Dispatches

Yesterday we learned that an American official was killed when a terrorist militia stormed the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. And today we find out that the person killed was the American ambassador. Three others also were killed.

UPDATE: A new CNN report suggests that the attack in Benghazi may have had nothing to do with the now-infamous Internet video.

Meanwhile, a London think tank with strong ties to Libya speculated Wednesday that Stevens was actually the victim of a targeted al Qaeda revenge attack. The assault "came to avenge the death of Abu Yaya al-Libi, al Qaeda's second in command killed a few months ago," the think tank Quilliam said Wednesday.

It was "the work of roughly 20 militants, prepared for a military assault," the think tank said, noting that rocket-propelled grenade launchers do not normally appear at peaceful protests, and that there were no other protests against the film elsewhere in Libya.

The planned attack came in two waves, one which prompted U.S. officials to leave the consulate for a secure location. The second wave was directed at the place of retreat, Quilliam said, citing unnamed sources on the ground in Benghazi and abroad.

A mob of Salafists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to “protest” a “blasphemous” Internet video made by some yahoos in Florida who decided to put the Prophet Mohamed on trial. The Salafists scaled the embassy walls, took down the American flag, set it on fire, and replaced it with their black flag.

Even though no one was (apparently) hurt, attacking an embassy is technically an act of war. Yet our embassy responded in part with the following statement: “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

Look: free speech doesn't mean anything unless offensive speech is protected. Say what you will about blasphemy, but it isn't a crime in the United States. It can't be.

It doesn't matter how offensive the Internet video in question may be. The U.S. Embassy, by suggesting its attackers had a “point,” just made itself look like it's staffed with cringing apologists.

You know what the Salafists want? They want the United States government to throw every American in jail who insults their religion. Obviously that's not going to happen, so let's not pretend that they're just overreacting to a reasonable grievance and that there's room for common ground. They aren't and there isn't.

Salafists find just about everything offensive, not only “blasphemous” videos made by Islam-haters in Florida, but even mainstream Islam as practiced in Egypt. The only way to make such people happy is by shutting off the entire Internet. And that's just for starters.

Our diplomats in Cairo need to stop making excuses for violent reactionaries and figure out what changes they need to make to secure their buildings and their employees. If that isn't possible, and if the Egyptian authorities can't keep our embassy safe, then it's time for our two countries to re-evaluate our relationship.

UPDATE: It's getting less press, but our consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi was also attacked, this time by a militia. And this time a U.S. official was killed.

We aren't going to cancel our First Amendment because fanatics on the other side of the planet get bent out of shape over what happens in free countries. And they won't stop getting bent out of shape. So we should brace for a lot more of this sort of thing in the future.

UPDATE: The Obama administration doesn't care for the U.S. Embassy's response to the attack on itself any more than I do. An administration official told Politico, "The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government."

The problem with diplomats is that sometimes they're too diplomatic. They're also dishonest. Earlier today the embassy tweeted that it stood by its initial reaction, but that tweet has since been deleted.

Click over to the Politico story and look at the photograph of "protestors" atop the embassy walls. They're flying the flag of Al Qaeda. It's not just an Islamist flag. It's the Al Qaeda flag. If Egypt's new government think it's a good idea to have a modus vivendi with such people, interesting times are ahead for all of us.

A French physician who volunteers for Doctors Without Borders recently returned to Paris from the Syrian city of Aleppo. He says “at least half” the rebel fighters he treated were from somewhere other than Syria.

He worked in Idlib Province and Homs earlier this year and saw few foreign fighters, but apparently now they're all over the place.

"It's really something strange to see. They are directly saying that they aren't interested in Bashar al-Assad's fall, but are thinking about how to take power afterwards and set up an Islamic state with sharia law to become part of the world Emirate," the doctor said.

The foreign jihadists included young Frenchmen who said they were inspired by Mohammed Merah, a self-styled Islamist militant from Toulouse, who killed seven people in March in the name of al-Qaeda.

If Assad is overthrown from below (as opposed to being ousted by a military coup), Syria will no longer have a real army. Who, then, will resist the Salafists from abroad? The non- and anti-Islamist factions of the Free Syrian Army don't know how to do counterinsurgency. They're insurgents themselves. What we might end up seeing then is two Sunni guerrilla armies slugging it out in a vaccuum. And that's before we factor in the Kurds, the Christians, the Druze, and the Alawites.

I'd like to sketch a plausible endgame for Syria that isn't horrifying, but it gets harder and harder each month.

My World Affairs colleague Ann Marlowe has spent more time in Libya than I have, and this week she brings our attention to problems that have been thus far completely ignored.

“Our life was chaos,” Loui Hatem el-Magri said the other day in Benghazi. The young architect continued, referring to Qaddafi, “He ruled us by chaos.” No one knew from one day to the next how any aspect of life would work.

Libya’s new government has struggled to break free of the old way. Dr. Iman Bugaighis, a Benghazi activist and academic, points out that Libyans didn’t know whether the first Saturday after the Eid holiday would be a government holiday or not until the day before. No one knew whether to plan to return to work the next day until 6 p.m. on Friday.

In Qaddafi’s Libya, there were laws, but no rule of law; anything might change at the dictator’s caprice. It was hardly worth making plans for the future, much less putting off present gratification for future rewards. And changing this mentality will be just as hard as instituting the rule of law.

Part of the problem is in deep cultural factors that go beyond the years of dictatorship to Libya’s earlier history. Any foreigner can tell you that Libyans have trouble concentrating and organizing themselves. Part of the problem is widespread illiteracy. This is true across most of the Muslim world, and means more than, say, not seeing anyone reading for pleasure. It means no “to do” lists—and thus little getting done. You are almost sure to find that, after a six-months interval, your friends’ well-intentioned plans to fix their house or improve their English have come to naught. Few people can even organize themselves to change a burned-out light bulb or maintain their cars (until something breaks). It means people can’t find important documents because they’ve never filed them properly.

On a wider level, it means that there is little sense of linear time and history, or any firm grasp on fact versus rumor and fantasy. An “old” mosque might be five hundred years old, or fifty. No one at the sole college in Zwara could tell me immediately how many students are enrolled, though the number is certainly less than 450. In three weeks of asking the question in Tripoli, Benghazi, Derna, Sabratha, and Zwara, I didn’t meet anyone who could tell me of a Libyan writer who was working on a history of the 2011 revolution. The standard answer in any city to the question of who is making sure the story is told accurately is that some individual has “many videos and photographs” from the town. The idea of sifting such evidence and coming up with a master narrative for one city seems unknown, as does telling the story of what happened all across Libya. It’s scary to contemplate how many of the facts will vanish before they can be collected.

Read the whole thing.

The odds that Syria’s tyrant Bashar al-Assad will survive the insurrection against him are increasingly slim, but the civil war might last a lot longer. The opening chapter pits the Baath Party regime and its paramilitary units against the Free Syrian Army, but there are other factions that have a stake in what happens next. Most of Syria’s Alawites—who make up roughly twelve percent of the population—are with the regime. They may face persecution from the majority if Assad loses. They might also mount a terrorist war against a new government, either from the alleyways of Damascus or from a breakaway state of their own on the Mediterranean.

The Sunni Arab majority is not only divided between Islamists and secularists, but also by region and tribe. The Christian and Druze minorities are nervously watching and waiting. And the Kurdish minority in the northeast hopes to divorce all of the above and go its own way like the Kurds have in Iraq. 

Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist groups have never been able to get much traction in that community. The Muslim Brotherhood is an exclusively Sunni organization, and it’s also, for the most part, an Arab one. Rather than viewing Islam as “the solution” to what ails them, most Kurds in Syria as well as Iraq view freedom and independence as the solution, along with an alliance with the US and Israel.

I recently spoke with Dr. Sherkoh Abbas, leader of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria.

MJT: Okay, let me start by asking you what’s going on right now in Syrian Kurdistan. I’ve hardly seen any mention of it whatsoever in the Western media.

Sherkoh Abbas: We’ve been ignored by the Western media, by the Middle Eastern media, and by the international community altogether. Maybe it’s because we don’t hijack planes, kidnap and kill people, or blow-up any buildings. The wheels that make the noise get the grease, and we haven’t made any noise until recently, beginning with a major uprising in 2004. Today the Kurdish street will not accept anything less than federation or at least a Kurdish Federal Region.

The Kurds of Syria are primarily poor because of the Arabization policies that were implemented during the Baath Party’s time. Even though oil and gas come from the Kurdistan region, less than one percent is invested there. Most Kurds are educated, but we have been deprived of basic human and national rights.

Today, the Kurdish street is vocal and is against Kurdish political parties because of their failed strategies, their bickering and fighting with each other, and their alliances with non-Syrian Kurds. We have three major classical Kurdish political parties; one group allied with Barzani from Iraqi Kurdistan, another group allied with Talabani from Iraqi Kurdistan, and one allied with the PKK.

Since 2006 we in the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria have supported regime-change and the creation of a Kurdistan Federal Region in Syria. In contrast, most of the above groups promote vague goals such as democracy and limited administration. They have not been clear on regime-change, so most Kurds now reject them even more. In  recent days they’ve been saying they want the right of self-determination within Syria, a contradiction. Last week Kurds in Syria came out and said that they support federalism and our road-map for the creation of a Kurdistan Regional Government.

We need assistance from the international community because the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish AK party are promoting and supporting groups that aren’t democratic and don’t fully support the Kurdish cause. The outsiders are aware that Kurds are not happy with their traditional political parties, so they’re providing money and assistance to steer people toward Islamic organizations.  

MJT: What do you think of the Free Syrian Army? Should the United States provide assistance to them or let them fight the Assad regime on their own?

Sherkoh Abbas: The Free Syrian Army is made up of defectors from the regular Syrian army who grew up with the doctrine of the Arab Socialist Baath Party. It is also influenced in part by the Muslim Brotherhood. This means it is not established with principles ​​of democracy and freedom. It is therefore uninterested in helping the Kurds in Syria or in promoting our rights due to their values. The Free Syrian Army’s views on the Kurdish issue in Syria is no different from that of the regular army. In the future it will be another obstacle to freedom and democracy in the region.

The United States can’t influence the Free Syrian Army without strenuous efforts in education which should focus on protecting the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in the country.

MJT: Why does the Assad regime support the PKK [the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization that has been waging war against Turkey for decades]?

Sherkoh Abbas: Assad's regime doesn’t just support the PKK. It also works to revitalize the Armenians and Alevis in Turkey. It is aligned with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in a desperate attempt to expand the spread of fire from Syria.

MJT: Is it true that the Assad government has withdrawn its security forces from Kurdish cities?

Sherkoh Abbas: Assad has removed some key army units, but his security agencies are still in place to prevent unfriendly groups from taking over. And, of course, there are groups that work with the regime, including Arab settlers, Assyrians, and Syriacs along with some Kurds.

The Kurdistan region in general is anti-Assad, anti-Baath, anti-Arab Nationalism, and wants regime change, but we do not want the Muslim Brotherhood to control us, nor any groups associated with the above ruling elements. 

MJT: What kind of relations do you have with the Barzani government in Iraqi Kurdistan?

Sherkoh Abbas: We have very good and brotherly relations, though we see tremendous pressure on our brothers in Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. At times their policy is geared more toward survival than helping us. And we are accustomed to the United States abandoning us by supporting Iraq's central government and the Turkish government at our expense.

MJT: What do you and most Syrian Kurds think of Israel? If the Israelis offered to help, would you accept it?

Sherkoh Abbas: I have said this many times: Israelis never killed or slaughtered Syrian people the way the current regime is doing. We have no issues with the Israelis. We want to solve our problems peacefully through dialogue and negotiations. Israelis, like Kurds, are targeted for elimination by the tyrannical regimes in the Middle East, so we are natural allies.

We ask Israel to help the Syrian people—all the Syrian people—and to use its political influence in the world to support the revolution and promote democracy in the region. We need all the help we can get from every country willing to help us.

Look, 400 Syrian men, women, and children were just slaughtered by the regime. Aside from the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood, who wouldn’t want help from Israel? The Israelis don’t kill people arbitrarily or oppress anyone in Syria the way most Arab governments do.

For fifty years Middle Eastern dictatorships turned Israel and the West into excuses to oppress people. We need to move beyond these failed dictatorial regimes and construct decentralized democratic systems where both minorities and majorities enjoy peace and freedom.

MJT: What changes would you like to see in American foreign policy?

Sherkoh Abbas: The United States uses an outdated policy from the Cold War. It needs a more pro-active policy based on human rights, democracy, freedom, and national interests. You should not continue on the current path of supporting ruthless dictatorships at the expense of human rights. We want American foreign policy to back democracy and minority rights, even if it might undermine current alliances, in order to build long-lasting relationships based on mutual interest. And we need American support for a democratic and decentralized Syria.

MJT: Has President Barack Obama reached out in any way to Syrian Kurds?

Sherkoh Abbas: Yes, to pressure us into watering down our demands to such an extent that it would be suicidal for any Kurdish leader to accept it. The Kurdish street loudly supports federalism. We want the Obama administration to be sensitive to our needs. 

There are 22 Arab countries and none of them are democratic. We have suffered under nationalists, secularists, Arab Nationalists, Islamists, and Baathists. We cannot believe that the Free Syrian Army and its supporters in Qatar and Turkey who say regime-change and democracy should be enough to fix all our problems.

MJT: What do you expect will happen if Assad is overthrown?

Sherkoh Abbas: Full scale civil war. It has already started. Syria could change from a failed dictatorship to something that looks like Somalia or Afghanistan, or—at best—Lebanon during its civil war. The fighting will continue and Syria could become a haven for Islamists.

The United States should work with Russia and create a federal system. Russian interests can be guaranteed in an Alawite state while American and Israeli interests can be guaranteed in Syrian Kurdistan.

Here’s a reminder for those of you who live in the Pacific Northwest that I’m having a book release party Wednesday night, September 5, where I’ll read from my new book, Where the West Ends. Autographed copies will be for sale. Coffee and treats will be provided by Ristretto Roasters and wine will be provided by Anne Amie vineyards.

Wednesday, September 5 at 7pm.

Ristretto Roasters
3808 N. Williams Ave.
Portland, Oregon

Syria's civil war was doomed from the very beginning to spill into Lebanon. Trouble started last year shortly after peaceful demonstrations against Bashar al-Assad's regime turned violent, and it started again last week when sectarian clashes ripped through the northern city of Tripoli, the second-largest in Lebanon after Beirut, and turned parts of it into a war zone.

Sunni militiamen from the neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh are slugging it out again with militants from the adjacent Alawite stronghold of Jabal Mohsen. They have transformed their corner of Lebanon into a mirror of the Syrian war, in which Sunni rebels are waging pitched battles with the Alawite-dominated military and government. As of Wednesday, the death toll in Tripoli was twelve, and a few more were killed yesterday. More than a hundred have been wounded.

Tensions are also increasing between Lebanon's Sunnis, who support the Syrian uprising, and Lebanon's Shias, who support the Assad regime and Hezbollah. Syrian rebels recently kidnapped a man they say is a Hezbollah member; his Lebanese clan members ran around southern Beirut with AK-47s and ski masks and kidnapped almost two dozen Syrian Sunnis and even a Turkish citizen in Lebanon.

Some reporters are describing the violence as some of the worst since the Lebanese civil war that raged from 1975-1990 -- so far a bit of an exaggeration, with numbers still insignificant compared to the thousands killed, tortured, and maimed next-door in Syria. But the numbers could easily mushroom, transforming the entire Lebanese political scene for the worse.

Assad's occupation of Lebanon was terminated seven years ago by the Beirut Spring, but the two countries still function to an extent as a single political unit. Syria may no longer have its smaller neighbor under direct military rule, but it has been deliberately exporting its violence, dysfunction, and terrorism since the 1970s. Its hegemony there was partially restored when Hezbollah invaded Beirut in 2008, forcing anti-Syrian parties to surrender much of their power at gunpoint.

Even if Assad had no interest in mucking around in Beirut's internal affairs, however -- even if Lebanon were entirely free of Syrian influence -- we should still expect to see the conflict spill over. The Lebanese could not build a firewall even if the Syrians wanted to help them – but definitely not while terrified Syrian refugees are holing up in the county, and not when Hezbollah has a vested interest in keeping its patron and armorer in charge in Damascus, and not with Sunnis and Alawites living cheek-by-jowl in the north.

Read the rest at the Gatestone Institute.

The three guys at Ricochet--the always funny James Lileks, my one-time traveling companion Rob Long, and Stanford's invaluable Peter Robinson--interviewed me about my new book, Where the West Ends, on their podcast this week.

You can download it from iTunes or listen to it right here. I come on at 41:00.

Judith Butler, a comparative literature professor at UC Berkeley, is embroiled in controversy again now that the city of Frankfurt intends to give her a prize worth 50,000 Euros on September 11.

German Middle East expert Thomas von der Osten-Sacken told Benjamin Weinthal at the Jerusalem Post that Frankfurt is legitimizing a “de facto boycott of its partner city Tel Aviv’s academic and cultural institutions” because Butler is a booster for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. More important, however, as Osten-Sacken pointed out recently in a German magazine, Judith Butler is a “Hamas fan.”

She isn’t happy to be branded this way. “My remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah have been taken out of context and misrepresent my established and continuing views,” she said to the Jerusalem Post in an email. So, okay, let’s look at what she said in full and in context.

At a “teach-in against war” on campus last year, she said, “Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.”

Now let’s look at the context. You can see for yourself on YouTube, but the video is eighteen minutes long, so I’ll quote the relevant portion right here. I trust that Professor Butler would agree that I’m including all the context she’d think anyone needs to make a fair judgment call.

A student asked her the following question: “I’d like you to comment on the importance of Hamas and Hezbollah. And I think since the beginning of this year—and especially when Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian people and Hezbollah by the Lebanese—people are now supporting these violent resistance movements. But even within leftist and anti-war activists and intellectuals there is always this kind of condemnation and hesitation in supporting these two groups just because of the violent components of their resistance movements. Doesn’t our inability or hesitation in supporting these groups do more harm than good?”

The student got a round of applause from the room at the end of that question.

Here is Judith Butler’s response, with the missing context included.

“Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence.”

It’s only fair to point out that she says she’s not a supporter of violent resistance. And that’s all fine and good. But Hamas and Hezbollah both explicitly say, in Arabic and in English, that they seek the destruction of Israel. There is no non-violent way to destroy a country.

I’d like to ask her, though, what makes Hezbollah a “progressive social movement”? Because it builds hospitals and schools? That hardly makes a movement “progressive.” Has any modern political entity not built hospitals and schools when it had power? Adolf Hitler built hospitals and schools, as did everyone from Augusto Pinochet to Georgios Papadopoulos. So what?

Hezbollah is notoriously hostile to every social value liberals and progressives hold dear, from women’s rights to gay rights, with one exception. Hezbollah says the United States and Israel are the Great Satan and the Little Satan. That’s it. That, all by itself, is enough to get a socially retrograde totalitarian terrorist organization labeled “progressive” even by a professor who adheres to non-violent politics.

But the city of Frankfurt can give her a prize if it wants, and it can do so on September 11. Supporting European fascism is a crime now in Germany, but supporting the Middle Eastern variety is apparently fine.

Con Coughlin reports in London’s Telegraph:

According to Western intelligence officials, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to the elite Quds Force unit following a recent emergency meeting of Iran's National Security Council in Tehran held to discuss a specially-commissioned report into the implications for Iran of the Assad regime's overthrow.

Damascus is Iran's most important regional ally, and the survival of the Assad regime is regarded as vital to sustaining the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militia which controls southern Lebanon.

The report, which was personally commissioned by Mr Khamenei, concluded that Iran's national interests were being threatened by a combination of the U.N. sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear programme and the West's continuing support for Syrian opposition groups attempting to overthrow the Syrian government.

Intelligence officials say the report concludes that Iran "cannot be passive" to the new threats posed to its national security, and warns that Western support for Syrian opposition groups was placing Iran's "resistance alliance" in jeopardy, and could seriously disrupt Iran's access to Hizbollah in Lebanon.

It advised that the Iranian regime should demonstrate to the West that there were "red lines" over what it would accept in Syria, and that a warning should be sent to "America, the Zionists, Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others that they cannot act with impunity in Syria and elsewhere in the region."

I’m not convinced the Iranian regime easily can or actually will dispatch terrorists to Western targets, but I could be wrong. Khamenei has every reason to view the fall of Bashar al-Assad with despair. For his post-modern Mediterranean empire will have its torso ripped out.

Jamie Weinstein at The Daily Caller interviewed me about Egypt, Iran, and my new book Where the West Ends. You can read the whole thing over there, but here’s part of it.

Getting to your new book, “Where the West Ends,” what compelled you to write it?  

I didn’t plan on writing and publishing “Where the West Ends” until I had already completed all the field work that went into it. I realized two years ago that I had spent a great deal of time on the part of our planet between Turkey and Russia, and between the Balkans and the Caucasus, where Western Civilization blends with Russian and Islamic civilizations. It’s an absolutely fascinating part of the world, both familiar and exotic at the same time. When it dawned on me that I had a whole book’s worth of material from there, I knew at once that “Where the West Ends” would, in fact, become a book.

Where does the West end? And how do you define the West?

I think of the West as all the world’s nations that are the children of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, but it’s debatable, and even that straightforward definition crashes into the rocks east of Greece. Russia, for instance, is a bastard child of the Roman Empire, but is it Western? It sort of is, but it’s also the bastard child of medieval-era despotism from the far East. And what about Turkey? Its largest city was once the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, but it was conquered from Asia and today it’s Islamic.

And what about Israel? It’s either part of the West or similar to the West. There’s a debate there that will never end. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that it’s Western. If so, the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank may be the only place on earth where Western civilization suddenly stops and another — in this case, Arab civilization — abruptly begins. Everywhere else, the West falls away in degrees.

North America’s Pacific Rim is the western edge of the West. In the east, the West fades slowly like twilight.

What do you hope readers get from your book?

First and foremost, I want readers to be entertained. This book was certainly the most fun of my three books to write. I want people to ride along with me as I explore near — yet strange — parts of the world that hardly anyone ever visits on holiday: Places like the wrecked parts of the former Soviet Union. “Where the West Ends” is basically a literary road trip. If you’re looking for a dull information dump, read something else. And the last thing anyone should expect from me this time around is policy analysis.

The first 50 or so pages is about the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life, when I took a road trip to Iraq on a lark from Istanbul without any planning. My best friend, Sean LaFreniere, and I rented a car so we could visit the ruins of the ancient city of Troy, and we decided, what the hell, Iraq is only 1,000 miles away, let’s go there instead. We didn’t have nearly enough time to do it properly, so we decided to just drive there for lunch and come back as quickly as possible.

It was the most excruciating and trouble-plagued trip I’ve ever taken. Everything went wrong. Everything. That journey was unrelentingly miserable, but I’ve never had so much fun as a writer as I did when I told that story in print. It brought to mind a quote by the great travel writer Tim Cahill: “An adventure,” he wrote, “is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.”

I also went to Georgia when Russia invaded, and I drove behind Russian lines with a bad-ass dude named Thomas Goltz. He’s a professor in rural Montana, but he looks like a biker with his shaved head and his whisk broom moustache. He lived in Chechnya and wrote a first-person narrative account of the apocalyptic war with the Russians.

Sean and I also drove through blasted-up Bosnia, the Wild West of Albania, and through the post-Soviet disasterscape in Ukraine on a botched journey to the radioactive wasteland around Chernobyl. That was another trip where absolutely everything went off the rails, partly because we were totally unprepared, and also because a road trip through Ukraine from Poland is much more difficult than it sounds — or at least it was when we did it a couple of years ago.

With the exception of Iraqi Kurdistan, none of the destinations in this book are part of my regular beat. I visited 13 countries, and all but two are formerly communist. If I have expertise anywhere, it’s the Middle East — not Eastern Europe, Western Asia or the former Soviet bloc. This was mostly just a fun book to write. It’s hopefully a fun book to read.

And it’s devoid of partisan political commentary — with one exception. I went to places in the former Soviet Union that no tourists visit for pleasure, and I was shocked at how ruined some of those places still are. If anything, these journeys made me more of an anti-communist than I already was, and I’m sure that comes across in the book.

Why do you do what you do? Is it pure adventurism, as you intimate in the book, or something deeper?

A huge part of it is pure adventure. Sean and I have been wondering lately about how we can ever top our on-a-lark road trip to Iraq for lunch. The only thing we’ve been able to come up with is to drive to Afghanistan, for breakfast, from Hong Kong.

I do this sort of thing because I write for a living and traveling gives me material, but there’s something else, too — something deep inside that drives me. Partly, it’s because I want to see the world, and I quickly get bored visiting places tourists like to go (though I wouldn’t say no if someone offers me plane tickets to Paris); partly, because visiting the broken parts of the world makes me appreciate more what we have in the United States.; partly, it’s a way to ward off boredom and torpor.

There’s also something else — something I can’t explain — that’s just wired into my personality. My brother also likes to take trips like this and he doesn’t write for a living. Our parents didn’t raise us to be travelers — they hardly took us anywhere — but both of us turned out like this anyway. In another era, he and I would have explored parts of our planet that no one has ever seen.

Read the whole thing at The Daily Caller.

And you can pick up a copy of my own new book, Where the West Ends, in both trade paperback and electronic formats.

My friend and colleague Benjamin Kerstein has published a number of books, and this summer he released what is perhaps the most blistering critique of the radical leftist ideologue Noam Chomsky ever to appear in book form. It’s called Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite and is a collection of essays, reviews, and take-downs that originally appeared on his blog of the same name during a three-year period from 2004 through 2007.

I read most of the material in this book when it first appeared, and now I have it all in one place in trade paperback on my bookshelf. Kerstein and I discussed Chomsky and his new book last week.

MJT: What possessed you to spend three years writing about Noam Chomsky?

Benjamin Kerstein: That's a huge question, and lest people start thinking I'm completely obsessive, I should note that I was doing a lot of other things at the same time. The short answer is 9/11. I grew up in an extremely liberal community where Chomsky was very popular, and as soon as 9/11 happened I knew that all those people I used to know would go straight to him in order to find out what they should think about it, and what they would come back with would be very nasty indeed. I regret that I was proven absolutely correct in that. It was really a disgraceful display by some very disgraceful people. Chomsky had become quite marginal in the years before that, but after 9/11 the left disinterred him and put him back on a pedestal. The New York Times, for example, ran a ridiculously fawning profile of him. He was being mainstreamed again and I felt strongly that someone had to say something.

I like to think that I and the others who were speaking out against him managed to make a small difference. For years he was spewing this stuff out with basically no opposition at all. I hope we managed to give people some material that helped them apply some critical thinking to his claims.

MJT: Can you boil down your case against him into a couple of sentences or paragraphs?

Benjamin Kerstein

Benjamin Kerstein: There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you've ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it's quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don't think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.

Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn't just influential, he's basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn't the case when he started out back in the late '60s, but it is now.

Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he's more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he's supported, it’s a very bloody list indeed.

Communism and fascism are obviously dead as the proverbial doornail, but I doubt the totalitarian temptation will ever go away. The desire for unity and a kind of beautiful tyranny seems to spring from somewhere deep in the human psyche.

Fourth—and this may be most important—he makes people stupid. In this sense, he's more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual. He allows people to be comfortable with their prejudices and their hatreds, and he undercuts their ability to think in a critical manner. To an extent, this has to do with his use of emotional and moral blackmail. Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right. This is essentially a kind of secular puritanism, and it's very appealing to many people, for obvious reasons, I think. We all want to think well of ourselves, whether we deserve it or not.

There is an intellectual side to this, as well. You see it clearly in his famous debate with Michel Foucault. Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn't make it true.

Chomsky's answer is essentially: Because I believe it to be so. Now, whatever that is, it isn't thinking. In fact, it's an excuse for not thinking. Ironically, Chomsky later said that Foucault was the most amoral man he ever met, whereas I would argue that Foucault was simply pointing out that Chomsky's “morality” is in fact a form of nihilism.

I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think. They never have to ask themselves any difficult questions or provide any difficult answers. It’s a form of intellectual cowardice essentially, but I'm sure you can see its appeal.

This may be one of the reasons for Chomsky's hostility to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis may be many things, but it is certainly a method of gaining self-knowledge, of asking difficult questions about one's self and others. And that is precisely what he, and his followers, want to avoid.

My apologies for the length of this answer, but I think you'll agree that, of all the bad things people are capable of, their refusal to think is one of the worst, mainly because it leads to most of the other bad things of which they are capable.

MJT: Can you give us an example of a Noam Chomsky lie?

Benjamin Kerstein: Well, the greatest of them all is his claim that there was (and possibly still is) an alliance between the United States and the Nazis. It's so blatantly deranged that several Chomsky admirers I've spoken to simply denied outright that he ever said it.

But it's right there in his book What Uncle Sam Really Wants. Obviously, the United States never had an alliance with Nazi Germany, and the Nazi regime hasn't existed since 1945, so it would be rather difficult to conclude an alliance with it. Now, I have absolutely no idea whether Chomsky actually believes this lie or not—I doubt it—but it’s an important part of his ideology. In one of his earliest books, he wrote that America requires a process of de-Nazification. He has denied saying this, but again, it's right there in black and white. I think its impossible to understand Chomsky's politics without understanding that, to him, the US is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany and needs to be dealt with accordingly. It should be noted, by the way, that this was a very important aspect of post-war Stalinist propaganda, and I have no doubt that Chomsky adopted it from that rather dubious source.

MJT: Were you ever a Chomskyite yourself?

Benjamin Kerstein: That's a difficult question. I grew up in a community where he was popular, and I accepted many of his ideas without knowing where they came from. But I can't say I was ever a worshiper of his. The few times I tried to read his books I found them dull and repetitive. Chomsky is much more interesting when read with a critical eye. Nonetheless, I can't say I was unsympathetic to the basic worldview he was expressing. We all were. It was all around us, after all. But I don't think anyone becomes a Chomskyite by reading him. As Camus said of communists, “first they convert, then they read the scriptures.” Let's say that, had things gone differently, I might have become one. I certainly know a great many people who did. So I would have to say that, compared to Chomsky's true believers, no. But in terms of being sympathetic to a point of view that was influenced by him, I would have to give a qualified yes.

MJT: For a while he denied Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia ever happened. Then when he could no longer deny it had really occurred, he blamed it on the United States instead of the perpetrators. What do you think was initially going on in his head? Was he lying? Was he in denial? How do you explain it?

Benjamin Kerstein: It would take a team of psychiatrists a hundred years to figure all of that out. I can only give you my personal speculations on the subject. I think that, in the beginning, he may have believed that it was all a frame-up by the New York Times and the US-Nazi alliance or whoever else he made up to blame it on. No doubt a great deal of wishful thinking on his part was involved, but it’s possible he was sincere in his conspiracy theories.

Then, as the facts became more difficult to deny and he started looking worse as a result, things got more complicated. At some point, he must have realized that he was saying things that in all likelihood were false. My guess is that he justified it in two ways: First, by relativizing it. Something along the lines of “whatever the Khmer Rouge may have done, it can't be as bad as what America did in Vietnam, or Chile, or Indonesia, etc. Therefore, I am justified in continuing to defend the regime.” Second, by demonizing his opponents, by saying “whatever the Khmer Rouge may have done, it's more important not to allow my opponents to win, because they are evil, and it is morally wrong to allow evil to win.”

Then, when the really horrendous scope of the genocide became clear, he was faced with having to admit he'd been wrong and owning up to it publicly. That is something Chomsky has never done and will never do. Perhaps he has a very fragile ego under all the bluster. It certainly seems like it. In any event, blaming anything and everything bad that happens in the world on the United States has always been Chomsky's default position. So once he'd exhausted all other possibilities of escape, that's what he fell back on. And he'll keep doing it until his dying day. You will never get a mea culpa from him on anything, and certainly not on Cambodia, which is probably the biggest disgrace of his career.

What is truly sad is that if you look at the claims Chomsky attacked in his famous article on the subject, they turned out to be mostly accurate in terms of the number of dead, etc. Now, at the time (most people don't know or have forgotten this) there was a serious debate over possible military intervention to stop the killing. I could be wrong, but I think it was Paul Berman who said that Chomsky helped shift the debate from what to do about the genocide to whether it was even happening. I doubt any words I could write would constitute a more damning indictment than that.

There may have been another and much darker motive at work—and I want to emphasize that this is speculation on my part. The Khmer Rouge justified its violence by claiming it was wiping out the urban bourgeoisie and that this was a necessary use of force whose purpose was to achieve a more just society. In other words, the people they killed deserved it. Chomsky may have bought this argument. He certainly hasn't shied away from it in other cases. Remember, in terms of motive what the Khmer Rouge did wasn't hugely different from what most other radical Left regimes have done when they seized power. The major difference is one of scale. That is, in terms of the number of people dead and especially in terms of the percentage of the population that was annihilated, the Khmer Rouge was disproportionately bloodthirsty.

MJT: This book reads like you wrote it not with a pen but with a blowtorch. Was that a calculated decision on your part, or did the subject matter itself set you on fire?

Benjamin Kerstein: Mostly the latter. I have a visceral reaction to certain kinds of intellectual malfeasance, and I do not like people who exploit the relative weakness or ignorance of others in order to abuse and manipulate them. But there was a certain amount of calculation in that I did try to take some of Chomsky's style—which is strident, to say the least—and turn it back on him. A sort of exercise in turnabout as fair play. I like to think that I did so without also falling into the dishonesty and emotional blackmail that characterizes Chomsky's writing. I also hope that my use of irony and sarcasm was more successful than his; Chomsky is really quite pathetic when he tries to be funny.

MJT: Your review of Chomsky’s Peace in the Middle East? was eye-opening. He wrote it right after the Yom Kippur War. It was published in 1975. He was stridently anti-Israel back when much of the left was still pro-Israel. I can’t help but wonder, given his out-sized influence in radical circles, if he were instead pro-Israel like many others, and if he remained so, if Israel would be a little more popular in the West today than it is, if the hostility toward the Jewish state would come primarily from the right-wing fringe instead of the left-wing fringe. What do you think?

Benjamin Kerstein: It's a complicated question, because in a certain sense Chomsky was a bit late to the game on Israel, though he more than made up for it afterwards. It didn't begin with him. The New Left was already moving against Israel as far back as the mid-1960s. It really starts with the Suez War in 1956, when Israel turns decisively against the USSR and pivots toward the West. The Soviets started pumping out the anti-Israel propaganda, and people in the Western Left naturally started falling into line. And certainly, the rise of a certain kind of Third World-ism that fetishized the Arab war against Israel predated Chomsky's emergence as a major voice on the anti-Israel Left. It's also important to remember that, despite Chomsky's intense hatred of Israel, his real idee fixe has always been the United States. It's only as Israel starts to draw closer to the US following the Six Day War, and especially after the Yom Kippur War, that he really gets going.

It's for this reason that the question of his remaining pro-Israel really isn't a question at all. As soon as Israel became an important ally of the United States, Chomsky could never have been pro-Israel even if he'd wanted to be. It would have thrown his entire worldview into disarray.

I would say, though, that he solidified the position of the Left on Israel and certainly gave it a lot of ammunition. He also played an important role in giving anti-Israel ideas a legitimate place in the American intellectual debate—especially in academia—and in making it a sort of litmus test for Jewish Leftists. A lot of the things he wrote in the wake of the Six Day War were denunciations of fellow Jewish Leftists for not being “real” Leftists because of their Zionism. So as a collaborator in what was basically a purge, and in ensuring that Jewish Leftists knew that the price of their continued participation in the movement was their support for Israel, he did play an essential part. 

He was also one of the anti-Israel Left's first and probably most important shields against accusations of Anti-Semitism. Since he was one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals in America at the time (mainly for his linguistics work), he gave the anti-Israel Left a lot of cover, and allowed them to escape responsibility for the Anti-Semitic aspects of their ideology for a long time. It was really only with the Second Intifada that people finally started speaking out against Leftwing Anti-Semitism, which was mainly the fault of the movement itself. They'd gotten a free pass for so long that they probably thought it would go on forever. In a sense, thankfully, this has to count as one of Chomsky's greatest failures.

MJT: At times in your denunciations of Chomsky you sound like a conservative. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but aren’t you a centrist and even left-of-center in some ways?

Benjamin Kerstein: Whenever people ask about my personal political beliefs, I'm reminded of Orson Welles' line, “I, sir, am not one of anything.” It's a bit of a cop-out, but I do have to admit that my politics don't really fit with any particular ideology. I think the most honest thing to say is that I've learned a great deal from both the Right and the Left, and I tend toward a “Third Way” position that tries to deal with social and political issues in a less dogmatic fashion. The ideology I probably feel closest to is communitarianism, in that it seems to acknowledge many of the flaws on both Left and Right and tries to steer a course between them. For example, it criticizes the Left for its overemphasis on the state as a means of change and control. But it also criticizes the Right for its tendency to hold that there is little or no positive role the state can play in a society.

And obviously I am a Zionist, but that is something that does not really fit within a Right/Left paradigm.

MJT: How many of his books have you read? I’ve read two of them and certainly won’t read any more.

Benjamin Kerstein: Well, I've read pieces of a great many of them. I would say “most,” but he churns them out at such a pace that I can't say that with any great confidence. I say “pieces” because his books are often repetitive. Most are collections of speeches or short articles, so there's naturally some skipping around in order to get to things you haven't dealt with. Peace in Middle East?, for example, is basically the same article repeated several times, with a unique article as the final chapter.

Much of the material I used in my book is composed of individual pieces, usually because when you write a blog, you naturally tend toward the topical. So, for instance, a transcript of the Chomsky-Dershowitz debate from a few years ago would appear on the Web, and I'd naturally deal with it more or less immediately. The only book I regret not having dealt with at length is Manufacturing Consent, which is one of his most famous and, I think, one of his silliest.

MJT: Chomsky once wrote that the United States could learn a lot about democracy from Haiti. Do you think he actually believes this sort of thing or is he just throwing bloody chunks of red meat to his base because they expect it?

Benjamin Kerstein: I doubt he actually believes that, but it's important to point out that most of what Chomsky says is driven by emotion rather than intellect. His tone is very intellectual, in that he speaks in a very quiet, measured style most of the time. But the content is clearly driven by what can only be called a species of hysteria. I obviously don't know him personally, but he seems to be at heart an extremely angry man, and I would guess that his anger is driven by something that is ultimately not political.

I will say, though, that one thing you realize very quickly when you deal with Chomsky at length is that he is very conscious of his audience. He often says one thing to a “red meat” type of crowd and something quite different—sometimes the opposite—to a potentially less sympathetic audience. Sometimes you even find both within the same speech or article.

A classic example is his comments on 9/11. First he condemns the attack, and then he spends several pages justifying it. Another is his claims about American democracy. In some of his earlier books, he quite obviously thinks that America is a kind of quasi-dictatorship or oligarchic tyranny in which democracy and freedom are a sham. Then after 9/11 his audience balloons in size, and suddenly he's talking about how free American society is. A reader can essentially pick one or the other, depending on his inclinations.

MJT: Chomsky was denied entry to Israel in 2010 at the Allenby Bridge at the Jordanian border. You wrote in your book that you approved of the decision to send him back to Amman, that throughout his long career he has been “a consistent and dedicated supporter and/or apologist for tyranny, terrorism, political violence of all kinds, and sometimes horrifying acts of mass murder.” But what’s the worst thing that could have happened had Chomsky been allowed in? He wasn’t a security threat. By declaring him persona non grata, he looked like a martyr and Israel came off like a country that can’t handle free speech or criticism. Was it really worth it? Don’t you think Chomsky was privately thrilled that this happened?

Benjamin Kerstein: Well, what I wrote was mainly intended as a criticism of those who were portraying him as an innocuous sort of liberal in order to attack the Israeli decision. I felt very strongly that, whether they approved of the decision or not, they had a responsibility to point out what he really believes.

That being said, I did support the decision, for two reasons: First, I don't think any country has the obligation to indulge people dedicated to its defamation. And what Chomsky says about Israel is defamatory. It's also important to point out that defamation is not criticism. Criticism is quite a different thing, and I certainly don't think Israel should ban a critic like Peter Beinart, for example, who I completely disagree with.

I also pointed out that some of the things Chomsky has said about Israel could fall under the jurisdiction of Israel's laws against racist defamation. Obviously, libertarians and others do not approve of these laws, but I think they are sometimes necessary, and some very dangerous people within Israel itself have been at least somewhat impeded by them. Meir Kahane is the most well-known example.

Second, I do think there was the potential—perhaps an unlikely one, but a potential nonetheless—that violence could have been provoked by Chomsky during his visit. His rhetoric, as you've pointed out, is often extremely brutal, and his views on Israel tend toward outright demonization. The situation in the West Bank is always volatile, and I think there was a case to be made that Chomsky could potentially have set off the proverbial fire in the crowded theater.

Now, I do think that letting Chomsky into the country probably wouldn't have been a huge disaster, and the ban did make Israel look bad internationally. I myself probably would have let him in, but I don't disapprove of the decision not to.

MJT: In your book you describe him as a monster. Not a gadfly or a lunatic, but an actual monster. What would you say to people who reject Chomsky’s view of the world but who think monster is a bit much?

Benjamin Kerstein: It's a good question, and I would only say that over the last hundred years or so we have been faced with a series of powerful secular ideologies that have done many good things but also many horrifying things. As a result, we've had to reckon with the role that intellectuals play in creating and supporting these ideologies. And especially with the extent of their responsibility for the things done by these ideologies, good or bad. Now there are many, many cases over the last century of intellectuals lending their minds or simply their names to dubious causes, and over time we've developed a certain sense of what the responsibility of the intellectual ought to be. It obviously isn't an easy question. Was Jean Paul Sartre a monster, for example, because he was a Stalinist for a time? I would say no, though he did have an awful lot to answer for.

The most famous of these cases—and I mention it in my book—was Martin Heidegger. Now, there is no doubt that Heidegger was a brilliant philosopher, and most of his philosophy isn't political at all; it's a very esoteric exploration of the nature of existence and of the concept of existence. Nonetheless, I think history has reached the conclusion that there was something monstrous about him because he not only lent his name and his prestige to the Nazi party when it took power, but because he also used his skills to justify it philosophically. The strongest reason, though, is that after it was all over, when he was under no pressure politically or otherwise to do so, he continued to defend his actions and to minimize the Nazis' crimes, including the Holocaust.

In the case of Chomsky, however, I think we have one of the most egregious cases. He didn't just support an ideology, he essentially created it, or at least played a major—perhaps the decisive—role in doing so. And there isn't just one case of lending his skills to justifying horrendous acts of political evil, there are many. And as I noted before, he has never owned up to any of them and as far as I can tell never will. What we're looking at with Chomsky is a man who has dedicated essentially his entire public life to political evil. I think we are justified in calling such a person a monster.

Postscript: You can get a copy of Benjamin Kerstein’s Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite in trade paperback and electronic formats at Amazon.com.

Likewise you can pick up a copy of my own new book, Where the West Ends, in both trade paperback and electronic formats .

I’m also trying to raise money for another trip to the Middle East, either to Libya or Syria (depending on if and when Bashar al-Assad is overthrown), so please help me out. Donations add up to plane tickets, as do sales of my books.

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A few weeks ago I mailed autographed copies of my new book, Where the West Ends, and three came back to me marked “Return to Sender.”

The three of you who ordered and paid for copies that bounced are:

Carl Sanders
Peter Luccarelli III
Barry Youngerman

I can’t reach any of you by email, so please write to me at michaeltotten001 at gmail dot com with your current mailing address so I can get your books to you.

I’ve finally decided to have a book release party now that my third book, Where the West Ends, has been published.

The general public is invited, so if you live in or will be visiting the Pacific Northwest, come on down.

The event will be hosted by the Ristretto Reading Series at the Ristretto Roasters café at 3808 N. Williams Avenue in Portland, Oregon, on September 5 at 7pm.

I will read (briefly) from the new book. Autographed copies will be for sale.

Coffee and treats will be provided by Ristretto Roasters (which, by the way, roasts and brews the best coffee I've ever had anywhere), and wine will be graciously provided by Anne Amie Vineyards.

An Arab country that’s pro-Western and has a non-Muslim majority? Though it sounds like something that could exist only in an alternate universe, there’s a chance that such a state could emerge from the ongoing conflict in Syria. Alawites make up only 12 percent of the Syrian population, but they overwhelmingly dominate the regime: the family of the tyrant-ruler Bashar al-Assad is Alawite, as are the elite members of the military, the bureaucracy, and the intelligence agencies. The majority of Syria’s population, by contrast, is Sunni Muslim, and the opposition to Alawite rule is overwhelmingly Sunni. When the dust clears in Syria, the Alawites could conceivably beat a retreat to their historic heartland in the northwestern mountains along the Mediterranean. “It is now clear that this is where the Syrian conflict is headed,” writes Syrian expert Tony Badran in Foreign Policy. “Sooner or later, Assad will abandon Damascus. . . . Reports are emerging of internal population migration as Alawites begin moving back to the ancestral mountains.”

Alawites are sometimes inaccurately described as Muslims. In fact, their religion has as much in common with Christianity and Gnosticism as with Islam. They splintered from Shia Islam more than 1,000 years ago and have been going their own way ever since. They venerate Ali, the cousin of the prophet Mohammed, but they also believe that human beings used to be stars. They don’t pray five times a day as Muslims do. Much of their religion is secret. No one can convert to Alawism: you’re either born an Alawite or forever frozen out of the fold.

Sunni and Shia Muslims have always considered the Alawites infidels. It hardly occurred to anyone that they might be Muslims until the late Lebanese imam Musa Sadr issued a fatwa declaring them Shias in 1974. His ruling had nothing to do with Alawite theology and everything to do with his own political interests and the fact that Syria’s new Alawite ruler, Hafez al-Assad, needed a veneer of Islamic legitimacy. The fiction that Alawites were Muslims later helped cement the Syrian government’s alliance with the Shia theocracy in Iran.

The noxious ideology of Assad’s Alawite regime has nothing to do with Alawism as a religion; it is strictly practical. Its Baathist variety of secular Arab nationalism papers over the deep divisions in Syrian society by subordinating religion and sectarian identity to ethnicity: being an Arab trumps being a Sunni, an Alawite, a Christian, or a Druze. (The Kurds in the northeast are the losers in this equation, and they’re treated accordingly.) Assad’s hostility toward Israel and his alliance with Iran likewise make strategic sense. By championing the Sunni community’s anti-Zionist cause, he has been able to purchase some legitimacy from his cowering subjects. Also, Assad’s sponsorship of terrorism and his status as Iran’s sidekick give Syria much more geopolitical clout than it would otherwise have as a ramshackle, Soviet-style, resource-poor backwater.

Now that the Sunnis have turned against Assad, however, it’s all crashing down, as it was doomed to do sooner or later.

Read the rest in City Journal.