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[ by Charles Cameron — Facebook diplomacy between Israeli and Iranian individuals, atheist proselytizing in the US, popular media uses in a “monitory” world ]
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I have long been intrigued by some of the unofficial ways in which we communicate with one another — some of you may recall an earlier post of mine on a spate of religious arguments carried out on “duelling buses“, while another more recent post noted some of the stencilled graffiti and at times quite sophisticated artwork featured on the walls around Tahrir Square during the demonstrations there…

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In much the same spirit, I’d like to offer here for your consideration four thumbnails of images recently posted on Facebook by individual citizens in Israel and Iran, in response to a posting (above) by two Israeli graphic artists, Ronnie Edri and Michal Tamir, which seems to have triggered quite a response in both countries.

The two Israeli posters appear to have posted images of individuals, perhaps themselves. The Iranian posters, interestingly, used images of Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the “Iranian Schindler” (upper image), with a caption that reads in part:

Abdol Hossain Sardari, a junior Iranian diplomat, found himself almost by accident in charge of Iran’s mission in Paris in 1940 and went on to help up to 2,000 Iranian Jews flee France…

and an image of the tomb of Esther and Mordecai — the tomb in Hamadan, Iran, of the same Jewish heroine recently celebrated at Purim, and pointedly referenced by Netanyahu in his gift of a Megillah to Obama — and a popular site of pilgrimage for Iran’s present day Jewish population.

Apparently there has been quite an exchange of these graphics, although some have been on the more caustic side, expressing what I can only call .. strangelove…

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My other graphic examples are of a pair of billboards recently put up by American Atheists:

As we might expect, these were to be displayed (respectively) in or near Jewish (above) and Muslim (below) communities — the Jewish-oriented billboard in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York, and the Islamic-oriented billboard in Paterson, New Jersey.

According to the MSNBC report where I first ran across these billboards a couple of weeks ago, a Williamsburg rabbi said the sign in his district was “a disgrace. .. The name of God is very holy to us and to the whole world” — while the American Atheists’ president David Silverman reported he had not received “any blowback” from the Muslim Community in Patterson.

One imagines that some in each community would have had hurt feelings, while some in each community clearly had the good sense to show tolerance.

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These images tie in, I believe, with John Keane‘s notion of “monitory democracy” [link is to .pdf] that our blog-friend David Ronfeldt discussed in his post today… with our discussions here [1, 2] of the wicked complexity of many of the problems that face us… and also perhaps of the Slaughter doctrine [1, 2, 3]of the responsibility to protect…

[ by Charles Cameron — sometimes i post things so obvious they might actually be useful ]
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One quick annotated quote from Sec. Clinton‘s speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace China Conference, March 7th:

Now when I say “we,” I do not mean only our governments, as important as they are. Every day, across both of our countries, executives and entrepreneurs, scientists and scholars, artists and athletes, students and teachers, family members and citizens of all kinds shape and pull and add to this relationship. Together, they represent a vast range of priorities, concerns, and points of view. And they are all stakeholders in how we build toward a shared future.

It’s really that list I’m after…

There are seven billion individuals bouncing up and down on our trampoline, some of them holding hands, some of them in gangs that want to trip up rival gangs, or make a clearing for themselves and themselves alone, some too weak to bounce much at all…

and each time each one of us lands, we impact the trampoline from a different angle, stretch it a different way – tugging it to the will of the artist, the entrepreneur, the child, the retiree, the curious, the aggressive, the meek…

As we know, the earth is round, which is to say three-dimensional – but the tugs on it, the tensions, are more complicated than that, in fact they’re complex, n-dimensional – and constantly shifting.

Hilary Clinton wants to wake up in the morning, have coffee – and model that! – along with, and in balance with, her counterpart in another huge mass of population, half a globe and at least six philosophies away…

The coffee’s good, but it’s not enough — what we all could use is a new mode of thinking.

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Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission

The End by Sir Ian Kershaw

I am currently reading The End, about the last year of the Third Reich and the Nazi death spiral toward Germany’s absolute destruction. It is a fascinating, mass suicidal, political dynamic that was mirrored to an even greater degree of fanaticism by Nazi Germany’s Axis partner, the Imperial Japanese. Facing the prospect of certain defeat, the Germans with very few exceptions, collectively refused every opportunity to shorten the agony or lighten the consequences of defeat and stubbornly followed their Fuhrer to the uttermost doom. It made no sense then and still does not now, seven decades later.

Adolf Hitler’s personal authority over the life and death of every soul in Germany did not end until his last breath. When surrounded by Soviet armies, trapped in his Fuhrerbunker in the ruin of Berlin, all it took for Hitler to depose his most powerful paladins, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler was a word. They still commanded vast military and paramilitary security forces – Himmler had been put in charge of the Home Army as well as the SS, Gestapo and German police – but when Hitler withdrew his support and condemned them, their power crumbled. Goering, the glittering Nazi Reichsmarchal and second man in the state, was ignominiously arrested.

Even in Gotterdammerung, the Germans remained spellbound, like a man in a trance placing a noose around his own neck.

Currently, the chattering classes of the United States are uneasily working their way toward a possible war with Iran, or at least a confrontation with Teheran over their illegal nuclear weapons program (some people will object that, technically, we are not certain that Iran has a weapons program. This is true. It is also irrelevant to the diplomatic dynamic created by Iran’s nuclear activities which the regime uses to signal regularly to all observers that they could have one).  There is much debate over the rationality of Iran’s rulers and the likely consequences if Iran is permitted to become a nuclear weapons state. There is danger and risk in any potential course of action and predictions are being made, in my humble opinion, far too breezily.

In the run-up to war or negotiation, in dealing with the Iranians and making our strategic calculations, it might be useful to recall the behavior of the Germans.

[ by Charles Cameron — ISAF apologizes to Afghans, Taliban thinks the Ummah is offended, and an insight from Bernard Lewis ]
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Responding to the burning of “religious materials, to include Qurans” by coalition forces in an incinerator at Bagram, Gen. John R. Allen, commander of ISAF, is quoted in an ISAF release as saying:

On behalf of the entire International Security Assistance Force, I extend my sincerest apologies to the people of Afghanistan.

Commenting on the same incident, an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan / Taliban statement said:

Last night, the American invaders, in accordance with their barbaric characteristics once again burnt copies of the sacred book of the Muslims (Holy Quran) with the purpose of desecration and with this perverted action, aroused the sensitivities of one billion Muslims worldwide including the Afghans.

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As is often the case, the devil is in the details.

Note that the ISAF addresses its apology to “the people of Afghanistan” while the Islamic Emirate describes those offended by such actions as “one billion Muslims worldwide including the Afghans”.

I am reminded of Bernard Lewis‘ observation:

For a long time now it has been our practice in the modern Western world to define ourselves primarily by nationality, and to see other identities and allegiances—religious, political, and the like—as subdivisions of the larger and more important whole. The events of September 11 and after have made us aware of another perception—of a religion subdivided into nations rather than a nation subdivided into religions…

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The converse of this is that those in Afghanistan and elsewhere who identify more readily with the Ummah than with an individual nationality will also more easily think of a war seemingly fought against the Ummah as being the work of Christendom aka “the Crusaders” — an idea that fits well with a centuries-long sense of history — rather than by a UN-mandated coalition that includes troops from Jordan, Turkey, and the Emirates…

Not that the 2,000-odd ISAF troops from those particular countries are likely to be the ones who burn Qur’ans.

PRAGATI – the Indian National Interest Review has published my review of John Lewis Gaddis’ biography George F. Kennan: An American Life 

The creative art of strategy 

….Into the breach strides eminent diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis, offering a magisterial 784 page biography, a quarter- century in the making, George F. Kennan: An American Life. Gaddis, a noted historian of the Cold War and critic of revisionist interpretations of American foreign policy, has produced his magnum opus, distilling not only the essence of Kennan’s career, but the origins of his grand strategic worldview that were part and parcel the self-critical and lonely isolation that made Kennan such an acute observer of foreign societies and a myopic student of his own.

Gaddis, who is a co-founder of the elite Grand Strategy Program at Yale University, had such a long intellectual association with his subject, having been appointed Kennan’s biographer in 1982, that one wonders on theories of strategy at times where George Kennan ends and John Lewis Gaddis begins. Giving Kennan the supreme compliment among strategists, that he possessed in the years of the Long Telegram and the Policy Planning Staff, Clausewitz’s Coup d’oeil, Gaddis does not shy away from explaining Kennan’s human imperfections to the reader that made the diplomat a study in contradictions….

Read the rest here.