Monthly Archives: March 2015

Meet the Weather Underground’s bomb guru

Bryan Burrough writes: Ever since 9/11, the threat of terrorist bombs on U.S. soil has become a major concern, drawing the attention of hordes of federal investigators and journalists. What few Americans remember clearly today is that barely 40 years ago, during the tumultuous 70s, such bombings were more or less routine, carried out by a half-dozen significant groups of underground radicals, from the Symbionese Liberation Army (best known for kidnapping the heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974) to lesser-known outfits like the F.A.L.N., a Puerto Rican independence group that bombed a Wall Street–area restaurant, Fraunces Tavern, killing four people in January 1975. Amazingly, during an 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the F.B.I. counted more than 1,800 domestic bombings, almost five a day.

By far the best known of the radical underground groups was Weatherman, later known as the Weather Underground, which detonated dozens of bombs across the country from 1970 until it dissolved in late 1976. A splinter faction of the 60s-era protest group Students for a Democratic Society, Weather has been the subject of a dozen books, memoirs, and documentary films; its best-known leaders, Bernardine Dohrn and her husband, Bill Ayers, remain icons on the radical left to this day. Yet despite all the attention, very little has ever been revealed about the group’s internal dynamics, even less about its bombing tactics and strategies, a topic that few Weather alumni, mostly now in their 60s, have ever been eager to discuss publicly.

Partly as a result, Weather’s seven-year bombing campaign has been misunderstood in fundamental ways. To cite just one canard, Weather’s attacks, for much of its life, were the work not of 100or more underground radicals, as was widely assumed, but of a core group of barely a dozen people; almost all its bombs, in fact, were built by the same capable young man—its bomb guru. Nor, contrary to myth, did Weather’s leaders operate from grinding poverty or ghetto anonymity. In fact, Dohrn and Ayers lived in a beach bungalow in the seaside village of Hermosa Beach, California.

Of far greater significance is the widespread confusion over what Weather set out to do. Its alumni have crafted an image of the group as benign urban guerrillas who never intended to hurt a soul, their only goal to damage symbols of American power, such as empty courthouses and university buildings, a Pentagon bathroom, the U.S. Capitol. This is what Weather eventually became. But it began as something else, a murderous core group that was obliged to soften its tactics only after they proved unsustainable. [Continue reading…]

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The Nusra Front’s game-changing rise in Syria

The Washington Post reports: Syrian rebels captured the key northern city of Idlib from government forces on Saturday in what amounts to the most significant defeat for forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in two years.

The rebel force, led by the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, surged into the city center overnight Saturday and by day’s end had ousted government forces almost entirely.

The loss for the government came amid a number of recent indications that the Assad regime is struggling to maintain the momentum it won on the battlefield last year, including the failure of two recent offensives that fizzled in the north and the south of the country. [Continue reading…]

Lina Khatib writes: The Nusra Front’s ability to deliver results is largely driven by its pragmatism. The group has been collaborating with a wide variety of local forces that are not pushed to fight under its umbrella. Instead, they fight with Nusra as allies — a radical departure from the Islamic State’s model, which does not tolerate collaboration unless absolutely necessary.

This approach has enabled the Nusra Front to widen its network of support quickly, including the addition of some Free Syrian Army brigades in Aleppo, Hama, and Daraa. Crucially, Nusra engages in friendly competition with Ahrar al-Sham, which has recently become the largest group under the Islamic Front umbrella following its merger with another Islamic Front faction, the Suqour al-Sham Brigades. This development has made Ahrar al-Sham almost as large as the Nusra Front, and the alliance between the two could become an important factor in the Syrian conflict.

Nusra also learned from the mistakes of both the regime and the Free Syrian Army. In northern Syria, people saw the corruption of the regime replaced with that of brigades fighting under the banner of the FSA, such as the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front, which imposed inconsistent taxes on the population, established checkpoints at which its members regularly seized people’s property, and controlled food supplies.

Nusra used the anticorruption framework to win hearts and minds. People quickly began to see FSA checkpoints replaced with Nusra checkpoints that “did not demand anything in return for protecting us,” as one Nusra supporter said in an interview. The Nusra Front also used the fight against corruption to justify its attacks on uncooperative FSA brigades. Nusra’s assault on the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front in late 2014 won wide popular support, despite the fact that the main aim of the attack was actually to eliminate one of Nusra’s key military rivals.

The Nusra Front also noticed that FSA leaders in the north who had become warlords abandoned the front lines, and Nusra ensured that its leaders remained in the field. This presence underscored the idea that the Nusra Front was providing protection — military as well as social — and vastly increased its acceptance among ordinary Syrians.

While not everyone likes Nusra’s ideology, there is a growing sense in the north of Syria that it is the best alternative on the ground — and that ideology is a small price to pay for higher returns. “The one who defends me has the right to impose whatever law they see fit,” one sympathizer told me.

The international coalition’s airstrikes that began in September 2014 took Nusra by surprise, but they further increased the group’s popularity. Many Syrians felt disappointed that the West did not act against the Assad regime, but instead attacked an entity that was fighting the regime. Many rallied around Nusra, providing local support and contributing to its intelligence-gathering capabilities. This allowed Nusra to increase the areas under its control not through territorial gains or the provision of services — methods the Islamic State uses to extend its reach — but through expanded local networks and influence. [Continue reading…]

Rebels in Idlib destroying a statue of former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad

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How the Yemen conflict risks new chaos in the Middle East

The Washington Post reports: The meltdown in Yemen is pushing the Middle East dangerously closer to the wider regional conflagration many long have feared would arise from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring revolts.

What began as a peaceful struggle to unseat a Yemeni strongman four years ago and then mutated into civil strife now risks spiraling into a full-blown war between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran over a country that lies at the choke point of one of the world’s major oil supply routes.

With negotiators chasing a Tuesday deadline for the framework of a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, it seems unlikely that Iran would immediately respond militarily to this week’s Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, analysts say.

But the confrontation has added a new layer of unpredictability — and confusion — to the many, multidimensional conflicts that have turned large swaths of the Middle East into war zones over the past four years, analysts say.

The United States is aligned alongside Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and against them in Yemen. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have joined in the Saudi offensive in Yemen, are bombing factions in Libya backed by Turkey and Qatar, who also support the Saudi offensive in Yemen. The Syrian conflict has been fueled by competition among all regional powers to outmaneuver one another on battlefields far from home.

Not since the 1960s — and perhaps going back even further — has there been a time when so many Arab states and factions were engaged in so many wars, in quite such confusing configurations, said Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi-led airstrikes intensify in Yemen as possible coalition land attack looms

The Washington Post reports: Arab leaders vowed Saturday to back the embattled Yemeni president as a Saudi Arabia-steered coalition intensified airstrikes across Yemen, developments that could mark preparations for a possible land invasion targeting the country’s Houthi insurgents.

In the southern city of Aden, a hotbed of anti-Houthi sentiment and a possible starting point for a coalition ground assault, one politician described a situation of “great chaos” as the insurgents pressed their advance on the city. Meanwhile, the Saudi Press Agency reported that the desert kingdom’s navy had evacuated 86 diplomats from Aden by ship on Wednesday.

Support for Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled Aden for Saudi Arabia this past week, was firmly voiced by leaders of regional powers attending the Arab League summit Saturday in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh — a rare sign of unity in a region rife with war and divisions. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration on the Middle East: The distance between statements and facts

The New York Times reports: Making sense of the Obama administration’s patchwork of policies “is a puzzle,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a researcher at the Brookings Institution and former senior State Department official.

“But whether that puzzle reflects the lack of a coherent policy on the administration side or whether that puzzle simply reflects the complexity of the power struggles on the ground in the region — well, both are probably true,” she said.

The chaos gives regional rivals “more reasons to fight out that power struggle and more arenas to do it in,” Ms. Wittes said.

The lightning pace of events has fueled criticism that the Obama administration has no long-term strategy for the region. In picking proxies and allies of convenience, the argument goes, the administration risks making the chaos worse — perhaps strengthening terrorist groups’ hand, and deepening the chances of being drawn into fights Americans do not want.

One senior Obama administration official described the difficulty of trying to develop a coherent strategy during a period of extreme tumult.

“We’re trying to beat ISIL — and there are complications,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We have a partner who is collapsing in Yemen and we’re trying to support that. And we’re trying to get a nuclear deal with Iran. Is this all part of some grand strategy? Unfortunately, the world gets a vote.”

The administration had until recently held up Yemen as a model of a successful counterterrorism campaign, only to see the American-backed government in Sana crumble and the efforts against Qaeda operatives in Yemen crippled indefinitely. Earlier this week, American Special Operations troops stationed there had to detonate their large equipment before evacuating Yemen and flying across the Red Sea to an American base in Djibouti — concerned that the war matériel would fall into the hands of the Houthi forces.

In Yemen, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, the administration talks as if it is supporting the orderly transitions to state building, but its actions are in fact helping to dismantle the central states, said Peter Harling, a researcher with the International Crisis Group, who with the journalist Sarah Birke recently wrote an essay analyzing the regional dynamic.

In each case, local players like the Islamic State or the Houthi movement have stepped into a power vacuum to stake their own claims, but none have the credibility or wherewithal to unify or govern.

But Washington, Mr. Harling said, insisted in each case on maintaining the fiction that its favored local player had a viable chance to rebuild an orderly state — whether moderate rebels in Syria, the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad or the Hadi government in Yemen.

The Western powers “have to pretend the situation is not as bad as it is, so they don’t have to accept failure and take ownership of the situation,” Mr. Harling said. “In many years of working in the region, I have never seen such a distance between statements and fact.”

“Unfortunately, the world gets a vote,” said a senior Obama administration official who didn’t want to be named.

I can imagine those words coming from the lips of deputy national security adviser for strategic communication Ben Rhodes, and the the reason he wouldn’t want to be named would not be because of the proverbial sensitivity of the issues. It would simply be for the sake of saving himself embarrassment. And avoiding the risk of having such words quoted back to him in a Senate hearing while he seeks approval for some position in another administration.

When the question is whether this administration has a coherent strategy and the response is that unfortunately, the world gets a vote, the implication is that under the Obama administration’s unchallenged management, the problems of the Middle East could all be sorted out. The problems, so the argument goes, all come from those other pesky foreign powers.

That’s the kind of claim that can only be insinuated and must additionally be cloaked in anonymity, because if made explicitly and with attribution it would deservedly draw a derisory response.

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Four active Arab wars stem from a common malaise

Rami G. Khouri writes: The latest war in the Middle East, the Saudi Arabian-led assault on Yemen to prevent the Houthi movement from taking full control of the country, has triggered a fascinating legal and ideological debate about the legitimacy and efficacy of the venture. The significance of this war in Yemen is not really about the legally authorized use of force to ensure a calm Arab future. It is, rather, mainly a testament to the marginalization of the rule of law in many Arab countries in our recent past.

The 10 Arab and Asian countries participating in the fighting have justified it on the basis of assorted legal mechanisms through the Arab League, the United Nations Charter and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which allow countries to come to the life-saving aid of governments threatened by domestic or foreign aggression. The more meaningful and lasting dimension of the Yemen conflict is its expansion of active warfare in collapsing states adjacent to the energy-rich region of the Arabian Peninsula.

I am sickened but mesmerized by the nightly routine of flipping through assorted pan-Arab satellite television channels and following the four active wars that now define many aspects of the Arab world – in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Iraq – with lower intensity fighting and destruction in countries such as Somalia, Egypt, Sudan and Lebanon. In all these fractured lands, violent extremists such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS have put down anchorage and are operating across borders.

The capacity for warfare and other forms of political violence across the region seems unending, just as the mass suffering of civilians seems unlimited. The telltale signs of what these wars are about and why they happen so regularly is evident on the television screens in the human and physical landscapes that are slowly crumbling here and there.

The two most striking images that stay in my mind as I follow the day’s fighting in our four active wars is the primitive condition of our cities and villages, and the equally ravaged condition of our human capital. Streets and sidewalks are caricatures of what they should be, buildings are often simple, unpainted cement block structures with usually informal associations with such amenities as water and electricity. Individuals are often shabbily dressed and drive dilapidated pickup trucks and beat-up old sedans, because they do not have the money to buy anything better. This is not a consequence of the wars; it is the cause of the wars. [Continue reading…]

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The dangers of the Arab intervention in Yemen

Kenneth M. Pollack writes: The news that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states along with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Sudan have launched air strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen should give every American pause. Yes, the Houthis are Shi’a who receive some degree of backing from Iran, but this is a very dangerous escalation that is unlikely to improve the situation in Yemen and risks the stability of Saudi Arabia over the medium to long term. Moreover, the Iranian role has been greatly exaggerated in what is first and foremost a Yemeni civil war.

Even with U.S. assistance, the GCC and its coalition partners lack the capacity to break Houthi ground operations the way that American air power has been able to smash ISIS ground operations in Iraq and Syria. With enough American help, they could certainly inflict some harm on the Houthis, but they are unlikely to be able to materially shift the balance of power. If the airstrikes fail, as seems more likely than not, there is a real danger that these same states will decide to intervene on the ground—and that intervention will be largely composed of Saudi forces.

As I warned in a previous post on Yemen co-authored with the highly-regarded scholar of civil wars, Barbara Walter, a compelling body of scholarly research on civil wars has found that interventions into civil wars on behalf of the losing side rarely produce a rapid, negotiated settlement. Instead, they typically prolong the conflict, producing more death and devastation. Of greatest importance in this case, they also have a bad habit of overstressing the intervening state—especially when that state has limited capabilities and internal problems of its own. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S. is providing air cover for ethnic cleansing in Iraq

Michael Weiss and Michael Pregent write: American warplanes have begun bombing the Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Tikrit in order to bail out the embattled, stalled ground campaign launched by Baghdad and Tehran two weeks ago. This operation, billed as “revenge” for the Islamic State (IS) massacre of 1,700 Shiite soldiers at Camp Speicher last June, was launched without any consultation with Washington and was meant to be over by now, three weeks after much triumphalism by the Iraqi government about how swiftly the terrorist redoubt in Saddam Hussein’s hometown was going to be retaken.

U.S. officials have variously estimated that either 23,000 or 30,000 “pro-government” forces were marshaled for the job, of which only slender minority were actual Iraqi soldiers. The rest consisted of a consortium of Shiite militia groups operating under the banner of Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Population Mobilization Units (PMU), which was assembled in answer to a fatwah issued by Iraq’s revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani in June 2014 following ISIS’s blitzkrieg through northern Iraq. To give you a sense of the force disparity, the PMUs are said to command 120,000 fighters, whereas the Iraqi Army has only got 48,000 troops.

Against this impressive array of paramilitaries, a mere 400 to 1,000 IS fighters have managed to hold their ground in Tikrit, driving major combat operations to a halt. This is because the Islamic State is resorting to exactly the kinds of lethal insurgency tactics which al Qaeda in Iraq (its earlier incarnation) used against the more professional and better-equipped U.S. forces. BuzzFeed’s Mike Giglio has ably documented the extent to which IS has relied upon improvised explosive devices, and just how sophisticated these have been. Even skilled explosive ordnance disposal teams — many guided by Iranian specialists — are being ripped apart by what one termed the “hidden enemy” in Tikrit. [Continue reading…]

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Russian propaganda exploits Western weakness

Andrew Kornbluth writes: It is becoming clear that certain authoritarian models of government are capable of matching and, in some respects, even exceeding the accomplishments of their democratic counterparts. Whether Russia, with its dependence on energy exports and otherwise undiversified economy, should be counted among them is debatable, but there is one area in which the Russian state has so far demonstrated a clear mastery over its Western opponents: its propaganda or, to use the public relations term, its messaging.

But impressive as the information component of Russia’s current “hybrid war” over Ukraine has been, its success arguably owes less to its ingenuity than to ingrained flaws in Western democratic culture for which there is no simple solution.

The effectiveness of Russia’s spin is difficult to deny; in addition to the almost 90 percent of Russians who support their president and, albeit passively, his expansionist campaign, a large part of the Western public, especially in Europe, remains convinced that Russia bears little or no responsibility for the war in Ukraine.

Ironically, Russian messaging has worked by exploiting vulnerabilities in precisely those mechanisms of self-criticism and skepticism which are considered so essential to the functioning of a democratic society. The modern Western culture of self-doubt has proved particularly susceptible to manipulation in a 21st-century confrontation that strongly recalls its Cold War origins.

Four assumptions popular in contemporary Western democratic discourse have been co-opted by Russian messaging in the present crisis. The first is that all sides in a conflict are equally guilty. Never far beneath the surface, Europe’s suspicion of the leader of the Western alliance, the United States, has been reinvigorated by successive scandals over the war in Iraq, torture and eavesdropping. Everyone has committed crimes — so the thinking goes — so how can the West possibly reproach Russia?

Likewise, in this confused moral landscape, the “illegality” of the Ukrainian revolution is blithely juxtaposed with the illegality of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, while the enormous differences in nature, scale and motive between the subjects under comparison go unmentioned.

The second assumption is that there are “two sides to every story.” The desire to consult multiple sources and the unwillingness to accept just one narrative are part of a healthy critical outlook, but the system breaks down when one side is a fabrication. There is no middle ground, for example, between the claim that the Russian army is fighting in Ukraine and the claim that it is not. [Continue reading…]

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Jews in Europe are not blind fools

Diana Pinto writes: Europeans, especially European Jews, are used to being treated as museum pieces and historical relics by Americans. We are the object of extensive commentary but rarely regarded as possessing any living voice worth engaging with. I recently had the strange experience of listening to myself and other European Jews talked about as if we were already as silent as a Pompeian plaster cast while reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s article “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” in the April issue of The Atlantic and watching his accompanying video chat with James Bennet and Leon Wieseltier. If a plaster cast may be permitted to speak, I would say that Goldberg and his colleagues aren’t describing my reality; the world I come from isn’t already destroyed; and the story of the Jews in Europe isn’t yet ready to be relegated to museums or to antiquarian sites like Pompeii.

The implicit assumption in Goldberg’s piece, and in many articles going back to at least the end of the Cold War in 1989, is that Europe’s Jews, if they had an iota of common sense and dignity, would not be in Europe. [Continue reading…]

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Can a dying language be saved?

Judith Thurman writes: It is a singular fate to be the last of one’s kind. That is the fate of the men and women, nearly all of them elderly, who are — like Marie Wilcox, of California; Gyani Maiya Sen, of Nepal; Verdena Parker, of Oregon; and Charlie Mungulda, of Australia — the last known speakers of a language: Wukchumni, Kusunda, Hupa, and Amurdag, respectively. But a few years ago, in Chile, I met Joubert Yanten Gomez, who told me he was “the world’s only speaker of Selk’nam.” He was twenty-one.

Yanten Gomez, who uses the tribal name Keyuk, grew up modestly, in Santiago. His father, Blas Yanten, is a woodworker, and his mother, Ivonne Gomez Castro, practices traditional medicine. As a young girl, she was mocked at school for her mestizo looks, so she hesitated to tell her children — Keyuk and an older sister — about their ancestry. They hadn’t known that their maternal relatives descended from the Selk’nam, a nomadic tribe of unknown origin that settled in Tierra del Fuego. The first Europeans to encounter the Selk’nam, in the sixteenth century, were astonished by their height and their hardiness — they braved the frigid climate by coating their bodies with whale fat. The tribe lived mostly undisturbed until the late eighteen-hundreds, when an influx of sheep ranchers and gold prospectors who coveted their land put bounties on their heads. (One hunter boasted that he had received a pound sterling per corpse, redeemable with a pair of ears.) The survivors of the Selk’nam Genocide, as it is called — a population of about four thousand was reduced to some three hundred — were resettled on reservations run by missionaries. The last known fluent speaker of the language, Angela Loij, a laundress and farmer, died forty years ago.

Many children are natural mimics, but Keyuk could imitate speech like a mynah. His father, who is white, had spent part of his childhood in the Arauco region, which is home to the Mapuche, Chile’s largest native community, and he taught Keyuk their language, Mapudungun. The boy, a bookworm and an A student, easily became fluent. A third-grade research project impassioned him about indigenous peoples, and Ivonne, who descends from a line of shamans, took this as a sign that his ancestors were speaking through him. When she told him of their heritage, Keyuk vowed that he would master Selk’nam and also, eventually, Yagán — the nearly extinct language of a neighboring people in the far south — reckoning that he could pass them down to his children and perhaps reseed the languages among the tribes’ descendants. At fourteen, he travelled with his father to Puerto Williams, a town in Chile’s Antarctic province that calls itself “the world’s southernmost city,” to meet Cristina Calderón, the last native Yagán speaker. She subsequently tutored him by phone. [Continue reading…]

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An Iran deal would begin a long process

Simond DeGalbert, a former French diplomat and former member of the French negotiating team in the P5+1 discussions with Iran, writes: A comprehensive Iran deal looks ever more likely today than it did recently, even if many issues remain to be solved. Western leaders have repeatedly stated their view that no deal would be preferable to a bad one—a point that’s yielded intense debate about what exactly would constitute a good deal versus a bad deal. Considering the highly technical nature of the issues at stake, it’s no surprise the devil will be in the details. It will be hard to assess the deal before every provision of the last annex to the comprehensive agreement is signed on, if it ever happens. But assuming we do, assessing the quality of the agreement should mostly be done in light of its objectives and of the agreement’s ability to fulfil them.

If a comprehensive deal is struck, it’s important to remember that the deal is just the beginning. As hard as the negotiations have been, the implementation and enforcement of the deal over the coming years will be an ongoing challenge—but it can be surmountable as long as the P5+1 set clear enforcement mechanisms.

To understand what a deal will mean in the years ahead, it’s important to understand how the negotiations unfolded. As a matter of fact, our expectations about what a comprehensive agreement could achieve have changed over time. Since 2002, concerns about the nature of Iran’s nuclear program have mostly been fueled by the covert development of enrichment activities, but also by their obvious inconsistency with any identifiable civilian needs and the acquisition of nuclear militarization know-how. Hence the long-term objective, enshrined in United Nations Security Council resolutions, to establish the exclusively peaceful nature of the program, through a full suspension of enrichment in Iran.

It is the assumption that this prerequisite would prevent a negotiated breakthrough that led P5+1 to alter the terms of their negotiation with Iran in the 2013 Joint Plan of Action. From that point forward, an agreement was not to be based on an unambiguous Iranian strategic shift, but rather on the insurance that Tehran’s program would not be turned from its existing dual nature to an entirely military one. Such “constructive” ambiguity about Iran’s program and intentions could be achieved through agreed upon enrichment restrictions, the conversion of the heavy-water reactor of Arak and intrusive monitoring and verification. [Continue reading…]

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The Canterbury Scene remembered

Earlier this month, Daevid Allen died at the age of 77. Even though (to my surprise) he got an obituary in the New York Times, his name will not have been widely known among Americans.

He was an Australian Beat poet, latter-day minstrel and co-founder of Soft Machine and Gong. Upon his arrival in England in the mid-60s, he helped give birth to what would later become known as the Canterbury Scene.

For centuries, Canterbury was known as a place of pilgrimage in South East England, but during the late ’60s and early ’70s the name began to signal something else: a new musical culture.

Like many forms of creativity this didn’t fit neatly inside a ready-made niche.

In the era of record stores, albums had to be racked somewhere and the Canterbury groups would usually get shoved under Progressive Rock, but what they really represented was a meeting place between rock, jazz, classical, avant-garde, and what had yet to be dubbed World music.

But the Canterbury Scene couldn’t exactly be defined in stylistic terms. It was more of a tribe of musicians engaged in fluid collaborations, forming bands which had a habit of gaining their widest recognition after they had already dissolved.

Inventive, dense, complex, eccentric, lyrical, classical, experimental, psychedelic, romantic — the Canterbury sound had all these qualities. And the musicians creating this sound tended to express a particular constellation of English values: non-conformist, whimsical, innovative and yet unpretentious.

For readers here who find my choices of music and even the fact that I post any music, strange, the Canterbury Scene is part of the explanation why — which is to say, while as a teenager my friends were listening to Led Zepplin, The Who, and Deep Purple, I was engrossed with the offbeat creations of the likes of Matching Mole, Gong, and Hatfield and the North.

Here, and for the next few days, is an introduction to the Canterbury scene and the music which — at least to my ear — remains as original and inspiring now as it was when it was recorded over 40 years ago.

Egg — ‘Enneagram’ (from The Civil Surface, 1974)

Gong – ‘Love is How U Make It’ (from Angel’s Egg, 1973)

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What George Washington would have said about Netanyahu

Mark Perry writes: Early in the afternoon of Monday, February 23–the day following the anniversary of George Washington’s birth—North Dakota Republican John Hoeven rose from his seat, walked to the podium of the U.S. Senate, and began to read George Washington’s “Farewell Address.” In his seminal good-bye to the nation, the first president condemned the rise of political parties because they “distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” and warned against “a passionate attachment of one Nation for another,” which “produces a variety of evils.”

What’s striking about the latest recitation of the Farewell Address—a tradition followed in the Senate since 1896—is how little has changed since Washington wrote it (helped by Madison and Hamilton). The ills and controversies that so beset the father of the nation are still on full display in early 2015, dogging the 44th man in succession, Barack Obama. President Washington was lamenting the inordinate influence and arrogance of a French diplomat he had come to detest, known as “Citizen Genet,” who had rallied cheering American supporters into backing the French war against the British and had played havoc with U.S. foreign policy. President Obama is now lamenting the inordinate influence of one Citizen Netanyahu, who according to some Obama administration officials is up to pretty much the same mischief. And very gingerly, Obama appears to trying to pry America away from its “passionate attachment” to Israel. [Continue reading…]

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Personal and public tragedies

“Ask not what disease the person has, but what person the disease has,” the Canadian physician William Osler would often say.

Although he is often described as the father of modern medicine, that particular lesson has not been deeply learned either by medical practitioners or the public at large.

Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old German pilot who is believed to have deliberately crashed a Germanwings Airbus A320 airliner in the French Alps, is now reported to have been suffering from depression.

Depression has thus been turned into a one-word explanation for what led to the catastrophic end of Flight 9525.

In the world of simplistic narratives in which we live, a lot of people will now imagine that anyone with depression has the potential to become a mass killer.

But the true story of what led a young man to end his own life and at the same time kill another 149 people, may never be known. It’s quite possible that his deadly impulse did not coalesce into a firm intention until he found himself alone in the cockpit.

William Saletan assumes the dubious role of a fatalistic suicide counselor when writing:

If a person is determined to kill himself, telling him to abstain isn’t enough. The least he can do — and perhaps the most he can do — is to spare the lives of others.

That’s a bit like talking someone down by imploring them not to jump off a building until passersby have cleared the sidewalk. It might sound like a reasonable request, yet it overlooks the tunnel vision of despair. It’s an attempt to appeal to a person’s sense that life is precious when that is the very sense that they have already lost.

In the aftermath of any catastrophic event, we always crave an explanation — a way of understanding what happened, and in this case, a way of becoming confident that something similar will not happen again.

Aircraft crews wear uniforms for a very good reason: we entrust ourselves to their safe care with the expectation that they follow something akin to military discipline in their allegiance to procedure. Uniformity in appearance helps reinforce the expectation of uniformity in behavior. That’s why no airline will ever introduce “casual Friday” where the flight and cabin crews can show up however they please. Even though we know each individual has their own personal life, as passengers we rely on their personal lives not intruding on their work.

Lubitz may have foreseen that his diagnosis was going to destroy his career and concluded that if he couldn’t work as a pilot — if he had to abandon his life’s dream — he had no reason to live. That might explain his suicidal intention, but it wouldn’t explain why he chose to end the lives of everyone around him.

To understand that choice, we might need to understand why he chose to become a pilot in the first place.

Since in piloting the emphasis is on technical proficiency, as passengers we tend not to be too concerned about the pilot’s people skills. Can he land the aircraft safely is all we care — and at least 95% of the time it will be he.

But flying a passenger aircraft doesn’t only require skill in its operation, it also requires a deep sense of responsibility. No doubt most pilots take on and carry that responsibility in an admirable way, but I have to wonder whether in an age of paranoia, the ability and perceived need to isolate the flight crew from the passengers has come at the expense of the human factor.

The flight crew need to be just as concerned about the welfare of the people on board as do the cabin crew and yet within the post 9/11 security constraints it’s common for pilots to get no more than a fleeting glimpse of their own passengers as they pass through the departure gate.

Within the prevailing security mindset, airlines are now being required to consider implementing a rule that many already apply: that whenever a pilot leaves the cockpit another crew member should stand in so that a single pilot is never left alone.

But there might be other procedural changes not directly related to security that could have reduced the risk of the Germanwings tragedy.

Flight crews could just as easily receive passengers and point them to their seats as does the cabin crew. If Andreas Lubitz had met and made eye contact with everyone on the aircraft in this way, he might not have chosen to end their lives — he might even have had second thoughts about ending his own.

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Into the maelstrom: The Saudi-led misadventure in Yemen

Frederic Wehrey writes: Citing a request for outside intervention by Yemen’s deposed President Abd-Rabu Mansour Hadi, the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan have launched an aerial intervention against the so-called Houthi movement in Yemen. Egypt has four warships en route to Aden in southern Yemen and has expressed willingness to “send ground troops if necessary,” while Turkey is considering providing logistical support. Sudan and Pakistan are also reportedly joining the operation.

The Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah in Arabic, or God’s Partisans, are a Zaidi Shia movement that began a rebellion in northern Yemen in 2003–2004. In the chaos following the Arab Spring revolutions and the internationally overseen removal of Yemen’s long-serving authoritarian ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012, the Houthis expanded their power base—apparently with Iranian support—to undermine the Saudi-backed Hadi government.

In 2014, the Houthis linked up with allies of the Saleh family, which is still angling for a way to recapture power, and rapidly pushed south, capturing the capital, Sanaa. They then moved on to Aden, where Hadi had fled before leaving the country by sea on March 25 (it was announced that he arrived in Riyadh on March 26). Meanwhile, a separate Salafi-Sunni insurgency led by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) continues to rage in the south and east of the country, with the self-proclaimed Islamic State having recently raised its own profile in Yemen by publicizing a string of gruesome massacres. [Continue reading…]

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