Back to Ancient Greece: Sources Again

I don't intend to stop blogging about the present.  It is too urgent and too depressing to avoid. However, I really do need to get back to Ancient Greece and another depressing topic -- the defeat of Athens in (short lived) replacement of the democracy with the Thirty Tyrants.  As before, I will start with sources.

Xenophon

Thucydides' account abruptly breaks off shortly after the Athenian victory at Cynossema with seven years of the war left to go.  We know he lived to see the end of the war; he alludes to the end of the war at least twice, but he apparently did not live to complete his history.  Indeed, the account breaks off so abruptly we can understand the tradition that he was murdered.

Where Thucydides breaks off, Xenophon takes up.  Xenophon was a young man when the war ended, and a pupil of Socrates.  After the war, he joined a Greek mercenary army taking part in Persia's civil war and is best known for writing the Anabasis, his account of how he got the army safely out after their side was defeated.  But he wrote numerous other works, including the Hellenica, a history that takes up where Thucydides leaves off.  Xenophon presupposes that his reader is familiar with Thucydides; he begins as abruptly as Thucydides ends, "After this, not many days later."  Xenophon's history is considered rather "thin" compared to Thucydides, i.e., it tends to give less detail and fewer perspectives.  But it describes the time of the Thirty Tyrants better than any other source we have.  Xenophon was in Athens at the time of the Thirty and almost certainly witnessed their actions.  He was also a pupil of Socrates and gives an account of the master including a description of what he was doing under the Thirty.

Xenophon was not the only historian of the period.  Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus says that not only Xenophon, but Theopompus, a historian whose work has been lost, as have the works of Cratippus, another contemporary historian.  Diodorus, though writing centuries later, appears to have relied on these works as well as on Xenophon.

Plutarch does not have biographies of any of the principles in Athens at the time of the Thirty, but his biographies of Alcibiades and Lysander, the Spartan Admiral who finally defeated Athens and installed the Thirty, contain useful information about the city's downfall.  Finally, under the earlier democracy, Athens, great center of culture and learning though it was, remained in many ways an oral culture.  The speeches of the period were given orally and not written down.  The restored democracy had professional speech writers who prepared speeches to be given to the Assembly and to juries. These speeches are all (intentionally) biased, but they are a useful source of information on Athens under the Thirty.

And, as before, modern historians Kagan and Grote have been useful in explaining and interpreting, though relying on incomplete information and a large measure of speculation.  And there are minor sources as well.

So, on to the final years of the Peloponnesian War and the downfall of Athens.

The Strangest Jihad Attack Yet

So, the San Bernardino shooting is looking more and more like the work of jihadis.  Not just that the shooters are Muslim, or that one is alleged to have pledged her allegiance to ISIS.  And not the quantity of weapons and bombs they turned out to have stockpiled.  Crazed loners do that too, after all.  The things that strongly point to jihad, and to a larger conspiracy are:

1. Since this was a husband-wife team, obviously it was not the work of a crazed loner.  They planned it together.  So there was a conspiracy, at a minimum, of two.
2. The reason the government is not committing itself to saying this was an act of terrorism was that the shooters have done an incredibly professional job in covering their (electronic) tracks. They have apparently removed the mother board from their computer and smashed their cell phones.  They must have learned that somewhere, though whether on one of those how to be a terrorist websites or from a personal instructor is anyone's guess.
3. The fact that they have gone to such lengths to cover their tracks strongly suggests that they have accomplices to protect.  And presumably at least some of those accomplices are not overseas in the Middle East, but here in the US or at least in some country where they can be easily reached.  Otherwise, why go to such lengths to protect them? 

The main thing that argues against this being jihad is -- the target.  What do you say when a pair of jihadis stockpile an immense arsenal, build a large number of bombs, obtain Kevlar body armor, remove their mother board, smash their cell phones, in short, do everything that suggests they are planning something really big -- and then shoot up the office Christmas party?

Really, I don't want to minimize the horrors of this attack.  Fourteen innocent people were senselessly murdered and numerous others wounded.  It's just that when jihadis strike, you usually expect their target to be something higher profile and more glamorous than the office Christmas party.  The current speculation, as far as I can tell, is that they were planning something big and glamorous but then got side tracked by some sort of personal quarrel at work.  It seems strange.  Engaging in that degree of advance planning, only to be sidetracked by some private quarrel seems incredible.  More plausibly, maybe they intended something bigger and more glamorous but just couldn't resist the temptation to settle a few private scores first.  But in that case why didn't they move ahead and do something bigger and more glamorous instead tooling around for a few hours until the police caught up with them?  

It is very strange regardless.  But what point is there arguing?  It happened.

UPDATE:  Well, now, this is interesting.  Apparently he received a deposit of $28,500 to his bank account two weeks before the shooting.  This suggests he had a backer with money, though not huge amounts of money.  He apparently withdrew or transferred $10,000 to himself and made three transfers of $5,000 to his mother.  Which would suggest that she was probably one of the people he was trying to protect when destroyed his electronic records.  Unsurprisingly, the authorities are now eyeing her with suspicion.

I Didn't Foresee That One

Well, that one took me by surprise.  It would appear that one of the shooters responsible for the horrible shooting at San Bernardino Inland Regional Center that killed 14 people has been identified as Sayed Farook.  I assume from the name that he is a Muslim and from the religion that he is a jihadi.  He appears to have acted in a conspiracy with his brother and sister-in-law and to have been highly armed and lethal.

I must say, my initial gut reaction to a shooting of a center for the developmentally disabled would be to blame it on a crazed loner.  It just doesn't seem like the sort of target that would appeal to jihadis. But then again, I misjudged Anders Breivik, so what do I know.

OK, folks, it is pointless to argue against Islamophobia now.  Just hunker down and hope the hysteria passes.

Thinking the Unthinkable: President Trump

Jonathan Chait has written a post on what happens if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination. Shorter version: The party establishment will have no choice but to rally behind him and he will increasingly be treated as a mainstream candidate.  He will probably lose, but not as spectacularly as Goldwater or McGovern because the country has become so polarized.

But what if Trump wins the nomination and goes on the win the general election?

Republicans will control all levers of government.  That means they will have to face the realities of power and decide what to do with it.  But, of course, that would apply if any Republican candidate what would be unique about Trump.

What is unique about Trump is his style.  He has developed the ultimate strategy for campaigning.  Tell the audience whatever lies it wants to hear, without the slightest regard for true, and raise your voice if confronted with actual facts.  It seems to work very well on the campaign trail.  The problem, of course, is that in the world of power unpleasant facts don't go away just because you yell at them.

And honestly, I do not know whether his followers care or not.  I cannot tell what they want. Deportation of all illegal immigrants within six months?  An end to those pesky telephone messages that say "For English, press one"?  An end to Spanish signs at Home Depot?  The return of the good-paying blue collar jobs of yesteryear?  A quick and easy victory in the Middle East?  Conservative domination of popular culture?  Trump is not going to be able to deliver on any of those.  Or are they okay with that and don't really care if their President can deliver so long on any of these things so long as he is as mad as hell as his supporters and articulates their anger.

I fully agree that most hawkish types don't particularly care what happens in the ground in the Middle East.  They just want a President who makes lots of noise and beats his chest.  Or consider all the people urging Obama to be angrier about the BP oil spill.  At the time I thought it was silly.  Being angry won't contain the oil one bit sooner.  But maybe if Donald Trump were President and an oil spill occurred and he acted really angry and screamed and yelled a lot, he would get credit when the spill was contained (as it eventually would be).  Trump is just a lot of hot air, but maybe his followers just want hot air and don't care whether he accomplishes anything because being loud and angry will make it feel like he accomplished something.

As for his policy positions, aside from immigration they are fairly reasonable.  He isn't promising to cut entitlements and gut the safety net.  (Although he is just as enthusiastic about cutting taxes as anyone else).  And he seems relatively sensible about the Middle East, wanting to substitute big talk for an actual war.

But the real problem with Trump is that he is all hot air,  He is completely unqualified to be President.  He is acting as a sort of male Sarah Palin, proudly proclaiming his lack of qualification as reason to vote for him.  It got old with Palin; I am hoping it will get old with Trump as well.  But if he does win, he will quickly find himself in over his head, not having a clue about policy and all those things that a President is supposed to do.  Presumably the result will be that he will be uniquely dependent on his advisers and that they will actually be the ones running things, while he acts in charge but doesn't have a clue.  So how a Trump administration works out will depend on who he chooses as advisers.  My guess is that he will choose fairly conventional Republican advisers because, after all, that is who there is to choose from.  So they would probably set policy about the same as they would under any other Republican President, except with less direction from the top.

In short, my guess is that a Trump Administration would be a fairly conventional Republican administration, only more obnoxious and less competent.

An Incredible, Unsolvable Mess

Finally, on the subject of ISIS, I have two excellent articles to recommend.

This one gives some cold, hard facts about why ISIS is not going to be militarily defeated.  Shorter version -- everyone hates ISIS and wants it to go away, but no one is actually willing to commit the ground troops to rule that ungovernable area, and most actors have other priorities:

• Assad: Priority is defeating the non-ISIS rebels and holding onto power.  After all, the non-ISIS rebels border on him directly while ISIS does not.  And if the other rebels fall and only ISIS remains, then many of his current enemies will have no choice but to support him.
• Turkey: Priority is defeating the Kurds, who want to create a Greater Kurdistan that includes parts of Turkey.
• Kurds: They want a Greater Kurdistan.  To the extent ISIS controls Kurdish areas, they want to capture them.  They do not want to conquer and control non-Kurdish areas.  Nor do they want to see a strong central government restored in Iraq because it will want to subdue any aspirations the Kurds may have to independence.
• Iraqi Shiites: Priority is their own power.  Might prefer to allow Sunni areas to secede than to share power with the Sunnis.
• Iran: Priority is to dominate Iraq.  Any power sharing with Iraqi Sunnis would weaken that domination.
• Saudi Arabia: Priority is great power rivalry with Iran.  Any enemy of Iran is to some extent an ally.
• Israel: Priority is defeating Hamas, Hezbollah and Assad.  If Hezbollah goes off to fight for Assad instead of staying home to fight Israel, so much the better.

I should add that Israel's viewpoint is short-sighted.  Assad is no doubt an enemy, but one they can live with.  There have been no shots fired across the Israel-Syrian border since the mid-1970's. Neither chaos nor ISIS offer any such guarantee.

It also seems short-sighted on the part of Saudi Arabia.  They are supporting jihadis who have the monarchy in their sights as a target.  This article explains why Saudi Arabia is stuck in that trap.  The problem, it explains, is that the Saudi royal family's legitimacy rests on the support of the Wahabi clergy, i.e. a deeply puritanical strain of Islam, and the one that supplies most of the jihadi recruits. Since the royal family is (a) very large (too large to police effectively), and (b) not noted for its strict observance of the rules of Wahabism, it can retain the support of the Wahabi clergy only by promoting Wahabism abroad, even though the Wahabis are the main recruits the the various terrorist organizations, including ones that seek to overthrow the Saudi monarchy.  

So it's a Catch-22: The Saudi regime promotes Wahhabism in order to stay in power, but the more it promotes Wahhabism, the more it indirectly bolsters ISIS and other jihadists, who want to remove the Saudi royal family from power.

The article goes on to point out that Saudis fear democracy as much as they fear jihadism, so they not only support the spread of Wahabism, but also repressive government crushing democracy protesters, helping leave no middle ground between the tyrants and the terrorists.  And its great power rivalry with Iran (well, regional power anyhow) exacerbates local conflicts as each side arms its allies.  Some ally!

So, if I were king, what would I do to about the situation in the Middle East.  My basic answer is, my goal would not be military victory, but reduction in tensions.  Negotiated settlement between Assad and the rebels.  Any sort of brokered talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran to reduce tension and great power rivalry between them.  Unfortunately, persuading people to reach a negotiated settlement often involves temporarily ramping up the war.  And no one know just how "temporary" that will be.  And in the end, if the article on ISIS is correct then it, too, will ultimately have to be resolved by negotiations since no one is willing or able to dislodge ISIS by force.  The deal would have to take the form of allowing ISIS to govern its enclave in peace in exchange for not bothering anyone else. Such agreements have been made, even with very hard line governments.  Unfortunately, getting them to agree often means ramping up the war against them as well. . . .

Some Unpalatable Facts About Civil Wars

Back in the olden days, before these things were readily available on the Internet, George Will wrote a typically (and appropriately) caustic assessment of our attempt to intervene in Somalia.  He said that it violated three well-established rules about intervention in other countries' civil wars:

1. Don't.
2. If you do, you must choose sides.
3. When choosing sides, try to bet on a winner.

Rule number two here referred to our attempt in Somalia to intervene in the country's civil war while remaining neutral and not siding with anyone.  The attempt failed, and it soon became clear that outside forces that attempt to intervene to break up someone else's civil war will be inexorably drawn into the conflict.  (We had the same experience in Lebanon as well).  

In Syria right now we are clearly violating Rules 1 and 3.  Arguably by supporting the "moderate" opposition we are also violating 2 by not being on any side.  Only we are doing even worse than in Lebanon and Somalia.  There we attempted to neutral and not favor or oppose any side.  In Syria we are essentially opposing and seeking to defeat all sides.  And Obama's hawkish critics only want to make it worse.

While I think that Will's rules about intervening in other people's civil wars are sound as prescriptive rules, I would like to add my own descriptive rules.

 There are no good guys in civil wars.  Civil wars are fought between bad guys and other bad guys. Morally clear-cut ones are fought between bad guys and worse guys (sometimes much worse). While there may be good guys at the outset, these go down fast.  There are two main reasons.  One is that  good guys just don't like fighting civil wars.  They typically don't have armies or are way behind the curve in forming them.  The other reason is that civil war tends to brutalize the participants.  The longer the war goes on, the worse the participants become, and the more brutal an extremist factions come to the fore.

Foreign interventions are always on behalf of the loser.  The reason is obvious.  The side that is winning doesn't need a foreign power to intervene on its behalf.  Admittedly, one foreign intervention can sway the war in favor of a formerly losing power, so some other foreign power may counter-intervene.  Nonetheless, it presents a painful truth.  If you intervene in someone else's civil war, chances are it will be on the side with the less popular support.

The side that is most cohesive usually wins.  In other words, the side most likely to win is the one that is best disciplined, has the strongest and clearest leadership, and is least likely to fight among itself.  In the Spanish Civil War, that was Franco.  In the Russian Civil war (1917-1920), it was the Bolsheviks.  In Syria, either Assad or ISIS may qualify.  The loose coalition of non-ISIS rebels we are backing most emphatically does not qualify.  When one side in a civil war has the more clear-cut leadership, that leadership is invariably bad.  In fact, its badness is often the reason so many disparate factions have united against it.  Nonetheless,

It is probably for the best that the most cohesive side wins.  The reason is that only a cohesive party can actually bring the ghastly war to an end.  If the more fragmented side wins, what follows is not an end to the war, but continued civil war among rival factions.  If Franco had been defeated, war would have continued between the Republican factions, with the Communists have the advantage of being by far the best organized. If the Bolsheviks had been defeated in Russia, the White Russian factions would have continued fighting, and the outcome can only the speculated upon.*  If Assad had been defeated quickly in Syria's civil was, in all probability what would have followed would not be government of the moderate opposition, but continued civil war among different rebel groups, with hard-core jihadis having the advantage of cohesion and pure viciousness.

The ever-escalating cycle of radicalization and brutalization can be ended only by ending the war.  The war can end either with victory by one side, or with a negotiated settlement.  When Franco prevailed, he eased out the fascists and stayed out of WWII.  When Lenin won, he ended the most  the most coercive features of War Communism and allowed some free scope to peasants and petty traders.*  It is hard to imagine ISIS and the other jihadis ever moderating, but even Hamas and Hezbollah have regained some rationality once secure in power.  This might seem more palatable than the others, except

If is often necessary to escalate a war in order to end it.  This applies both to international and civil wars.  The other side can be persuaded to accept something less than total victory only if victory is proven to be too costly.  The other side is presumably making similar calculations, so the pressure to escalate is powerful on both sides, even if the ultimate goal is a negotiated peace.

Given these unpalatable facts, is it any wonder that the first and best rule about intervening in other people's civil wars is, "Don't"?

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*But what about Stalin, one may ask?  My answer is that Stalin was a historical fluke in no way foreseeable during the Russian Civil War.  Lenin and his Bolsheviks were quite bad enough even if Stalin is left out of the picture. 

Could We Have Prevented ISIS with Earlier, Stronger Intervention

So, could we have avoided the godawful mess we are facing with ISIS by intervening earlier and more forcefully?  This editorial offers the typical interventionist argument that we could.

If only we had left a small residual force (about 15,000) in Iraq, it argues, we could have stabilized the country and prevented the rise of ISIS.  Advocates of this viewpoint never explain exactly how that was supposed to work.  If the much larger force we had in place earlier failed to keep Iraq stable, why would a mere 15,000 men be sufficient to defeat ISIS?  The answer now appears to be that the small contingent would have reigned in the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki and kept him from oppressing the Sunnis so they would not have felt the wish to revolt.  Since Iraq was relatively peaceful at the time, the American people would have accepted the small residual force.  But this ignores a rather important actor in Iraq -- the Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki.  He wanted our troops out, as did the vast majority of Iraqis.  Attempts to negotiate terms for them to stay failed. Interventionists effectively want us to have left a force in place against the wishes of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people.  Maintaining troops in a foreign country against the wishes of the government and the populace is generally considered an act of war.  Furthermore, despite claims that our troops would have restrained Maliki, it is probably not too far-fetched to believe that one reason Maliki wanted our troops out was that he did not want to be restrained.  He wanted to proceed with the oppression of the Sunnis that led to the rise of ISIS.  Look, you can force people who hate each other to kiss at gunpoint, but you can't make the love each other.  A force kept in Iraq against the wishes of the Iraqi government and people might very well have found itself at war with the government and with the Sunni rebels when they returned.

The editorial also argues, as interventionists often do, that if only we had intervened early and forcefully on behalf of the moderate insurgents in Syria, ISIS could have been prevented from arising there.  The problem was that the so-called "moderate" insurgents were always difficult to detect with the naked eye.  The arms we did ship them very often ended up in the hands of militant jihadis.  The time to prevent Syria's ghastly civil war was before it started.  And even then it would probably have ended up like Egypt.  It did not take long after the downfall of the government for the nice guys to go down in Egypt.  Still, Egypt did avoid civil war, which certainly made its fate better than Syria's.  But once the civil war broke out, there was little we could do to prevent the most militant jihadis from coming to the fore.  And keep in mind that ISIS was the result of a split within the insurgents.

Simply put, revolution and civil war are a messy business, difficult to control or restrain.  Foreign intervention tends to be met with counter-intervention, and simply to prolong the war and make it bloodier.  Certainly I trust that no one would dispute that Iran and Saudi Arabia have made things worse by intervening on their respective sides.  I see no reason whatever to think that our intervention would have gone any better.