Well, I was almost done with a long piece of analytical wriiting on the alarming growth of sectarian fighting in the Middle East, when I was interrupted. The iPad I was using ran out of juice and it erased my article when it finally powered back up. I’ve been trying to write on an iPad with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard for the last week, and it is a torturous experience. My writing has suffered terribly and even my motivation to write has been greatly diminished. I am going to pick up my MacBook Air from the Genius Bar. They fixed it and it is waiting for me. I can’t wait to have it back because trying to write with an iPad feels like making a banjo player use a guitar. I know what I want to do, but it’s just too difficult to pull it off and it doesn’t come out right.
The two articles I was referencing in my lost article were from the New York Times and the BBC. Perhaps you can read them and start a conversation about their meaning. That’s what I intended to happen this morning.
NYT article: blames sectarian violence on Syrian conflict. Hunh? I know it’s the Times and they feel bad about the Iraq thing, but that’s where the sectarian violence re-erupted. And it was 100% us.
It’s like a 70s sit-com in their world. You wake up each day ignorant of what you’d done the episode before.
Sure, Syria caused Iraqi violence. Why not?
I’m thinking our long term plan going into Iraq was something like this:
You know an article is kinda full of BS when it contains the words “experts fear”.
I can’t even text, let alone even think of trying to write an article on an iPad.
Shortly before I left my telecommunications company, they handed me a Blackberry – now, I had no excuse not to answer some idiot’s e-mail at 2am!
I told my Manager that handing me one of those would be like handing a monkey a Rubix Cube – there’s some small chance the monkey or I will “solve” the puzzle we’ve been handed, but it will be just that – pure chance.
Frustration aside, I’ll eagerly await your article once it’s done. I know less than nothing about the Middle East.
I feel your pain. Still no phone/Internet here after more than a week. Surfing on an iPhone is getting old. #verizonsucks
Ok. That’s a tough one, but I’ll take a shot. I’ll bite.
Iraq is toast. (Thanks aWol) Syria has a shot if Iran and the Russian Federation kick in. Israel will lose a few more fighter jets over Damascus and begin to really freak the fcku out. Palestine will remain in apartheid for the next 4 decades and more land will be stolen. Palestinian children will continue to be arrested and held hostage.
Libya and Egypt are decades from governing themselves. Lebanon will continue to be bombed from the sky by Israel just like Syria is. Later, if the US has another democratic president, Israel will eventually bomb Iran. Want to know why? Because if Iran is deemed to pose a threat (note I didn’t say nuclear) Israeli citizens won’t feel secure. And they will immigrate, weakening Israel and Likud cant abide by that. Puti-Pute might fold, but in Iran, Ahmadinejad is a troll. Ali Khamenei is in charge and he is consolidating power for a death-match.
Good times ahead.
It’s like heaven having my refurbished MacBook Air back. Looks and feels brand new and no data loss. I got lucky.
No data loss? This was in doubt? You need a backup solution, such as the Time Capsule (also at the Apple Store). I upgraded to a solid state drive a year ago and the restore was so automatic and complete that it appeared to be the exact same disk in my Mac. The great thing is that it requires zero action on your part except the initial, easy set-up.
As long as you could have a full-size keyboard and mouse, what was so nightmarish, exactly? The screen? The response time? I don’t have a tablet, so can’t try it, but always thought it might be a good idea, since text takes so little processing power. What went wrong?
I personally do a lot of writing on the iPad (which does not have a mouse, by the way). I find the experience to be just fine and have actually written entire chapters of a novel on it. However, I imagine it can be a lot more difficult when you’re trying to blog. The iPad doesn’t handle HTML the way some word processors do on normal computers. Many blogging platforms will let you highlight text, press a button, and then create a link by adding in a URL. On an iPad, the chances are you’ll have to write in raw HTML.
Plus, you can’t really multitask or switch easily between multiple windows on an iPad.
I don’t know exactly what problems Booman is having, but I can understand why he would find it to be an inferior experience.
I assume the ipad has a usb port you could plug a mouse into though? It would be interesting to find out if these problems are due to the nature of tablets or to Apple.
To create a single hyperlinked piece of text took me about 90 seconds, and involved tapping and holding the screen alternately with using the keyboard, and writing out all the HTML (which I do anyway, but on a larger keyboard). Trying to do it without the keyboard involves a special depth of hell where I had to toggle between three virtual keyboard screens to do one simple hyperlink.
It’s amazing how disruptive it is to the creative process to have to do basic things in a new slow inefficient and awkward manner. Capturing text and linking to it is normally no different than typing. It requires no energy or thought. I’ve done it so many times, that I don’t care how many links I use or how much text I grab. But, for the last week, I didn’t want to use more than one or two links in a piece. I wouldn’t even really consider doing pieces that would require that.
My friend Shayan wrote an app for Chrome that saves your writings in just these occasions. I can link you if you want it.
What shallow articles, both of them.
The US destabilization of Iraq set loose sectarian and ethnic conflict in Iraq, which got moderated in the initial phases of the Malaki government. Malaki’s re-election and his retention of three key portfolios for himself has made clear his intention to rule as an autocrat. Sunni-Shiite violence serves to isolate the Sadrists; Malaki could be more conciliatory with all of the other factions of government–Kurds, the few Sunnis left participating in the government, Sardrists–but the conflict is crucial to his maintenance of power.
The Syrian civil war has complicated the situation in Iraq, but it was breaking down even before the Arab Spring appeared in Syria (and also in Iraq). The absence of effective borders in the region has meant the conflating of conflicts.
The broader meaning of what is going on is the collapse of the political geography put in place by Britain and France in the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. Once you frame policy in sectarian terms, as the US did at the end of the First Gulf War, local political actors find it to their benefit to play into that frame, as Ahmed Chalabi did. As the use of Wahabist resistance to the Soviet Union came to blow back in Afghanistan by creating the Taliban and other sectarian political groups, using sectarian divisions to destabilize the rule of Saddam Hussein has come back to destabilize Lebanon-Iraq-Syria region.
So the US, by continuing to arm Saudi Arabia and continuing to treat Iran as a enemy has effectively enlisted with the Sunnis in this conflict and cannot act as any sort of broker of resolution. That is in addition to allowing Israel to continue to receive aid and act with impunity with regard to policies that inflame the situation.
Maybe the best policy for the US and NATO would be to just back off. There is no way that the US can fix the situation even if that were our intent. And the statements of several policymakers and “experts” leads me to believe that resolving conflicts is very far from the intent of the Washington consensus.
Given the current political geography, very few of the states in the Middle East can function democratically as ethnic or sectarian and intolerant states. Which is why authoritarianism is the norm. And the experience in the region with secular states has not led to tolerance but to various autocratic forms of secularism that masked ethnic domination.
So additional military action creates more PTSD, which drives further military action…
The idea of some Greater Middle East responsive to US interests is a dangerous fantasy of empire. We no longer have the resources to squander on those kinds of fantasies. Someone should clue in the stenographers of empire–the NYT and the BBC.