Quotes of the Day:
“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
"Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction."
– Margaret Thatcher
"I don't believe you have to be better than everybody else. I believe you have to be better than you ever thought you could be."
– Ken Venturi
1. A C.I.A. Fighter, a Somali Bomb Maker, and a Faltering Shadow War
2. Opinion | The U.S. is using sanctions more than ever. But do they work?
3. The Unlikely Outsiders Who Won the Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine
4. ‘The Loneliest Americans’ Asks What Being Asian American Really Means
5. Cancers Strike US Fighter Pilots, Crews at Higher Rates, Air Force Finds
6. Quad should make Micronesia a priority
7. Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over?
8. Global Violence on an Intimate Scale: The Work of ‘Missionaries’ (book review)
9. What Have We Learned from Twenty Years of War?
10. Death of detained Uyghur imam underscores harsh conditions in Xinjiang re-education camps
11. Green Berets Hone Their Destruction Of Enemy Air Defenses Skills For A Peer Conflict
12. For the US's Vietnam-era covert special operators, the quietest missions were also the most dangerous
13. An "Oh So Social" Conversation: "Damascus Station" by David McCloskey 16 November 2021 1800hrs.
14. What Previous Covid-19 Waves Tell Us About the Virus Now
15. IAEA warns of North Korea scenario in Middle East if Iran’s nuclear diplomacy fails
16. America’s political scientists are worried about “lethal partisanship”
17. A new book explores the symbiosis of espionage and entertainment
1. A C.I.A. Fighter, a Somali Bomb Maker, and a Faltering Shadow War
Excerpts:
As in Afghanistan, America’s campaign in Somalia has been undermined by its own deadly misfires.
...
U.S. officials say the experience of Afghanistan shows that success cannot be defined as remaking a government or society, and that the mission in Somalia had paid off by disrupting Al Shabab. Mr. Goodboe, according to friends, judged his work by a similar yardstick: whether terrorists could threaten Americans or the United States.
Still, some analysts say the U.S. needs to contemplate a totally new approach in Somalia, including a political settlement with Al Shabab, or face the prospect of bring trapped in another “forever war” with an inglorious end.
A C.I.A. Fighter, a Somali Bomb Maker, and a Faltering Shadow War
The hunt for an elusive Somali militant illustrates why Al Shabab, despite a decade of American covert action, are at their strongest in years.
- Oct. 24, 2021
- Updated 8:03 a.m. ET
A ruined tank left over from Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s, in Mogadishu, in April.
The hunt for an elusive Somali militant illustrates why Al Shabab, despite a decade of American covert action, are at their strongest in years.
A ruined tank left over from Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s, in Mogadishu, in April.Credit...
- Oct. 24, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
MOGADISHU, Somalia — The C.I.A. convoy rolled out of Mogadishu in the dead of night, headed south along a crumbling ocean road that led deep into territory controlled by Al Shabab, one of Africa’s deadliest militant groups.
The vehicles halted at a seaside village where American and Somali paramilitaries poured out, storming a house and killing several militants, Somali officials said. But one man escaped, sprinted to an explosives-filled vehicle primed for a suicide bombing, and hit the detonator.
The blast last November killed three Somalis and grievously wounded an American: Michael Goodboe, 54, a C.I.A. paramilitary specialist and former Navy SEAL, who was airlifted to a U.S. military hospital in Germany. He died 17 days later.
His was a rare American fatality in the decade-old shadow war against Al Shabab, the world’s wealthiest and arguably most dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate. But Mr. Goodboe was also a casualty of an American way of war that has flourished since the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, now under greater scrutiny than ever.
The United States’ most ambitious response to the 9/11 attacks was in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of troops were dispatched to banish extremists and rebuild the country — a mission that recently ended in crushing failure with the chaotic American withdrawal.
But in Somalia, as in countries like Yemen and Syria, the U.S. turned to a different playbook, eschewing major troop deployments in favor of spies, Special Operations raids and drone strikes. Private contractors and local fighters were recruited for risky tasks. The mission was narrow at first, a hunt for Qaeda fugitives, only later expanding to include fighting Al Shabab and building up Somali security forces.
Now that playbook is also failing. As in Afghanistan, the American mission has been stymied by an alliance with a weak, notoriously corrupt local government, an intractable homegrown insurgency and the United States’ own errors, such as drone strikes that have killed civilians.
Mogadishu’s streets bear the scars of war, many of them decades old.
As a result, Al Shabab are at their strongest in years. They roam the countryside, bomb cities, and run an undercover state, complete with courts, extortion rackets and parallel taxes, that netted at least $120 million last year, by American government estimates.
Al Shabab also appear to have designs on the United States, with the arrest in 2019 of a militant while taking flying lessons in the Philippines, allegedly to commit another 9/11-style attack on the U.S. But critics of the American approach in Somalia, including some military officers, say the threat to the homeland has been exaggerated, and that Washington’s own policies only boost the extremists they seek to defeat.
Biden administration officials deny the mission in Somalia has failed, but they say they are cleareyed about its shortcomings. The administration could unveil a new Somalia policy in coming weeks, some officials said.
The U.S. government has been reluctant to commit troops to Somalia since the “Black Hawk Down” episode of 1993, when Somali militia fighters killed 18 American service members in a blazing battle later depicted in books and Hollywood movies. After that fiasco, the U.S. withdrew from Somalia for more than a decade.
Americans eventually returned in small numbers — covert operatives, soldiers and, lastly, diplomats who are bunkered into a windowless, penitentiary-style embassy at the Mogadishu airport that opened in 2018. Fearing another bloody debacle, they rarely venture out.
Nearby lies the C.I.A. compound, where the air crackles with gunfire at night as the Americans train a small Somali paramilitary force that spearheads anti-Shabab operations.
There are now fewer than 100 American troops in Somalia, mostly in intelligence and support roles. In January, former President Donald J. Trump moved most of the 700-member force across the borders to Kenya and Djibouti, though it continues to conduct strikes in Somalia, and train troops.
Outside the wire, Mogadishu has been transformed in recent years with the help of African Union peacekeepers who patrol the streets. There are trendy cafes, gleaming apartment blocks and fast, cheap internet. The city’s Lido beach is packed on weekends. Piracy, a major international preoccupation a decade ago, has largely vanished.
Lido beach in Mogadishu, bustling with restaurants and hotels, has become a popular spot — a sign of Somalia’s progress and, last year, a target for Al Shabab.
Yet this progress hangs by a fraying thread. Somalia’s fractious political elite is riven by disputes that erupted briefly into violence this year. After the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, gleeful Shabab militants distributed sweets in celebration, hoping they too might wait out the foreigners and seize power.
Other Somalis worried that Washington would abandon them next. “It rang frightening alarm bells,” said Abdihakim Ante, a former Somali government adviser.
The fate of Afghanistan “shows how quickly things can change,” said Stephen Schwartz, a former U.S. ambassador to Somalia. “Somalia has no time to waste.”
The arc of the faltering U.S. mission in Somalia can be seen in the stories of two men, an American and a Somali, on opposite sides of the fight.
A Forever Warrior in a Forgotten War
Michael Goodboe was the archetypal elite fighter of the post-9/11 era.
A member of the elite SEAL Team Six, he deployed to Afghanistan within weeks of the Sept. 11 attacks. He worked from the C.I.A.’s temporary station at the Ariana Hotel in Kabul and joined the first “Omega team” — a highly classified unit combining Special Forces operators and C.I.A. paramilitaries that led the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and other fugitives.
Colleagues admired Mr. Goodboe, known as “Goody,” for his easy manner, steady temperament and keen sense of purpose — qualities that stood out in the SEALs’ swaggering subculture, and helped him forge close relationships with the Afghan, and later Somali, troops he helped to train, they said.
Many SEALs “do the minimum time, get their trident” — the SEAL symbol, worn on Naval uniforms — “and write a book,” said Capt. Christopher Rohrbach, a 24-year SEAL who has served in East Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
But Mr. Goodboe “was a team guy,” he said. “He was there for the greater good.”
Michael Goodboe, a former Navy SEAL who was fatally wounded in a C.I.A. operation in Somalia last year, in an undated photo taken from social media.
After retiring from the Navy in 2009 with a clutch of medals, Mr. Goodboe joined the C.I.A.’s paramilitary wing, now called the Special Activities Center — a clandestine group of about 200 fighters, the vanguard of the agency’s far-flung wars. The job eventually took him to Somalia.
The C.I.A. had a checkered history there.
In the mid 2000s, C.I.A. officers based in Nairobi, Kenya, led the American return to Somalia. They regularly flew into a remote airstrip outside Mogadishu, carrying suitcases of money for a coalition of warlords who had promised to help hunt Al Qaeda.
But the operation backfired badly in June 2006 when public hostility toward those warlords galvanized support for an Islamist group, the Islamic Courts Union, that swept to power briefly.
A year later, Al Shabab emerged.The C.I.A. station chief overseeing support for the warlords was transferred.
The C.I.A. returned to Somalia in 2009, establishing a secure base at the Mogadishu airport and teaming up with the National Intelligence Security Agency, Somalia’s fledgling spy agency. The Americans also joined the fight against Al Shabab.
C.I.A. snipers deployed to rooftops around the sprawling Bakara Market, then a Shabab stronghold, picking off Islamist fighters from up to a mile away, said a retired Somali intelligence official who worked with the Americans.
In 2011, Somali security forces killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Qaeda leader behind the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and seized a trove of valuable intelligence, including plots to bomb the elite British school Eton and London’s Ritz Hotel.
A temporary grave marker for Mr. Goodboe at Arlington National Cemetery.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times
The Somalis handed everything to the C.I.A., including a memento — the dead militant’s unusual model of rifle, said Hussein Sheikh Ali, then a senior Somali intelligence official and later Somalia’s National Security Adviser. “It was a turning point” in the relationship between the Americans and Somalis, he said.
But as the fruits of cooperation became clear, so did the costs. Human rights groups and U.N. investigators accused Somalia’s spy agency of torturing detainees and using children as spies. Some detainees recently accused the C.I.A. of complicity in torture.
In 2015, the C.I.A. station chief in Mogadishu pressed for the removal of General Abdirahman Turyare, the Somali intelligence chief, accusing him of corruption and mismanagement. General Turyare said he was the victim of American highhandedness and arrogance.
“I refused to bow before the self-made king,” he said in an interview with The Times, referring to the station chief.
The dispute dragged on for a year as State Department leaders appealed to President Hasan Sheikh Mohamed, who comes from then same clan, to take action against General Turyare. Only after Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, told Somali leaders that their relationship was also endangered by the dispute was General Turyare removed.
At the heart of that dispute, several Somali officials said, was control of Gaashaan, a paramilitary force officially part of the Somali spy agency, but in reality led by the C.I.A.
People working for the United States and other foreign countries tend to stay within the heavily guarded grounds of Mogadishu’s airport, rather than risk venturing out.
Since 2009, the C.I.A. has been training Gaashaan, which means “shield,” and it has grown into an elite force of 300 troops. Among the trainers was Mr. Goodboe. Gaashaan uses cellphone tracking technology to hunt Shabab commanders, mobilizes against militants when they strike Mogadishu and joins with C.I.A. paramilitary specialists for raids.
By late last year, when Mr. Goodboe arrived in Somalia for another monthslong tour, the C.I.A. and Gaashaan had turned their focus to one Shabab leader in particular — a bomb maker with a background in television.
The Master Bomb Maker
Somalis who once knew him say that Abdullahi Osman Mohamed was an unlikely jihadist kingpin.
“A friendly, energetic guy with a baby face,” recalled Mahmood, a former colleague who gave part of his name to speak freely about one of Somalia’s most dangerous men. “Very smart, very handsome. I often wonder how he became terrorist number one.”
In Sept. 2020 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed an order designating Mr. Mohamed, also known as “Engineer Ismail,” as a “global terrorist.” According to the United States, he is Al Shabab’s senior explosives expert, head of their Al Kataib propaganda wing, and a special adviser to the supreme leader, Ahmed Diriye.
Some Somalis go further, saying that Mr. Mohamed is one of two deputy Shabab leaders.
He was the intended target of the ill-fated November raid in which Mr. Goodboe was fatally injured, according to a retired Somali official and a senior American official who refused to be identified to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The C.I.A. declined to comment. A U.S. official would not say who the target was.
Much of the damage left by Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s has not been repaired.
In many ways, Mr. Mohamed typifies the mix of resourcefulness and ruthlessness that has made Al Shabab such a formidable enemy.
He came from a conservative, middle-class Mogadishu family. His father worked for Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity the U.S. accused of links to Al Qaeda in 2002.
Mr. Mohamed, then in his early 20s, graduated from university in Sudan in 2006 and began working as a studio technician for Al Jazeera in Mogadishu. His boss, the station’s Mogadishu bureau chief, Fahad Yasin, later went into politics and became Somalia’s spy chief — a striking illustration of the Somali conflict’s complex layers. Mr. Mohamed later spent time at Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar for training.
It was an especially tumultuous time in Somalia. Ethiopia, backed by the United States, invaded in 2006 to oust the Islamic Courts Union. American warplanes bombed Islamist forces.
Like many Somalis, Mr. Mohamed was enraged, said a family friend who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. Ethiopia and Somalia had fought a major war in 1977-78, and remained bitter rivals.
Mr. Mohamed began moonlighting for Al Shabab.
Al Shabab, or “the youth,” were a faction of the defeated Islamic Courts Union. Ousted from Mogadishu, they fled to southern Somalia and launched a guerrilla war, including bombings and assassinations, against Ethiopian soldiers.
By 2008, Al Shabab had become the most radical and powerful armed faction in Somalia, with thousands of recruits. Their leaders condemned what they called American crimes against Muslims across the globe. The U.S. State Department designated Al Shabab as a terrorist organization in 2008. In 2012, the group pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda.
Al Shabab’s broad goal is to establish their vision of an Islamic state in Somalia. In areas they control they have banned music and movies, and impose harsh punishments like stoning accused adulterers and amputating the limbs of accused thieves.
Mr. Mohamed first helped Al Shabab with propaganda, the friend said. Later, as American airstrikes killed successive Shabab explosives experts, the young militant, whose degree was in electrical engineering, was promoted to take their place.
Motorists in April passed the site in Mogadishu where, a month earlier, a car bombing killed 20 people and wounded 30.
Al Shabab went on to perpetrate a series of horrific attacks including, in 2017, a truck bombing in central Mogadishu that killed at least 587 people — one of the deadliest terrorist acts in modern world history.
As Shabab leaders were killed off and the Danab, an elite, American-trained Somali commando unit, evolved into a powerful anti-Shabab tool, the militants adapted.
They melted into the countryside, where they were harder to hit, and established a rudimentary parallel state with its own courts, bureaucracy and road tolls.
Al Shabab’s influence also extends into the heart of Mogadishu, where the group and its supporters have infiltrated Parliament, the business community and the security services, officials say. The Western-backed Somali government is ineffectual in comparison, divided by the corrosive clan politics that have crippled international efforts to unify Somalia’s security services. Graft is rampant; Transparency International ranks Somalia, along with South Sudan, as the most corrupt countries in the world.
A Somali intelligence officer in an interview listed the Shabab tax rates at Mogadishu port — $90 to import a regular container; $150 for a large one. He produced a neatly written receipt, provided by a city resident, for a $250 payment to register a recent land sale on the edge of Mogadishu — made out to Al Shabab.
While the militants enforce their writ with violence, many ordinary Somalis grudgingly appreciate their basic services. Even middle-class Mogadishu residents prefer to settle some disputes at Shabab courts that convene under trees in the surrounding countryside.
“If you go to the Somali courts for justice you won’t get it, particularly in property disputes,” said Abdirazak Mohamed, a member of Parliament. “Corruption is pervasive and the judges can’t enforce their decisions. But Al Shabab can do that.”
Mogadishu residents frequently travel by bus to outlying areas to have disputes settled by Al Shabab courts, rather than trust government courts.
Somalia’s national army officially has 24,000 troops, but in reality is one-fifth that size, a senior American official said
American analysts estimate that Al Shabab command anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Under Mr. Mohamed, their bombs have grown more sophisticated and powerful.
The group uses its hold on Mogadishu port to smuggle in large volumes of explosive materials and Chinese-made trigger devices, two U.S. officials said. In October 2020, Somali authorities intercepted 79 tons of sulfuric acid, an ingredient in roadside bombs.
In January, a bomb struck an armored convoy with American-trained Danab commandos, traveling toward Baledogle, a base 70 miles from Mogadishu.
The blast badly wounded the Danab commander, Maj. Ahmed Abdullahi, who was airlifted to Turkey, and killed a South African employee of Bancroft Global Development, an American contractor that recruits and trains Danab fighters. The South African, Stephen Potgieter, was the seventh Bancroft employee to die in Somalia since 2009, said Michael Stock, the company’s chief executive.
Mr. Mohamed’s growing reputation for chaos and bloodshed have made him a highly respected leader inside Shabab ranks, Somali and Western officials said.
To those pursuing him, he is an elusive figure, always out of reach.
American Mistakes
As in Afghanistan, America’s campaign in Somalia has been undermined by its own deadly misfires.
After an American missile struck a farmhouse near Jilib, southern Somalia, in February 2020, the military said it had killed a “terrorist.” Months later the military admitted that it had, in fact, killed a 17-year-old schoolgirl named Nurto Kusow Omar.
The attack also injured her sister, Fatima, then 14, who indicated during an interview where a missile fragment pierced her body. She wakes up screaming from nightmares. “I don’t want to say what I see,” she said.
Fatima Kusow Omar was 14 when she was injured in an American drone strike that killed her sister in Jilib, Somalia in February 2020.
Airstrikes in Somalia surged from 2017, when President Trump eased combat rules intended to protect civilians. The military admits killing several civilians, but has not paid compensation — a contrast with Afghanistan and Iraq, where just in 2019 the U.S. made hundreds of payments worth $1.5 million for death, injury or property damage.
In an email, Nicole D. Kirschmann, a spokeswoman for the United States Africa Command, declined to explain why no such payments were made in Somalia. But she said that Somali officials reviewed and approved each compensation decision.
Although Washington is by far the largest foreign donor to Somalia, giving $500 million in 2020, few Somalis see evidence of that assistance because Somali partner organizations hide their American ties to avoid Shabab reprisals. Even bags of American food aid do not carry a U.S. logo.
In contrast, Turkey donates less money but spends it on high-profile projects — new roads, mosques and hospitals — that are promoted with the Turkish flag. Turkey is hugely popular in Somalia.
The American aversion to casualties among U.S. personnel has created an unusually high dependence on private contractors. The best known, Bancroft, hires retired soldiers largely from Eastern Europe, Africa and the French Foreign Legion to recruit and train Somali forces. Bancroft’s property wing built the fortresslike Mogadishu embassy and leases it to the State Department; a senior official said it is among the most expensive to operate in Africa.
Bancroft’s financial practices came under scrutiny this year when the government examined its $33 million contract to train Danab and African Union troops.
The port in Mogadishu, where fishermen haul in their catch each day.
In a report published in July, the State Department Inspector General said the department had paid Bancroft $4.1 million for expenses that were not authorized under its contract, including $3.78 million in “incentive compensation” for its personnel — and said the money should be recovered.
In an email Mr. Stock, the Bancroft CEO, denied any wrongdoing.
The C.I.A., meanwhile, is struggling to keep its distance from a political storm surrounding a key ally, the Somali spymaster, Fahad Yasin.
President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, backed by Mr. Yasin, postponed an election that was supposed to be held in February, extending his term. Critics accused him of a blatant power grab and rival security factions exchanged gunfire in central Mogadishu, evoking fears that the country’s fragile transition to democracy was collapsing.
American officials proposed slapping sanctions on Mr. Yasin to force him to back down, two Western officials said. But the C.I.A. staunchly opposed the idea, apparently to protect its counterterrorism interests.
It sent the wrong signal to Somali officials about America’s priorities, one of the officials said: “They see the mouth and the body doing two different things. It’s confusing.”
Biden’s choice
Current U.S. officials say missteps by the Trump administration have complicated the situation in Somalia. The Biden administration is mulling whether to send back some of the troops Mr. Trump withdrew in January.
Critics of that approach say Al Shabab is principally focused on East Africa, and their ability to strike in the United States has been overblown.
“If it ever was to pose an existential threat to the U.S. it’s because our presence in Somalia made it so,” said Captain Rohrbach, the active duty SEAL.
U.S. officials say the experience of Afghanistan shows that success cannot be defined as remaking a government or society, and that the mission in Somalia had paid off by disrupting Al Shabab. Mr. Goodboe, according to friends, judged his work by a similar yardstick: whether terrorists could threaten Americans or the United States.
Still, some analysts say the U.S. needs to contemplate a totally new approach in Somalia, including a political settlement with Al Shabab, or face the prospect of bring trapped in another “forever war” with an inglorious end.
A memorial wall at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. honors agency employees killed in the line of duty. It has 137 stars — four of them added last May. Though the identity of those four officers remains classified, one was Mr. Goodboe — a final, anonymous tribute.
“Engineer Ismail” is believed to be still at large. In the latest Shabab bomb attack, on Sept 25, a suicide bomber hit a checkpoint in downtown Mogadishu, a few hundred yards from the presidential villa. Eight people were killed, including a woman and two children.
Blood from an al Shabab suicide bombing stains a wall where five civilians, including a child, were killed at an outdoor tea shop in Mogadishu in April.
Reporting was contributed by Christina Goldbaum, John Ismay and Mark Mazzetti.
2. Opinion | The U.S. is using sanctions more than ever. But do they work?
Sanctions are not a strategy. They are part of the ways of strategy. Do not criticize sanctions without examining the entire strategy.
But when assessing sanctions we need to assess the effectiveness of enforcement. I am reminded of a lesson young military leaders learn - never give an order you cannot enforce (or will not enforce). Seems like that might apply to sanctions.
Conclusion:
Ms. Yellen’s review ended Oct. 18 in what can only be described as modest fashion, with the publication of a short paper in which the department essentially restated these dilemmas, urged a more targeted, refined use of sanctions, and promised to “modernize the underlying operational architecture by which sanctions are deployed.” One recommendation — to pursue the widest possible international support for any future sanctions — was valid, but fundamentally the State Department’s job, not Treasury’s. Another — to supply Treasury more resources and personnel to keep up with the expanding enforcement job — will take congressional action. The Senate could help matters by confirming Mr. Biden’s nominee for Treasury’s top sanction-enforcement job, Brian Nelson, newly released from a “hold” that had been placed on him by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Mr Cruz wanted the administration to punish the German-Russian deal to build a gas pipeline — by hitting the construction company with sanctions.
Opinion | The U.S. is using sanctions more than ever. But do they work?
The Washington Post · by Opinion by the Editorial Board Today at 8:15 a.m. EDT · October 24, 2021
No U.S. president resorted to economic sanctions more often than did Donald Trump, whose administration issued about 3,800 new sanctions “designations” in a single term. There were many reasons for this, including Mr. Trump’s penchant for targeting adversaries such as Iran, and for doing it unilaterally as opposed to waiting for cooperation with allies. In a broad sense, though, he was just accelerating a trend that began with his predecessors, including President Barack Obama, who made 2,350 new designations in his second term (though he “delisted” targeted countries, individuals and entities more often than Mr. Trump did).
As of Oct. 1, 2021, there were 9,421 sanctions designations in effect, according to the Treasury Department, which is responsible for enforcing them. That’s a tenfold increase since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, spawned a new era in the use of sanctions, aimed at defunding far-flung terrorist networks and other nonstate networks in addition to traditional state adversaries. In addition to counterterrorism, the goals include fighting nuclear proliferation by Iran and North Korea; punishing human rights violations or corruption; and battling cybercrime. And it’s easy to see why the United States resorts so often to sanctions: They promise the achievement of foreign policy goals without the use of armed force, by taking advantage of the United States’ pivotal role in global finance and trade.
The question, though, is whether sanctions are yielding diminishing returns. Then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew raised that issue in one of his last official speeches — five years ago. In the same spirit, the current secretary, Janet L. Yellen, promised the Senate at her confirmation hearing that she would conduct a review of all existing sanctions. Some risks — that a given sanction will simply fail to achieve its goals, or will create unfair difficulties for U.S. businesses and humanitarian aid organizations — are familiar. The administration has already taken steps to mitigate this by issuing humanitarian relief licenses for Syria, Venezuela and Iran for covid-related aid, and a more general one for Afghanistan.
More novel is concern that the heavy U.S. use of so-called secondary sanctions, which not only ban dealings with certain individuals, companies or governments but also stop third parties from dealing with them, may alienate even friendly countries. In a worst-case scenario, the United States would cause countries to find cryptocurrency alternatives to the U.S. dollar and U.S.-dominated financial transactions systems.
Ms. Yellen’s review ended Oct. 18 in what can only be described as modest fashion, with the publication of a short paper in which the department essentially restated these dilemmas, urged a more targeted, refined use of sanctions, and promised to “modernize the underlying operational architecture by which sanctions are deployed.” One recommendation — to pursue the widest possible international support for any future sanctions — was valid, but fundamentally the State Department’s job, not Treasury’s. Another — to supply Treasury more resources and personnel to keep up with the expanding enforcement job — will take congressional action. The Senate could help matters by confirming Mr. Biden’s nominee for Treasury’s top sanction-enforcement job, Brian Nelson, newly released from a “hold” that had been placed on him by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Mr Cruz wanted the administration to punish the German-Russian deal to build a gas pipeline — by hitting the construction company with sanctions.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by the Editorial Board Today at 8:15 a.m. EDT · October 24, 2021
3. The Unlikely Outsiders Who Won the Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine
The Unlikely Outsiders Who Won the Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine
Uğur Şahin and Stéphane Bancel were long underestimated by investors and scientists. But when Covid-19 threatened the globe, these two unknowns had a solution.
WSJ · by Gregory Zuckerman
The investors liked Dr. Şahin but had misgivings about his company, which was developing vaccines and treatments to combat various cancers and infectious diseases. One of its approaches was to use a molecule called messenger RNA to carry instructions into the body, enabling it to ward off illness. Dr. Şahin had spent more than two decades researching how to teach the immune system to fight disease. He needed an IPO to help make it happen, but investors were balking—including the Kansas City mutual-fund manager he had just met.
No one yet knew that this molecule would form the basis of one of the greatest achievements in the history of science and business, or that Dr. Şahin and an executive named Stéphane Bancel—both heading companies outside the ranks of pharmaceutical giants—would be instrumental in that success. When the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe in early 2020, these two outsiders would be the ones to introduce vaccines that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The story of how they made it happen is based on interviews with Dr. Şahin, Mr. Bancel and nearly 100 scientists, executives, investors and others close to the men and their companies.
In the fall of 2019, though, such success looked unlikely for Dr. Şahin, then a 54-year-old scientist desperate for some help. Soft-spoken and serious, he wore smart business suits to the investor meetings, rather than his usual T-shirts, jeans and sneakers. Dr. Şahin had close-cropped hair, thick eyebrows and brown eyes that were big, just like his ears.
Dr. Şahin was different from most biotech executives. Early in his career, the immigrant from Turkey demonstrated a competitiveness that some found excessive. Each year, he and his lab mates headed to a nearby park for a relaxing day highlighted by a relay-race. One year his team lost by a nose. Dr. Şahin was so upset that he had to take a half-hour walk so his anger could dissipate. Back in the lab, someone asked how he was.
“I’m fine,” Dr. Şahin said. A lab mate said he was surprised by the irritation he detected in Dr. Şahin’s voice.
Before Covid-19, Dr. Şahin faced skepticism from investors about his company and its approach.
Photo: Marzena Skubatz for The Wall Street Journal
In 2008, Dr. Şahin started BioNTech in the German city of Mainz with his wife, Özlem Türeci, another cancer researcher. They were all work and very little play. Each evening the couple went home, brewed some coffee or tea, and began a night shift of more research and writing. They had time to sleep only about four hours a night, they told members of their team. Fine, a lot of executives are workaholics. With Dr. Şahin and Dr. Türeci, though, it never was the same four hours—the couple only overlapped in bed about two hours each night, one staffer was told. It wasn’t entirely clear why they had adopted the gonzo sleep habits. Employees speculated Dr. Şahin was trying to send a passive-aggressive message to their researchers about the pre-eminence of the company’s research.
When Drs. Şahin and Türeci and their daughter went on a holiday, they visited all-inclusive resorts in the Canary Islands or elsewhere. These weren’t traditional family vacations, though. Dr. Şahin and Dr. Türeci usually shipped three or four hulking computers to the hotels along with 27-inch monitors, so they could continue their research. They packed six suitcases, at least one stuffed with scientific papers, which Dr. Şahin sometimes lugged to the pool.
Dr. Şahin demanded that his team give priority to its work as much as he and Dr. Türeci did. Those not deemed dedicated enough were often let go or Dr. Şahin froze them out, former staffers said.
Medical breakthroughs were Dr. Şahin’s sole focus. Even as the company prepared to go public in 2019, he and his wife still lived in a modest apartment without a television or a car. Each morning, Dr. Şahin rode an aging Trek bicycle to BioNTech’s offices.
But that fall, as he tried to drum up support for the IPO, investors had qualms about his company and its approach. BioNTech had been around for 11 years but it wasn’t close to an approved vaccine. Only one drug was in a medium-stage, Phase 2 trial. Just 250 patients had been treated with the company’s vaccines. The stock market was under pressure, biotech stocks were wilting and few investors wanted to pay a lot for a German company with limited signs of success.
Tired and tense, Dr. Şahin stood in the Kansas City parking lot, ear to a cellphone, speaking with yet another investor. Hanging up, he told his team the investor would only buy shares if BioNTech reduced its IPO price. They faced an ugly choice: Scrap the offering or slash its price, hoping to get enough investors interested. Some of the BioNTech team sat in an open, black van, hiding from the baking sun. It had been a long trip and they were ready to go home.
“We need to decide,” Dr. Şahin told them.
Dr. Şahin chose to sell shares, no matter the price. His company needed money to advance its research. A few days later, he rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, a wan smile on his face. The company raised $150 million in the IPO, just over half what it had hoped for, giving it a valuation of $3.4 billion. Even with the discounted price, BioNTech shares fell more than 5% on their debut.
Some day, investors and others would appreciate what his company was trying to do. Dr. Şahin was sure of it.
High hopes
Dr. Şahin wasn’t the only vaccine researcher sparking skepticism in late 2019. In Cambridge, Mass., Stéphane Bancel, who ran a company called Moderna Inc., faced even more serious doubts about his quest to develop safe and effective vaccines and drugs using mRNA molecules.
A view of Moderna’s Cambridge, Mass., headquarters in 2020.
Photo: brian snyder/Reuters
By then, researchers had spent decades working with mRNA but most experts thought the idea folly. The molecule instructs our cells to create necessary proteins but is so unstable that it is quickly chopped up by the body’s enzymes. Injecting the molecule and hoping it could make it all the way to the cell to create proteins, as Moderna and BioNTech were trying to do, seemed a nearly impossible task.
A few pioneers—including a Wisconsin scientist working with children with rare genetic diseases and a stem-cell researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—had demonstrated mRNA’s promise. But their work was dismissed by much of the scientific community. A young scientist in Mr. Bancel’s company had discovered a way to modify mRNA’s chemical building blocks to avoid some of the challenges to using the molecule. But Moderna experienced such difficulties developing drugs that it pivoted to vaccines, a crowded field with limited profit potential that few investors valued.
A 47-year-old from the French city of Marseille, with full lips, a cleft chin and a taste for Steve Jobs-inspired turtleneck shirts, Mr. Bancel was an engineer and Harvard Business School graduate. That pedigree earned him respect in some circles, but not in the scientific world, where Mr. Bancel was viewed as an outsider. By 2019, he had spent eight years running Moderna, a name that was a mashup of “modified” and “RNA.” Mr. Bancel was better known for his ability to convince big investors that Moderna would succeed, rather than for any scientific achievement.
If anyone was going to find a way to make mRNA work, skeptics said, it surely wasn’t going to be someone like Mr. Bancel. Industry members all knew the stories from the early days at Moderna, when Mr. Bancel regularly ripped into his employees, leaving them on edge.
“Fifty percent of you won’t be around in a year,” he once told a group.
Employees, trying to match Mr. Bancel’s pace and expectations, sometimes pushed themselves harder than was reasonable. One young scientist, Summar Siddiqui, fell to the floor in the office kitchen while working a 12-hour day and was rushed to an emergency room for treatment. Another stressed-out scientist collapsed at home, hitting his head on a table, knocking himself unconscious. He woke in a pool of blood and was taken to an emergency room. Still another passed out in the shower. One researcher fainted in a parking lot near Moderna’s office. After being revived by a colleague, she insisted on heading into the office but was persuaded to check into nearby Mount Auburn Hospital.
In Mr. Bancel’s view, his ire and impatience were necessary. Moderna had a chance to revolutionize medicine and he was sure competition was around the bend. He had to push his team to move as fast as possible.
“It’s not mean if the intent isn’t to hurt,” Mr. Bancel said in an interview, referring to the language he employed. He noted that Ms. Siddiqui is still with Moderna nine years after the emergency-room incident.
By 2019, Moderna’s scientists were quietly making progress with their mRNA vaccines. By then, Mr. Bancel had built a loyal team. He inspired team members with the promise of what mRNA molecules could do.
“We’re going to be the company that can respond to a crisis,” he told them.
Outside scientists, investors and others suspected Mr. Bancel exaggerated his company’s potential. A scientific publication even compared Mr. Bancel to Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced chief executive of blood-testing startup Theranos, who also had an easy way with investors and a predilection for black turtlenecks.
Before Covid-19, Mr. Bancel was viewed as an outsider in the scientific community.
Photo: France Keyser/Myop for The Wall Street Journal
By the end of 2019, the sniping had taken a toll. Moderna’s shares were 15% below its own IPO price from a year earlier, making it harder for Mr. Bancel to raise new money. Moderna was forced to slash spending. Some investors were upset the company had shifted its focus to vaccines. The criticisms didn’t seem fair to Moderna’s researchers. They were injecting mRNA molecules packed with genetic instructions, producing ample proteins in the body that could teach the immune system to protect against disease. Moderna was even working with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and other senior U.S. government scientists who were becoming intrigued by Moderna’s mRNA techniques.
Moderna hadn’t tested its vaccines in many people, though. Like Dr. Şahin and BioNTech, Mr. Bancel’s company wasn’t close to an approved vaccine. Moderna was planning its very first Phase 2 clinical study for a vaccine and was nowhere near a late-stage trial for any of its products. The company hoped to have a vaccine in the market by 2023 but even that goal seemed ambitious. Effective vaccines took an average of 10 years to develop; measles, the fastest in history, took four years. There was little reason to expect success from Moderna anytime soon.
‘Is it a virus?’
In December 2019, Mr. Bancel flew to Europe with his wife and daughters to spend the holiday season at a home he owned in southern France. It was a chance to escape the pressures of running his company and dealing with the doubters.
One morning, just after the New Year, Mr. Bancel woke up early and headed to his kitchen, trying not to wake his sleeping daughters. Mr. Bancel brewed some Earl Grey tea and grabbed an aging iPad on the kitchen table. He checked his emails and scrolled through the latest news. One story stopped him cold: Lung disease was spreading in southern China.
Mr. Bancel began emailing Barney Graham, a senior U.S. government scientist.
“Do you know what it is?” Mr. Bancel asked.
Dr. Graham, a veteran vaccine researcher at the National Institutes of Health, said he and his team were aware of the outbreak. Rumors on Twitter and China’s Weibo social-media platform pointed to a cluster of pneumonia cases around the city of Wuhan, in southern China. Dr. Graham had already emailed a younger scientist in his lab, Kizzmekia Corbett, saying they needed to prepare for whatever was emerging in that country. Details were scant, though—Dr. Graham didn’t even know if a virus or bacteria was causing the infections.
Dr. Şahin feared that millions could die from Covid-19. Here, in June 2020, health workers carry the body of a man who died due to the coronavirus in New Delhi, India.
Photo: Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Mr. Bancel couldn’t stop thinking about the spreading illness. His scientists had no experience with bacterial infections. But if a new virus was in fact emerging, maybe his team members could do something about it. Perhaps they could finally prove that mRNA worked.
Mr. Bancel kept sending messages to Dr. Graham, each one more urgent than the last.
“What’s the latest?”
“Do you know yet?”
“Is it a virus?”
Dr. Graham promised to let Mr. Bancel know as soon as he learned the cause of the sickness. A few days later, as he and his family flew back to Boston, the outbreak remained on his mind. He doubted the sickness in China was going to be a huge deal.
But what if it was?
Merrymaking interrupted
By mid-January 2020, Dr. Şahin was convinced the coronavirus emerging in Wuhan would spread, leading to a pandemic. He convened an early-morning meeting of BioNTech’s senior executives.
“We’re going to need a vaccine,” he said. “I think we can do something about it with our mRNA.”
Days later, though, as Dr. Şahin walked the office, he heard employees chatter about the ongoing Mainz Carnival, a season of merrymaking. They didn’t seem focused on vaccine work. It drove Dr. Şahin nuts. He told employees to cancel their holiday plans and stop taking public transportation, to avoid infection. You need to focus on a vaccine, he told them.
“I’m serious about this,” he told the researchers, saying that millions of people would die from the new virus. Now, they got the message.
Dr. Şahin called Philip Dormitzer, a senior Pfizer Inc. scientist. He warned Dr. Şahin against spending too much time on a vaccine, reminding him that two coronaviruses had emerged in the previous decade before petering out.
“Remember, SARS was contained,” Dr. Dormitzer said. “MERS, too.”
Just after the New Year in 2020, Mr. Bancel saw a news story that stopped him cold: Lung disease was spreading in southern China. It was the beginning of an outbreak in Wuhan. Pictured here is a Wuhan exhibition center that had been converted into a hospital.
Photo: STR/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Dr. Şahin ignored the warning, pushing ahead. But he needed help. BioNTech had only about $300 million on its balance sheet. He called another senior Pfizer executive, Kathrin Jansen, who proved more worried about the virus. The two companies agreed to collaborate on a vaccine.
Dr. Şahin had hope.
‘We have to try’
Mr. Bancel told his team a vaccine was their priority. But Stephen Hoge, Moderna’s president, was wary. The company has just 800 employees, limited cash, and it had never run a late-stage trial. If Moderna built a Covid-19 vaccine and it failed, the company was likely doomed—investors would never forgive it for dropping everything to build a vaccine.
Mr. Bancel was insistent. He had committed Moderna to work with Dr. Graham’s team at the NIH to quickly develop a vaccine, and later Moderna would get even more help from the government’s Operation Warp Speed. In February, the company shipped its first batch of Covid-19 vaccines, to the NIH to begin testing in mice. Early results showed the shots elicited antibodies to the coronavirus, a promising, albeit early, sign.
Mr. Bancel convened a meeting with top Moderna executives in a ninth-floor conference room. Usually, he oozed confidence. This time, he was serious and measured, worrying the group.
“We’ve been asked to make a vaccine,” he said. “We have to try.”
Staffers listened somberly. They realized the seriousness of the moment, some for the first time. They thought of their own health, the imminent threat to their families, and the immense challenge ahead.
Three hours of sleep
During the summer of 2020, Dr. Şahin was upbeat. He worked on the vaccine’s trials, helped solve manufacturing issues and led negotiations on deals to distribute shots in various countries.
In late summer, though, as Dr. Şahin awaited the critical results of the vaccine’s Phase 3 clinical trial, he became more anxious. An effective vaccine could help bring an end to the pandemic and give his company the opportunity to produce other drugs and vaccines. Failure would mean a lengthier pandemic and more global misery.
Thomas Strüngmann, a German businessman and longtime backer of Dr. Şahin’s work, saw that he needed a distraction. During weekly Sunday night calls, Mr. Strüngmann began chatting with Dr. Şahin about books, movies, and other lighter topics—anything but BioNTech’s shots—brightening his mood.
BioNTech workers, like the ones above, would help develop a new Covid-19 vaccine.
Photo: Marzena Skubatz for The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Bancel and senior executives at Moderna needed a way to calm their own nerves ahead of their vaccine’s late-stage results. They decided to loosen things up and share a drink during daily Zoom deliberations; some sipped glasses of wine, while others drank beer. After a few weeks, though, the group realized they were inviting trouble with their nightly drinking sessions. They returned to alcohol-free meetings.
For a healthier diversion, Mr. Bancel joined regular Zoom calls with close friends. He looked exhausted, sometimes joining the calls after getting three hours of sleep. Mr. Bancel didn’t want sessions to end, though, clinging to fleeting moments of calm as tensions built.
‘It’s a home run’
On Sunday, Nov. 8, just after Americans voted in a contested presidential election, Dr. Şahin and Dr. Türeci were told the results of the vaccine’s Phase 3 trial. It was an interim analysis after a significant number of 44,000 subjects had become infected with SARS-CoV- 2.
Around 10 p.m. in Germany, Dr. Şahin and Dr. Türeci arranged a call with five members of their senior executive team. One executive, Sean Marett, dialed in to the video call in his basement, to avoid waking his sleeping children. He sat on the edge of a couch, near some children’s toys. His palms were sweating as he waited for the news.
“We got the results,” Dr. Şahin said.
Nearly every person who had come down with Covid-19 had been in the placebo group. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 95% percent effective. Complete silence. The staffers were stunned. Then, Mr. Marett began laughing. Within moments, the entire group was giggling uncontrollably. In an instant, months of fear, pressure and nervousness had been released.
The work done by Moderna and BioNTech led to scenes like this in Los Angeles, where a man was inoculated with a new vaccine in February 2021.
Photo: Apu Gomes/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A week later, the data-safety monitoring committee overseeing the Moderna vaccine’s trial was ready to share interim results of the company’s own Phase 3 study. Dr. Hoge, representing Moderna, dialed in to the video call. He was terrified. Pfizer-BioNTech’s numbers had been so good. What if Moderna’s didn’t come close? Around noon, committee members sent word to Dr. Hoge and Dr. Fauci that they were ready to share the results.
Dr. Hoge studied the faces on the screen and said he thought: Gimme a smile! Someone, anyone!
The committee’s chairman addressed the group, recounting all the reasons the trial had been conducted and what it aimed to find. Dr. Hoge tried to mask his impatience. He thought: The goal?! Dude, we’re trying to stop a pandemic; that’s the goal!
Mr. Bancel and others sent messages to Dr. Hoge on a group chat.
What’s going on?!
Then the numbers were revealed: The Moderna vaccine had proved 94.5% effective at protecting people from Covid-19. Dr. Hoge couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He zoned out. Then, he panicked that he had missed some important information.
He stole a moment to text his colleagues.
It’s a home run.
A HOME RUN.
In his home in Boston, Mr. Bancel met his wife in a hallway. They embraced. His 18-year-old daughter raced down from her second-floor room, while his 16-year-old daughter ran up the basement stairs. They all began crying.
Adapted from “A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine,” by Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman, to be published by Portfolio on Oct. 26.
WSJ · by Gregory Zuckerman
4. ‘The Loneliest Americans’ Asks What Being Asian American Really Means
Excerpts:
The autobiographical telling also leaves the reader wondering the extent to which the Asian American experience is unique. We may be lonely, but are we the loneliest? How much of the Asian American experience is the same lonely journey taken by other immigrants who came to America before? Kang briefly touches on Irish and Jewish immigration histories by drawing from Noel Ignatiev and his seminal book How the Irish Became White, but he does not explore the parallels very deeply. This is a missed opportunity for a rich source of discussion, especially when Jewish immigration history also features a collection of hugely disparate streams of migration, a nation-building narrative centered on historical trauma that may or may not be individually applicable to current-day Jewish Americans, and anxiety arising from the sense of not quite fitting in, as displayed in Philip Roth’s novels and Woody Allen’s movies. Asian Americans may be lonely, but America has always been a place where everyone is lonely together.
Similarly, if Kang leaned more strongly into the theme of class (as he did in his podcast) and explored the economic stratification among other ethnic groups, he might have unlocked even more parallels. In his book, Kang posits that only two racial identities exist in the United States in a solid form—white and Black—and Asian Americans uneasily navigate between the two. Yet even among Black Americans, there is a lively debate on whether Black political leaders, such as Hakeem Jeffries and even Barack Obama, who graduated from Ivy League colleges or began their careers at New York investment banks can truly represent their community.
To be sure, none of this detracts from The Loneliest Americans, which is an essential read. We were promised an “Asian American moment” after the Atlanta shootings, but all we got was an incoherent discourse about Asian names and a Marvel superhero movie packed with Asian American actors, while little attention is given to the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable—like the impoverished Asian immigrants living in basements who made up the vast majority of New York’s flood victims during Hurricane Ida. Through his book, Kang provides a clear-eyed explanation of how we got here.
‘The Loneliest Americans’ Asks What Being Asian American Really Means
Jay Caspian Kang turns a sharp eye on conventional narratives of identity.
By S. Nathan Park, a Washington-based attorney and nonresident fellow of the Sejong Institute.
Following the Atlanta spa shootings in March that claimed eight lives, including six women of Asian descent, a torrent of op-eds tried to make sense of the tragedy. Asian American thinkers aired out all kinds of different ways in which they faced racist discrimination. Historians traced anti-Asian violence in the United States back 150 years, recounting the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, and the killing of Vincent Chin, among others. Foreign-policy experts spoke of the impact of the United States’ strategic competition with China on Asian Americans. Several Asian American writers noted that the police mangled the names of the Asian victims in the attacks.
Shocked by the shootings, I read those accounts with great interest. But after a couple of months, frustration began to set in. I, like many, thought this tragedy would galvanize Asian Americans into having deeper conversations about what we could do about the anti-Asian violence that has been raging since early 2020. Instead, the conversation was stuck in a loop, retelling the same stories that did not directly address the victims of violence: the history of Asian America made up of dots rather than lines, white people messing up Asian names, the lack of Asian faces in Hollywood movies, and the discrimination faced by the types of Asian Americans who can get op-ed spaces in major publications. Save for a handful of notable exceptions, in-depth discussions on the Asian Americans who were the most exposed to violence—older people, urban poor, first-generation immigrant women like the ones who were killed in Atlanta—were few and far in between.
At the time, I could not put a finger on the source of my frustration. The clarifying moment came as I was listening to the May 4 episode of Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast hosted by Jay Caspian Kang, along with the journalist E. Tammy Kim and the historian Andy Liu. In that episode, Kang debated with the sociologist Tamara K. Nopper on whether “Asian American” exists as a political identity.
Following the Atlanta spa shootings in March that claimed eight lives, including six women of Asian descent, a torrent of op-eds tried to make sense of the tragedy. Asian American thinkers aired out all kinds of different ways in which they faced racist discrimination. Historians traced anti-Asian violence in the United States back 150 years, recounting the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, and the killing of Vincent Chin, among others. Foreign-policy experts spoke of the impact of the United States’ strategic competition with China on Asian Americans. Several Asian American writers noted that the police mangled the names of the Asian victims in the attacks.
Shocked by the shootings, I read those accounts with great interest. But after a couple of months, frustration began to set in. I, like many, thought this tragedy would galvanize Asian Americans into having deeper conversations about what we could do about the anti-Asian violence that has been raging since early 2020. Instead, the conversation was stuck in a loop, retelling the same stories that did not directly address the victims of violence: the history of Asian America made up of dots rather than lines, white people messing up Asian names, the lack of Asian faces in Hollywood movies, and the discrimination faced by the types of Asian Americans who can get op-ed spaces in major publications. Save for a handful of notable exceptions, in-depth discussions on the Asian Americans who were the most exposed to violence—older people, urban poor, first-generation immigrant women like the ones who were killed in Atlanta—were few and far in between.
The Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang, Crown, 272 pp., $27, October 2021
At the time, I could not put a finger on the source of my frustration. The clarifying moment came as I was listening to the May 4 episode of Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast hosted by Jay Caspian Kang, along with the journalist E. Tammy Kim and the historian Andy Liu. In that episode, Kang debated with the sociologist Tamara K. Nopper on whether “Asian American” exists as a political identity.
Kang’s stance was that it does not. He observed how much of the Asian American discourse about the Atlanta shootings was not about the attacks themselves but about “interpersonal microaggressions.” Kang found this “wildly disrespectful” to the victims: “It supposes, essentially, that the reason why these people got killed, or why they were in this vulnerable position, is exactly the same thing that made it so that your co-worker thought that you were the other Asian person. Which is crazy! That is the way Asian American identity functions right now.”
Kang’s latest book, The Loneliest Americans, is a book-length exposition of this disconnect. The title of the book comes from Kang’s 2017 article in the New York Times Magazine about a death in an Asian American fraternity. Michael Deng, a freshman at Baruch College, was killed in a hazing ritual called “the Gauntlet,” in which the pledge was assaulted and racially insulted by his prospective fraternity brothers after being subject to a belly crawl intended to recall the Bataan Death March. As fraternity rituals tend to be, the Gauntlet was as silly as it was brutal—a shallow attempt to manufacture solidarity by stitching together far-flung and disconnected events, as if a World War II crime committed by the Imperial Japanese Army against American and Filipino prisoners of war held any relevance to Chinese American college students in New York today.
By connecting the article to the book, Kang turns the camera from the fraternity death to Asian Americans as a whole, implicitly suggesting that wider attempts to construct an Asian American identity are just as flimsy as the Gauntlet. Part reportage and part autobiography, Kang takes us to various places in time that could potentially serve as a source of Asian American identity: Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, when the term “Asian American” was coined; Asian enclaves such as Koreatown in Los Angeles and Flushing, Queens; and online forums, such as Reddit, where Asian Americans might congregate.
At each location, Kang sees the same issue: Any attempt at a unifying, nation-building narrative for Asian Americans, however well intended and earnest, falls apart at the slightest touch. The history of immigration fails to unify because Asian immigration before and after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which opened up a route to the United States for highly skilled labor, is dramatically different. The Asian American legacy of the radical ’60s means nothing to most Asians who came to America afterward. Asian enclaves originally sprouted in low-income areas, but when more educated and wealthy immigrants moved there after 1965, they never found solidarity with the people already living there. Online, the attempt to forge an Asian American identity is either superficial (based on a shared love of boba milk tea, for example) or toxic, as with the self-proclaimed Asian men’s rights activists who attack Asian women dating white men.
By inserting himself in this argument, Kang displays tremendous honesty and courage. There’s a familiar narrative in Asian American accounts, stories of immigration that begin with a challenge and end with a triumph—in other words, the same platitudinal stories that were told after the Atlanta shootings. Kang points out the many flaws in these stories, starting with the story that he could write about himself.
“On the day my mother was born, the skies over the 38th parallel lit up red,” Kang offers with mock grandiosity, pointing out the disingenuousness in the way that second-generation Asian Americans appropriate the historical experience of their parents. Also disingenuous is the way some Asian Americans deliberately blur their personal history to project an image of struggle. An Asian American men’s rights activist whom Kang interviewed “makes a lot out of his midwestern roots but generally does not name Ann Arbor … choosing instead to let the implications of the region tell a vague story in the same way I used my childhood in ‘the South’ [in Chapel Hill, North Carolina] as proof, or at least probabilistic cause, that I might know about racism.” (Ann Arbor, in Michigan, and Chapel Hill, I should explain for those unfamiliar, are prosperous college towns whose socioeconomic reality is a long way from their surrounding regions.)
While effective and genuine, the autobiographical presentation of Kang’s book is also limiting. Because Kang, a Korean American, focuses on his own journey, a book that is supposed to be a commentary on Asian Americans ends up being mostly about Korean Americans, with some detours involving Taiwanese Americans in Flushing and the Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis.
This narrowness of scope is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Koreans are arguably the most internally diverse ethnicity among Asian Americans when it comes to class, wealth, and the routes they took to the United States. The contrast between immigrant groups as diverse as Indian doctors and Laotian refugees is often used to illustrate the two economic poles among Asian Americans, but Korean Americans are everywhere on the spectrum, as Kang’s own family illustrates: Among the four of his mother’s siblings who settled in the United States, two were nurses, and two were cooks. Kang’s thesis—that the term “Asian American” is inadequate to cover the range that it aspires to—would have been made stronger if he ventured further outside of his own life, looking at, for example, how South Asians relate or do not relate to the Asian American discourse in which East Asians such as Koreans and Chinese often feature more prominently.
The autobiographical telling also leaves the reader wondering the extent to which the Asian American experience is unique. We may be lonely, but are we the loneliest? How much of the Asian American experience is the same lonely journey taken by other immigrants who came to America before? Kang briefly touches on Irish and Jewish immigration histories by drawing from Noel Ignatiev and his seminal book How the Irish Became White, but he does not explore the parallels very deeply. This is a missed opportunity for a rich source of discussion, especially when Jewish immigration history also features a collection of hugely disparate streams of migration, a nation-building narrative centered on historical trauma that may or may not be individually applicable to current-day Jewish Americans, and anxiety arising from the sense of not quite fitting in, as displayed in Philip Roth’s novels and Woody Allen’s movies. Asian Americans may be lonely, but America has always been a place where everyone is lonely together.
Similarly, if Kang leaned more strongly into the theme of class (as he did in his podcast) and explored the economic stratification among other ethnic groups, he might have unlocked even more parallels. In his book, Kang posits that only two racial identities exist in the United States in a solid form—white and Black—and Asian Americans uneasily navigate between the two. Yet even among Black Americans, there is a lively debate on whether Black political leaders, such as Hakeem Jeffries and even Barack Obama, who graduated from Ivy League colleges or began their careers at New York investment banks can truly represent their community.
To be sure, none of this detracts from The Loneliest Americans, which is an essential read. We were promised an “Asian American moment” after the Atlanta shootings, but all we got was an incoherent discourse about Asian names and a Marvel superhero movie packed with Asian American actors, while little attention is given to the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable—like the impoverished Asian immigrants living in basements who made up the vast majority of New York’s flood victims during Hurricane Ida. Through his book, Kang provides a clear-eyed explanation of how we got here.
5. Cancers Strike US Fighter Pilots, Crews at Higher Rates, Air Force Finds
Cancers Strike US Fighter Pilots, Crews at Higher Rates, Air Force Finds
Nearly 30% higher likelihood of testicular cancer and roughly 25% for skin and prostate cancer, according to the military’s most comprehensive study yet.
U.S. Air Force fighter pilots and crew members are far more likely to be diagnosed with certain types of cancers than their fellow airmen, according to the most comprehensive military study to date.
The study is the first confirmation of a connection long suspected by fighter aviators who saw their peers contracting some cancers at concerning rates. Earlier, less comprehensive studies had proven inconclusive.
The study also identified at least one airframe—the F-100 Super Sabre—whose crews faced higher rates of almost all types of cancer compared to both their non-flying fellow airmen and the general population.
The 2021 study, “Cancer Incidence and mortality among fighter aviators,” was conducted by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing. It tracked every airman who had recorded more than 100 flight hours in an Air Force fighter aircraft from 1970 to 2004.
The study found a total of 34,679 “fighter aviators”: fighter pilots and weapons systems officers. Their cancer rates were compared to 411,998 Air Force officers who did not fly fighter aircraft and were on active duty for at least one day from 1970 to 2004.
Compared to their non-fighter peers, the study found, fighter pilots and their crew were 29 percent more likely to be diagnosed with testicular cancer; 24 percent more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma; and 23 percent more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer.
When compared to the general U.S. population, fighter aviators were 13 percent more likely to be diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 25 percent more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma, and 19 percent more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. The study also found that the fighter aviators had similar rates of other types of cancer, such as brain cancer, compared to non-flying Air Force officers. And compared to the general U.S. population, they had lower rates in several categories, including renal, thyroid, and urinary cancer.
“Current and former fighter aviators are encouraged to discuss this report with their flight surgeon or primary care provider, including such topics as ultraviolet radiation protection and its impact on vitamin D, lifestyle approaches to cancer prevention, and screening for melanoma skin and prostate cancers,” said Maj. Brian Huggins, a preventive medicine consultant with the 711th Wing.
The study represents the deepest dive to date on a question that continues to surface among the military aviation community: Did their military flying careers cause the many cancers they now see among the men and women they flew with?
“We’re about to graduate out of the era of ‘We think this deserves a study, and we think that cancer incidence rates and mortality are higher among military aviators, but no one’s paying attention.’ That was 2017, 2018, and 2019. Here in 2021, we have this study. And the Air Force is talking about it out loud,” said Vince “Aztec” Alcazar, a former F-15E Strike Eagle pilot who now leads the aviator medical issues committee for the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association, a private veterans support organization.
The Air Force study also looked at a few specific fighter airframes to compare rates of incidence between those crews and non-flying personnel. However there were limitations. The study only singled out four Vietnam-era warplanes, the F-100, F-4, F-105 and RF-4, to look specifically at those crews’ cancer rates, even though the study covers all fighter jets flying through 2004, such as the F-16 and F-15.
Still, among those Vietnam-era planes, there were striking findings, particularly for the F-100 Super Sabre, the nation’s first supersonic warplane.
“Male fighter aviators who flew the F-100 had greater odds of being diagnosed and dying from colon and rectum cancer, pancreas cancer, melanoma skin cancer, prostate cancer, and brain cancer. They also had greater odds of being diagnosed and dying from thyroid cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, despite similar odds of diagnosis,” the study found.
Crews who flew the F-105 and F-4 also showed higher rates of testicular, melanoma, and prostate cancer.
A larger, Congressionally-directed cancer review is also underway. Run by the Defense Health Agency, or DHA, the study is looking at aviation community rates of cancer across all military branches, not just the Air Force. Initial results are expected by year’s end, said a spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
The DHA study kicked off after Feinstein got language included in last year's defense bill that required the Pentagon to determine whether service members involved in any part of military aviation, whether a pilot, navigator, weapons officer, carrier deck crew or flight line crew have higher rates of cancer than the general U.S. population.
If the DHA study does find higher rates of cancer for the aviation community, the legislation requires Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to launch a deeper, and much-more-difficult-to-execute study. That study would look for causes, such as whether cockpit emissions may be linked, or contact with fuels, solvents, radars or other environmental factors. It would also calculate rates of cancer by type of aircraft flown and locations served. Finally, it would set recommendations for the age at which cancer screenings should begin for those service members.
Feinstein and other lawmakers filed legislation to address aviator cancers after a number of former fighter pilots spoke out last year about the high rates of cancers and cancer deaths they were seeing among their ranks.
One of the initial leaders of that outreach was Thomas “Boot” Hill, a former F-4 and F-14 Navy pilot who served as the commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 143 and air boss aboard the aircraft carrier Washington.
After several fellow aviators got sick with cancer, Hill started compiling an Excel database of every Tomcat pilot or commanding officer he could verify who had either been diagnosed with or died of cancer. He then expanded it to all Naval aviation airframes.
Hill started with the year 1985 and got as far as 2001. He found that those naval aviators were three to five times more likely to be diagnosed with cancer than the general population.
The Air Force study and the larger service-wide study expected later this year “means a lot,” said Hill’s daughter Lauren Farrelly, her voice breaking. “It means it wasn’t all in vain, it wasn’t just him sitting, you know, doing a spreadsheet. It gives us some comfort knowing this is something that will continue to be fought for.”
Hill, 69, died nine days ago, after a decade-long battle with esophageal cancer. In his 23-year Naval aviation career he flew more than 3,600 hours and made 960 carrier landings.
“My two boys want to be just like him,” Farrelly said.
6. Quad should make Micronesia a priority
Dr. Paskal says what few publicly admit.
Excerpts:
No matter what the diplomats say, the Quad is about China. And one of the areas under the most persistent Chinese CNP attack is Micronesia. Beijing needs to win there if it has to break out of the “bathtub” of the South and East China Seas created by the Island Chains.
The Quad (and all democracies) has a choice. Help Micronesia fight China’s CNP and become a zone of security, prosperity and freedom, in the process showing democracy really is the better system.
Or watch as countries of the region are pulled into China’s expanding orbit and China’s frontline moves even closer to the shores of the Quad.
There is no third choice.
Quad should make Micronesia a priority - The Sunday Guardian Live
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Published : October 23, 2021, 6:11 pm | Updated : October 23, 2021, 8:37 PM
Most leaders in the region want closer relationships with other democracies, especially in economic development, education, and health care, so that they have option to China’s CNP (Comprehensive National Power) onslaught.
There has been a lot of discussion about what the Quad should (or shouldn’t) prioritise. It might make sense to also start talking about where it should prioritise. One area might be Oceania, in particular the Micronesian region. I’ll explain.
It has to do with China’s concept of “comprehensive national power” or CNP.
COMPREHENSIVE NATIONAL POWER (CNP)
Adopted by Beijing in the 1990s, the CNP concept is embedded in Chinese think tanks and is key for understanding Beijing’s global strategy. For the Chinese Communist Party, CNP is an actual number. Its researchers obsessively calculate every country’s CNP.
Things that add to a country’s CNP number include its access to resources (their or someone else’s), research and development (including stolen intellectual property), human capital, financial capital, influence over global rules, influence in international organizations, strategic positioning, and much more.
CNP is the concept that connects the dots between the Confucius Institutes, the artificial islands in the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, and getting American teenagers to install TikTok on their phones.
CHINA IN OCEANIA
Over the past couple of decades or so, China has had a massive CNP push in Oceania. That has included headline items—like getting a country to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China—as well as seemingly little ones such as, a Huawei data centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a couple of hundred Samoan athletes training in China, a Chinese police liaison officer in Fiji, a Chinese-run shop located opposite the entrance to a military barrackin Tonga, or legislation that allows online gambling in Palau.
Coordination is facilitated by China’s large embassies across the region, with staffers who speak the local language and have seemingly limitless slush funds.
Also, since 2012, at least six Oceania-specific research centres have been set up in China, including Liaocheng University’s Research Centre on Pacific Island Countries, which has a full-time staff of close to 40 researchers and worked with the National University of Samoa to open a Confucius Institute in that country.
Given this massive effort, the question is why does Beijing think the Pacific Islands are so important for its CNP?
A key reason is geography.
IMPORTANCE OF THE NAVY TO BEIJING’S PLANS
A core part of China’s CNP strategy is developing a world-class military—spearheaded by the Navy—that is capable of challenging, and eventually displacing, America as the world’s preeminent naval power.
Between 2016 and 2020, the Chinese navy added the equivalent of Japan’s entire current surface fleet and it is on track to having nearly twice as many surface ships as the US Navy before the end of the decade.
The problem for China is that to use its navy, it needs access out of its ports and into the Pacific and beyond. But looking out from the east coast of China there are a series of island chains that can be used to block that access.
ISLAND CHAIN DEFENCE CONCEPT
The First Island Chainroughly stretches down Japan, including Okinawa, through Taiwan and the Philippines. The second and third chains include Guam, the Marianas, FSM (Federated States of Micronesia), Midway, and more. This area saw some of the most desperate battles of World War II.
The chains are a problem for Chinese strategists.
This is one reason why China is so serious about capturing Taiwan—they need it to break the First Island Chain.
If Taiwan falls, the First Island Chain is broken, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) gains an unsinkable aircraft carrier and launching point for operations in the Pacific and beyond. If China controls Taiwan, it will expand from there—seizing more of the First Island Chain, up the Ryukyus and down the Batanes. That could eventually allow China to subordinate Japan and the Philippines. Tokyo understands this, which is why it is now openly saying Taiwan’s defence is Japan’s defence.
At the same time, Beijing is working on Taiwan, it is also trying to burrow itself into the Second and Third Island Chains to disrupt American (and Japanese, Australian, Indonesian, Philippines, etc.) planning, and gain the ability to attack the First Island Chain from behind.
Understanding how important “breaking the chains” is for the PLA is fundamental for understanding how the Pacific Islands fit into China’s CNP calculations and grand strategy.
VIEW FROM PACIFIC ISLANDS
Many Pacific Islanders have a better understanding of China and geostrategic issues than some of the top experts in Western think tanks. They have come by this knowledge painfully and over a long time.
Over the last 130 years, parts of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) have been ruled sequentially by Spain, which sold them to Germany (after Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War), which lost them to Japan (after its defeat in World War I), before the United States gained control in World War II.
Each change, decided by factors far outside the control of the FSM people, left a deep impression on the country’s inhabitants. The FSM became independent in 1989—finally getting its own say—and is now party to a Compact of Free Association with the United States. It has also signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Regional leaders, like many around the world, have been trying to balance interests without toppling over. However, as China’s hegemonic intensions become clearer, regional leaders—having seen where this path leads before—are becoming more concerned and more vocal.
In a recent speech, Ambassador Amatlain Elizabeth Kabua, Permanent Representative for the Republic of the Marshall Islands to the United Nations, said: “In recent years, there has been increasingly high-level attention to our region, and while we welcome the engagement, we have [the] motivation to distinguish between someone who is interested in building a durable partnership to help us grow as a people and as a nation—which we welcome and encourage—or someone who is interested in our area just for their own expansion.”
Most leaders in the region want closer and deeper relationships with other democracies—especially in economic development, education, and health care—so that they have a viable option to China’s CNP onslaught.
Many in the region see India as a potential partner in a range of areas, though the many laudable Pacific Island initiatives announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi seem to get blunted in implementation.
Many also want more direct engagement with the US. The most often complaint heard about the United States in Oceania is “Where are you?”
So how can democracies work with Pacific Islanders to create a comprehensive multinational defence to China’s comprehensive national power in a way that benefits all?
THE QUAD IN MICRONESIA
The Pacific Islands are divided into three broad political areas, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. This is a vast area, and covering it all immediately is likely to dissipate the effort and lead to discouragement.
The area that would make the most sense to work with initially is Micronesia.
Micronesia consists of five independent countries, Kiribati, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, FSM and Palau. The last three have Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with the USthat allow their citizens to live and work in the US, and give the USguaranteed military access as well as the “right of strategic denial,” to other states. The region also includes USterritories Guam and the Northern Marianas.
Reasons for the Quad to prioritise Micronesia include:
* Many of the countries have close ties to the US, indeed Guam is the US.
* India has said it wants to improve relations with the Pacific Islands, and has already included them in Quad initiatives such as vaccines.
*Japan, which has a long history in the area, is ramping up engagement, including a recent JMSDF visit to Palau.
*Australia says the region is one that Canberra considers important.
*Being closest to China, the countries of Micronesia are on the strategic front line.
*Three of the countries (Nauru, Palau and Marshalls) recognise Taiwan, making them major targets of Beijing.
*The region is home to strategically crucial and sensitive infrastructure, including major military installations in Guam and a network of critical undersea cables.
*The USis currently renegotiation the COFAs, so there is increased awareness in Washington and Hawaii.
*The recent fragmentation of the Pacific Island Forum, which saw the leaders of the five Micronesian countries say they will leave the organization, means Micronesian leaders are rethinking their regional structures, leaving an opening for new, innovative and more responsive Micronesian collaboration.
Given all that, it would make sense for the Quad, as a group, and as individual countries, to work with the area to create a Micronesian Zone of Security, Prosperity, and Freedom that would knit the region together, letting its countries and territories reinforce each other.
Quad activities would be designed to improve interoperability while benefiting the people of Micronesia. They could range from human security initiatives like those pioneered during the Quad vaccine development, to helping with infrastructure, to enforcement exercises around illegal fisheries.
One thing that would be particularly of use would be a permanent Quad Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR) training and logistics centre based in Micronesia.
THE CHOICE
No matter what the diplomats say, the Quad is about China. And one of the areas under the most persistent Chinese CNP attack is Micronesia. Beijing needs to win there if it has to break out of the “bathtub” of the South and East China Seas created by the Island Chains.
The Quad (and all democracies) has a choice. Help Micronesia fight China’s CNP and become a zone of security, prosperity and freedom, in the process showing democracy really is the better system.
Or watch as countries of the region are pulled into China’s expanding orbit and China’s frontline moves even closer to the shores of the Quad.
There is no third choice.
Cleo Paskal is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and The Sunday Guardian Special Correspondent.
7. Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over?
The subtitle illustrates why this is a national security issue.
Excerpts:
Indeed, gender comes to stand for, or is linked with, all kinds of imagined “infiltrations” of the national body – migrants, imports, the disruption of local economics through the effects of globalization. Thus “gender” becomes a phantom, sometimes specified as the “devil” itself, a pure force of destruction threatening God’s creation (not, I gather, climate change, which would be a much more likely candidate). Such a phantasm of destructive power can only be subdued through desperate appeals to nationalism, anti-intellectualism, censorship, expulsion, and more strongly fortified borders. One reason, then, we need gender studies more than ever is to make sense of this reactionary movement.
The anti-gender ideology movement crosses borders, linking organizations in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and east Asia. The opposition to “gender” is voiced by governments as diverse as Macron’s France and Duda’s Poland, circulating in rightwing parties in Italy, showing up on major electoral platforms in Costa Rica and Colombia, boisterously proclaimed by Bolsonaro in Brazil, and responsible for closing gender studies in several locations, most infamously at the European University in Budapest in 2017 before it relocated to Vienna.
In Germany and throughout eastern Europe “genderism” is likened to “communism” or to “totalitarianism”. In Poland, more than one hundred regions have declared themselves “anti-LGBT zones”, criminalizing an open public life for anyone perceived as belonging to those categories, forcing young people to leave the country or go underground. These reactionary flames have been fanned by the Vatican, which has proclaimed “gender ideology” “diabolical”, calling it a form of “colonizing imperialism” originating in the north and raising fears about the “inculcation” of “gender ideology” in the schools.
Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? | Judith Butler
Increasingly, authoritarians are likening ‘genderism’ to ‘communism’ and ‘totalitarianism’
In June, the Hungarian parliament voted overwhelmingly to eliminate from public schools all teaching related to “homosexuality and gender change”, associating LGBTQI rights and education with pedophilia and totalitarian cultural politics. In late May, Danish MPs passed a resolution against “excessive activism” in academic research environments, including gender studies, race theory, postcolonial and immigration studies in their list of culprits. In December 2020, the supreme court in Romania struck down a law that would have forbidden the teaching of “gender identity theory” but the debate there rages on. Trans-free spaces in Poland have been declared by transphobes eager to purify Poland of corrosive cultural influences from the US and the UK. Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul convention in March sent shudders through the EU, since one of its main objections was the inclusion of protections for women and children against violence, and this “problem” was linked to the foreign word, “gender”.
The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive rightwing Catholic and evangelical organizations. Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.
It is not easy to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence. They assemble and launch incendiary claims in order to defeat what they see as “gender ideology” or “gender studies” by any rhetorical means necessary. For instance, they object to “gender” because it putatively denies biological sex or because it undermines the natural or divine character of the heteronormative family. They fear that men will lose their dominant positions or become fatally diminished if we start thinking along gender lines. They believe that children are being told to change genders, are actively recruited by gay and trans people, or pressured to declare themselves as gay in educational settings where an open discourse about gender is caricatured as a form of indoctrination. And they worry that if something called “gender” is socially accepted, a flood of sexual perversities, including bestiality and pedophilia, will be unleashed upon the earth.
Although nationalist, transphobic, misogynist, and homophobic, the principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements. Indeed, in attacking “gender” they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents; they oppose protections for women against rape and domestic violence; and they deny the legal and social rights of trans people along with a full array of legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment and killing. All this fervor ramped up during a pandemic time in which domestic abuse has soared and queer and trans kids have been deprived of their spaces for gathering in life-supporting communities.
Gender studies does not deny sex; it asks how sex is established, through what medical and legal frameworks
It is easy enough to debunk and even ridicule many of the claims that are made against gender studies or gender identity, since they are based on thin caricatures, and often verge on the phantasmagoric. If it matters (and let’s hope it still does), there is no one concept of gender, and gender studies is a complex and internally diverse field that includes a wide range of scholars. It does not deny sex, but it does tend to ask about how sex is established, through what medical and legal frameworks, how that has changed through time, and what difference it makes to the social organization of our world to disconnect the sex assigned at birth from the life that follows, including matters of work and love.
We generally think of sex assignment as happening once, but what if it is a complex and revisable process, reversible in time for those who have been wrongly assigned? To argue this way is not to take a position against science, but only to ask how science and law enter into the social regulation of identity. “But there are two sexes!” Generally, yes, but even the ideals of dimorphism that govern our everyday conceptions of sex are in many ways disputed by science as well as the intersex movement, which has shown how vexed and consequential sex assignment can be.
To ask questions about gender, that is, how society is organized according to gender, and with what consequences for understanding bodies, lived experience, intimate association, and pleasure, is to engage in a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions that seek to stop and reverse emancipatory change. And yet, “gender studies” is opposed as “dogma” by those who understand themselves on the side of “critique”.
One could go on at length to explain the various methodologies and debates within gender studies, the complexity of scholarship, and the recognition it has received as a dynamic field of study throughout the world, but that would require a commitment to education on the part of the reader and listener. Given that most of these opponents refuse to read any material that might contradict their beliefs or cherrypick from complex texts to support a caricature, how is one to proceed?
Still others claim that the very concept of “gender” is an attack on Christianity (or, in some countries, traditional Islam), and accuse the proponents of “gender” of discriminating against their religious beliefs. And yet, the significant field of gender and religion suggests that the enemies do not come from the outside, and that the dogma is to be found on the side of the censors.
For this reactionary movement, the term “gender” attracts, condenses, and electrifies a diverse set of social and economic anxieties produced by increasing economic precarity under neoliberal regimes, intensifying social inequality, and pandemic shutdown. Stoked by fears of infrastructural collapse, anti-migrant anger and, in Europe, the fear of losing the sanctity of the heteronormative family, national identity and white supremacy, many insist that the destructive forces of gender, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory are to blame. When gender is thus figured as a foreign invasion, these groups clearly reveal that they are in the business of nation-building. The nation for which they are fighting is built upon white supremacy, the heteronormative family, and a resistance to all critical questioning of norms that have clearly restricted the freedoms and imperiled the lives of so many people.
The vanishing of social services under neoliberalism has put pressure on the traditional family to provide care work, as many feminists have rightly argued. In turn, the fortification of patriarchal norms within the family and the state has become, for some, imperative in the face of decimated social services, unpayable debt, and lost income. It is against this background of anxiety and fear that “gender” is portrayed as a destructive force, a foreign influence infiltrating the body politic and destabilizing the traditional family.
Indeed, gender comes to stand for, or is linked with, all kinds of imagined “infiltrations” of the national body – migrants, imports, the disruption of local economics through the effects of globalization. Thus “gender” becomes a phantom, sometimes specified as the “devil” itself, a pure force of destruction threatening God’s creation (not, I gather, climate change, which would be a much more likely candidate). Such a phantasm of destructive power can only be subdued through desperate appeals to nationalism, anti-intellectualism, censorship, expulsion, and more strongly fortified borders. One reason, then, we need gender studies more than ever is to make sense of this reactionary movement.
The anti-gender ideology movement crosses borders, linking organizations in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and east Asia. The opposition to “gender” is voiced by governments as diverse as Macron’s France and Duda’s Poland, circulating in rightwing parties in Italy, showing up on major electoral platforms in Costa Rica and Colombia, boisterously proclaimed by Bolsonaro in Brazil, and responsible for closing gender studies in several locations, most infamously at the European University in Budapest in 2017 before it relocated to Vienna.
In Germany and throughout eastern Europe “genderism” is likened to “communism” or to “totalitarianism”. In Poland, more than one hundred regions have declared themselves “anti-LGBT zones”, criminalizing an open public life for anyone perceived as belonging to those categories, forcing young people to leave the country or go underground. These reactionary flames have been fanned by the Vatican, which has proclaimed “gender ideology” “diabolical”, calling it a form of “colonizing imperialism” originating in the north and raising fears about the “inculcation” of “gender ideology” in the schools.
Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support authoritarian governments
According to Agnieszka Graff, co-author with Elzbieta Korolczuk of Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment, the networks amplifying and circulating the anti-gender viewpoint include the International Organization for the Family, which boasts thousands of participants at its conferences and the online Platform CitizenGo, founded in Spain, which mobilizes people against lectures, exhibitions, and political candidates who defend LGBTQI rights. They claim to have more than 9 million followers, ready to mobilize at an instant (they mobilized against me in Brazil in 2018 when a furious crowd burned the effigy of my “likeness” outside the venue where I was to speak). The third is Agenda Europe, consisting of more than 100 organizations, which casts gay marriage, trans rights, reproductive freedom, and LGBTQI anti-discrimination efforts as assaults on Christianity.
Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims.
They insist that “gender” is an imperialist construct, that it is an “ideology” now being imposed on local cultures of the global south, spuriously drawing on the language of liberation theology and decolonial rhetoric. Or, as the rightwing Italian group Pro Vita maintains, “gender” intensifies the social effects of capitalism whereas the traditional heteronormative family is the last bulwark against social disintegration and anomic individualism. All this seems to follow from the very existence of LGBTQI people, their families, marriages, intimate associations, and ways of living outside the traditional family and their rights to their own public existence. It follows as well from feminist legal claims to reproductive freedom, feminist demands to end sexual violence as well as the economic and social discrimination against women.
At the same time, opponents of “gender” seek recourse to the Bible to defend their views about the natural hierarchy between men and women and the distinctive values of masculine and feminine (although progressive theologians have pointed out that these are based on debatable readings of biblical texts). Assimilating the Bible to natural law doctrine, they claim that assigned sex is divinely declared, suggesting that contemporary biologists and medical doctors are curiously in the service of 13th-century theology.
It does not matter that chromosomal and endocrinological differences complicate the binarism of sex and that sex assignment is revisable. The anti-gender advocates claim that “gender ideologists” deny the material differences between men and women, but their materialism quickly devolves into the assertion that the two sexes are timeless “facts”. The anti-gender movement is not a conservative position with a clear set of principles. No, as a fascist trend, it mobilizes a range of rhetorical strategies from across the political spectrum to maximize the fear of infiltration and destruction that comes from a diverse set of economic and social forces. It does not strive for consistency, for its incoherence is part of its power.
In his well-known list of the elements of fascism, Umberto Eco writes, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” for fascism is “a collage … a beehive of contradictions”. Indeed, this perfectly describes anti-gender ideology today. It is a reactionary incitement, an incendiary bundle of contradictory and incoherent claims and accusations. They feast off the very instability they promise to contain, and their own discourse only delivers more chaos. Through a spate of inconsistent and hyperbolic claims, they concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship.
This form of fascism manifests instability even as it seeks to ward off the “destabilization” of the social order brought about by progressive politics. The opposition to “gender” often merges with anti-migrant furor and fear, which is why it is often, in Christian contexts, merged with Islamophobia. Migrants, too, are figured as “infiltrating”, engaging in “criminal” acts even as they exercise their rights of passage under international law. In the imaginary of the anti-gender ideology advocates, “gender” is like an unwanted migrant, an incoming stain, but also, at the same time, a colonizer or totalitarian who must be thrown off. It mixes right and left discourses at will.
As a fascist trend, the anti-gender movement supports ever strengthening forms of authoritarianism. Its tactics encourage state powers to intervene in university programs, to censor art and television programming, to forbid trans people their legal rights, to ban LGBTQI people from public spaces, to undermine reproductive freedom and the struggle against violence directed at women, children, and LGBTQI people. It threatens violence against those, including migrants, who have become cast as demonic forces and whose suppression or expulsion promises to restore a national order under duress.
That is why it makes no sense for “gender critical” feminists to ally with reactionary powers in targeting trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people. Let’s all get truly critical now, for this is no time for any of the targets of this movement to be turning against one another. The time for anti-fascist solidarity is now.
Judith Butler is visiting distinguished professor of philosophy at the New School University. Butler’s latest book is The Force of Nonviolence (Verso)
8. Global Violence on an Intimate Scale: The Work of ‘Missionaries’ (book review)
Excerpts:
Missionaries insists that writing, story-telling, and fiction have the power to show how individual lives are shaped by abstract violence and that abstract violence becomes legible through its effects on individuals. Lisette pitches the New York Times Magazine the story of her kidnapping. When it is picked up, she realizes, “Her pitch was bullshit, but her story couldn’t be.” The pitch is terrible because she does not know what happened to her, because she cannot make sense of her own concrete experience, “But shitty things happen to people all the time. It doesn’t make a story.” The story — the thing Lisette wants to write, the thing that Missionaries is — links individuals to systems and systems to individuals. In doing the same, the post-9/11 novel cannot afford to be shit even when it is about shitty things happening to people.
Klay uses sweeping geographic range to make violence intimate and precise local knowledge to show violence on a global scale. In this way, Missionaries does not orient or fix war by making war look and feel only a certain way or have a specific nature. It showcases the capacity of fiction to interpret war by telling the story of individuals coming to terms with their own experiences of war.
Global Violence on an Intimate Scale: The Work of ‘Missionaries’ - War on the Rocks
War is a disorienting experience. One way that individuals process it is through writing. Two decades after the attacks that spawned what came to be called the “Global War on Terror,” the intertwined issues of how to tell the story of 9/11 and its meaning remain deeply unsettled. The injuries and interpretations that characterize war are already immensely complicated by their very nature, but they become even more so when the violence has gone on for so long. For many Americans that infamous day is still lived experience, but it is also far enough in the past that young adults who today can vote and enlist in the military were born after 9/11. How to write about the day itself and its aftermath are such important issues because writing has the power to shape the meanings of that event and what came after.
Fiction possesses particular powers that are especially important for telling the story of war and trying to make sense of it. The defining aspects of fiction — its capacity both to chronicle the lives of individuals and to capture an entire society, its moment-by-moment attention to unfolding action and its movement through longer stretches of time, and its ability to zero in on specific locations even as it spans the globe — are especially useful in grappling with 9/11 and its aftermath. The post-9/11 novel turns the traditional novel to new ends by entering into the lived experiences of individual characters in local places while telling a story with global reach.
The 9/11 Commission famously wrote of “failures of imagination” within the U.S. government before the attacks. Novels are, of course, works of imagination. On Sept. 15, 2001, Ian McEwan, who would go on to write about the run-up to the Iraq War in Saturday, claimed in The Guardian that had the hijackers read fiction they would not have become hijackers, “If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim.” McEwan’s line of thinking, laid down immediately after the attacks, has been complemented by other novelists and thinkers as that Tuesday morning recedes in time. In 2008, Zadie Smith charted “Two Paths for the Novel” to show how the post-9/11 novel is riven between making meaning and turning entirely away from it. More recently, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attacks, Jim McDermott’s “Five Pieces of Popular Culture That Wrestled with 9/11” does not look at pieces that are openly and explicitly about 9/11. Texts that are obviously about 9/11 include Tom Junod’s exquisite Esquire piece “The Falling Man,” Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. McDermott, however, turns his attention to work such as The Sopranos, on the theory that, “with its casual racism and misogyny, its deconstruction of morality as simply window dressing and its emphasis on aggression as a law unto itself, the show seemed custom-made for post-9/11 America.” McEwan trains his attention on empathy, Smith turns to mean-making, and McDermott suggests that the meanings of 9/11 may be found in cultural productions that are not obviously about that day and its aftermath. Moreover, in the years after 9/11, formalism — tracing the shape of literary works for their cultural, political, and social resonances, but also treating culture, politics, and social relations as having shapes that the literary helps make visible — emerged as an important approach to literary studies.
The two paths I see for the post-9/11 novel are direct engagement with the Global War on Terror conflicts down one path, and indirect, offset engagement with those conflicts down the other. Concentrated, sustained attention in fiction on America’s two post-9/11 wars exists alongside fiction written during those conflicts that is not explicitly about them. This attention plays out not just in the content of the novel — a recognizable contemporary New York in the manner of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, a New York shaped by the counterfactual American victory in Vietnam in the manner of Matt Gallagher’s Empire City, or the borders of conflict in the manner of Elliot Ackerman’s Dark at the Crossing — but in its form: Its rhythms, handling of space, and the interactions between the two.
Philip Klay’s Missionaries is a post-9/11 novel that uses the formal properties of the novel — its geographic sweep and local focus, and its social reach and its deep-dive into single lives — to anchor violence in the lives of individual characters even as he chronicles the societies that perpetuate and continue violence. Klay, a Marine Corps veteran who deployed to Iraq, shows how an intense focus on specific locations is necessary to tell the story of global political violence. His novel shows the power of the novel today to make intimate and personal immensely complicated political, social, and military conflicts.
Missionaries centers on war but moves around. While it takes political violence as its subject, it does not limit its view to Iraq or Afghanistan even though its setting involves Global War on Terror conflicts. Klay probes the ability of writing to engage with political violence by putting American involvement in Colombia alongside American involvement in Afghanistan. Commentators on Klay’s novel are split over its methods and overall effect. Writing in the New York Times, Juan Gabriel Vásquez says, “Klay’s understanding of Colombia, the main theater of war in ‘Missionaries,’ is the chief source of admiration for this reviewer. There are no simple wars, of course, but the Colombian conflict is as intricate as they come.” Vásquez’s admiration for Klay’s handling of the complicated specificities of political violence in Colombia is different from Zac Davis’s take on the novel in America Magazine, “What happens to a world, a nation, a society constantly engaged in forever-war? It is an enormous question that Klay understands can be answered only by engaging the lives of individuals, and especially the forgotten ones.” Vásquez sees specific forms of violence playing out in a specific location, but Davis emphasizes that forever war brings home how any location is embedded in a series of relations. Klay himself says that Missionaries is about the impact on local communities of “abstract systems of violence moving around the world.” Zeroing in on places is crucial to telling a story with a global reach. Without a broad geographic sweep, the impact of outside forces on a location is hard to see. Writing about abstractions takes on added importance when their power is made intimate and relevant.
The novel opens in Colombia. Klay rotates narrators early in the novel, a technique familiar to readers of his first book, Redeployment. Abel, a young Colombian, is first, his story beginning in 1986. Klay’s writing is relentlessly local from the start: “My town sat on the top of a small hill by the side of a river whose banks held only sand. At noon you had to walk quickly so as not to burn your feet.” This laser-like focus on a single place, on its features, and on what it physically feels like to be there are distinguishing aspects of this first line that continue throughout the novel. The book’s ability to show Colombia in all its complexity arises from Klay’s movements through different parts of the country, which allow him to chart the political, social, cultural, religious, and economic dynamics at work. He devotes considerable attention in the second half of the novel to contrasting privileged students from Bogotá with the residents of Norte de Santander. Valencia, the daughter of a high-ranking military officer, works for Luisa, a woman from Norte de Santander who experiences political violence first-hand early in the novel and spends the rest of the novel interviewing victims of violence. When Valencia mishandles an interview, the result is not what she expects:
Afterward, Valencia braced herself for shouting and screaming, but in a way what happened was worse. Luisa sat her down and said quietly, “We have to show these people respect. If you are not capable of that, you need to think hard about what you are doing here, and what type of person you are.”
Klay’s ability to draw locations and people so precisely yields a detailed picture of an entire country.
The reverberations of violence in Colombia exist in the novel next to political violence in Afghanistan. Missionaries opens in Colombia, but its second chapter lands in Afghanistan. Lisette, an American journalist from Pennsylvania, tells her story, “It didn’t begin with the bombings. By which I mean Kabul was no longer Kabul well before then.” Through Lisette, the novel shows a place in transition, a place where political violence is still a reality, but less and less American attention is paid to it. She takes aim at the indifference of other journalists, aid workers, politicians, and even well-informed everyday Americans when she notes, “‘The tide has turned,’ Obama had told us in 2012. Indeed.”
Even Lisette’s attention flags as she leaves Kabul for home. Back stateside, she types out the email that almost everyone who writes about Missionaries inevitably quotes, asking, “Are there any wars right now where we’re not losing?” The answer she receives is “Colombia.” On the strength of this reply, Lisette travels to Colombia, where she is kidnapped in Norte de Santander. The novel sets Colombia and Afghanistan as opposites when it comes to winning (or at least not losing) and losing. But the distinction between winning and losing appears increasingly irrelevant in the face of Klay’s depiction of the realities of political violence on individual lives.
The novel’s focus on the local and the particular, stemming from its confidence that it can trace change in a place over time, takes on new meaning at its end. The stability implied in Lissette’s “we” — that it refers to a single county, that “we” are Americans, that lines between groups of people can be clearly drawn — was always hard to realize or sustain.
Although the novel primarily focuses on two places, it ends in a third place altogether, the United Arab Emirates:
An American mercenary was aiming a laser at the instruction of an American pilot operating a Chinese drone. They were communicating over an encrypted frequency routed through a Canadian aircraft mounted with Swedish surveillance technology bounced from repeater hub to repeater hub to the main air-ground tower at their base in the Empty Quarter.
That Klay piles country name on top of country name here is one way he makes concrete “abstract systems of violence moving around the world.” Making these real and visible is the work of Missionaries. Without that legibility, the individuals who experience violence are like Lisette, who, after her kidnapping, says, “I don’t know what happened to me.” Uncertainty results from a lived experience torqued by abstract systems of violence.
Missionaries insists that writing, story-telling, and fiction have the power to show how individual lives are shaped by abstract violence and that abstract violence becomes legible through its effects on individuals. Lisette pitches the New York Times Magazine the story of her kidnapping. When it is picked up, she realizes, “Her pitch was bullshit, but her story couldn’t be.” The pitch is terrible because she does not know what happened to her, because she cannot make sense of her own concrete experience, “But shitty things happen to people all the time. It doesn’t make a story.” The story — the thing Lisette wants to write, the thing that Missionaries is — links individuals to systems and systems to individuals. In doing the same, the post-9/11 novel cannot afford to be shit even when it is about shitty things happening to people.
Klay uses sweeping geographic range to make violence intimate and precise local knowledge to show violence on a global scale. In this way, Missionaries does not orient or fix war by making war look and feel only a certain way or have a specific nature. It showcases the capacity of fiction to interpret war by telling the story of individuals coming to terms with their own experiences of war.
Katherine Voyles holds a Ph.D. in English from U.C. Irvine. She uses that background to write on the cultures of national security and national security in culture in a wide variety of places including Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Foreign Policy. She also serves as co-managing editor of The Strategy Bridge.
9. What Have We Learned from Twenty Years of War?
What Have We Learned from Twenty Years of War? - Modern War Institute
What lessons should the United States and its allies take from twenty years of irregular warfare since 9/11? What will the future of irregular warfare look like? Episode 38 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast is a recording of the keynote policy panel, featuring prominent scholars and practitioners, from the inaugural Irregular Warfare Initiative conference held on September 10, 2021.
The panel opens with a broad agreement that while the nature of irregular warfare has not changed, its character will continue to evolve. A range of topics are then discussed, including a reflection on the causes of the United States’ strategic failure in Afghanistan, the important role of information and influence operations in modern conflict, what institutional reforms might be needed within the US government to succeed in future irregular warfare contexts, and more.
Panelists include:
Major General Richard Angle is the commanding general of 1st Special Forces Command, with operational experience spanning most conflict zones of America’s military commitments over the past twenty-five years.
Ambassador and retired Lieutenant General Doug Lute served in a multitude of roles, including as deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan and as the United States representative to NATO.
The hosts for this episode are Kyle Atwell and Andy Maher, please contact them with any questions about this episode or the Irregular Warfare Podcast.
10. Death of detained Uyghur imam underscores harsh conditions in Xinjiang re-education camps
Crimes against humanity are being committed against the Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party.
Death of detained Uyghur imam underscores harsh conditions in Xinjiang re-education camps
Qeyimahun Qari survived 15 years in a prison only to die in an internment camp.
A Uyghur imam who survived 15 years in prison for separatism in northwestern China’s Xinjiang only to die during a two-year stint in an internment camp, raises questions of torture and highlights the abusive nature of the camp system that has drawn accusations of genocide, said Uyghurs with knowledge of the case.
Qeyimahun Qari, whose death in 2018 has only recently come to light, was sentenced in 1991 for separatism and served a 15-year sentence in the No. 1 prison in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi).
Authorities arrested him again in 2017 and put him in an internment camp, the usual practice with former prisoners, said a Uyghur from the same county as the imam and who is now living in exile.
“He was the imam of our No. 4 township mosque from 2007 to 2010,” said the source who is from Tokkuzak county in Kashgar (Kashi) prefecture, where Qeyimahun lived and worked. “He was arrested in 2017 and died in 2018.”
“He was a healthy man who was able to handle all the physical work in courtyards and on farms, and no one had ever observed that he had any health issues, even on the day when he was working in a cornfield and was taken away by the police,” he said.
At the time of his initial arrest 30 years ago, Qeyimahun respected in his community for his religious and social activities as well as his charisma, he said.
Qeyimahun’s second arrest came when a village policeman seized him after morning prayers while the imam was taking water to his field, according to the source. At the time, Qeyimahun was 59 and had no health problems, said the Uyghur in exile.
About two years later, authorities handed over his dead body to his family, the source said.
Qeyimahun’s case underscores that the treatment of Uyghurs in the four-year-old internment camp system is far worse than regular prison life, said Memettursun Osman, a Uyghur former camp detainee.
“Based on my personal experience I can say that regulations and conditions in the camps, including torture are tenfold harsher than in prisons and other detention facilities before 2017,” he said.
China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of detention camps since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated and tortured incarcerated Muslims.
Until their last breath
One police officer who had been stationed at a camp in Opal township for two years confirmed that Qeyimahun was found dead there at the end of 2018.
“I heard that the one with the name Qeyimahun Qari died in the camp,” said the officer who did not give his name.
Qeyimahun was rushed to the hospital a few hours before his death, the policeman said, adding that he did not know which illness or ailment the imam was suffering from.
“He died in the hospital,” he said.
“I don’t what he was taken to the hospital for,” he added.
Officers at police stations in two other townships where Qeyimahun had been held — Aral and Bulaqsu townships — told RFA that they were not authorized to speak about sensitive issues.
Because Qeyimahun was an imam who had overseen many weddings and ceremonies, the police frequently interrogated him inside the camp to try to obtain information about the Uyghurs who came to his mosque, the source said.
During the interrogation sessions, Qeyimahun declined to reveal their names and other personal details to prevent them from being arrested and detained, prompting authorities to torture him, said the source.
The former imam’s sudden death caused residents of Bulaqsu, where Qeyimahun lived and where his mosque was located, to fret over the condition of their relatives interned in the same camp, especially the elderly and the weak.
Because the interrogations and torture inside the camp were harsher than those that detainees were subjected to in prison, many Uyghurs confessed to charges they hadn’t committed.
Authorities also continued to hold some of the detainees after they confessed to “crimes” they were charged with, hoping to get them to expose the “crimes” of others, Memettursun said.
Authorities told the camp detainees that they would be released after they had demonstrated good behavior and had confessed to their “crimes,” he said.
Mehmettursun told RFA that during his detention in a camp in Hotan (Hetian) prefecture in southwestern Xinjiang, he saw other inmates “confess” to crimes just to avoid being tortured and then be transferred to a prison.
“I know they torture the detainees until they are about to take their last breath, and sometimes they don’t even care if the subject is still breathing or not,” he said.
Breaking the silence
Increasing international awareness of the camp system and other abuses including forced sterilization of women and forced labor has prompted parliaments in Canada, the Netherlands, the U.K., and Lithuania, as well the U.S. State Department to brand China’s actions in the region as genocide.
Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), said the 43 countries made history with their statement condemning China’s atrocities against the Uyghur people and calling on China to grant the U.N. unfettered access to Xinjiang.
“Sadly, there have been many countries that are not speaking out on Uyghur genocide due to Chinese pressure or economic relations with China,” he told RFA. “Some are even shamelessly supporting and defending China’s ongoing genocide.”
Isa noted the signature of Turkey, where some 50,000 Uyghurs live, was important because China has used pressure and deceptive tactics in the past to keep Turkey silent on the Uyghur crisis.
“Apparently, these tactics backfired,” he said. “The signing of the joint statement by Turkey will definitely help break the silence of some Muslim countries and take active measures in the future.”
The Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project also praised the action by the U.N. member states that signed the statement.
“U.N. member states have just taken the next step towards accountability for the Chinese government’s brutal treatment of Uyghurs,” said Omer Kanat, the organization’s executive director.
Zhang Jun, China’s ambassador to the U.N., later rejected what he called “groundless” accusations at a press conference on China's position on human rights issues.
“Ambassador Zhang said that the attempts by the U.S. and a few other countries to politicize and manipulate human rights issues will find no support,” said a statement on the website of China’s permanent mission to the U.N.
“People around the world are clear-eyed about the truth. More than 80 countries have made statements to support China.”
At a regular press conference in Beijing on Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin echoed Zhang’s comments, saying that “a small number of Western countries, based on disinformation, rumors and lies, keep attacking and maligning China on issues relating to Xinjiang and other matters and interfering in China’s domestic affairs with human rights as a disguise.”
Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
11. Green Berets Hone Their Destruction Of Enemy Air Defenses Skills For A Peer Conflict
Green Berets Hone Their Destruction Of Enemy Air Defenses Skills For A Peer Conflict
Army Special Forces soldiers knocked out "enemy" air defenses, snooped on mock missile silos, and sabotaged a simulated port in a recent exercise.
YouTube screen capture
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U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers, more commonly referred to as Green Berets, knocked out simulated enemy air-defense assets during a recent exercise. They also sabotaged a mock port facility and collected intelligence on stand-ins for strategic targets, such as radar sites and missile silos. This training highlights how the U.S. military's entire special operations community has been refocusing on preparing to support future higher-end conflicts, including against potential near-peer adversaries such as Russia or China, after decades of conducting low-intensity counter-terrorism missions.
Elements of the Army's 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) carried out these missions in support of conventional troops from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, during a recent rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, La. This appears to be the same exercise that, in September, saw mock enemy troops — also known as the opposing force (OPFOR) — use missile and machine-gun armed unmanned ground vehicles for the first time, as you can read more about here.
Personnel at the JRTC also played the role of local partner forces working with the Geren Berets. British Army soldiers from 4th Battalion, The Rifles — a specialized infantry unit — presently assigned to that service's Special Operations Brigade, were also attached to the American special operations force for this exercise.
"That really replicates what we'll see in future conflicts with multinational partners and our allies overseas in combat," Maj. Marshall McGurk, a Special Operations Training Detachment (SOTD) Advanced Operational Base (AOB) Lead Observer Controller/Trainer at JRTC, said in a video about the exercise, seen above, that the Army released.
For the Green Berets, this exercise at the JRTC was "a little bit of a departure from what we're used to due to the fact that this under the auspices of LSCO, which is large scale combat operations," Sgt. Major Afshin Aryana, from Company A, 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, said in his own video interview. The 7th group has a regional focus on operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has typically seen them support allies and partners conducting counterinsurgency and counternarcotics missions. The group has also deployed detachments in support of operations in Iraq, as well as the recently concluded campaign in Afghanistan, on multiple occasions over the past 20 years.
"Our mission here is to support 3rd of the 101st in large scale operations, largely initiated with our ability to take out integrated air defense systems [IADS]," Aryana explained. "The IADS fight was a huge part of it."
"As you have these systems all around the battlefield, essentially, the radar in one area can pick up targeting for a rocket in another area," he continued. "Unless you destroy the main system, the hub, at the end of the day, no aircraft can fly into that area."
YouTube screen capture
What appears to be a surrogate for a Russian-made truck-mounted 30N6 Flap Lid fire control radar that was part of the recent exercise at the JRTC. Variants of the Flap Lid radar are components of the S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missile systems.
In spite of its name, the 101st Airborne Division is actually an air-assault-focused unit that specializes in operations using helicopters. "And an airborne unit that has planned an air assault, like the 101st, if we can't get those birds on the ground, then the mission is already lost," Aryana said.
The issue of enemy air defenses, both in terms of ground-based assets and hostile aircraft, is something that has been largely absent in U.S. counter-terrorism operations in the past two decades. Those missions have, with some exceptions, generally taken place in environments where the airspace above has been entirely permissive. This is something that simply cannot be guaranteed during future conflicts, especially potential large-scale fights against major adversaries, such as China or Russia.
In addition, suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses, or SEAD/DEAD, are missions that are typically assigned to friendly aircraft, which face increasing risks themselves. In recent years, it has only become more and more apparent that other assets, including special operations forces on the ground, will be important pieces of the SEAD/DEAD puzzle in the future.
Back in 2017, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Don Hampton, who has been referred to as the deadliest F-16 pilot, said as much in an interview with The War Zone's own Tyler Rogoway:
There are ways in and around those [air defense] systems and I will go back to one of my life-long premises—anything that kills a SAM or part of a SAM can be a Wild Weasel. So it doesn't necessarily mean it's me in a tactical airframe. It might be special forces teams on the ground blowing up radars. It might be naval warships standing offshore if they're within range of their guns and just blasting the hell out of them.
Aryana also pointed out that commanders would not be able to take for granted their ability to regularly communicate with Green Berets in the field in future large-scale operations. This would be especially true with regard to Operational Detachment Alphas (ODA), or A-Teams, the smallest Army Special Forces units, operating deep behind enemy lines. "Just the simple writ large understanding that that is no longer on the table," he said.
YouTube screen capture
A map showing part of the operations area for the recent JRTC exercise that Green Berets from the 7th Special Forces Group participated in.
"We have to give good commander's guidance for ODAs to operate for multiple days without constant guidance or real-time updates, to develop their own intelligence, and to be a more self-sufficient organization," the Army Special Forces soldier continued. "This leads us and the ODAs to learn what we can and can't do and it teaches a decentralized sense of leadership."
After helping to neutralize the mock air defenses during the recent JRTC exercise, the Green Berets turned their attention to other missions, including hampering enemy activity or otherwise collecting information about what those forces might be doing. "We did this through things such as reconnaissance missions on strategic assets like radar and missile silos and whatnot," according to Aryana.
Aryana's mention of "missile silos" here is particularly interesting. There have been multiple reports this year that about indications that the Chinese military is dramatically expanding its silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) forces.
Another "one of those [strategic assets] there was this port that belonged to the people of [the fictional country of] Arnland, but the [OPFOR] had taken control of that port," Aryana said. "We couldn't destroy the port, because we didn't want to destroy critical infrastructure for the people in Arnland, so we ended up just disabling it for a period of seven days, which stopped the flow of equipment and resupply to the enemy."
YouTube screen capture
A Green Beret sets simulated demolitions charges to disable a piece of electric infrastructure at a mock port during the recent JRTC exercise.
Of course, U.S. Army Special Forces units, as well as other American special operations forces, have trained over the years to gather intelligence, support the targeting of, and otherwise conduct raids on strategic targets and critical infrastructure, and put those skills to use in actual combat. A prime historical example is the Great Scud Hunt, during which coalition special operators sought out Iraqi Scud ballistic missiles during the first Gulf War in 1991.
At the same time, many of these skills have not been core features of U.S. special operations missions in recent decades. What Aryana described here falls very much in line with a recent push within the Army's Special Forces community, in particular, to be prepared to carry out these kinds of tasks, including covert and clandestine reconnaissance and intelligence gathering on such sites in contexts short of an actual conflict. An unclassified Army white paper released last year outlined plans to establish contingents of Green Berets dedicated to performing these kinds of tasks, which the service described broadly as the "Hard Target Defeat" mission, something you can read about more here.
All told, the missions assigned to the Green Berets from 7th Special Forces Group during this exercise at the JRTC very much reflect what American special operations forces could be called on to do, together with other coalition partners, in a future high-end conflict.
Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com
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12. For the US's Vietnam-era covert special operators, the quietest missions were also the most dangerous
We have learned so much from MACV-SOG over the years. It is still one of the best special operations organizations ever developed.
For the US's Vietnam-era covert special operators, the quietest missions were also the most dangerous
msn.com · by insider@insider.com (Stavros Atlamazoglou) 3 days ago
© US Air Force/Capt. Billie D Tedford US Air Force Bell UH-1P helicopters from the 20th Special Operations Squadron fly into Cambodia in 1970. US Air Force/Capt. Billie D Tedford
- During the Vietnam War, a select group of US commandos carried out secret missions behind enemy lines.
- MACV-SOG, as it was known, sent small teams on across Vietnam's borders to conduct raids and gather intelligence.
- The enemy was the best source for that intelligence, but capturing prisoners was SOG's most dangerous mission.
During the Vietnam War, a select group of American commandos conducted some of the most sensitive missions of the entire conflict, including snatching live enemy prisoners.
Composed of Green Berets, Recon Marines, Navy SEALs, Air Commandos, and local fighters and mercenaries, SOG specialized in strategic reconnaissance, direct action, and unconventional-warfare operations.
SOG went where US troops weren't supposed to be, as US presidential administrations had publicly said no American GIs were fighting outside South Vietnam.
Their main battleground was the infamous Ho Chi Mihn Trail that snaked from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia and into South Vietnam, supplying the insurgency there.
Across the border
© SOG A SOG team reconnoiters the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. SOG
Cross-border operations were fraught with danger. The small SOG recon teams had to survive on their wits against a devastatingly superior enemy force.
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SOG commandos would be inserted by helicopters or small boats miles from their target and patrol toward their objective while trying to avoid the thousands of enemy troops scattered throughout the area.
One of SOG's primary mission sets was to gather intelligence about North Vietnamese troop numbers and movements. During these reconnaissance operations, SOG commandos would try to observe or take photographs of enemy formations, camps, or other details, such as bulldozer or tank trails.
They would also often try to bug enemy communication lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail or place seismic sensors that supposedly could calculate the number of troops passing through. They could also steal documents and maps that contained the positions and numbers of enemy in the vicinity.
In order to make sense of that intelligence, US commanders and military intelligence officers needed someone to provide context - or, even better, the "plans and intentions" behind it.
The enemy was the best source for that information, but capturing live prisoners was perhaps the most dangerous and risky mission that SOG commandos conducted.
'We want prisoners'
© Courtesy photo SOG Recon Team getting ready to be inserted. Courtesy photo
MACV-SOG encouraged and incentivized prisoner snatching, either as a specific objective or when the opportunity presented itself. SOG recon teams that captured an enemy soldier received a $100 bonus, plus five days of relaxation and recuperation anywhere in the world.
SOG teams had "a few contingency-based" standard-operating procedures for prisoner-of-war operations, "not the honey-pot snatch you're thinking about," John Stryker Meyer, a Green Beret who deployed twice with SOG, told Insider, referring to a practice in covert operations in which a person, usually a woman, is used to lure a target, typically a man.
There were no overarching standard-operating procedures for capturing live prisoners, however, and every SOG team had to come up with innovative ways that worked for them.
One SOG operator, Lynne Black, devised a creative but dangerous method. Black calculated the right amount of C-4 plastic explosive needed to knock out but not kill a man - only after much trial and error, including testing different amounts on himself and knocking himself unconscious several times.
Black's method required a SOG operator to place an explosive charge on a path or trail behind enemy lines and detonate it remotely after a North Vietnamese soldier had passed by.
The blast would stun but not kill the enemy soldier, and the SOG commandos would pounce, apprehending the disoriented North Vietnamese. If they could only find groups of North Vietnamese troops, the SOG recon team would kill everyone but the man targeted for capture.
© Courtesy photo SOG Recon Team practicing extraction by rope ladders. Courtesy photo
Another approach was to actually assault a small North Vietnamese position deep behind enemy lines.
SOG recon teams carried a lot more firepower than a conventional unit of the same size, but they were only made up of six to 10 operators, which meant they were limited in which outposts they could attack. They couldn't assault an enemy camp, but they could go after one of the checkpoints that littered the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Meyer described how those "door-knock missions" were conducted along the trail in 1969 and 1970.
"The NVA had checkpoints with a booth or a little small station, and we were going to hit one of those to get a live POW," Meyer told Insider. "We're going to hit it with [tear] gas first, go in there quick, kill everybody except for one and bring them back."
The commitment of North Vietnamese troops, as well as indoctrination efforts by their commanders, often meant the North Vietnamese targeted by SOG teams fiercely resisted capture, equating it to a slow and painful death in American hands.
On one mission, a SOG recon team captured a North Vietnamese prisoner and flew back to their forward operating base. While en route, SOG commandos inspected their prisoner more closely, only to find that it was a woman. In their moment of surprise, the prisoner escaped, jumping from the helicopter to her death.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
msn.com · by insider@insider.com (Stavros Atlamazoglou) 3 days ago
13. An "Oh So Social" Conversation: "Damascus Station" by David McCloskey 16 November 2021 1800hrs.
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An "Oh So Social" Conversation: "Damascus Station" by David McCloskey
The “Oh So Social” Conversation Series is a virtual event created by The OSS Society to bring together leading figures from the intelligence and special operations communities to discuss critical national security issues.
On November 16, 2021, join General David Petraeus, USA (Ret.) for a discussion with former CIA officer David McCloskey about his new novel, Damascus Station. Called "the best spy novel I have ever read" by General Petraeus, Damascus Station is set against the backdrop of a Syria pulsing with fear and rebellion and is a gripping thriller that offers a textured portrayal of espionage, love, loyalty, and betrayal in one of the most difficult CIA assignments on the planet.
“In his first novel, former CIA analyst McCloskey tackles the Syrian civil war in all its complexity ... Using his own experience to great advantage, McCloskey vividly details multiple aspects of tradecraft, including the elaborate rituals employed to detect and avoid surveillance. The human side of the story is equally well developed—not only the verboten romance, but also the textured portrayals of various supporting characters ... A strong debut.”—Booklist
“The most realistic and authentic depiction of modern-day tradecraft in nonpermissive and hostile environments you will find in print. I am shocked the CIA’s Publication Review Board allowed David McCloskey’s Damascus Station to see the light of day. Read it now, before it is banned!” —Jack Carr, Navy SEAL sniper and New York Times best-selling author of The Devil’s Hand
Please click here to register for this event.
Thanks to our sponsors: General Atomics, In-Q-Tel, BCG Federal and FiServ.
The spearhead points the way forward.
14. What Previous Covid-19 Waves Tell Us About the Virus Now
What Previous Covid-19 Waves Tell Us About the Virus Now
After another brutal spike in coronavirus cases and deaths this summer — fueled by the Delta variant — infections are declining in the United States, down 50 percent from their peak in September.
Experts say what comes next is hard to predict, and we often do not know why the virus spreads the way it does. But looking back at the outbreak so far can provide some clues about how the virus may spread in the future.
Average cases during phases of the pandemic
Average cases per 100,000 people
Few or no cases
10
30
50
70
100
250
Spring 2020
Through May
Summer 2020
June – August
Fall 2020
September – November
Winter
December – February
Spring 2021
March – May
Summer and Fall 2021
June – Oct. 20
Note: Most Nebraska counties did not report data during the summer of 2021.
The country has suffered through five waves of the pandemic now, depending on how you count. “Each of these waves has a different complexity and pattern,” said Alessandro Vespignani, the director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston.
During the first wave, for instance, strict stay-at-home measures and drastic changes in behavior may have stalled the virus for a time. Last fall, with those measures and behavior comparatively relaxed, record-breaking surges in the Midwest rippled outward to the South and both coasts. By the time the highly contagious Delta variant fueled a wave across the country this summer, vaccines were widely available, shifting the pattern once again.
“Vaccines have clearly changed which places have been hit and how much they’ve been hit,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University.
Below is a look at five times that the U.S. case curve hit a peak, and the lessons and insights experts have gleaned from each wave.
The first outbreaks
In the spring of 2020, the first wave hit a few areas particularly hard, including New York City, New Orleans and Albany, Ga. A lot came down to random chance insofar as where the virus struck first, experts said, though population density and transportation hubs may have played a role.
Tests were hard to come by during this period, so cases were drastically underreported. But death data indicates the Northeast’s outbreak was one of the worst of the whole pandemic — one in about 400 New York City residents died within the span of two months.
Early stay-at-home orders and widespread, drastic behavioral changes flattened the curve in those outbreaks, however, preventing the coronavirus from rippling across the country in waves, the way it would in later surges.
While hospitals overflowed in the Northeast corridor, nearby areas like Maine did not see large outbreaks. Isolated hot spots broke out largely in places where people were unable to socially distance, like nursing homes, prisons and meatpacking plants.
“I think it’s easy to miss how bad things could have gotten and how much better we did than we could have largely because of the lockdowns,” said Justin Lessler, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina.
Hot spots in the Sun Belt
Cases surged again in the summer of 2020, but this time Sun Belt states suffered the worst outbreaks. Many states that set new records for cases and deaths were also those that reopened first, including South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Experts say seasonality — perhaps the Sun Belt’s summer heat driving people indoors — may also have been a factor.
The summer surge slammed many metropolitan areas of the South and Southwest, including Houston, Miami and Phoenix. Without tight virus restrictions in place, the virus spread outward into suburbs and exurbs. By the end of the summer, most of the worst outbreaks were occurring in rural areas.
“If you think of the spring wave in 2020, it was more pointlike around urban areas. In the other waves, you see more of a general flow,” Dr. Vespignani said, “Like when you throw a stone in a pond.”
The winter wave
The flow of cases is clearer in the surge that began in the Upper Midwest in September 2020. North and South Dakota had few virus restrictions in place to contain an outbreak, and both states had particularly bad spikes. One in 10 residents tested positive for the virus in the fall in North Dakota, and experts think many more cases went undetected.
From there, the outbreak expanded beyond the Midwest, reaching both coasts and stretching down to the South in a devastating wave. The country saw more daily cases and deaths in January than any other time before or since.
“You do see this movement, almost like it’s moving from county to county,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Columbia University, who said researchers found community-to-community transmission played an important role in virus spread during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. But Dr. Shaman said factors other than proximity could have also played an important role with Covid.
Disparate communities may have similar school opening dates, for instance, experience the same cold fronts, or share similar behavior patterns, all of which could lead to independent outbreaks at the same time.
“When you’re looking at anything after October of last year, the virus is everywhere. It didn’t need to be reintroduced,” Dr. Shaman said.
Then, in one community after another, cases fell often as quickly as they had risen. A sharp fall after a peak is not uncommon during epidemics, experts said. When a virus rapidly spreads through a community, it eventually runs out of people to infect.
A mystery in Michigan
By Spring 2021, U.S. cases had retreated far from their winter peak. At the same time, a more-contagious variant that had fueled an enormous surge in the United Kingdom, called Alpha, was quickly becoming dominant in the United States.
Michigan saw a large surge in cases and deaths, worrying experts that the variant would cause a similar nationwide outbreak. Instead, the virus seemed to stop at the Michigan border in May.
Epidemiologists still do not know why Michigan was unlucky — or why the outbreak did not spread to neighboring states. But some noted that it took place right around when all adults first became eligible for the vaccine, and before social distancing behavior loosened significantly.
It’s possible that people became more cautious during the resurgence, slowing the spread, said Dr. Lessler, the University of North Carolina epidemiologist. Then vaccines helped stamp it out.
Delta’s devastation
In June, U.S. coronavirus cases were at a low point not seen since the beginning of the pandemic, and nearly half the population had received at least one shot. States lifted virtually all virus restrictions and people relaxed their behavior in celebration.
The timing proved disastrous, especially for areas with lower vaccination rates. Another variant, this time Delta, took hold and quickly grew to account for a majority of U.S. cases. Missouri saw the first big surge of the Delta wave.
“That’s where the fire was ignited; then the fire started to spread to other places,” Dr. Vespignani said.
Soon, that outbreak moved across Arkansas, then Louisiana, both states with low vaccination rates. Florida became another early Delta hot spot. By the end of August, most states in the South had hit new records for daily cases or deaths and the virus turned northward, causing surges in the upper Midwest and Mountain West.
While the Delta wave rolled across much of the country, some places were relatively spared.
“That fire was never able to get, for instance, into the Northeast corridor,” Dr. Vespignani said. “It’s where there’s one of the highest vaccination rates. It’s like there’s a wall.”
Some experts say that the vaccination campaign and much of the country having already experienced several waves of outbreaks — which have conferred some immunity to those who were infected and recovered — have made them cautiously optimistic for the winter.
Dr. Lessler, who helps run the Covid-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, a consortium of research groups that model the future of the outbreak, said none of the groups forecast a substantial winter peak in the United States this year.
“We might see a little bump in cases, and of course people could radically change behavior or we could see a variant,” Dr. Lessler said, but he added that he did not think a substantial peak was likely.
All the same, there are bound to remain places where the virus can spread, as each new wave has shown. And questions still remain about how long immunity will last.
“The difference between the Michigan Alpha wave in Spring 2021 and the Delta wave is really telling you that the wall that you’ve built might work for one variant, but it might not be enough for the next one,” Mr. Vespignani said. “There might be another variant that is more transmissible and with more immune evasion. That’s why we need to build the wall as high as possible.”
15. IAEA warns of North Korea scenario in Middle East if Iran’s nuclear diplomacy fails
IAEA warns of North Korea scenario in Middle East if Iran’s nuclear diplomacy fails
UN atomic watchdog chief Rafael Grossi warned on Saturday that should nuclear diplomacy fail with Iran, the Middle East may find itself facing a scenario similar to that of North Korea.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) agents were kicked out of North Korea in 2009 and now the country is believed to have dozens of nuclear weapons.
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IAEA Director General said in an interview with NBC News: “The case of [North Korea] should remind us of what may happen if diplomatic efforts go wrong.”
“It’s a clear example, it’s an indication, it’s a beacon. If diplomacy fails, you may be confronted with a situation that would have enormous political impact in the Middle East and beyond,” Grossi added.
The IAEA’s monitoring program in Iran is “no longer intact” after Tehran refused to repair cameras at nuclear facilities, Grossi said, adding that the UN watchdog might be unable to “reconstruct the picture” of what the Iranians are doing.
Iran said in September it refused to give the IAEA access to surveillance cameras at Iranian nuclear facilities.
Grossi also stressed that he has been unable to establish direct communication with the Iranian government since Ebrahim Raisi became president in June.
Experts believe Raisi has been stacking the deck by appointing hardliner government officials to pressure the US into making concessions that favor Tehran in the talks over reviving the abandoned 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Talks to revive the nuclear accord which former US President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018 have stalled under Raisi and Washington has repeatedly expressed that its patience was wearing thin and threatened an ambiguous “Plan B” should diplomacy fail.
“I have never spoken to the new foreign minister. I hope to be able to have the opportunity to meet with him soon because it’s very important… so when there is a problem, when there is misunderstanding, when there is a disagreement, we can talk about it. I used to have it before, and I would assume it that I would be the normal thing,” Grossi said.
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16. America’s political scientists are worried about “lethal partisanship”
Something else that should concern us very much.
America’s political scientists are worried about “lethal partisanship”
About 40% of partisans consider supporters of the other side to be downright evil
Oct 7th 2021
SEATTLE
THE TAGLINE for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) held in Seattle last weekend read “Promoting Pluralism.” Under the sunny geometric windows of the city’s convention centre, and through the poorly lit rectangles of Zoom rooms, scholars met to discuss, among other things, the various threats to American democracy, and whether the country’s polarised political parties could peacefully coexist. Like experts on the use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the spectre of some disastrous future hung over the discussions and was made only slightly less alarming by the technical language used to describe it.
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Scholars of American politics are particularly dismayed by rising levels of “affective polarisation,” the political science term for the hostility one person feels towards members of the other party relative to the feelings they have towards members of their own party. Levels of affective polarisation have risen more than two-fold since the 1970s when the American National Election Studies, a quadrennial academic survey started at the University of Michigan, began asking citizens to rate how they felt about members of either major party. In 1978, according to the survey, the difference between Americans’ ratings of members of their own and ratings of members of the other party on a 100-point “feeling thermometer” scale was 27 points. The gap had widened to 56 by 2020.
Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University calls this phenomenon “identity-based” polarisation. In her 2018 book “Uncivil Agreement” Ms Mason crunched a mass of survey data to reveal how ideological, religious and racial identities have become “sorted” into overlapping mega-identities captured almost entirely by the words “Democrat” and “Republican.” One result, she concludes, is that isolated and warring tribes have become “relatively unresponsive to changing information or real national problems.”
That problem—that people’s political affiliations determine what information they absorb, rather than the other way around—is bad enough. Yet the degree of contempt partisans have for each other is even more troubling. In a paper Ms Mason presented at the conference alongside Nathan Kalmoe and Julie Wronski, two of her frequent co-authors, the researchers conducted a series of experiments to gauge the extent to which Americans thought certain groups deserved life-saving aid if they were infected with covid-19; if the economy should be reopened even if it would hurt certain groups; and whether disproportionate deaths among the opposing party were deserved or not. They found that respondents were much likelier to say disproportionate deaths among supporters of the other party were more acceptable than deaths among their own.
Discounting suffering on the other side destroys the empathy that liberal democracies require. In a 2019 paper, Mr Kalmoe and Ms Mason studied the extent to which voters rationalise partisan violence against their opponents or express outright support for it—what they call “moral disengagement” and “lethal partisanship”. They also found that 60% of partisans said the opposition was “a serious threat to the United States”, and 40% said opponents were “downright evil”. People with strong attachments to either political party were more likely to exhibit such views.
Between 5% and 15% of Americans in either party endorse violence depending on the circumstances. Mr Kalmoe and Ms Mason are updating their work on partisan violence for an upcoming book, “Radical American Partisanship”. According to new data, Americans of both parties have become more morally disengaged and more likely to endorse violence since the authors’ first study in 2019. They also find that since the 2020 elections Republican voters have become more likely to hold these views, and to endorse violence against political leaders—presumably because their champion lost.
Even though the strength of these feelings is striking, polarisation is such a familiar problem that merely mentioning it can act as a mental sedative. Suggestions as to how to lessen polarisation sometimes have the same quality, though the assembled political scientists deserve credit for trying. Erin Rossiter, of the University of Notre Dame, has found that even imagining a conversation with an opponent can cause at least a temporary reduction in hostility to supporters of the other party. Ms Mason and Mr Kalmoe find, in a final set of experimental studies, that telling Republican voters that Mr Trump had asked them to abstain from violence decreased the share of them that thought it was acceptable in pursuit of political goals. What party leaders say, and how they conduct themselves, really matters.■
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Polarisation explorers"
17. A new book explores the symbiosis of espionage and entertainment
A new book explores the symbiosis of espionage and entertainment
They have a lot in common—including personnel
Oct 23rd 2021
Stars and Spies. By Christopher Andrew and Julius Green. Bodley Head; 512 pages; £20
AT THE HEIGHT of his powers in the late 18th century, there was no more feted dramatist in Europe than Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the author of “Le Barbier de Seville” and “Le Mariage de Figaro”. He was also an extraordinarily successful spy, an agent of the French king’s personal intelligence agency, the Secret du roi. Sent to London in 1775 to negotiate a deal with a rogue French agent—a flamboyant transvestite chevalier called d’Eon de Beaumont—Beaumarchais reported to Louis XVI’s foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, that pessimism was in the air over the war to keep the American colonies.
To hasten Britain’s defeat, Vergennes authorised Beaumarchais to set up a front company to supply arms to the American rebels. By early 1777, while he was rehearsing a production in Le Havre, Beaumarchais managed to send nine shiploads of weapons to George Washington’s army. Remarkably, his fame was not an impediment to his clandestine activities, and may even have helped him avoid suspicion. The CIA’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence concluded that his efforts had helped bring “the infant United States through the most critical period of its birth”.
The interplay between show business and espionage was already well-established before the exploits of Beaumarchais. Since stars seek the limelight and spies lurk in the shadows, the symbiosis is not at first obvious, acknowledge Christopher Andrew (the official historian of Britain’s Security Service, MI5) and Julius Green (a theatre historian and producer). But, they argue, the two professions require similar skills: deception, role-playing and the ability to create and stick to scripts. Both attract characters at ease with the transitory lifestyle common to itinerant entertainers and undercover agents.
Dubbed the second-oldest profession, spying has always found entertainment a useful cover. King Alfred penetrated a Danish camp pretending to be a harpist; legend had it that the troubadour Blondel used his licence to wander across Europe to find the place of Richard I’s imprisonment. But this delightful history begins with the extraordinary intelligence network established by Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Catholic sympathisers, such as the lutenist John Dowland and the exiled adventurer Anthony Standen, were “turned” to work for the Protestant state. Standen was an accomplished actor and, posing as “Pompeo Pellegrini”, provided vital information about Spain’s invasion plans; Dowland infiltrated the Danish court. Christopher Marlowe, a playwright and poet, also spied for Walsingham.
In the 17th century the dramatist Aphra Behn became the first British woman to earn her living as a writer—and to be officially recruited as a spy by the British government. In 1666, after the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war, she was sent to Antwerp to persuade a former lover and Dutch agent to switch sides in a classic honeytrap operation. The book then speeds through the age of revolution and counter-revolution with quick-fire anecdotes and a huge cast of larger-than-life characters. They include the libertine and memoirist Giacomo Casanova, who was probably the first professional spy to describe himself as a “secret agent”.
Espionage in the 20th century is the book’s main focus. Before the first world war, the authors relate, spy dramas were all the rage in both novels and on the London stage. The first head of MI5, an engagingly theatrical naval officer called Mansfield Cumming (known as “C”), employed a West End costumier, Willy Clarkson, to provide him with a succession of disguises. During the war, the most celebrated agents were women. The most famous of all, the upmarket Dutch stripper Mata Hari, spied, not very effectively, for the Germans—until her capture and execution.
Stage fright
A far more successful spy was Mistinguett, a singer, dancer and film star who extracted from a Prussian prince, her one-time lover, the location of the final German offensive in 1918—in Champagne, not on the Somme as had been expected. Her successor in the second world war was the great African-American entertainer Josephine Baker (pictured), who, after moving to France, carried out numerous missions for her adopted country’s Deuxieme Bureau, winning Charles de Gaulle’s gratitude.
During the second world war, SIGINT, or signals intelligence, was mostly more valuable than HUMINT, the human kind. But theatre intruded even at Britain’s code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. Before the war its deputy director, Frank Birch, had a stellar career as a pantomime dame, particularly as an acclaimed Widow Twankey in “Aladdin”. Initially Britain’s main HUMINT mission was to help persuade America to enter the fight. The head of the MI6 (foreign-intelligence) station in New York, William Stephenson, recruited a galaxy of stars as influence agents, including Roald Dahl and Noel Coward.
Another of Stephenson’s recruits was Eric Maschwitz, a Hollywood screenwriter and lyricist. He produced a forged map purporting to reveal a Nazi master plan for taking over South America. President Franklin Roosevelt was completely fooled. Maschwitz went on to become head of light entertainment at BBC television.
The book has its faults. Surprisingly, for instance, it omits the spies and adventurers who played the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia in the 19th century. At times, the stylistic joins between the two authors are a little too visible. But anyone who loves a good spy story will find and enjoy hundreds of them here. ■
This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Smoke and mirrors"
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
