp pointed out, the President implicitly noted that they are not a significant threat to the United States and there is no immediate crisis preventing getting congressional authorization. Syria continues to be an extremely challenging foreign policy problem and as Marc Lynch summarizes, the political science research on the civil wars does not support the idea that we could have just fixed it by intervening to a greater extent:

Would the United States providing more arms to the FSA have accomplished these goals? The academic literature is not encouraging. In general, external support for rebels almost always make wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve (for more on this, see the proceedings of this Project on Middle East Political Science symposium in the free PDF download). Worse, as the University of Maryland’s David Cunningham has shown, Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective. The University of Colorado’s Aysegul Aydin and Binghamton University’s Patrick Regan have suggested that external support for a rebel group could help when all the external powers backing a rebel group are on the same page and effectively cooperate in directing resources to a common end. Unfortunately, Syria was never that type of civil war.

So put me in the skeptic camp on the benefits of striking Syria. I was less skeptical with the war in Libya, but I take the same position now as I did then: if the President thinks this is a good idea, then take it to Congress. It's in the Constitution for a good reason and there aren't any circumstances that prevent it. Were I in Congress, I'd be inclined to vote no absent notable constraints. However, I'm in the minority there apparently, so what's the harm in asking?

Don’t split the party! 2014-05-31

Since we only had one day in Osaka, we went our separate ways in order to better catch the things of most interest. This was complicated by the fact that our portable wifi hotspot hadn’t yet been delivered, so we were limited to the one working rental phone. Over the course of the trip we had trouble with meet ups a couple times, in part because I’d forgotten how to properly use public phones. Turns out you dial first then put in the money, which is not how pay phones in the US (used to) work. Regardless, Kate and Mom got off to go to the Modern Transportation Museum (MTM) and I went on to check out the Osaka Human Rights museum. Fun fact about the MTM: it’s moving and the current location closed on April 6th. This hasn’t merited mention on the English language website and it didn’t get planned in time to get picked up by our guidebook, although wikipedia notes it, so score one for the wiki model.  So they spent several hours hanging out on the platform at Bentencho, after attempting to check out a tea shop that was full and not accepting more customers.

On my end, I walked around a bit searching for the Human Rights Museum before realizing I was misreading the map by looking where the label text was written rather the connected dock. Fortunately once I found the place, it was actually open and will get a write-up next.

Traditional Osaka street life, eight stories up! (2014-05-31)

The Osaka Museum of Housing and Living is easy to reach off the subway. It is on the eighth floor of the Housing Information Center and well worth the price of admission. The tour starts by going up another two stories and giving you a view down on the reconstructed Edo-period 1830s village. It’s in the midst of a summer festival, so shops display their wares through fanciful displays, the streets are in their full regalia, and fireworks can be seen in the nighttime portion of the cycle of the hours. After the overview you go down a level to walk the streets yourself. The whole experience was enhanced by the people wandering in festival-appropriate yukata, but unlike the similar wanderers in Higashiyama, here you have a chance to don the outfits yourself. We sadly lacked the time to wait, but those that made the change seemed to quite enjoy themselves and enriched the experience for everyone else.

There was a mix of shops, baths, workplaces, and houses on display. The displays throughout the museum were predominantly in Japanese, only fair given that Commodore Perry hadn’t yet arrived to force the opening of Japan by 1830. I believe an audio tour was available although there was a lot you could get by just observing.

The lack of English is a bit more challenging after you return to the eighth floor, but the diorama of life in Osaka across the past two centuries by strength of the models alone.  The bustling commercial district of Kitasenba on the right could easily be mistaken for a Western city of the 1930s and that development by emulation is certainly not a coincidence.

While a far lighter visit than the Hiroshima Peace Museum, the dioramas also cover the post-war reconstruction period, with the Shirokita Bus settlement shown on the left. Each of the dioramas had both the wider overview and a more intimate scene like this one that gave more of a feel for what life was like in the period in question. After you finish seeing reconstructions and artifacts from multiple points in Osaka history there’s a rotating special exhibition to round out the visit. This time it was focused on a particular architect with Scandinavian ties if memory serves.

Afterwards, we split up to go on separate (mis)adventures, but that will have to wait until the next travel post.

Osaka Underground and a ride on the Purple Line

Japan’s third largest city (second being Yokohama off Tokyo Bay), Osaka is a short bullet train hop from Kyoto. For train purposes, Shin-Osaka station works a bit like Chicago, one of the main meeting points for those heading west or east. Shin means new, the station itself is a bit out of town and so after arriving, and admiring a fancy new model train on a far platform, we quickly caught the train to the central Osaka station and the city’s loop line.

Our first destination was lunch and perhaps unsurprisingly, we settled on trying this vaunted Osaka-style okonomiyaki at the first available opportunity. That opportunity came via the tunnels that undergird the area around the station. Nearby department stores and a range of subway stations all are accessible without crossing a single street. The tunnels were quite well lit with waterfalls and natural light in sections. That said, navigating them can be a bit of a challenge and the distances aren’t trivial, so visitors would be well advised to keep an eye out for signs and to keep a map at hand.

Once we fed, we headed to the Osaka Housing and Living museum, which looks at what life was like at various point in the city’s past. To get there we took the subway’s Purple Line, which wouldn’t particularly resemble the planned Maryland light rail line except in color, but that didn’t stop us from taking a picture! For those readers that don’t know, that particular transit line has been in the works for a generation and I put in my volunteer time trying to get us a system with some of the easy connections between various lines that cities like Osaka have. It’s late enough, that I’ll put off the museum entry for tomorrow night, but if you’d like to know where the project stands I’d recommend Robert McCartney’s column in the Washington Post.

Ponto-cho and dinner over the Kamo River, 2014-05-30

After crossing the Kamo River, Mina-san lead us one one Kyoto’s narrow commercial streets. This one was quite popular; it was the way to get to restaurants with decks over the river. Adding to its character was a plover theme; the birds, called chidori in Japanese, were  found on many of the paper lanterns.

We’re both quite fond of plovers, although for a while I had them mixed up with sandpipers. Chidori are energetic little birds, delightful to watch around the beach. They’ll rush into the receding tide, looking for a snack, only to flee moments later as the waves return.

Mina-san had made reservations for dinner at one of the riverside restaurants, and we were thrilled to be led out onto the dining deck after first removing our shoes.  Seating proved a bit tricky as half of the members of our party haven’t quite figured out how to manage cushions with chair backs (the chair backs make the traditional kneeling hard to do, but the smaller space made lounging difficult as well) but the view and the fresh air made any discomfort far worth dealing with. I’d trained up on that skill back in 2002 in preparation for the chance to attend a tea ceremony, but I’ll confess I still had to shift my weight every so often.

After ordering drinks, primarily be ers and plum wine, Mina-san and Moti navigated the menu, selecting a lovely variety of  dishes.  The style was reminiscent of tapas, and we tried everything from vegetables to tofu to beef to sashimi.  As night fell, we relaxed and watched the people on the decks nearby, those walking along the riverbed, and those strolling along the canal.  We’re both extremely fond of outdoor dining and this was one of the loveliest settings we’ve had the pleasure of experiencing.

Following our dinner, we took a stroll through more of the nearby neighborhoods, passing eateries and other shops that had been in business for many years. The night was cool and pleasant, a wonderful contrast to the heat of the day, and the streets of Kyoto are particularly scenic after dark. In a different sort of contrast, we also saw a handful of specially-lit motorcycles traverse the streets in a manner more typical of Neo-Tokyo than the old capital. Incongruous fun aside, we stopped only because all the day’s activities had tired out Kate and my mother, and so we walked back to the Gojo Guest House for our last night there, bidding farewell to Mina-san along the way.

Update: Typo fixed.

Stops along sloping stone streets and steps 2014-05-30

The main exit to Kiyomizu-dera deposits you on Matsubara-dori and a series of stone-lined streets and enticing storefronts. I had fond memories of this walk to Yasaka-Jinga (also known as Gion Shrine and regularly in our journey around that neighborhood). The shops were a fun place to wander and pick up some of the range of chopsticks and tchotchkes we’d promised the family. The rest of the group also stopped for snacks while waiting and kindly shared with my mother and I.

Further along the walk, the balance shifts more in the direction of restaurants, tea houses, and other higher class establishments set back a bit from the main road. If memory serves, one of my favorite gardens in my prior trip was somewhere in this district. I did not find it again this time, and doubtless the first time some of the romance was its hidden nature behind the gate. But I quite enjoyed the trip nonetheless.

We took a  short break in Maruyama Park, sitting on benches around a pigeon statue and appreciating the garden which much be stunning when the trees are in blossom. I fear on my prior visit to the park I didn’t maintain proper decorum as my stomach proved highly upset. The consequences were thankfully not long-lasting then, and I attributed the ill-affects to some combination of octopus and jetlag. Being in better state this time, we had the chance to admire the fine detail work of the shrine on the way out and back to the streets of Gion.

We were headed on to dinner on the far bank of the Kamo River, again swinging by the aforementioned statue of Kabuki founder Izumo no Okuni. We would see performers there later that night, which is fitting. The statue apparently dates only to 2002 although it was in November so I could not have seen it on my first trip in January of that year, which makes sense as otherwise our professor would likely have told us about it. I go on about this statue, as I did with Mina-san while walking, because it does get to a contradiction at the heart of my enjoyment of Kabuki. That highly stylized form of theater was easily my favorite of the several kinds I saw in 2002, even beating the Bunraku puppet theater that was my assigned research area. However, thanks to Tokugawa-era social restrictions, female parts are typically played by onnagata, male actors specializing in female roles. Some day, I shall have to find a performance that finds good ways to nod to the theater’s traditions but also lets women back in on the fun and the art.

Shrine of good matches and the temple of clear water 2014-05-30

Jishu-Jinja is a moon apart from the rest of Kiymizu-Dera. Stairs wind up to a cluster of close-packed small buildings including a number of places to buy charms. The shrine is also a satellite in that it backs onto the hill rather than being surrounded by the larger temple as was the case in Ginkaku-ji. Such joint arrangements mean that it is often a bit of a challenge to discern temples from shrines, although after having played that game in 2002 in my cultural arts class I did try to regularly train up my mother in telling the difference. The sometimes colocated places of worship and the commonality of many elements between various branches of Buddhism and Shinto reflect a larger intermixing in Japanese religious life.

The term is syncretism rather than the Christian concept of ecumenism. The majority of Japanese people don’t profess a particular faith but do engage in both Buddhist and Shinto practices at various stages of life. To try to de-exoticize that a bit, every culture has rituals and traditions particularly when it comes to birth, marriage, and death. In the U.S. context even secular weddings often have Christian wedding accouterments. I’m told that they have become popular in Japan, and indeed I saw a fair number of ads to that effect.

Also, traditions that persist are often appealing in their own right. Moti’s friend and our gracious hostess Mina-san did take the challenge of the shrine to wander between the two stones embedded in the floor of Jishu-Jinja with her eyes shut. She had ready help, as the rest of our group had all had the blessing of having found terrific matches, although with my father’s passing a few years ago we did only have two couples. The main obstacles of the walk are the other visitors, although to my surprise there weren’t very many attempting the walk on that day. The ground atop was flat, although if your quest is heedless and rushed, you could speed past your goal and face disaster on the stairs. However, there’s no restriction from being helped by a potential partner or, in this case, friends. By tradition, it means that any matches will take some help from others, but that hardly seems a terrible burden to bear.

Finally, in the picture to the left,just behind the statue of patron god Ōkuninushi, is a helpful reminder that some parts of Japanese folk practices may prove more familiar than a Western traveler might first think. The three foot tall rabbit is no Easter bunny, but instead played a role in the stories of the god’s successful match. As seems to be common in stories the world over, this hare was a fairly gentle trickster, one that got in over his head and paid dearly for it. I was born on Easter and since I’m not Australian I’m quite fond of rabbits and do like taking pictures of them where err I see them. I’ll leave to my treasured readers whether this indicates a tendency towards being a bit of a rogue although I do confess that I enjoy garden vegetables (that I pay for).

The giant building blocks of Kiyomizu-dera 2014-05-30

After finishing the Philosopher's Walk, we were ready for lunch. Fortunately, Moti’s friend Mina-san had recommended a place for us to eat. It was a prix fixe menu with ten distinct bowls per person on a tray, each having a serving of a different culinary treat. This is not an uncommon style of Japanese meal. We ate at a long thin table along a plywood wall with Venetian-inspired art hanging from it. The size of a truly small Japanese eatery may be familiar to a Manhattanite, but is fairly unfamiliar throughout the rest of the U.S., as space is rarely at that much of premium.

We then met up with Mina-san herself on the way to our next attraction, Kiyomizu-dera. My memory had tricked me on the approach to the heritage site. I was incorrectly thinking it was further out of town, but instead we climbed directly from the streets of Gion to the entrance gate. The day was quite hot, but I recall the elevation helping. The aquatic theme of the complex certainly didn’t hurt; the name Kiyomizu means pure water and refers to a cascade down the foothills on which the mountain was built. As the picture on the left shows, the giant blocks were quite real, a consequence of renovations. Which is only fair as the current wooden buildings date back to 1633 and were constructed without nails.

The main building has a vast balcony, from which you can gaze out on the hills, see a pagoda dedicated to easy childbirth, or look down at the stone building where the water flows out of the hill and into the extended cups of waiting visitors. The view I most remembered from 2002 was looking back at this balcony, but before we would get there some of the group would brave crowds to walk up to Jishu-Jinja.

That Shinto shrine to Ōkuninushi, a god of love and good matches, is accessible through the Buddhist temple in a way that is not at all unusual in Japan but represents a blending of religions that I’m used to only seeing in ecumenical collaborations often driven by necessity or seeing in pictures of the trips to the Holy Land where sites are revered by multiple religions operating in close proximity. We’ll pick up with the visit to that shrine tomorrow.

The police in Ferguson perversely demonstrate why military occupation can be hard

As ever, speaking for myself and not my employer.

Ferguson Missouri has been patrolled by body armored, heavily armed and equipped, nominal police officers. As Matt Yglesias notes, among many others, this hasn’t worked out so well. Reporters have been arrested, largely peaceful crowds have been tear gassed, and the situation is getting tenser. As Kelsey D. Atherton documents with testimony from veterans, U.S. military doctrine and training intentionally cuts against what was being done there.

Having gone to grad school during the Iraq War and having followed humanitarian interventions before that, there’s a range of reasons that taking a para-military approach runs into trouble. If you’re interested in reading more about grappling with the line between military and policing and various attempts to effectively straddle it, check out Where is the Lone Ranger When We Need Him? by Robert M. Perito for the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Military and paramilitary approaches can be escalatory

James Gerrond notes “In the USAF, we did crowd control and riot training every year. Lesson 1: Your mere presence has the potential to escalate the situation.” This is fairly easy to understand on a human level. Being around people with weapons out, particularly if you don’t trust them, is just stressful. That can even extend to body armor, which is why many NGOs intentionally eschew it even in conflict zones. Worse, if heavy-handed tactics are used in response to genuine provocation or simply without justification, those already protesting suddenly have more cause. Ferguson does not have a notably higher violent crime rate than the nation as a whole. This entire thing was quite avoidable.

Policing is challenging and political

Military force is hardly apolitical, but in the strict sense of the term national defense and a focus on external enemies means that the military isn’t responsible for enforcing the domestic social order, be it good or ill. However, when keeping the peace, particularly in reference to a protest, police can’t avoid confronting the fissures and fault lines in society. This of course is especially true when they represent the target of the protest. Most any occupying military will want to rely to the extent possible on local police forces, but those forces will often have political problems of their own if the country has notable existing fault lines.

Legitimacy matters

The question of whether people trust the those patrolling the streets is both squishy and critical. CSIS’s Bob Lamb put out a report this summer on assessing legitimacy that does a good job of nailing down the concept and what it provides:

Legitimacy is a worthiness of support (or, in some contexts, of loyalty or imitation), and illegitimacy is a worthiness of opposition. Legitimacy sustains and illegitimacy impedes. In the short term, legitimacy also induces compliance with demands and requests and encourages supportive participation and public action, while illegitimacy induces opposition.

The Ferguson Police Department’s legitimacy was already tarnished by the shooting of Michael Brown and was further squandered through their choice of tactics. Most everyone is now hoping that the Governor Nixon’s deployment of the State Highway Patrol will change that dynamic not because they know the territory better or they’re more trained in crowd control, but because they’re avoiding escalation and are trusted in a way that the local police no longer are.

We’ll know soon enough if that works, but I think there’s a good chance it will. The most successful form of foreign intervention, as Rolan Paris elaborates, are peacekeeping operations. The biggest advantage peacekeepers have is legitimacy. They are coming into a situation with the agreement of all major parties to a conflict.

Last night’s police response in Ferguson was certainly an example of ineffective militarization, but it’s important to remember all the advantages they had. They lived there, they knew the territory, they spoke the language. It’s that much harder for even far better-trained outsiders to play that role. Peacekeeping shows that it can be done, but I suspect that a key enabler of success is having a measure of legitimacy from the start. Meanwhile, I’m gratified that there appears to be a widespread realization that our police forces shouldn’t try to act like occupying forces: they aren’t good at it, and it makes their job harder in the first place.

69th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima tonight at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time today (August 5th)

Kate’s Mother passed on a reminder to me.

I thought I would pass on the link to http://www.worldpeace.org/ in case it was of interest to anyone that’s been reading along.

[Update: Fair warning, audio quality on the stream is not the best, there’s a buzzing, hopefully that’ll get fixed.]

[Update 2: We’re guessing it’s actually cicadas in the background which does make sense for summer time in a park.]

2014-05-29 The return to Gion [Completed]

After returning from Daitoku-ji, we decided to grab something to eat.  Francis’ guidebook recommended the Karafuneya Coffee shop, which apparently not only specialized in a wondrous variety of sweets, but had incredibly detailed models of them to look over while waiting to be seated.  If you’ve ever wondered what over two hundred varieties of parfait would look like, look no further.  From individual treats to a 50000-yen variety that would likely feed an entire school class, it was here.  Kate reveled in the sheer concept and ultimately decided on a caramel apple pie parfait.

The shop didn’t just serve dessert, it also had a selection of diner classics including salads and onion rings, but the displays at the front showed you where their heart was. Our visit also showed us how attitudes on smoking were evolving. We were given a choice sitting at two tables or sitting together but within close proximity of the smoking station. We’d later dine at places that did not have a non-smoking section, but the balance did seem to be shifting both in the restaurants and on the streets. In that latter case, smokers were increasingly clustered and carrying a lit cigarette while walking was discouraged, at least in the larger cities.

After we finished we crossed the Kamo river at Sanjo Dori and made our return to Gion. Looking up the Kamo and walking the streets of Gion were disproportionately strong memories from my 2002 trip, and the actual reality did not disappoint. The west bank (the right of the picture) was backed with restaurants often with deck dining and that seemed to be open much later than those we encountered the prior night in the depths of Gion. The east bank had a linear park that helped serve as a transition between the two parts of the city.

Kyoto can be a hot city. It certainly was while we were there, with easily the highest temperatures of the trip, hitting the eighties and nineties. This made the attraction of the Kamo quite obvious and tall buildings with rooftop decks proliferated in a delightful mix of styles. However, there’s nothing new about gathering by the river for entertainment; that’s where Izumo no Okuni founded Kabuki on dry riverbeds. The Kabuki-za theater, shown on the left, and a statue of the lady both owe their proximity to those origins. Famously, though, Kabuki subsequently became entirely the domain of male performers, as a consequence of the social controls of the Tokogawa era, a subject we’ll return to in a future post.

We then proceeded to weave through the streets of Gion. The section by the Kamo seemed densely packed with any number of diversions housed in an eclectic mix of architectural styles and accouterments. Our destination for the night was the Gion-Shimbashi district, a charming historic pair of streets and canal that had quieted down for the night but still was an exciting new atmosphere for most of us. At the end of the strip was a restaurant with its own patron cat, shown at the right. If you look at the slideshow below you’ll see that it even has a shelf at the base of the hostess stand with a pillow for it to rest on. I won’t try to draw any larger observations from that, aside from noting that distinctive character proved easy to find in that part of town.

After completing our circuit, we headed back towards our guest house, along the well lit streets of Shijo Dori. We made it home more easily this time, the twisty avenues at the end of the journey were becoming more familiar. Also welcoming was the sight of the Yasaka shrine at night, which unlike the many other portions of that walk actually shows up nicely in nighttime photography.

 

2014-05-29 Exploring other temples of Kyoto: Ryōan-ji and Daitoku-ji

Kyoto was Japan’s ancient capital. It is overflowing with temples, shrines, and history. The closest equivalent for the United States may be Philadelphia if the historic core were both far older and scaled up. Amusingly though, there were more odd moments of familiar culture than even Tokyo, although part of that is that hip hop is a bit more popular in the present capital. The Omerice (Omelet + Rice) let us sample a fairly common Japanese take on a western classic, although my dish with yuba, layers of the skin of soybean milk, was tasty but particularly unfamiliar. Nonetheless the Beatles were playing on the sound system in the second story dining room.

We then finished our walk from Kinkaku-ji to Ryōan-ji temple, which apparently translates as the Temple of the Dragon at Peace. It is known for its dry garden and I read of it in 2002 although I still need to verify whether I had a chance to see it on that rainy day more than a decade ago. As is often the case, the temple grounds have far more than just the elements its most known for. There are traditional gardens, with a central pond, that all visitors first pass by. After ascending the stairs, the temple building itself is a remarkable mix of white plaster and find architectural detailing. The interior has illustrated mountain landscapes or floral depictions, the former being a favorite of mine that I tend to associate more with Chinese art.

The paragon of Zen gardens itself has more than a dozen stones, although they are arranged such that you are not likely to see them all from a single position. Several of the clusters of stones blend together when viewed from a distances but are clearly distinct when gazed at directly. I don’t know the specific theology or aesthetic behind the arrangement, but it certainly does reward study from a range of perspectives and contemplation.

After leaving, we meandered the remainder of the path around the pond, seeing both ducks and turtles.  The ducks were more common, and a favorite of Francis dating back to childhood, although I went with the turtles in this instance because it had the better broad picture of the pond and perhaps also because of my University of Maryland bias.

Our next stop was another Zen temple, Daitoku-ji. The day was coming to an end, and we proved only able to visit one of the four sub-temples. Based on the walking book we had with us, subsequently returned, that temple was strongly associated with Sen no Rikyū, a pivotal figure in the evolution of the Japanese tea ceremony. I had the opportunity to participate in a tea ceremony in 2002, at a different temple that I’d gotten confused with Daitoku-ji. However, it was still interesting to wander the moss garden grounds and read once again about the history of the ritual.

One critical thing to note about the ceremony: it is meant to be a place apart.  The entrances can be fairly small, require humbling ducking, and are not conducive to carrying a sword. The practices do promote a certain equality among the participants, which may have contributed to Hideyoshi ordering Sen to kill himself, an incident allegedly prompted by Sen placing an image of himself near the top of a gateway the leader of Japan passed through. How can such a fancy ceremony promote harmony? I think the short answer is that clear rules of interaction can be empowering to those with less prestige and social capital.

After Francis successfully rescued himself from the closing temple, we proceeded out to a bus and back to central Kyoto.

2014-05-29 Our first morning in Kyoto

Morning in Kyoto broke gently. Despite having the windows open there was not that much noise on our tiny side street. My wife and my mother’s first night on futons may have been eased by exhaustion, but they are generally notably more comfortable than the American convertible couches baring the same name. As the view down the street shows, what Gion lacks in navigability, it does make up for in charm.  There was even a small ukiyoe (Japanese woodprint) museum down the street, though lamentably we never did make it in.

After settling in to our new abode, taking advantage of the showers two flights of stairs below (Kate’s only real complaint about the place, particularly as the last set was rather steep) and doing a bit of planning, most of us went off to breakfast at Café 3032.  We would return regularly; it was just a block and a half away, the food was good, and it was one of the first places open of a morning. The breakfast was more a Western style with a Japanese twist, as was the music from a cover band with a name that translated as Adult Reggae and included songs by Nirvana and an instrumental cover of Sublime. When we asked, we discovered that apparently the Japanese female vocals were popular with the American guests, so apparently they know their audience. Regardless, if you visit, I recommend the French toast; it was delicious.

After regrouping and delivering a carryout sandwich, we walked down to one of Gion’s main thoroughfares to catch the bus to Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion. Just before we got to the stop, we discovered that we happened to be traveling in the midst of school trip season. Delightfully, we were one of the attractions. Several groups of students we met in Kyoto and Tokyo had assignments to interview foreigners and practice their English. The first group of schoolgirls picked me, asked their questions clearly, and handed around the assignment book so everyone got a chance to participate. The questions were fairly standard: I like baseball, sushi, and did not yet have an opinion between Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji as I had not visited the silver pavilion on my last trip. I’ll likely never forget the enthusiasm of my lead questioner and was charmed in a way that didn’t wear off when we boarded the standing room only bus to one of Kyoto’s best known landmarks.

International Relations Debate Notes: Reputation for Resolve

Routine reminder: I speak for myself and not my employer.

What’s a reputation for resolve? The summary below will lay out the technical definition, but the short version is that those calling for more coercive action (be it military or economic) backing up U.S. threats and red lines regularly cite reputational benefits that will go beyond the immediate incident. Alternately, those believing in the importance of reputation for resolve may simply argue for making more limited use of threats and red lines, as is outlined below. This ties into a variety of related concepts; reputation in general, deterrence, and credibility all tie together to the concept, but the biggest controversy lies in the resolve component.

The Foreign Entanglements show on Blogging Heads TV recently had a debate on the matter that I summarize below because I think that you often can learn more of the strengths and weaknesses of each side when they actually talk to one another. To more succinctly summarize the discussions, I’ve grouped arguments thematically rather than by when they occurred in the video. For a literature review going in, check out the blogging heads link or this Drezner piece from a few years back.

Mercer’s Deterrence Theory:

Deterrence is based on credibility/reputation which has three parts:

• Power: What a state’s capacity is. What forces or tools does it have available and how costly is it to use them? In general the United States is the highest capacity state in the world, but it varies from case to case. When it comes to Iran or Russia, Europe has more economic tools available.
• Interest: How much does the country care about this issue? The United States does not have a high interest in Libya or Syria, but fought a war in the former case and not the latter. By comparison, free travel of oil through the Straits of Hormuz is considered a high interest of the United States.
• Resolve: Whether a country’s leadership seems likely to use its power to assert the interest in question. In poker terms, does the county’s leadership have a tendency to bluff?

Critiques to a reputation for resolve

Going back five years or so, the resolve portion of that triad has faced substantially more skepticism from academic political scientists. Farley was defending the strong critique, not just that a reputation for resolve is not applicable as the situation varies, but that it is not even well enough understood to be a useful concept. Farley argues that the reason for this is that we cannot predict how actions that send messages will be received. There's too many moving parts. Specifically, had the U.S. bombed Syria without overthrowing Assad, this might have been viewed as a result that failed to demonstrate resolve.

Debating the examples

Farley countered that we we have not seen a reputation for resolve in practice. Our red lines against Iran include, for example, mining the Straits of Hormuz. These have not been pressed and what we have done in Syria has made no difference. The reason for this is that we obviously have greater interests at stake in Iran. On the other hand, red lines often do not work when our interests are weak; for example, our red line in Syria did not work even though we had just deposed Qaddafi in Libya.

Gartenstein-Ross argues resolve when your interests are highly involved is different than when they are peripheral. He outlined the reputation for resolve as relevant in two categories 1) where U.S. interests are low but a clear threat is made, 2) where U.S. interests are directly involved but the situation is messy. He argued that Syria was reacting not to Libya but instead the lack of U.S. response to Iran's support of insurgents that killed Americans in Iraq and Assad's allowing foreign fighters to transit through Syria to Iraq.

Farley argues that we have no real visibility into the Assad regime; one could tell a competing narrative that the U.S. would be interested in payback when an opportunity arose due to the weakness of his regime. This leaves reputation for resolve as a variable without predictive content. Gartenstein-Ross agreed that the Assad regime would consider both stories. This is a case of acting with incomplete information.

Farley points to Cold War history, saying that if academics and historians can't establish a how a reputation for resolve works with the extensive archives from the Cold War, then policymakers should be extremely careful about making any decisions on the basis of a reputation for resolve.

How to implement academic humility

Gartenstein-Ross laid out that he believes that reputation for resolve is a case where the academics are experiencing a bias towards variables they can measure. In one example, for a time the statistic-oriented baseball fans undervalued fielding because there wasn't a good way to report on it, unlike hitting. Leaving out an important variable could then lead to an undervaluing of certain players and worse performance for the team despite a more scientific-seeming approach. Gartenstein-Ross specifically believed that academics were prone to make this mistake and believed they made the same error when discounting the specific religious content of belief systems in militant organizations.

Farley replies that practitioners are not acting in a theory-free zone; they are operating with theories that come out of Cold War deterrence theory and Thomas Schelling. They continue to operate with this Cold War understanding because that's where they gained much of their experience. Those with the strongest and most visceral feel of reputation and resolve were old Russia hands. Academics should be humble, but that humility encourages tearing down previous academic theories that are now obsolete. It is possible that we will find a way to show the impact of reputation for resolve in the future, but in the absence of such evidence we should not expend blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve.

Gartenstein-Ross says that the two views are not necessarily irreconcilable. He is not arguing for expenditure of blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve. Instead, when things are not in our interest, we should be very hesitant to make any sort of threat if we are not willing to fulfill it. By this means reputation can be obtained, and we should use this mechanism.

The utility of bluffing and a reputation for resolve

Farley queries whether this means Gartenstein-Ross wishes to take the bluff away from the United State's strategic toolkit. He further charges that many of those who say we should have acted in Syria are doing so on the basis that we could better bluff our way through Crimea. Farley raises the example of the Chinese air identification zone. In that instance, the U.S. flew B-52s, planes that you cannot possibly overlook, through the zone and China did nothing. Similarly, he says that Putin has effectively deployed bluffing on multiple occasions.

Gartenstein-Ross stands by his view and argues that the Chinese bluff was counterproductive. During the unipolar moment in the 1990s we had a high ability to bluff.  However, our relative decline over the past thirteen years have weakened our ability. He finds the U.S. bluff on Syria to be outmoded thinking much as Farley argues that the reputation for resolve is outmoded. Bluffs are now more likely to be called, both because of the reduced capability and because of the vicious circle of he reputation for resolve because bluffs that are called.

Gartenstein-Ross then returns to the Iran example in pointing to the utility of a reputation for resolve. The U.S. has a variety of red lines with respect to Iran. Some are clear, like the Straits of Hormuz. However, there are subtler moves regarding the nuclear program where a reputation for resolve can matter. Reputation for resolve is not as important for the bluff, or the big policy areas and matters of war and peace, but for subtler decisions it plays a bigger role.  He says that while he's more skeptical than Farley of political science's ability to truly measure something like the reputation for resolve and thinks Farley overstates a legitimate critique, he believes that it's something that should be better understood.

My own thoughts

Gartenstein-Ross argues the more limited case for reputation for resolve and I think to really judge that debate we’d have to get into the literature on bluffing. That said, it is important to remember that in the specific case of Syria, tons of chemical weapons were removed from the country and their existing facilities were demilitarized. There are allegations of continued use of chlorine gas and continued atrocities by the Syrian government are indisputable, but the significant quantity of weapons and facilities destroyed is a boon in its own right.

What’s more telling is that the Gartenstein-Ross’s limited case for a reputation for resolve points to greater restraint when U.S. interests are low. He repeatedly argued that President Obama’s mistake was setting the red line, not in failing to enforce it. While he noted that our reputation for resolve was diminished by failing to engaged in unspecified retaliation against Iran and Syria for aiding insurgents in Iraq, he did not lay out any positive mechanisms by which to increase our reputation for resolve. If spending blood and treasure are off the table and limited strikes will make little difference, than wherefore complaints from other commentators about the President’s policy in Ukraine? U.S. sanctions have slowly been ratcheted up. European allies have been slower to act, but due to greater connections with Russia their actions have had greater effect.

What about complaints from allies?

This debate did not touch on one source of complaints of ill-resolve: those from U.S. allies. Gripes have been made in public and in private. Vehement critiques of resolve like Daniel Larison do not dispute the existence of such complaints but instead argue that they play to Washington’s pride and insecurity. I don’t doubt that some of that goes on, but I think some of the behavior may have a less harsh interpretation, namely allies bargain about who should bear the burden of common interests. Matt Yglesias gives an example of how this works in European debate over sanction policy:

The biggest gas importer is Germany, which would rather see someone else's ox gored. Angela Merkel has been talking up the idea of a ban on the export of military equipment to Russia. Conveniently, Germany doesn't have a big outstanding weapon sale to Russia. But France is scheduled to sell advanced Mistral naval vessels to Russia. Much of the international community wants France to cancel that deal, hurting the Russian military and the French economy while leaving others unscathed. Meanwhile, from the French viewpoint a better countermove might be for the UK to seize Russian funds and property squirreled away in London.

It’s not that France, Germany, and the UK doubt one another’s resolve, they’d just genuinely prefer that someone else pay the bill and no doubt can come up with compelling normative reasons why this is so. Rather than applying the deterrence-elated concept of reputation and credibility writ large to allies, I would argue that we should apply a range of appropriate tools, such as collective action problems to negotiation theory to security dilemmas. This is not to say that complaints from allies are merely bluffs and puffery – the current alignment of the Middle East in particular is genuinely unstable - but that their use of the word credibility should not dictate our choice of intellectual framework.

Okayama to Kyoto 2014-05-28

The trip back to Okayama Station from the Kōraku-en gardens was much tighter than I hoped, but we made it. My favorite landmark on the remainder of the trip to Kyoto was seeing Himeji castle. Like many of the castles in Japan, it was reconstructed after World War II. However, it was rebuilt using not just the original floor plan, but also with classical building methods. I toured it with friend and co-traveler Chad back in 2002. We were considering trying for Hiroshima, but when that was rejected as too far, seeing the castle at Himeji was an appealing alternative. After touring it, in slippers that were at least two sizes too small, we went on to check out their botanical garden. It was more of the scale you see in the West, but still quite nice. So while we did not stop back in Himeji this time, it maintains a fond place in my heart.

We also passed through a train yard on the way into Kyoto Station. All of the engines pictured on the left are part of full blown shinkansen. I suspect that a good part of the system’s timeliness is that they have ample reserves. By comparison, I still didn’t have my act entirely together on hotel directions, so between the comparatively small lunch earlier, we ended up getting into Kyoto with a crew that was starting to get grumpy. Moti had some success with station wifi and I cross-referenced street names, but he did end up having to call to be guided into the place once we were within a few blocks. Not my finest hour, although I’m proud to say that for every subsequent stop on the trip, there was a copy of a map saved in the trip google doc. Our residence, the Gojo Guesthouse, proved to be a terrific experience, but we were disappointed to learn that we had yet more travel to do through intricate streets, as we were not staying in the most prominent of the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) buildings.

So, instead, we did the only sensible thing and went for food. Gion is quite a wonderful neighborhood, but unfortunately, it also can be a tricky place to eat as it gets later in the evening. Not because it’s dangerous - not in the slightest - just because so many of the restaurants, including most everything in our Lonely Planet guide, was closed. Moti and Francis scouted about and soon enough we found our salvation, an okonomiyaki place! This was not Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki but was instead in the more common mode of nearby Osaka. The meal was quite good, although we did get rushed out the door despite having ordered a succession of dishes and drinks, so we won’t be specifically recommending the place in question.

The last stretch to our rooms was not that far, but it did seem so at the time, in part as I was carrying an extra backpack. However, from here on out the news was largely good; the guest house certainly does earn our recommendation and proved a fantastic launching point for our adventures in Kyoto. But that shall have to wait until tomorrow.

Transit Blogging: Hyperdia: emperor of route finders

After we finished at the Hiroshima Peace Museum we explored the city a bit more while Moti and Francis finished their visit. The next step our trip was Kyoto, but during research during brief down periods, I’d discovered that our initial scenic plan along the Sea of Japan just wasn’t going to work. While the Japanese rail system is amazing and extensive, it sensibly isn’t high all speed rail, particularly when crossing from one coast of the country to the other. As a result, there were a few different points along the trip where our desire to check out interesting routes was foiled as we realized that the train trip alone would take an all day commitment.

Thankfully, there is HyperDia.com which, while not primarily a mapping tool, is far and away the best route planner I’ve had the pleasure of using. For example here’s the search we used to get to our next destination, a stopover in Okayama on the way to Kyoto.

The output format is fairly straightforward and familiar. The strength is really found in the speed and stability combined with a wisely designed interface. It isn’t without flaws - use of the back button rather than scrolling down to the bottom will result in you having to regularly re-input parameters - but I found it a stalwart companion throughout the trip and only once did it not cover all the modes of interest.

There are a few different aspects that makes the interface so convenient:

• The English interface is top notch and in no way feels like a neglected variant of the main Japanese page.
• The destination completion works well. Try it out and just type in a few Japanese cities you know and you’ll quickly see a range of options.
• The option to set up to three pass through cities makes it easy to try out scenic trips and experiment with brief stopovers. The only flaw there for tourists is that it doesn’t do loop trips; you can’t have the same destination twice on the list.
• The check boxes make it easy to customize your choices. For the average JR Pass rider, you’ll probably want to click off the Nozomi and other top-tier Shinkansen, as they aren’t covered. More fine tuning is also allowable, but in most cases for inter-city travel, the first few options will just be JR anyways so you don’t need to worry about it.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t want a companion book or the like; we certainly recommend Japan by Rail although most any reliable guide should mention station names. Hyperdia isn’t meant to be the Amtrak Interactive Rail Atlas or the like; you’ll still have to figure out where you want to go and what you want to see on your own. But once you have a couple possibilities worked out, it’s easy enough to experiment with a range of ways of running your trip. To be fair to the American sites, Hyperdia is such an amazing tool because it works with such an fantastic infrastructure backbone. The trains stick to their timetables and three-minute transfers are both achievable and not catastrophic in the event of a failure. The sprawling stations do have consistent numbering systems that are reported through the trip planner. Best of all, most anywhere you want to go, you can get there by train, possibly with a bit of help from a bus for intra-city travel or when going off the beaten path.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: Main Building 2014-05-28

Content warning: The main museum gets most directly into the consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima, beyond even what is shown in the East building.

Walking through corridors showing the damage done to Hiroshima to property and to people, I certainly felt a moral imperative that these weapons never be used again. However, how is it that nuclear weapons have only been used twice in battle? I believe deterrence and mutually assured destruction is part of the story, but a key related concept is what Thomas Schelling calls the nuclear taboo. At first the escalation to nuclear weapons was seen as more of a continuation of existing policy than a radical break during WWII, and President Eisenhower made nuclear first use a policy in the event of a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe. However, by 1964 President Johnson declared “Make no mistake, there is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. For 19 peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.” This reflected earlier decisions not to deploy them in Korea and subsequent avoidance by the U.S. in Vietnam, by Israel against Egypt in 1973, and by the Soviets in Afghanistan. Nina Tattenwald discusses the origin of the taboo (summary by Patrick Lam) and the main building passionately and decisively makes the case that this taboo must be maintained whether you believe in full abolition or that they’ve contributed to the decline in great power war.

The displays (excerpted online) covered the multitude of ways that nuclear weapons can visit destruction upon cities: the rays of heat, the blast itself, the conflagration of flammable materials, and of course the radiation. The picture on the left shows a portion of the facade of a bank where someone was sitting at 8:15 that morning, likely waiting for it to open. Given the location, the person died on the spot, the stone around them was blasted white while the steps underneath them left the remnant of their “shadow” in the middle of the picture.

The mangled remains of the city, stone, wood, and steel filled many of the displays showing the widespread extent of the damage from a single nuclear bomb with a small yield by today’s standards. The museum did its best to mark where each piece came from within the blast zone. The details filled out the almost incomprehensible damage shown in the photographs and the detailed model on the right. One piece I don’t have the heart to include in the display was the shredded remnants of the school uniforms of children who died in the bombing or the days thereafter (let alone the photographs of the burned bodies directly afflicted). Some had been evacuated to the country but others were conscripted to create firebreaks and in anticipation of conventional bombing.

Death and devastation can come in many forms. As I’ve earlier mentioned, more people died from a single raid in the firebombing of Tokyo; however, that raid involved 334 B-29s with 279 dropping bombs. By comparison, the Enola Gay flew with only two other planes, suggesting a terrible potential to scale that was achieved by both sides in the Cold War. This is also where the radiation comes in, as experienced by many of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombs. Sadako Sasaki, who helped inspire the Children’s War Memorial, had been two at the time of the bombing but died years later of leukemia despite having been quite healthy in the interim. The picture on the right are some of the cranes she folded; you may have read or heard of her story when you were a child.

The remainder of the museum focused on the stories of survivors, the rescue and recovery efforts, and even pictures drawn by those who were there. This was complemented by prayers and wishes for peace from around the world and a view out to the rest of the park. Based on the wikipedia page, one million people visit the museum a year. I hope, in addition to whatever else we do to make this a better world, we all work to keep this taboo from fading.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: East Building (Pt. 2) 2014-05-28

The first floor of the museum continued to show a variety of consequences of the bombing, but I’d like to focus on the letters that make up the wall undergirding the model of the A-Bomb Dome. They are written on behalf of the people of Hiroshima to protest every nuclear weapons test. The letters continue until present day and are primarily not driven by states like North Korea, but instead are by ongoing sub-critical tests by Russia, China, and the United States. Such test produce no yield of fissile material and are allowed under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. However, while such tests are safer than other forms of testing, the city government objects to their intent as it seeks nuclear disarmament. I’d be interesting in discussing those issues in further depth at some point, although it was not my international relations focus and at my think tank (who I continue not to write on behalf of) the topic is handled by a different program. However, suffice to say, the topic is not a flight of fancy. The arsenals of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have shrunk dramatically and there are any number of steps that disarmament advocates call for, such as de-alert weapons or ruling out first use, short of total abolition.

The second level dealt with Hiroshima under Allied occupation, specifically British Commonwealth forces in this city’s case. This is a topic I am somewhat familiar with, although it has been several years since I read Embracing Defeat. The exhibit focused on the ramifications of the bombing, from the Red Cross hospital where survivors were treated on the left, to the U.S. government studies of the effects of radiation poisoning that at times prioritized secrecy of treatment of the afflicted. Particularly hard-hitting for us, due to my Mom’s prior work at the United States Information Agency (not extant at the time), was the discussion of censorship on reporting of the extent of the damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Restrictions imposed after the outbreak of the Korean War also prevented public gatherings including the 1950 peace festival, although the mayor did travel abroad to speak on the topic in France. The occupations of Japan and Germany are widely viewed as the best examples of the potential of rebuilding an enemy after a war. I still agree with that assessment, although I think there are many factors that resulted it in not being an applicable model elsewhere and it’s important to remember that even after the war ended there remained policies that put security concerns above ethical ones.

Finally, the top floor focused on the current state of nuclear weapons in the world, with the globe on the right showing declared stockpiles. I found this part to be informative and well-argued. I also particularly appreciated the sheer number of languages offered in the digital displays. That said, there’s a few other books I’ll be ordering and a few debates I wish to watch before I write in greater detail on these topics. The next portion was the museum shop, from which we acquired a good number of bilingual children’s books on the Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and other materials before proceeding to the second building. That one was rawer now that the the context has been established, and included more artifacts. It reminded both Moti and myself of nothing so much as the Holocaust Museum, both in content and caliber. I am yet unsure if I can do it justice in this format. I may continue on with the trip in the next post and save any further discussion for writing that is not travelogue.

To end on a slightly more hopeful note, I do want to emphasize the extent to which the de-escalation and then end of the Cold War has dramatically reduced the global stock of nuclear weapons. This should not encourage complacency; North Korea has gone nuclear and even now the world powers are in talks to reach a deal with Iran to prevent further proliferation in the Middle East. But if anyone tells you that the world is scarier now than it was at the height of the Cold War, they are trying to sell you something or just don’t know what they’re talking about. The progress we’ve made on preventing the annihilation of the human race is vital, and some credit must go to those who have made it their lives’ work to convince leaders and peoples of the world that these weapons must be constrained.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: East Building (Pt. 1) 2014-05-28

Some years ago, in my home town of Washington, D.C., the Air and Space Museum had an exhibit about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I believe I went through it, but I may just be conflating pictures of the plane with past trips to the museum in my ever fallible memory. Regardless, that exhibit unsuccessfully sought to avoid controversy by focusing on the technical aspects and avoiding politics and context. Worse yet are museums that actively distort the past for propagandistic purposes. By comparison, the Peace Museum takes an extremely challenging topic and addresses it in a forthright and informative matter.

The initial section gives the history of Hiroshima leading into the Second World War. Hiroshima was a garrison city a staging area for troops in various wars, one of the centers for emigrants from annexed Korea, and an industrial town with a significant reliance on mobilized students and forced labor. The panel on the right discusses the invasion of China: “Early in the War with China, the Japanese Army occupied many Chinese cities. In December 1937, it took the capital city, then called Nanking. The occupation of this important city cheered the Japanese people, who considered the war in China a holy crusade. Hiroshima’s residents celebrated with a lantern parade. In Nanking, however, Chinese people were being massacred by the Japanese army.” It goes on to briefly discuss varied estimates of the death toll. Wartime atrocities are not the subject of the museum - for that there is the Kyoto Museum for World Peace - but it squarely addresses the context of the bombing before making the hard case against it.

After reviewing the history, the museum proceeds to the actual attack. There are any number of artifacts, although the greater detail is held for the second building and a future post. On your left is a pocket watch donated by Akito Kawagoe, stopped at the exact moment of the bombing. The discussion of the decisions of the U.S. government does not rely on hyperbole. Instead it presents key memos and minutes from the debates, showing various competing views. As is somewhat widely known, the old capital Kyoto was also considered as a possible target. However, its selection was vehemently opposed by Japan experts within the U.S. government as a sacrilege which would destroy any hope of future peace with Japan. The museum did not specifically argue that there was a clear course that would have achieved peace without the use of the bomb, but did highlight that possible concessions, such as allowing the continuation of the imperial system as the occupying forces did anyways, were not deeply explored before the attack.

 

The destruction of the bombing was shown in multiple forms, including the two models above. One related point mentioned by the museum, but not an area of primary focus, was that the firebombing of Tokyo and not the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki is widely cited as the source of the largest casualty count from a single air raid. The horrifying specter of nuclear war is not just the enormity of the individual bombings, but that the threat can scale up in a way that more air force-intensive operations could not. This relative continuity in death toll is perhaps one of the reasons why the specific morality of the atomic bomb was not as hotly debated. In many ways it was a continuation of existing policy by other means. However, the questions raised there require research beyond the scope of this post.

Our last morning at Peace Memorial Park 2014-05-28

The entire group wanted to spend time at the museum, but Kate, my mother, and I decided to get up earlier and attend the daily carillon ringing at Peace Memorial Park one last time. The chimes toll electronically, with a slight background buzz, but I’m still moved every time I hear it.

When approaching the carillon, we passed by a large number of students, respectfully gathered at the Children’s Peace Memorial. They presumably were there with similar intent when it came to timing. Moti was not with us, so I could not tell you what exactly was said, but the sentiment was unmistakable.

We then walked to the west side of the island, which we had not yet explored. It was perhaps the portion in which the weight of history was felt most heavily as it included the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound which sat over a vault holding the unclaimed remains of many of the victims of the bombing.

Further south is a monument specifically to the Korean victims of the attack. It estimated their number at twenty thousand, about ten percent of the dead. [The total casualty count estimated by the memorial is higher than most other sources, but the estimate of the number of Korean dead is in line with what I’ve seen elsewhere]. Japan occupied Korea well before the U.S. had entered the second World War and the garrison city of Hiroshima had a population that were soldiers, mobilized students, and ordinary civilians. Later in the trip, at the Osaka Human Rights museum, I got to see video of other Koreans, then residing in Japan, celebrating the end of the war and as one might expect very glad to see the end of the occupation of their nation. The placement of this memorial on the main island is actually a relatively recent change, one that happened only within the past few decades. I’m very glad that it did.

Update: Fixed the date in the title and add a note on the casualties.

Transit Blogging: Hiroshima

With my family’s longstanding advocacy on behalf of Maryland’s prospective Purple Line, we check out light rail most anywhere we travel. An interesting thing about trams and streetcars, at least in cities that have had them for some time like Hiroshima, is that there is a huge variety vehicles in service. I’m sure there are multiple factors at work, but one big one is that many cities abandoned their surface rail networks in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result of that, and the standardized gauge, many cars seem to have shuffled around the world to various cities and transit museums.

This is not to say that the city doesn’t have a range of shiny new cars. There were several varieties about, including an underground line I visited on our last day there, after finally going to the Peace Museum. The underground line thankfully had a machine to get a Paspy, the local smart card. As I believe I’ve earlier mentioned, the trick to getting these cards is to look for machines labeled IC, probably for intelligent chip or the like. The best strategy is typically to just find the card when arriving in the station, a task that has grown much easier than it once was. Just a few years back, finding cards normally involved hunting down an authorized retailer or one of a small number of valid distribution points. As you would expect, things vary greatly from city to city, but I think that smart chip cards have just gotten cheaper and more widely available, so distribution has gotten more convenient.

For me, the trams really epitomized the city’s charm and resilience. They were running again at an astonishing pace after the atomic bombing and even with a wide range of types of cars they manage to provide service with remarkable regularity. If you missed one, there always seemed to be a new car just down the line. The interiors were often crowded, but the riders were courteous and sometimes the cars themselves were full of whimsy such as the art contest winners depicted on the right. The friendly and welcoming nature ultimately comes from the city and its people; the infrastructure just reflects and reinforces it. But the enjoyment of the place’s vibe was common throughout the group. Francis was pleased to discover that one of Hiroshima’s sister cities was Montreal. I can see it.

Okonomiyaki, Hiroshima-style! 2014-05-26

Hiroshima loves okonomiyaki! How can I make such a bold statement about a city? Well, it has a three-story tall building full of okonomiyaki stands, Okonomimura, in the central business district. I think that qualifies, don’t you? Happily my wife Kate also loves okonomiyaki and the last time she had it was with our friend Coby in L.A. This is in large part my fault, as my diet restrictions on mammals and cephalopods runs right up against some favored ingredients in the cuisine.

The dish is a grilled one, typically prepared in front of the customer either at a common bar like the one in the picture to the right or at grills at the table. The word basically means grill what you like, so this isn’t really a cooking gimmick so much as intrinsic to the style. Ironically, the only available local option we know about in Howard County is premade, so I can’t get it without pork. All of the chosen ingredients are combined to form a pancake-style final product, although the Hiroshima style is a particularly large one, in part due to its inclusion of cabbage and noodles.

We picked a place by going up to the third floor, walking to the pack, and then sniffing. The back right place had a pleasant odor, and though almost all of the menu items contained pork, I was able to request a special order. Our noses served us well; our range of selections were all quite good and our server was quite the charmer. She already had a smattering of relevant English questions and worked with Moti to start to master follow-ups. She’d learn from him to go for “Where in Canada?” or the like after people named their country of origin and then tested it out on the other people at the table.

I don’t have the card handy at the moment, but I intend to specifically list the name and location of the place, as we’d all recommend it to anyone visiting the city. Kate continues to love okonomiyaki in all its forms, and I should perhaps just come up with a written Japanese explanation of my preferences. That said, we consistently had a fun time with later places that served it, and it’s popular throughout Kansai; don’t miss an opportunity even if you aren’t in Hiroshima.

Arriving at Hiroshima 2014-05-26

While I loved the entire trip, Hiroshima is what I cite as my favorite part. This was partially true because I had been to Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo in the past, so while still spectacular they were not as packed with discovery. Also, while Japan is a treasure trove of trains, Hiroshima is flush with trams, both of the single car streetcar and the two car long trolley variety. The short length is made up by volume, a mixture of classic cars like the one on the right to smooth curves of modern models. After completing our misty ride on the Sakura line from Osaka to Hiroshima, we rode one of those classic cars into the city center and then walked down to our hotel, the Tokoyu Bizfort.

My mother called it in for the night, and the rest of us walked down a covered promenade towards the river and the Peace Park. I’d seen such plazas on my past trip; they’re a natural outgrowth of large pedestrian-friendly cities that have an extended rainy season. We stopped for a chocolate snack at the Stick Sweets Factory before walking the rest of the way to the Peace Memorial Park.

The Park was once a busy downtown commercial and residential hub. In 1945 Hiroshima was a garrison city, but still an urban space in its own right. The nominal target of the atomic bomb was the Aioi bridge at one end of the island. The building Hiroshima is perhaps most known for, the A-Bomb dome, was the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, the closest building to survive the blast. We walked through the park as the sun went down.

The first Shinkansen 2014-05-26

The Japanese bullet trains, literally translated as new highways, began operations in 1964, coinciding with the Tokyo Olympics. Some of that difference with the history of the United States is of course driven by geography and the fact that it’s much easier to build straight rail in country forced to redevelop itself after bombing. Nonetheless, given the decay inflicted upon our cities by the interstates, I feel confident in saying that President Eisenhower should have gone with trains, at least on the North-East corridor and the like.

Our journey south had two legs; the longer stretch was between Tokyo and Osaka. The picture on the left is of the more rural end of the spectrum of what we were seeing. Cities and towns were also regularly present at the foot of misty mountains. Prior to going to Japan we had picked up a deck-building board game called Trains with a Japanese theme. One of the features of the board was that plains were in light green and mountains were in dark green. After this section I understood why; vast hills were everywhere and from what we could see beneath the mists they seemed consistently below the tree line.

The stop in Shin-Osaka was fun for me, although we didn’t have time to leave the station. Shin-Osaka refers to the new Osaka station; the older central one couldn’t affordably be expanded to become a network hub and as a result you’ve got to catch a quick train to get between the two. General fans of technological wackiness should note that there’s an escalator that briefly turns flat in the middle. This was actually our second strange pedestrian aid of the trip. When we were transiting through Toronto they had a high speed moving walkway with foot-wide platforms moving at higher than usual speed, spreading out for most of the journey and scrunching together at the ends. I suppose the lesson there is just that inventors and designers think a lot about how to efficiently move people through hub stations.

Tsukiji fish market, Hama-Rijyu gardens, and leaving Tokyo for the first time

Our trip was skirting on Japan’s hot and wet summer, so our overall plan involved a journey from South to North with a bit of time in Tokyo at both ends. This ultimately worked out fairly well; we faced some days of persistent rain and all-encompassing fog, but the temperature was only a problem for the Kyoto stretch. However, since we were jetlagged and rising early anyways, we gave ourselves the morning off in Tokyo and went to see the Tsukiji fish market. As during my trip in 2002, we didn’t feel up for doing the 5:30 AM tuna auction. What we hadn’t realized was that under the current rules, if you don’t get one of the small number of slots for the auction then the commercial side of the market is closed to tourists until 9 a.m. No matter, we still got to see tuna being carted around, to dodge the ubiquitous mini-trucks with their conical front steering columns, and to have a lovely sushi breakfast.

The commercial district and small nearby shrine are fun, but it’s the right off the boat fish that’s the most appealing part of a morning market visit. That particular day, the chef was pushing a batch of oysters that was apparently the pick of the market not an hour before. We took that advice and were impressed; I’m not really an oyster person but trying something in top form is a great way to better understand the appeal.

After leaving breakfast (and procuring an octopus tea cup), we visited the fruit and vegetable market. There was a range of fascinating selections and it did help me understand the Japanese side of the constant trade battles regarding their restrictive agricultural  markets. Moti, who had worked with the JET program for a year in cherry-producing Yamagata, told us stories of getting vast numbers of cherries gratis because of small imperfections preventing their sale on the market. I’ve seen impressive fresh produce at U.S. farmers markets and fine grocery stories, and I’m no expert on these issues. However, the food we saw and the ate throughout the trip successfully cultivated a gourmand feel that is markedly different than the industrial agriculture portion of the U.S. market. It was also the first time I recall seeing wasabi in the raw and I was pleased to discover that the spice had a spiky covering to matched its flavor.

Wandering around the market itself was still remarkable if claustrophobic at times. The market itself may be moving before too long, a subject of some controversy, and seems to have a somewhat uneasy relationship with its status as a tourist destination.

We ended our Tokyo visit on a more relaxed and open note and visited nearby Hama-Rikyu gardens. One of many gardens once reserved for the ruling elite and now open to the general public, it has many elements you can find in Japanese gardens in North America but on a far greater scale. What could not have been anticipated by its original designers was the contrast of old and new, nature and city, of wooden plank bridges and skyscrapers. Such contrasts can certainly be found at Chicago’s Skyline Drive or New York’s Central Park, but the sheer density and continuous history of Japan makes such striking combinations the rule rather than the exceptions. After finishing that walk we returned to our hotel and caught our first Shinkansen to Hiroshima.

The Wind Rises

The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
- The Graveyard by the Sea by Paul Valéry

The Wind Rises is the story of an aeronautical engineer, of dreams of flight, of the gifts and price of love, and about the choices we make as the world around us falls apart. It is the last masterpiece of Hayao Miyazaki, the famed Japanese anime director, but the setting is the all too real-world Japan during the interbellum period. The film is subtle and understated: I believe it will reward repeat viewings, but dream sequences and time skips may also leave first-time viewers a bit confused. This fictionalized tale of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the famed Japanese Zero fighter, does demand patience and an interest in the mechanics of flight, but should be quite accessible to American audiences and those who do not typically watch animation. I recommend it as a true work of art, one that wrestles with challenging questions and largely overcomes its flaws. To go any further requires a deeper discussion of the plot.

Discussing those flaws requires grappling with the thorniest question of the premise: how does it handle the war? In abstract terms, this film is a tragedy. The more you know of history, the more signs and portents are at hand. By the midway point, this is made quite explicit by a Cassandra who intrudes with mentions of just what was happening in the world in the early 1930s. I think that character is key to the film, although a venerable friend found him off-putting.

Moving on to spoiler-filled reviews, Inkoo Kang in L.A. Weekly and Devin Faraci do speak to the tension in the piece but I think Film Critic Hulk [and the shouting-free SBT] effectively retorts most charges. I sympathize with critics’ desire for a film focused on challenging revisionists (and indeed, Miyakazi has done so in writing). I in fact have one such Japanese film on my shelf, the Human Condition, which I intend to watch before writing up my final thoughts on The Wind Rises. However, The Wind Rises is a subtle knife and not a manifesto, and both have a role in changing minds. While I view it as a great film, I do think the critics hit their mark when they complain of the absence of the foreign victims of Imperial Japan from the piece. Manchuria is referenced and this is a home front piece, unlike Das Boot which effectively depicted a historical a take no prisoners policy. However, I do think that the frontlines that Horikoshi was so distant from could have been depicted in his dreams even as he assiduously ignored them in his waking life.

Flaws acknowledged, this is an important film. We do not live in uniquely dangerous times, but nonetheless the wind rises.

Image credit: Promotional stills taken from pieces by paulselluloid and Barbara Chai.

[Update: Added a positive review that doesn’t use all caps.]

Agnes Under the Big Top

Running until Saturday the 28th at the Round House Theater in Silver Spring, a production of the Forum Theater Company.

The Post’s preview enticed me to this production. I didn’t let a subsequent poor review of the play, if not the actors, dissuade me from enjoying it.

Agnes Under the Big Top is a series of immigrant character studies with a subway theme. It was the subway that pulled me in; I hadn’t even realized that this would be the third play I’d see this year with my high school friend Nora Achrati in a big role. Thus, I am a bit biased, but I still disagree with the Post’s second assessment.

The characters are a mix of two Bulgarians who left the circus life, the Liberian who is the title character, an Indian striver (Jason Glass) , a busker playing a variety of roles (Jon Jon Johnson), and a bedridden American (Annie Houston). Their experiences were not exactly the stuff of the American dream. Indeed, much of the play focused on the stories we tell each other and ourselves and how they help or harm us.  At ninety minutes and with a pay what you want ticket price, if the elements of that setup intrigue you and you’ve got room in your plans for a Silver Spring visit this Friday or Saturday, I’d recommend checking it out.

My favorite of the characters was Ed Christian’s Shipkov, a former ringmaster-turned-subway operator. Weighed down with cynicism, he’s still the inveterate showman, prone to holding forth as he trains a new apprentice. While the tone is dark, he, along with much of the show, was quite funny and the flashbacks to his past made his present condition all the more heartbreaking. Shipkov and Rosa, Nora’s character, once had a loving relationship that fell apart for a reason I did not expect but that felt achingly real. I found this a particularly impressive feat, as Rosa was speaking Bulgarian for most of the play but her feelings shone through. My favorite of Shipkov’s monologues was his complaint about present culture where many dream of being on the stage with little appreciation of the work that goes into doing it right. I definitely revisited this sentiment last Saturday while watching a few Flugtag skits that would have greatly benefited from the assistance of someone with some actual training.

I was also quite impressed by Joy Jones as the title character, Agnes, who makes a fairly effective argument for just stretching the truth a bit.

However, the specific mechanism of her last big decision rang false to me. There is much that proper storytelling and perspective can do, particularly in the lives of the characters of this play. However, there are also very real limits to stories and I don’t think magical realism should be allowed to trump an act that does great harm to another.

Technorati Tags: Theater,Agnes Under the Big Top,Silver Spring,Forum Theater

Source: Tickets purchased by Kate, thanks Kate! Although I did contribute a bit by donating to the Busker who also performs before the show, a good reason to come early.

This blog opposes a military strike on Syria

My grounds are fairly straightforward. We don’t have the backing of a major Arab ally, let alone a major regional organization or the U.N. Security Council. The first is certainly not sufficient but that we lack it is terrifying. In Libya our initial action did have the backing of the Security Council and we got support from the Arab League to go further. That support weakened as time went on, to be fair, and similarly I will note that the verdict is still out on Libya’s outcome.

I’ll also note that while horrific video is out there, let’s get the report from the U.N. inspectors. They’re there; they won’t be attributing responsibility, but it isn’t for the U.S. to judge whether their arrival was sufficiently timely.

Ultimately, while I think there are good political science and economic cases against, I actually found Noah Millman’s breakdown decisive:

Since the creation of the United Nations, the only legitimate justification for the unilateral use of force is self-defense. Nobody alleges that a strike against Syria is an act in self-defense.

Nobody is even seriously defending it under “responsibility-to-protect” which was the justification for the Libyan intervention (and the Kosovo war before that). RTP extends the concept of self-defense to the defense of others. It’s a highly suspect doctrine with obvious potential for abuse – potential that was very arguably realized in the Libyan case. But even this expansive mandate for intervention doesn’t apply to Syria, where we are not proposing to protect the rebels but to punish the Syrian government for its reported use of chemical weapons against civilians.

If we launch an attack on Syria, it will not be under any legal warrant whatsoever. But the entire public justification for an attack is the to punish Syria for a crime of war – that is to say, the justification is the need to uphold international law. In other words, an attack would be an open declaration that the United States arrogates to itself the right to determine what the law is, who has violated it, what punishment they deserve, and to take whatever action is necessary to see it carried out. If that’s liberal internationalism, then I’m a kumquat.

I favor building a legal case against Assad. I don’t believe that will hasten the end of the war, but nor will this bombing.

As ever, I speak for myself and not my employer.

Halt our aid to Egypt

Technorati Tags: Egypt,Foreign Assistance,Massacre

Cutting off aid is mandated by law after a coup. As a general principle, I’m not fond of the executive branch overriding or evading constitutional laws. Nonetheless, I think the administration’s buying time by not making a declaration may have been forgivable if the Egyptian government took the deal that the U.S. and partner nations mediated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

But efforts to prevent the crackdown failed. Jay Ulfelder puts it in quantitative perspective:

According to a story in this morning’s New York Times, the crackdown that began a few days ago “so far has killed more than 1,000 protesters.”

This puts Egypt in rare and sullied company. Since World War II, the world has only seen onsets of about 110 of these episodes, and fewer than a handful of those onsets occurred after 2000: in Sudan in 2003 (Darfur) and again in 2011 (South Kordofan);  in Sri Lanka in 2009; and in Syria since 2011.

Thus, I think we should obey the law and cut off non-democracy building aid to Egypt (which is the vast majority of our aid; even our non-military aid is mostly economic). We need not oppose their attempts to gain IMF aid nor seek sanctions against them, but unless and until the distant prospect of a genuine civilian democratic rights-respecting government emerges we must cut them off as a client.

The expert I trust most on these issues is  Marc Lynch, although I recommend the Arabist for a great collection of regional reactions on Middle East issues, with the note that I will regularly disagree with some of the sources they pull in but it’s important to be aware of opinions you disagree with. Lynch also has his own round up over on Foreign Policy. Now that I’ve laid out my sources, I feel I can safely endorse Lynch’s pessimistic read of the effects of cutting of aid:

These steps won't matter very much in the short term. Cairo has made it very clear that it doesn't care what Washington thinks and the Gulf states will happily replace whatever cash stops flowing from U.S. coffers. Anti-American incitement will continue, along with the state of emergency, violence and polarization, the stripping away of the fig leaf of civilian government, and the disaster brewing in the Sinai. It won't affect Secretary of State John Kerry's Israel-Palestine peace talks and the Camp David accords will be fine, too; Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi can't manage his own streets, and it's unlikely he wants to mess with Israel right now.

The hard truth is that the United States has no real influence to lose right now anyway, and immediate impact isn't the point. Taking a (much belated) stand is the only way for the United States to regain any credibility -- with Cairo, with the region, and with its own tattered democratic rhetoric.

The benefits may go beyond a slow start on restoring credibility, based on my past research on Egyptian aid. Past research by Steven Finkel for the U.S. Agency for International Development (PDF) found that democracy aid can be effective, but tends to be undermined in countries where the majority of aid goes to the military. That result is probably over-determined, but I’ve got one hypothesis I hope to explore in future work: namely that military aid is not apolitical in countries with weak civilian control of the military and in which the military is a major economic actor. Egypt certainly fits that bill on both fronts. While I don’t see them allowing real U.S. democracy building aid again anytime soon, we should stop giving the military an edge against other actors. Should we restore aid at some point in the future, the current approach to Pakistan where assistance is not funneled through the military may be a helpful model. Of course, if we move away from military assistance, that may hurt U.S. arms exports, but I think that’s a correct prioritization.

Finally, on a personal note, I suspect many of the people I met in Egypt, particularly the Coptics, victims in their own right, are now backing the crackdown. Even in those heady post-revolution days when we visited, the military was often above criticism. Moreover, while the Morsi presidency was actively sabotaged on political and economic fronts, his party worked hard to alienate and disempower everyone outside their immediate coalition. However, the coup was ill-advised because wide-spread violence was a predictable - and predicted - effect. With hope for reconciliation off the table and the U.S. distrusted on all sides, we are not in a position to make a positive impact, but we can start by not being complicit in a bloody mistake.

As ever, speaking for myself and not my employer.

2013-03-19 Jaffa (part 1)

Technorati Tags: Jaff,Israel,Tel Aviv,history,museum

Perversely, I have been too busy writing about Israel for work to write about it for the blog. The other complicating factor is that my visit to Jaffa was my favorite tourist site on the trip. The twisty alleys of this city feel ancient. That sense is deceptive; much of it was rebuilt by the Turks after Napoleon's bombardment  and he was only of many conquerors this millennia-old port town has encountered. It resides above a hill to the south of Tel Aviv and was the historic entry port for Jerusalem.

I learned of its history on a museum tour beneath the town’s main courtyard. My timing was excellent; there were only two people on the tour and the guide had the knowledge to sate my curiosity. The second half of the museum was a multimedia-enhanced encounter with the archeological remains of prior civilizations. While Jaffa may be better known for Andromeda’s Rock and for Simon the Tanner’s hosting of Saint Peter, I was most charmed to hear a story of one of the city’s conquests. The local magistrate had broken away from the Egyptian empire when a colleague arrives to resupply him with scores of jar holding food and drink. Come night, their true contents were revealed as soldiers climbed out of their clay shelters and retook the city.

A perhaps more reliable bit of Jaffa history involved grave markers. Some of the city’s Jewish residents had been buried with a menorah carved into the grave cover. The design was what you see on right and had a tripod base.

That wasn’t the only distinctive marker I encountered; tile labels were embedded in the masonry work for many of the homes and stores. The one on the left sat above a monastery and provided some much needed softening for the hard metal door. As the cross indicates, Jaffa was the main place I encountered the other religions of the Holy Land. As previously mentioned, I passed a mosque on the way there and the city itself had a lovely cathedral, the tower of which you can see in the second photograph for this post.

After much wandering about and the tour, I was ready to take Guy’s brother’s sound advice and get lunch at Old Man and the Sea. That restaurant was a place to eat to excess - Guy would approve - and it is where I’ll pick up next post.

2013-03-18&19 Tel Aviv Beach and the Trip to Jaffa

Tel Aviv is a beach town, not merely temperate and on the water. It has ample sandy shores immediately adjacent to downtown. Perhaps surprisingly, the beach monuments were among most political ones I noticed during my trip.

Tel Aviv is a young city, barely a hundred years old, but that's long enough. There were monuments to the Aliyah Bet effort from 1934 to 1948 to evacuate Jews from Mediterranean countries in defiance of a British restriction on their then-colony. There was another monument to the Altalena affair, a clash shortly after the British left between the recently formed Israeli Defense Force and a Jewish paramilitary group. The rest of the beach seemed apolitical, so perhaps this was just a coincidence of my hotel placement, but the underlying reality is that shores are often borders.

The other time politics notably intruded from the landscape was a trip to the kibbutz cemetery that took us closer to the West Bank. Like Canada, Israel is a bilingual nation, so there is both Hebrew and Arabic on highway signs. That said, unlike the vehement bilingualism I remember from Quebec, in Tel Aviv I mostly saw Hebrew and English (which seems in keeping with the education system). Guy was generally less political on most matters than I am, although he made clear that he was rather frustrated with the current state of Israeli politics, particularly the current generation of leadership.

However, don't let the politics discussion deter you.  Both of my walks on the beach were lovely and the trip south to Jaffa was delightful. Surfers took advantage of the waves and trained on the beach. Small sailboats dotted the horizon. The buildings of Tel Aviv are a varied architectural backdrop from the skyscrapers of downtown to the mosque down by Jaffa. The last part of the walk was through parkland as the beach gave way to a rocky  shore.  

According to my walk book, the best time to do it would be sunset. That's probably right, but don't let that deter you if the timing doesn't work out. The journey is well worth it during the day, all the more so because it ends in Jaffa: the millennia-old sister to Tel Aviv, historical port to Jerusalem, Turkish-rebuilt hill city, and subject of my next post.

2013-03-18 Rothschild Boulevard

Guy's family were the consummate hosts. We had the chance to look through old photo albums, to swap stories, and to share a local favorite form of take out. Joachim and Priscilla had ended up staying at a different hotel because Kayak charged European users far more than American users in this instance, so we said our goodbyes. They had an early morning flight and I got to stay another day. Shai's family was so kind as to give them a ride and one of Guy's cousins was extremely gracious and offered a separate trip for me. From the family and friends I got advice for the remainder of my trip: see Jaffa, eat at Old Man and the Sea, check out Rothschild Boulevard and a few happening districts in southern Tel Aviv.

The city in the evening in March is quite inviting. Bicyclists and pedestrians travel the promenades depicted above and the weather lures you outside. The long stretched parks themselves are not the only pedestrian-safe places; sidewalks and crossing lights abound. In addition, every few blocks they offer a fancy like the pond above or art like the incomplete bridge to the left or hot drink stands. The latter was particularly notable to me, as I've always found D.C.'s mall in need of a few more tiny-scale park cafes, although food vendor trucks can help.

My jaunt on Rothschild started around the Habima Square (depicted on the right) and went down to Israel's first skyscraper: Midgal Shalom. According to the Wikipedia entry, it's also the only subway station in Israel. It was built under the tower in hopes of future connections that never came. I found out about this because I did find signs indicating a future light rail line which sounds as if it is still a few years away from completion.

I'd noticed one odd phenomenon on the walk that I'll have to ask some Tel Aviv natives about: eggplant graffiti. Various vegetable themes were actually fairly common in the city, but I think eggplants were the most prominent. Some googling found a blog post and flickr group that were similarly confused about the matter. Frankly, Guy could probably have told me more about the light rail than the graffiti. He's called Washington, D.C. his home for some time and probably would only keep up with such a phenomenon in Tel Aviv if it involved depictions of meat.

2013-03-18 Tel Aviv by day, walking to Rabin Square

Guy's funeral was in the early afternoon and after being stuck in the airport for three hours, starting at midnight, my friends and former colleagues sensibly pushed back our meeting time. Thus I had the morning to myself. I chose to retread some of the ground I walked the prior night in order to visit Rabin Square. The city was quite easy to traverse; hills are rare and mild and in March the weather draws tourists. Guy didn't talk about Tel Aviv that much, aside from mention of friends, family, or visits to his children, so I was setting my own agenda at this point. I don't know specifically what he thought of Rabin, but had mentioned before that he thought the current generation of leadership paled in comparison with the prior generation.

The square sits adjacent to the city government building, making it a common site for rallies, including the one where the Prime Minister had been shot. There was nothing going on the Sunday I visited, but even so there was a fair crowd around the memorial itself and the adjacent pond. If I read the wikipedia page correctly, the large monument is a memorial to Holocaust victims but there is a dedicated wall for Yitzhak Rabin specifically.

Afterwards I walked South by Mann Auditorium which had lovely outdoor gardens, including wisteria and cacti. The walk down King George Street was an interesting one, from street art to the regular reminder that Israel was a nation with many conscripts. I ended up at Carmel Market, where I got some terrific lemonade before heading back to the hotel.

Joachim, Priscilla, and I then met up and got lunch to reminisce. Appropriately enough the food proved to be massive; even the 'small' burger Joachim got was like an inch thick. I ordered shakshouka, a tomato egg dish recommended by my guidebook, which was fairly tasty and similarly voluminous. Fortunately, I have any number of places back home to visit for reminders of Guy that provide a reason to have a smaller dinner. So, for D.C. people, two of his favorites were Well Dressed Burrito (tasty hole in the wall) and Mehran (my work's preferred and notably affordable buffet spot).