Tag: United States of America

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Books & printed materials Conflict & disaster History & heritage Politics & government

[3005] Reading Revolutionary Iran, or an appreciation for glossary

My readings could be driven by current affairs. That was the reason I picked up Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. And that was the reason I recently read Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran: the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel had just concluded. These books always remind us that there is almost always a long history behind contemporary events. Things very rarely just happened on a day.

Revolutionary Iran, first published in 2013, focuses on the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But it also covers a hundred years’ worth of history, starting from the early 20th century (with the fall of Qajar Iran and the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty) up to the controversial 2011 Iranian presidential election. The long sweep of history is written up all with the aim of setting the revolution in its proper context.

As with any kind of similar books (such as much thicker and expansive The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya), the breadth and depth of the discussion are a challenge to casual readers equipped with only general knowledge of the country: there are just too many names, too many years and too many events to remember and make relevant to the whole exercise. These names and events are all interrelated, making reading Revolutionary Iran complicated. One could get lost along the way. That could cause frustration and eventually DNF: ‘did not finish’. The phone is always ready to dumb us down with social media, ever jealous of any of us perusing long-form materials.

The complexity reminds me just how useful a glossary and an index could be. It kept the story in my head straight while going through the pages of Revolutionary Iran.

Referring the glossary and the index could be a pain. Flipping pages back and forth is disruptive to reading flow. It is almost like reading while consulting a dictionary or an encyclopedia at the same time. It almost feels like reading Wikipedia with all of its hyperlinks could have been a more enjoyable endeavor.

But reading Wikipedia has its own pitfalls. Those hyperlinks are rabbit holes to be explored. With an undisciplined mind, one could easily end up reading about Kurdish nationalism or the history of Azerbaijan all of which may have some relevance to the events of 1979, but does not assist us in understanding the nuances of the Iranian revolution any better. Wikipedia’s hyperlinks could provide context, but an overload of information could also drown out of the context. Some who wander are lost.

So, a book, unlike Wikipedia, is a guided tour. It keeps the fluff out by focusing and contextualising the essentials. It is the model-building tool. And the glossary and the index, often forgotten, are little manuals useful if the reader needs help along the way.

Categories
Politics & government Society

[2847] We care because we are capable of empathy

It’s a big, big interconnected world out there. And that interconnectedness, ironically, makes the world smaller is a non-physical sense. Economically, socially and politically. Our lives are no longer affected purely by domestic matters. To some, the foreign affairs segment in the newspapers is an abstraction but for some others, the lines demarcating domestic and foreign concerns are blurry.

These remain the days of globalization still, however the Trumps, the Le Pens, the Farages and all those who long for a smaller world are trying to rewind the clock. They may yet be successful but for now they have a lot to undo. In the meantime, many have multiple homes and multiple affiliations with friends traversing national boundaries, opposing such undoing and rewinding.

For Malaysians, the war in Ukraine so far away across the Asian continent painfully proves the fact foreign affairs are home affairs too. Many Malaysians could not find the country on the map, but it still has an impact on the Malaysian psyche. And Malaysians did care for development in Bosnia during the Balkan War and in Kosovo. They do care about the conflicts in Palestine, in Syria and in Iraq. And to take a trivial example, there are Malaysians who care about the fate of foreign, English Premier League teams, despite not being English themselves.

The refugee crisis in Myanmar is also a Malaysian concern, because these oppressed men, women and children are coming to or passing by Malaysia. Whether we like it or not, we have to act in one way or another. Pretending the imaginary lines on a 2-dimensional map as an impregnable wall ensuring that is not our problem will not help by one bit. And to turn back the boats is not just an illiberal policy, it is heartless.

In the several years after the 9/11 attack, I became a victim of profiling at US airports, just because of my nationality and my Arab-sounding name. Security personnel would put me under extra security measures and screening. That discouraged me from leaving the US for home for the next four years for fear I would face immigration troubles upon reentry at the airports. I knew of other international students who needed to report to the Homeland Security office regularly, and I feared being subjected to the same requirement as an entry condition.

And so, I spent my entire time as a student in Michigan travelling throughout the US, reaching New York, DC, Miami, San Francisco, St Louis, Chicago, Sioux Falls and more. I remember how it felt like to drive the car through the Great Plains from the Great Lakes, or how peaceful it was staring into the night sky from the bottom of the Tuolumne Canyon just north of Yosemite in California. I learned to love America for the wonders it brought to my young mind.

Indeed, my political beliefs to a large degree were shaped in the US. However flawed the US is with all of its hypocrisies, it is still the greatest liberal democracy that the world has. It is the Athens, the Rome, the Baghdad, the Cordoba and the Delhi of our time. Just because of that, I looked up to it. Because of this and because I spent a significant portion of my early adult life there, if I had a second home, the US would be it.

When Trump and his followers do what they do, and among others equating the US to Russia, I feel that is an undoing of what the United States of America is supposed to be in my eyes, a foreigner, who looks kindly to the east across the Pacific. Trump is killing the US that I know, and by that, threatening the idea of liberal democracy all around the world (even in Malaysia where our democracy is becoming increasingly flawed and more authoritarian). That makes me angry.

The Trump’s ban, now challenged in the courts, adds further to the anger. My alma mater, the University of Michigan, is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. And I am entertaining thoughts of returning to Ann Arbor to catch the festivities and walk down the memory lane. Trump’s ban, could potentially affect me. I still remember my experiences at various US airports during the Bush era. I thoroughly dislike the discrimination and I do not wish on others what I went through.

So, I do care for things that if happening in the US. The world is interconnected enough that I have real attachments to the US. Needless to say, I have friends in the US too.

But one does not need to have personal ties to the US to be worried about development in the US. It is just like how some of us are concerned about the oppression in Xinjiang, or in Iran, or in Egypt, or in the Philippines or anywhere else without the need to have any personal connection.

Even if we cannot think of ways which a reclusive, protectionist US could affect Malaysia — it will by the way: HSBC economists think Malaysia will be one of the top four economies to be worst affected by a protectionist US — we can still care because we have empathy for other human beings. Injustice or discrimination anywhere is still wrong and we can take a position on the matter. We can make personal judging based on our values. We have enough room for empathy those near and far beyond our shores.

Because of our capacity of empathy and because of the interconnectedness of the world we live in, it is outrageous to think we have to choose between caring US-based or Malaysia-based issues. Both are causes for concerns. I care for the deplorable things happening in the US, and at the same time, I care about the 1MDB corruption scandal, or the blockade in Kelantan, along with other injustices in the Malaysian society I am living in.

Indeed, it is a false dichotomy having to choose the US or Malaysia. There is no reason why a Malaysian needs to choose between the two. We can be concerned for both, and more.

More importantly, there are liberal values and among them are that we all are created equal and all should have the same fundamental rights. This applies all around the world, not just in and around your small neighborhood.

In time when anti-liberal populists are turning national policies inward, it will be most disappointing to have liberals retreating to a small-world cocoon as well. Such inward retreat would be a betrayal of liberal belief, that liberal values are universal in nature and not provincial. We fight racism, discrimination and everything bad out there by staying true to our liberal values, not by abandoning it.

Categories
Liberty

[2566] We hold these truths to be self-evident…

…that all Men are created equal…

Categories
Conflict & disaster Society

[2473] A world without Iraq

I was almost late for my morning history class. I ran as fast as I could while trying to keep my balance on ice and snow. By the time I entered the classroom, I was gasping for air. For the not very athletic me, it was not easy to breathe hard during a cruel Michigan winter. As I settled in my seat thinking my heart was about to explode and my lungs collapsing, the instructor said, “Today will be about what ifs. What if you were early?”

The class burst into laughter at my expense.

After several minutes of friendly pokes, the instructor began to share his plan for the day. “But seriously, today will be about what ifs.” What if Venice and other cities had not monopolized the spice trade? What if old European powers were unsuccessful at colonizing Asia? What if Dien Bien Phu did not happen? What if the United States had not entered the Second World War? There were many more what ifs.

We were discussing colonialism in Asia and we were exploring the importance of certain events by trying to imagine an alternative history where those events did not occur. It required a broad understanding of history.

It also required all of us in the class to do our voluminous readings. A lot of us, being freshmen and still patting ourselves on our backs for getting into a storied school, did not finish our reading. We gave it a stab anyway. We had enough imagination to run wild.

That old memory reran in my mind as President Barack Obama finally, for better or for worse, fulfilled one of his election promises. The US is officially withdrawing from Iraq after more than eight years since the invasion that toppled the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The withdrawal ceremony was being telecast ”live” on CNN. As I sat in my chair listening to Leon Panetta making his speech, my mind wandered to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and the rest of the Arab world. Remembering my freshman lesson, I asked myself, ”What if the US had not invaded Iraq back in 2003?” Would Saddam Hussein’s regime have become a victim of the Arab Spring?

We will never know but nobody can say that would have been impossible. Whether a person is supportive of the war or vehemently rejects the invasion, he or she cannot deny that Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator.

That makes his removal desirable to some extent. If the 2003 invasion was legitimate in some ways, many in the anti-war camp would support or at least not reject the invasion. If Saddam Hussein was toppled organically by Iraqis just like how Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali were toppled, many more would support the regime change.

An Arab Spring for Iraq would have been ideal. It would have removed a dictator without causing bad blood among various sides. Yes, it would be eight years later but in a time of terrorism and religious extremism, a world without the 2003 invasion of Iraq could have spurred deeper co-operation between the US and those that mattered.

A world without the war would have the US possibly swamped with goodwill of the kind it received in the aftermath of the September 11 attack but soon after squandered in the run-up to the 2003 war.

It could be the case, or it could not. Just as Japan in the Second World War made the colonized natives realize that colonial European powers were not invincible, the US invasion also reminded the Arabs that their dictators were not gods.

Sure, the United States of the 2000s was not Japan of the 1900s that was seriously underestimated first by the Russians and then later all the colonial powers in South-east Asia. Still, what is possible is not always evident until somebody makes it a reality. The US with its unmatched military might removed Saddam Hussein. The US made possible a regime change.

Or — this might sound repulsive, especially for those in the anti-war camp but consider this — the Arab Spring might not have happened without the 2003 invasion.

An alternative reality without the war would have taken away the realization of the possibility, and possibly affected the psyche of the Arabs. What was possible would have remained only one of the possibilities deep in the minds of ordinary men, never to surface to the real world.

A world without the war also would have taken away the anger against the US. The US in many parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa had close relationships with many Arab dictators. The relations were maintained in the name of stability and much to the detriment to the freedom agenda.

The ordinary man in the streets of the Arab world, already with a low opinion of the US, saw the relationship as a constant reminder of how much they disliked their own autocrats. This only added to local frustrations that had nothing to do with the US directly. All that anger and frustration, along with the cumulative effect of all those issues, created a momentum to push history to converge to a point that sparked the Arab Spring.

Without the war, part of the momentum would not have existed. The cumulative anger without the invasion might not have been enough to start the Arab Spring. That sans-Iraq anger might have been just a weak undercurrent, never to surface and threaten the dictators’ expensive boats, rocked gently by the pleasant waves.

There are a lot of other considerations as well. Maybe without the war, the US would have enough money to bail out Europe. Maybe, Obama would not have been elected as the president. Maybe, we would be still swimming in cheap oil. Maybe. Maybe. Who knows, really?

At least we know one part of history is ending. At least we know the next chapter is a whole new world, for whatever it is worth.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on December 18 2011.

Categories
Economics

[2462] With a fail-safe, no reason for supercommittee compromise

The failure of the supercommittee to agree on the distribution of US budget cut is not much of a news. It has been expected. Leaks of how difficult it was to reach a common ground made it way to news reports .

More importantly, the impact of the failure is not too big because the fail-safe automatic cut is going to happen anyway. Both the unsurprising result and the minimal impact of the failure are signified through the low level of attention given by the media on the issue. Focus on the failure is not nearly as intense as focus on the earlier downgrade of US debt by S&P’s.

In retrospect, the fail-safe mechanism is a brilliant political maneuver. It was a result of uneven bargaining where deficit hawks, perhaps irresponsibly, held the US government at random and squeezed as much juice as possible out of the situation. Default or cut it. It was a Hobson’s choice: default was out of the question. And now here we are with the fail-safe mechanism.

While the fail-safe mechanism now ensures the implementation of the USD1.2 trillion budget cut over the next 10 years, it may have also contributed to the failure of compromise. If the members of the supercommittee — whom belongs to competing political parties and we know they serve their political bias — know the cut is going to happen anyway with its distribution already apportioned, why compromise when a compromise angers your voters base?

In a way, the supercommittee is really a lame duck committee. No incentive to action with every incentive to do nothing.