America’s intervention in the Syian Civil War

In my TiC, I was introduced to competing views on Russia’s motives in the Syrian Crisis, and to the discourse on the response of the Obama administration. In my Researched Based Argument, I will argue that it was in America’s best interest to intervene early on in the Syrian Crisis, and take a firmer stance against Russia, Assad and Iran. In my “mapping,” I have addressed what I already know about the topic, and the possible research paths I could take.
https://mm.tt/990158054?t=CC48KHBiEc

Photo Credits:
Google Images

#5: Brainstorming How to Deal with North Korea

https://mm.tt/990741512?t=L1U92OC6zu

Here’s my brainstorm map. There is a lot of things to consider if the U.S. were to try to deal with the DPRK using force or through sanctions. This exercise makes me think it would be a lot simpler to learn to live with a nuclear North Korea. That would be a good option, if not for the fact that they want to destroy the United States and its allies…

Mossadegh and the Shah

Over the course of the term, I have been doing research on the collusion between the Shah of Iran and Western intelligence agencies for the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically-elected, secular Prime Minister of Iran. To this day, particularly in Iran but also internationally, there is a significant degree of misinformation and politicization of information regarding the validity of the coup; scholars often linearly attribute the overthrow of Mossadegh to the dissatisfaction with the Shah in 1979, culminating in the Islamic Revolution, but this simplification is problematic and ignores a wide expanse of unrelated factors.

Since I was a child, I have heard various opinions on Mossadegh from various members of my family. To many in Iran, he remains a figure of all that Iran could have been, secular and democratic, with fierce pride in his country and steadfast refusal to accommodate Western oil interests. That he was overthrown by the CIA and MI6 remains a point of deep anger for many in Iran, who, as the current theocratic regime has remained staunchly undemocratic, reflect on Mossadegh as the final gasp of a truly representative Iran. Those loyal to the Shah had starkly different views on Mossadegh, regarding him as a megalomaniac whose obsessive hatred for anything Western blinded him to the extraordinarily negative economic consequences of his pro-Iran policies. For decades, for example, the British Anglo-Persian Oil Company had been extracting oil from Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan Province, paying pennies to the Iranians for the right to the oil fields, hiring few Iranians, and lying about their sales to avoid compensating the Iranian government. Mossadegh’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry returned the resources to the Iranian people, but at a significant cost. As he had been warned by the British prior to doing so, the nationalization resulted in an international embargo on Iran’s greatest export. A dramatic decline of the Iranian economy resulted, ultimately resulting in the various machinations of the Shah and Western powers to remove Mossadegh from office, which, despite being extraordinarily dishonest and misrepresented for decades after, were in fact legal under Iranian law. After the Shah regained power, he renegotiated terms with the Western oil companies for a more favorable (theoretically) 50/50 percentage split of oil profits. To an objective outsider, there seems to be enough blame to attribute to each of the parties in this storyline. Nevertheless, the history has been presented by many as a manichaean battle between the Iranian forces of good and evil, with certain segments of the population ascribing Mossadegh to the former and the Shah to the latter (and vice versa). In my RBA, I hope to deconstruct the cults of personality that have sprung up around the two figures and to evaluate the consequences, good and bad, of their actions.

 

 

Photograph:

“Mossadegh’s Arrest.” Iran Review, http://www.iranreview.org/file/cms/files/U6HCACBE3KXCAKC3L7ZCAMIQJR3CAKJW8KPCASYBGORCA27RDJWCAJB7SFBCAXH2U0ZCAR63UAKCARU2GPFCA5FL74ICA4JQSBNCA1HNJ35CAOPCTODCA4FZBQ4CAHC8X9JCA0KA9VOCAJCJ4A1(1).jpg

Russia’s Syria

In my research topic, I am focusing on Russian motives to engage in the Syrian Civil War, and how America, mainly under President Barack Obama’s administration reacted to the escalating conflict, and Russia’s growing influence in the Middle East. This research topic, especially Obama’s actions, is highly debated amongst scholars, and with the longlasting consequences of this civil war, it is therefore of interest to analyze competing approaches.

Scholars and opinionists have differed in their approaches to Russia’s motives in playing a key role in the Syrian Civil War. In his book, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East, Christopher Philips suggests Putin intervened in Syria to recognize Russia as a global superpower on par with the United States. Philips divides Russian motives into three macro reasons: geostrategic, domestic, and economic. These fields are discussed in Amos Yadlin’s article, Russia in Syria and the Implications for Israel, as he portrays Moscow’s strategic incentives in engaging in Syria. Both Yadlin and Philips relatively agree why Putin invested immense resources in Syria.  Regarding America’s response to the Syrian Civil War, Max Boot and David S. Sorenson differ very much in their approaches to analyzing Obama’s conduct. Max Boot, in his article “Cleaning Up Obama’s Syria Mess”  criticizes Obama’s administration for being too subtle in Syria, and allowing the Russian’s to dictate diplomacy. On the other hand, David S. Sorenson, in his book Syria in Ruins: The Dynamics of the Syrian Civil War, acknowledges the context in which Obama was when making decisions not to engage in military conduct, and use diplomacy. As of now, I am hoping in my RBA to examine the options Obama had to engage in Syria and deal with the ongoing empowerment of Putin in the Middle East, and argue that it was in America’s best interest to engage early and firmly in Syria.

Works Cited:

Sorenson, David S. Syria in Ruins: The Dynamics of the Syrian Civil War. 2016. Print.

Phillips, Christopher. The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East. 2016. Print.

Boot, Max. “Cleaning Up Obama’s Syria Mess.” Commentary 142.4 (2016).

Yadlin, Amos. “Russia in Syria and the Implications for Israel.” Strategic Assessment, vol. 19, no. 2, 2016. World Affairs Online.

Image Credit:
http://www.wikipedia.org

 

 

 

North Korea: Now What?

 

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has acquired the capabilities to launch nuclear warheads across oceans and has expressed an intent to use this in a first strike agains the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Preserving the geopolitical stability of East Asia to prevent nuclear war is the priority of the United States and United Nations.

The Trump Administration, refusing to rule out military aggression toward North Korea has stated that, when it comes to North Korea, “all options are on the table.” The United States has refused to adopt a “no first use” of nuclear weapons policy, meaning the U.S. could potentially launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korea. In the past, Trump has decried the publicizing of military strategy, calling military officials “stupid” for disclosing details about military operations in Mosul, Iraq. It is entirely possible for the president to order an attack on Pyongyang without any prior notice to the public, meaning little time for the American people to prepare for a nuclear counterattack on behalf of North Korea. At this point, any attack on North Korea that does not completely paralyze their nuclear launch capabilities can be assumed to be responded to with nuclear force. If the United States were ever to invade North Korea, the best time to do so was years ago, before North Korea developed the capabilities to launch nuclear warheads across oceans. Should North Korea launch its missiles, there is a chance that they would be neutralized by a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (a system that destroys incoming missiles), however there is no guarantee that this would be a success. The United States and the rest of the world community has two options: attack North Korea and hope to destroy its nuclear capabilities to a point where a nuclear retaliation is no longer a threat, or make concessions to keep an armed and reckless Pyongyang happy. The purpose of an RBA on this topic would be to analyze what strategies have and have not worked in curbing North Korean aggression, and what the next step should be, be it on the part of the U.S. or the U.N.

Image Credit: Daily Star

Deference and Deceit – Doubled

In Matthew Farish’s “Disaster and Decentralization: American Cities and the Cold War,” he writes,

“[J]ournalists, science fiction authors, religious leaders and concerned scientists all rapidly ‘transmuted the devastation of Hiroshima into visions of American cities in smoldering ruins’” (131).

The major reformation of American urban landscapes was precipitated by a variety of causes, not least of which was the shocking devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the hands of the United States. This sight formed the basis of a great deal of science fiction and was in the mind of Americans for long years after 1945. Academic leaders and scientists provided the intellectual defense for this hysteria, advocating dispersion of city-dwellers. In addition, it must not be ignored, according to Farish, that cities were also “spaces of blight” and “repositories of extreme cultures, classes, and races.” Suburbia was the answer to this growing fright; it served the twin ambitions of a bothered white urban community, for they could at once leave behind and ignore their ethnically distinct urban neighbors as well as live in (perceived) relative safety.

Today, the images of the Twin Towers take up a role in the American psyche similar to those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after World War II. Like the reaction of Americans then, consisting of deferent acceptance of the (often outlandish) assertions of scientists and societal leaders, there was a rally to the flag. Fear of nuclear disaster paralleled fear of terrorism, and fear of Russians gave way to fear of Muslims. Illusions of safety from harm were conjured up by government leaders seeking to ease the concerns of the American populace. More importantly, these fears were often fanned by the same leaders so as to propel controversial legislation that abridged legal rights of Americans.

Anxious Urbanism and the Conception of the American City

In “Disaster and Decentralization: American Cities and the Cold War,” Matthew Farish explores the impact of nuclear bombs, and, most significantly, of the fear of nuclear attack, on the density and characterization of American cities. One quote that exemplifies Farish’s argument falls towards the end of the paper, when Farish is describing the blending and shared knowledge of scientists and urban planners during the Cold War: “All were deeply tied to the military–industrial–academic complex of the security state…Put simply, while planners debated the specifics of atomic physics, scientists became urban visionaries, and both groups became intimately familiar with geopolitical strategy,” (Farish 139).

This quote notes the connections between urban centers and atomic threat, the central connection emphasized in Farish’s paper.  It gets at the heart of Farish’s argument: that the atomic age brought with it an anxious urbanism, in which Americans regarded cities with fear as places of future nuclear attack. This quote explains the prevalence of the military in all parts of American life, appropriately noted here as the “military-industrial-academic complex.” The US, as a “security state,” was constantly focused on war and defense; these fears and “Cold War imperatives” therefore seeped into all aspects of American life, including the design of cities.

Fear of nuclear threat, Farish explains, resulted in concrete actions to fundamentally change city designs and general US geography. These included forms of “limited dispersion,” such as the control of inner-city building and new, widely spaced satellite towns. Many Americans, particularly the middle class, fled to the suburbs.

Farish also explains how images of Hiroshima fueled this obsession with urban disaster. Journalists and scientists turned images of Hiroshima into visions of the destruction of American cities. Imagery of the Twin Towers falling in 2001 realized these visions and heightened these fears. While images of Hiroshima were potent, imagery of the Twin Towers, the financial center of the US and therefore a symbol of its supremacy, was more powerful because it was in a familiar and therefore personal context. The Twin Towers loom still in the American conscious as a reminder of the persistent threat to American identity and supremacy.

The image below is of a powerful 9/11 tribute, in which two beams remind us where the towers once stood. It reminds me that the Twin Towers are almost more present in the American imagination in their absence.

above image: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2014-09/11/4/enhanced/webdr08/enhanced-buzz-9019-1410425877-11.jpg?downsize=715:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto

featured image: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/911-tribute-in-light-illuminates-thousands-of-migrating-songbirds/

Urban Exodus during the Cold War and Security Anxiety post 9/11

Matthew Farish in his paper “Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War” writes, “The portent of geopolitical conflict was simply one of the numerous factors urging an unprecedented abandonment of central cities by manufacturers, corporations, and populations dominated by the white middle class.”

This quote embodies Farish’s main idea that during the Cold War, Americans (white Americans) moved from city centers to suburbs. While it was not the only reason, Americans looked to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and saw how populated city centers were easy targets for Soviet nuclear attacks. As people feared becoming a casualty for living in cities that were likely targets, they moved away from the cities. This quote emphasizes how a large portion of American society, complete with individuals and companies left the cities during this time, and how this phenomenon was not only due to the fear of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. The quote explains how there were many other reasons, including immigrants and people of color moving to the cities, prompting many whites to move away to suburbs. This exodus from the cities to the suburbs was one mainly done by white middle-class families.

Just like the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought fear in the minds of Cold War era Americans, in today’s society the images of 9/11 bring fear in the minds of 21st century Americans. This was exactly what Americans during the Cold War feared: an attack on an urban city. This fear and incessant imagery of 9/11 has been harnessed by American leaders to justify laws and policies that infringe on privacy in the name of security. This has prompted a nationwide debate about the trade-offs between privacy and security.

 

Picture from: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36957439

Power and Fear: Cold War parallels to post-9/11 anxieties

In “Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War,” Matthew Farish argues that the beginning of the nuclear age after the second World War had a profound impact on “white flight” to suburbs and the changing relations of geography and humanity, particularly in the changing cultural balance of urban and suburban environments. Much of the way these issues developed had to do with the particular cultural significance the environments of the city and the suburbs had for American citizens. Farish writes of the suburbs:

It was these suburban ‘citadels’ that infiltrated the discourse of Cold War geopolitics: they were the quintessential sites of American life, the spaces where history was being actively rewritten. Suburbs embodied order, safety and a deeply genderedconsumerism that ‘became as solid a pillar of the United States version of cold war cultureas did its remasculinized military.’ (Farish 128)

In contrast to the multiethnic, varied, dense population of the city, the American suburb was tightly controlled, whether in race, family structure, or even the homogenous culture associated with its tight-knit community. In addition to the tangible threat of nuclear attacks likely to target densely populated zones, suburbs also provided a haven from the racial and cultural tensions that characterized the city. As the nonwhite population of cities boomed, anti-city sentiment began to arise which characterized cities as hotbeds for crime and insurrection, with much of the rhetoric on cities utilizing language associated with illnesses or parasites, consistent with Andrew Ross’ identification of “the Cold War culture of germophobia.” For many, the city represented something of an incubator for un-American ideas, with Joseph McCarthy himself referring to housing projects as “a breeding ground for Communists.”(Farish 130) The imagery of bomb blast radii centered on the city’s heart drove many away as well; nuclear imagery remained one of the most important rhetorical tools for decades and held enormous emotional sway for the American public.

The imagery of the Twin Towers still holds similar power in the post-9/11 era, inspiring the same curious mix of fear and jingoistic patriotism the bomb did in the 1950s. Invoking 9/11 was something of a political shortcut in the years following the disaster, rendering one immune to criticism for fear of being labeled un-American. America became as obsessed with the idea of terrorist attacks as they had been with atomic bombs, with the same xenophobia manifesting itself in the city and the same anxious hypotheticals filling media. The decentralized and close-to-home nature of 9/11 meant that the fear its imagery inspired was one deeply personal to Americans. Terrorism could happen anywhere, to anyone, or so the implication went. The fear of infiltrating terrorists filled nearly the exact same niche as that of communist spies, down to citizens being asked to surveil their environment through campaigns like “If You See Something, Say Something.” The imagery of 9/11 provided a real anchor for these abstract fears, rationalizing them. This rhetoric was particularly effective on the same suburban middle class so affected by nuclear rhetoric during the Cold War. Those for whom the American Dream and thus the values it claims are desirable and attainable are the most easily swayed by rhetoric surrounding threats to those goals. 9/11 was concrete evidence of those who hate our freedoms and will do whatever they can to take them away. The incessant use of the imagery of 9/11 reinforced and validated these fears of terrorism. In the same way as depictions of Manhattan being bombed touched Americans so deeply during the Cold War, the personal emotion of 9/11 allowed its image to call up Americans’ deepest fears.

Fear, Paranoia and the Case for Urban Dispersal

“In the United States, a nation with a higher urban to non-urban ratio that Cold War rivals like China and the Soviet Union, a city was, as Bernard Brodie put it, a ‘made-to-order target, and the degree of urbanization of a country furnishes a rough index of its relative vulnerability to the atomic bomb.'”

The above quotation from Matthew Farish’s article, “Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War” encapsulates his central discussion of the motivations for urban dispersal in order to mitigate the effects of a hypothetical atomic bombing, fear of which was heightened following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards the end of the Second World War. That these cities were chosen as targets precisely due to their population density furthered the argument for urban dispersal and decentralization, which was one of the reasons for the development and rapid expansion of suburbia during the Cold War (alongside fear of desegregation, the exaltation of the white middle-class as the American ideal, and the desire  maintain racially and economically homogenous residential zones).

Farish argues that the American city was portrayed as a “made-to-order target” both due to the belief that the presence of poor and immigrant populations increased the susceptibility of urban spaces to “communist infiltration,” as well as the paranoia that the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be reciprocated by the nuclear-armed USSR. The use of “degree of urbanization” and “rough index” in the statement somewhat employs the language of social science and quantitative research, indicating the establishment of disaster research as a field of academic study in the post-war period. Farish notes the multiple interactions of academia, the military and industry in researching disaster scenarios, generating behavioral models, and introducing systems of home evacuation and shelters which complemented and contributed to the spread of “home and automobile ownership,” as part of the linkage between national security, containment and consumer culture.

Just as images of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki entered the American imagination and became a source of fear and anxiety upon which research and policy were predicated, the image of the falling Twin Towers during 9/11 has been similarly employed. The recurrent invocation of this image has maintained the fear of similar attacks and fanning of anger at having been victimized, in order to justify the implementation of anti-terror policies which may otherwise not have been accepted by the American people. These include the decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (which were framed as avenging the loss of American lives on American soil, and preventing future attacks), the granting of extensive surveillance powers to intelligence agencies, and the suspension of full legal rights of those suspected as being associated with the events of 9/11. This demonstrates the emotive and persuasive power of images to shape the view of the people with regard to domestic and foreign policy.