Disagreeing, Respectfully, with Spencer
I’ve known Spencer Ackerman for a long time, and he’s been a good friend to me over the years. Though I don’t see him very often, I will always think well of him, not least because we come from the same neighborhood and we are both huge Marvel fans. I know that Spencer cares deeply about the issues he covers, and that he is a dedicated reporter. But I don’t always agree with him, particularly when it comes to US involvement in Iraq and the nature of Iraq’s internal politics.
First, I’ll note briefly that Spencer is completely correct about Iron Man. I’ve now seen it twice, and I think it stands head and shoulders above the Spider-Man trilogy. The first two X-Men films, but the performances in Iron Man make it a notch better, Ian McKellen notwithstanding. Robert Downey Jr. was superb, as was Jeff Bridges. Gwyneth Paltrow was at her most charming. And the action sequences were stunning to watch. (Unsurprisingly, I very much enjoyed Stark’s unilateral assault on a gang of terrorist thugs who were terrorizing an Afghan village.) After seeing it on Thursday, I fled before the credits ended, as did most of the audience. This is a mistake. Stay to the end, as the names of countless personal assistants and drivers and song titles pass by: you won’t regret it. My only hope is that an Avengers film, which is to say an Ultimates film, has the kind of budget that would permit an all-star cast. Here’s hoping Watchmen) sets a strong precedent.
But when he argues that the Sons of Iraq
take our money and use it to become neighborhood warlords and gather weapons to eventually overthrow the Shiite-controlled government that we also support
Or it could be that there are transitional steps, as ex-insurgents (a) turn away from cooperating with Al Qaeda in Iraq in their anti-occupation struggle, (b) embrace cooperation with US forces as a means of strengthening their power relative to AQI and the Shia, © accept that not all Iraqi Shia are in fact agents of “the Persians,” but rather Iraqi nationalists who accept the need for minority rights, and (d) fully integrate into a broadly representative Iraqi state. It makes perfect sense that steps © and (d) would take a long time, particularly since the Iraqi Shia leadership has given Sunni Iraqis good reason to be wary. Bangladesh, for example, had a very strong moral claim in its fight for independence. And yet a sovereign Bangladesh has treated its Urdu-speaking Bengali population very poorly, as this was a Mohajir minority aligned with Urdu-speaking Pakistan. Kanan Makiya has made the point that Iraq’s failures have been rooted in a lack of Shia magnanimity. Without belaboring the point, I think there’s a coherent and persuasive case that we are seeing political maturation in Iraq.
Actually, to the neighborhood warlord point, this could be true in the sense that all states function like gangsters’ protection rackets. If Somalia is at one end of a spectrum of political order and Belgium is at the other, Iraq is in between, and quite a bit closer to Somalia, sad to say. There’s no doubt that Spencer knows what he’s talking about, and that he makes a decent point. The question for me is — which way is the arrow pointing?
Then there is the matter of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Spencer has very forcefully pushed back against claims that Saddam’s Baathist government had ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Of course, a great deal depends on what one considers “significant.” It seems clear to me that Saddam had nothing to do with the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, and that Al Qaeda is a non-state entity that has independent sources of funding and the wherewithal to function autonomously. To suggest otherwise, at this late date, is simply daft, and Spencer is right to say so. But there’s still a great deal we don’t know. For example, the evidence from the archives of Baathist Iraq suggests that, as Eli Lake noted in March,
Beginning in 1999, Iraq’s intelligence service began providing “financial and moral support” for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.
Ansar al-Islam is widely believed to be affiliated with Al Qaeda. Against, this isn’t evidence of a grand alliance. It is just more evidence for a straightforward proposition: that Saddam was willing to cooperate with groups of widely ranging ideological proclivities in pursuit of his broad objectives, among them hunting Americans and reducing the ambit of American power. This helps explain some of what we know, e.g., that Saddam’s intelligence service sought to build relationships with Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other Islamist groups. The Bush Administration’s rhetorical efforts to associate Saddam with Al Qaeda were clumsy and based on category error upon category error. We don’t need to defend these clumsy efforts, however, to see that Saddam was willing to employ brutal, unconventional tactics even towards the tail end of his regime.
Reihan,
If you’ll pardon my McCainian straddle, I think you both are right. Analytically, Sons of Iraq is 1) a potential long-term liability, and 2) a short-term necessity characteristic of positive interim vectors.
Prescriptively, I think we should worry about Ackerman’s long-term scenarios and conduct ourselves with tragedy aforethought, without allowing it to dip into despair.
In other words, courageously. But only if we are going to see it done.
— JA · May 4, 01:46 PM · #
Saddam was willing to cooperate with groups of widely ranging ideological proclivities in pursuit of his broad objectives
In that, he is much like the United States. And he shares a similar indifference to whether that pursuit adheres to any particular moral obligation.
Again, the question for Eli Lake, and any other neocons— or foreign policy realists, for that matter— why are we to proceed naturally from the assumption that Saddam’s proxies assassinating a foreign prime minister is wrong, but not apply that judgment to the United States, which has most certainly done the same? Why is the assassination of Barham Salih an act of unforgivable state-sponsored terrorism, but the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem a necessary and ultimately righteous act of real politik? Why is everything that we do permissible, and everything our enemies do terrorism?
The truth is, both are unconscionable acts. The difference, for Lake and the other neocons, is when we do something, it’s moral. When our enemies do something, it’s terror. Of course, I’m sure some will say that this is just more ultra-leftist boilerplate. I cannot for the life of me understand why acknowledging the most elementary lesson of morality, the dictate to remove the boulder from your own eye before you condemn others for the speck in theirs, provokes such marginalization.
I’m no expert and I have no particular claim to an informed or enlightened position. But I’m sure that any morally and intellectually coherent vision of foreign policy has to confront this basic issue.
— Freddie · May 4, 04:18 PM · #
“but the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem a necessary and ultimately righteous act of real politik?”
This is one of those intellectually dishonest “When did you stop beating your wife” statements that the hard left and isolationist right constantly make— and is exactly why they’re not taken seriously. The US didn’t assassinate Diem. Cite below. What happened is far more complex, but basically boils down, as it often does, to “Looking the other way when knowing an ally of convenience is probably about to do a bad thing.” But a Chomskyite can’t give history the honest nuance it deserves, because then his trivial little moral lesson is lost. We shouldn’t look away when our allies of convenience are about to do bad things— but if we don’t look away, we’re obligated to get even more entrenched in foreign affairs than we already are. But the Chomsky left and the Ron Paul right can’t say this, because they’re entirely fine with genocides and totalitarian regimes persisting unchecked as long as we stay behind the walls of our moral purity while millions perish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngo_Dinh_Diem
On orders from U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, refused to meet with Diệm. Upon hearing that a coup d’etat was being designed by ARVN generals led by General Dương Văn Minh, the United States gave secret assurances to the generals that the U.S. would not interfere. Dương Văn Minh and his co-conspirators overthrew the government on November 1, 1963.
The coup was very swift. On November 1, 1963, with only the palace guard remaining to defend President Diệm and his younger brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, the generals called the palace offering Diệm safe exile out of the country if he surrendered. However, that evening, Diệm and his entourage escaped via an underground passage to Cholon, where they were captured the following morning, November 2. The brothers were executed in the back of an armoured personnel carrier by Captain Nguyen Van Nhung while en route to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters.[
— WJA · May 4, 07:58 PM · #
Yes, lord knows Wikipedia is an unimpeachable source. (And, by the way, I didn’t claim that the United States assassinated Ngo. I referred, as is perfectly accurate, that the United States undertook an assassination by proxy, which makes it a perfect analogue to the asssassination by Saddam.) As even this account makes clear, Ngo would not have been assassinated without the express and explicit support of the United States. That is immoral. And it is no less immoral than Saddam using proxies to murder a foreign prime minister. (I am extremely curious as to which genocide and totalitarian regimes were combated by the assassination of Ngo. And I find anyone saying that the United States has an obligation to combat totalitarian regimes rather hysterical, considering it was and is the policy of the United States to give unequivocal support to whatever totalitarian regimes it chooses. That fact is absolutely undeniable in the face of both declassified CIA documentation and the historical record.)
The larger point is this: you complain that the “Chomskyite left” refuses to see nuance. But of course, you ignore the most salient and important aspect: you (and Eli Lake, and Reihan) apply none of the same rigorous search for nuance and extenuating circumstances to your analysis of the other sides motives and intentions. If someone tries to give a nuanced reading of September 11th, they are immediately denigrated as a terrorist sympathizer and America-hater. No nuance is allowed when discussing the actions of actors the United States has branded terrorists. You are proving my point quite ably: you give the most generous possible reading to whatever the United States does, coaxing every possible justification out of the historical record; meanwhile, you give the most close-minded, Manichean and broad reading of the “evil-doers.” That’s the bottom line, again— utterly different analytical and moral standards for the United States and its enemies. We, no matter what we do, are counter-terrorists; they, no matter what they do, are terrorists.
Next?
— Freddie · May 4, 10:03 PM · #
I hereby gamely attempt to write the longest and most abstruse blog comment of 2008. I wrote this before WJA’s and Freddie’s debate began. Fasten your seatbelts…
Freddie, I am very sympathetic to what you said in your comment. At the same time, I can confidently predict that asking the question, “Why is everything we do permissible and everything our enemies do terrorism?”, will (almost) always and (almost) everywhere provoke marginalization.
You said that you “cannot…understand why acknowledging the most elementary lesson of morality” provokes that kind of dismissal. I would like to attempt an answer to you. Please forgive me if I come across as overly didactic; often it’s my own self I’m trying to educate.
Here is why:
It’s not obvious that the “most elementary lesson of morality” is, in fact, to remove the log from one’s eye before condemning others for the speck in theirs.
From my understanding of human history and human nature, the elementary lesson of morality for most people is Cephalus’ definition of justice in Plato’s Republic: it’s all about doing good for your friends and harm to your enemies.
In this view of morality, human life is difficult, precarious, and threatened at every turn by the violent whims of the elements, the unreliability of the soil, the rapacity of predators. If a man survives the battle against nature, there is no respite: he is immediately at war against other men. The brutality of life on the veldt or the tundra gives way to the brutality of life in the social jungle. Damn, it feels good to be a gangster, but it’s a hard knock life.
Life is war, and you need to know who your friends are and who they aren’t. In a sense, primitive morality is basically a proxy for reliability. The just man is the one who can and WILL be there for you when it’s time to go the mattresses. ‘Primitive’ societies from archaic Greece to, arguably, the borderlands of Pakistan, are organized around codes of honour and shame.
There is very little element of either absolutism or universalism within these archaic moralities. “I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother and cousin against the world.” Morality is the dependent variable and therefore relative. Survival alone is absolute.
And we are not only talking about the faraway past here. The law of the jungle is at once the creed of the mesolithic tribe and the foreign policy doctrine of the classical polis.
This kind of vulgar Hobbesian account of human history doesn’t even have to be true to be useful. What matters is that people thought and acted as if it’s true – and they still do. Whether your anthropology is rooted in Original Sin or “A Long Time Ago in a Veldt Far, Far Away”, you can recognize how persistent this worldview is even for moderns like you, me, and Eli Lake.
Therefore I think to try and employ your preferred kind of moral suasion on either Lake himself or his audience is tactically, strategically, and categorically erroneous. In the big picture of human history, these new-fangled universal codes haven’t been as successful as their inventors and proponents hoped or predicted. Whether they originated in Reason (a la Socrates) or Revelation (a la Jesus), lots of people will tell you (off the record, mind you) that these products of the hippy-dippy Axial Age just don’t work in today’s cold, hard, world, son.
It’s endlessly instructive to look at what happened to the bright lights of the various wings of the worldwide New Ethics movement. Basically, going around telling people to be better is a great way to get shanked. Socrates’ commitment to truth and virtue got him killed. (Meanwhile, Thrasymachus’s speaking fees enabled him to renovate his kitchen and finally put in those marble countertops.) Jesus was executed, and every ethno-politico-religious Establishment in greater Palestine was happy to see him go. Even many of the successors to Jesus’s disciple Peter were arguably more inspired by Machiavelli than by Christ himself. (And despite the President’s attempt to burnish his reputation, Machiavelli is way more popular as an international relations theorist than the Son of Man ever was.)
The brilliant anthropologist Thucydides basically founded the scientific study of international relations. His great take-away lesson was that the polis goes to war driven by three motivations: fear, honour, and interest. Plato would point out that those motives originate in the two basal divisions of the human soul: the appetite and the spirit. The higher, reasoning part of the soul does not (or perhaps only very rarely) send cities and nations to war in the world according to Thucydides.
Now, let’s be clear. I am not any kind of cynic about moral progress. The New Ethics has had a profound and palpable effect in human life. Things are just better now than they used to be.
But some things don’t change. The Old Ethics are deeply inscribed on the human soul (no matter how you think they got there.) In times of conflict with strangers – in encounters with the Other – we tend to revert to our default setting. That, I think, Freddie, partly explains your experience of being marginalized and dismissed.
Prophets and philosophers are not honoured within their city or country because they openly rebuke and challenge their rulers and citizens. They continually seek to upset the time-tested political arrangement of doing good things to the good guys and bad things to the bad guys. In the eyes of the community, some of their opinions – which they freely share at every opportunity – are stupid (“we shouldn’t do bad things, not even to bad people”) and some are outrageous and evil (“if we do this bad thing, we are just as bad as the bad guys”). Even when they make a little bit of sense, their proposals are complicated, unsatisfying and often dangerous. Therefore they are kicked out of the discourse, if not right out of town, and labelled with whatever scarlet letters are appropriate within their society (“enemy of the polis” or “boilerplate leftist” are both devastatingly effective.)
Freddie, I addressed this comment to you but wrote it to further my own understanding. I’m sure it came across as offbeat; I just hope it’s not taken as condescending – it was certainly not intended to be. It’s just that more and more, I am fundamentally skeptical that “a morally and intellectually coherent vision of foreign policy” can ever exist. Or rather, I am confident that such a vision exists, but that it is useless because it is a vision. It seems to me that asking for coherence, let alone intellectual AND moral coherence, is setting the bar too high. It’s akin to wishing that the philosophers rule, or that the rulers genuinely and adequately philosophize. They don’t, and they never will.
Fear, honour, and interest will always drive a community’s interactions with its neighbours and the world. My free advice to American progressives is to make appeals based on calculations of American self-interest, rightly understood, with judicious appeals to Americans’ fears and sense of pride as well. The alternative, I believe, is utter marginalization.
— Tim · May 4, 10:45 PM · #
Reihan, your scenario requires—against almost all historical precident, both iraqi and globally—that two centuries-long-term religious enemies would have changes of heart for the postitive. That the Sunnis discover that there is a heretofor unknown group of shiites that are willing to forgive them for the decades of brutal sunni oppression for the sake of a newly discoverd sense of Iraqi nationalism. If I am a conservative president, conservative with the lives and tax dollars of my countrymen, I am not going to base a policy on something so dependant on groups of people I don’t completely understand and have very little control over radically changing their feelings about their enemies contrary to most historical examples. Especially when the payoff is so ambiguous/negligible. Would you send people to kill and be killed based on a scenario like this coming true?
— cw · May 5, 02:22 AM · #
Re. Freddie and Tim
4. Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.
Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish),” but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action. Realism, then, considers prudence-the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions-to be the supreme virtue in politics. Ethics in the abstract judges action by its conformity with the moral law; political ethics judges action by its political consequences. Classical and medieval philosophy knew this, and so did Lincoln when he said:“I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
-Hans Morgenthau
— David T · May 5, 04:38 AM · #
Many good points, from both Tim and David T. I could go on at length, but let me just say briefly this:
What I should have said to begin with is that I find it is impossible to have a fundamentally moralistic vision of foreign policy and continue to support the actions of the United States. Both of you have, to an extent, made the argument that foreign policy should or inevitably will function outside of morality. I disagree; but I find that an entirely consistent position. What bothers me is that most people, and certainly the neocons, use an explicitly moral framework to justify foreign policy. And most people tend to do so in a deeply inconsistent way. For example, in mentioning the incident above, Eli Lake makes an implicit appeal to the immorality of Saddam Hussein assassinating by proxy. I think, in the face of that appeal, it’s necessary to remain aware that the United States has done similar things in the past. If he is going to argue from a moral framework, I think he is obligated to do so in a consistent way.
— Freddie · May 5, 01:15 PM · #
There’s no real disagreement here – both of these guys know the Sons of Iraq are just attempting to consolidate power (which might, in the end, be good… for us but it’s not likely to be a “political” solution) and that Al-Qaeda had no relationship with Saddam. But it *does turn out that Saddam was actually inclined to support bad guys if they’d attack the Kurds – I’m sure Spencer is completely unaware of this.
— berger · May 5, 02:25 PM · #
Eli Lake!? — Why not cite Laurie Mylroie next?
Anyway, while the category “Urdu-speaking Bengali” may once have existed (prior to partition), its numbers were always negligable. You meant to say “Urdu-speaking Bangladeshi”. And I think your East Pakistan analogy is even more wildly inappropriate than the Iraq-warmongers preferred (and also inappropriate) Malaysian Emergency analogy. Which means you may as well send it over to Eli Lake…
— Ikram · May 5, 06:47 PM · #
Freddie, this distills so much so briefly. Admirably well-put.
You and I come from a very similar place. This used to really bother me too. I’d like to outline why it no longer does: something fundamental changed in the way I think, and I’d like to trace it here in a roundabout way…
I think Lake is demonstrating another kind of consistency. He is consistently advancing the interests of his tribe/polis/country, as best as he can see them. At the risk of overhyping the schema I brought up in my last comment, his “moral framework” is really the Old Ethics: local, particular, situational as against the universal, egalitarian, and absolute New Ethics. Of course, he doesn’t make his ethical priors and commitments explicit. Hence the (rhetorical) inconsistency.
There are all kinds of reasons why he employs the language of one framework in the service of another. For one, it’s flattering to him and to his audience. It also reflects that our culture has strongly identified with the New Ethics. They are ingrained in our habits of thought and speech. Even when we have absolutely no intention of living up to their demands, we still talk in ways that suggest or imply that we will.
So Lake acts like he is arguing from one moral framework, but he is really employing a completely different set of values. The New Ethics are just window dressing. The foundation and frame of the building are from a more ancient school of ethical architecture. Now, the inconsistency stems from the fact that he is either using New Ethical language in a deceptive, instrumental way (as a marketing campaign or smokescreen) or just out of ignorance.
To me, there are two constants at work here. Lake will not change his foundational ethical framework: the Old Ethical habits of thought and action will persist. But at the same time, the New Ethics have irrevocably infected our culture’s habits of speech. I think it is impossible for Eli Lake, in the year 2008 AD, to make a policy appeal to his fellow American citizens without employing (deliberately or accidentally) New Ethical patterns and tropes. So I expect this incoherence to remain.
And that is why it doesn’t bother me. Inconsistency – inconsistency that is offensive to reason, universal ethics, and even the aesthetic sense – is inevitable and to be expected, is what I’m saying. And the upshot of that is, why does it bother you?
I mean, to me, it sounds like you and I both agree that
So why, really, should it bother you when people with inconsistent and incomplete moralities advocate that the US do incoherent and unsupportable things? I mean, on a certain level it sucks that Lake has an audience…but, Thrasymachus made a nice living, you know what I mean? (Now I feel bad that I’m using Lake as a punching bag. Let me ease my conscience by declaring that I’m using him here as a representative type – as a rhetorical stand-in.)
Here’s the thing. I don’t believe anyone with any power or influence in US foreign policy will truly adopt a New Ethical praxis . I don’t want to jettison my ethics – and I believe that morality does not stop at the water’s edge – so I have stopped supporting the actions of the United States. “It” does things that I know/believe are wrong, and then turns around and uses my ethical language to justify them. This no longer frustrates me because it is the way of the world.
This may sound at once like a libertarian or a leftist critique of the state. Someone else could easily take this down a Rothbardian or Chomskyist road, I guess. But indulge me here a little longer. Mine is actually a Taoist attitude to the state.
Old Lao-Tzu used to say, “That the sage meets with no difficulty is because he is alive to difficulty.” I am no longer bothered by the obstinate tendency of political humans to offend against consistency precisely because I expect them to so offend. I would be surprised if they did not.
Along the same lines, I have dramatically reduced my identification with the behaviour and attitudes of the empire in question, so I am not as frequently disappointed by its actions or the justifications of its courtiers as I used to be. But that was a less important step. The big change was that I stopped expecting (in both senses of “expect”) the US leadership to act, think, and talk the way I preferred them to. I now expect them to act, think, and talk the way leaders of large empires tend to: that is, sometimes admirably, sometimes abominably, but always driven by Old Ethical imperatives, and not (or only rarely) by the radical demands of Axial Age morality.
Adopting a Taoist sensibility to the political arena may not be the heroic solution, but it works for me. (Believe me, it’s not the default setting for a guy with a temperament like mine. I had to work damn hard to care as little as I do, ha ha.) I assume that you are American, so this may not be a satisfying approach for you. It’s hard to stop asking for the best from your country. I think it’s admirable that you want to be a citizen of a truly just country.
It’s an admirable desire, but is it a healthy one? Freddie, I have my answer, and leave you to find yours. But I do think that the habit of blind allegiance to a mythical exceptionalism in US foreign policy is, well, bred in the bone. I think you should give up trying to fight it. The gross moral inconsistency that bothers you is a feature, not a bug, of the Old Ethics. (It’s adaptive – it girds the spirit for hard times.) I confidently predict, to boot, that we will see more inconsistency during the next decade, not less. So am I ultimately counselling you, Freddie, to know resignation? To believe in the audacity of despair? Did I just say No se puede? As the man said, I report, you decide.
— Tim · May 5, 07:11 PM · #
The relationship between Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaeda appears to be very quid pro quo, with Ansar’s goal being far more local than al-Qaeda’s. According to Global Security.org, Ansar al-Islam has conducted some training together and undertaken mutual aid arrangements with al-Qaeda. This is not unheard of, even for disparate groups: <i>Action-Directe</i> and the IRA both had refuge and training agreements with various Islamist terrorist groups located in North Africa and the Bekaa Valley during the ’80s and ’90s.
Ansar al-Islam is violently opposed to a secular Kurdish state. It makes sense that the Baathist security services would make use of that mutual interest. The U.S. did not declare Ansar al-Islam a terrorist group until 2004 (indeed, the group itself didn’t exist until December, 2001). Jund al-Islam, which appears to be a splinter group, has a more distinct Islamist agenda and is much more closely aligned.
Even if we take links between Iraqi security services and Ansar al-Islam at face value, there is no indication that Ansar is an affiliate of al-Qaeda (it appears to be a mutually-aiding fellow traveler), nor that any ties to Ansar spread beyond Kurdistan. For whatever it’s worth (probably not much), Mullah Krehkar, at the time the leader of Ansar, in 2003 denied formal connections to al-Qaida (but indeed heaped praise on bin Laden).
Interestingly enough, once Ansar al-Islam sheltered Zarqawi, it appears any relationship they had with Hussein’s security apparatus soured: Hussein was very interested in killing Zarqawi (a real al-Qaeda affiliate), but was prevented by the inability to access Kurdistan (partly due to the U.S.-enforced no-fly zone).
There’s a hell of a lot more nuance here.
— James F. Elliott · May 5, 08:40 PM · #