Gaza

Collective Punishment in Gaza by Rashid Khalidi

Gaza

Gaza reminds me of John Carpenter's Escape from New York, just a giant open air prison camp on the Mediterranean with the west side manned by Egypt's military dictatorship and the rest by Israel.

Escape From New York

Escape from New York is a 1981 American science fiction action film co-written, co-scored, and directed by John Carpenter. The film is set in a then-near future 1997 in a crime-ridden United States that has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into a maximum security prison. Ex-soldier Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is given 22 hours to find the President of the United States, who has been captured by prisoners after the crash of Air Force One. 

Carpenter wrote the film in the mid-1970s as a reaction to the Watergate scandal, but proved incapable of articulating how the film related to the scandal.[citation needed] After the success of Halloween, he had enough influence to get the film made and shot most of it in St. Louis, Missouri.[3] The film is co-written with Nick Castle, who already collaborated with Carpenter previously by portraying Michael Myers in the 1978 film Halloween. 

The film's total budget was estimated to be $6 million.[2] It was a commercial hit, grossing $25,244,700.[2] It has since become a cult film.

prescience by antiwar liberals

The nation-building problem by John Quiggin (September 21, 2002)

He links to

The Fifty-First State? by James Fallows (November 2002)

It is quite possible that if we went in, took out Saddam Hussein, and then left quickly, the result would be an extremely bloody civil war,” says William Galston, the director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, who was a Marine during the Vietnam War. “That blood would be directly on our hands.”

Blogs Yglesias: "John Judis in TNR, taking advantage of some kind of perestroika in the Richard Just Era: "In 1947, the United States faced a very similar situation in the UN and took exactly the opposite position—to the benefit of Palestine’s Jewish population."

New Republic intern Matt O'Brien writes on "Why Did Republicans Turn Against the Fed?"

As Ken Rogoff, a professor of public policy and economics at Harvard and the former chief economist of the IMF, told me, “If the shoe were on the other foot and a Republican were in the White House, we might see different rhetoric.” Similarly, Scott Sumner, a professor of economics at Bentley University and author of the influential blog The Money Illusion, pointed out that “people on the right were pushing for monetary stimulus in the 1980s when inflation was much higher than it is now”—and a Republican was, coincidentally, in the White House.

To others, however, a purely cynical explanation of Republican antipathy towards the Fed does not seem sufficient. Rather, deeper philosophical and psychological factors—and factions—unleashed by the Great Recession seem to figure in as well. For one, notes University of Oregon economics professor Mark Thoma, the latest financial crisis has empowered fringe elements of the GOP—those who ascribe pseudo-mystical properties to gold and the gold standard—to take center stage within the party. In particular, this libertarian faction has offered up an alternative explanation of the crash that, as Thoma explained to me, provides “a nice moral with a villain you can point to.” Whereas the Friedmanite wing of the GOP traditionally absolved markets from blame for financial crises by saying the Fed had failed to do enough, this faction preferred to blame the Fed and other government institutions for doing too much. According to this line of argument, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the housing bubble, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank legislation are holding back the recovery, and the Federal Reserve’s panoply of lending programs during the height of the panic merely bailed out Wall Street and forestalled the necessary restructuring of the banking system. It’s a seductive—and reassuring—argument for those who take as gospel the Reagan maxim that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Of course, the Federal Reserve invited some of this backlash with the opaque nature of its emergency programs in late 2008 and early 2009. The urgency of the crisis made the Fed’s ability to act without Congressional approval attractive to policymakers, but in doing so, the central bank usurped some functions that typically are the province of the Treasury. “It’s absolutely true that the Fed made itself vulnerable to [attacks] by starting fiscal policy and preserving the banking sector,” says Rogoff. Republican leaders have harped on this notion that the Fed continues to overstep its mandate. For instance, the bank’s quantitative easing (QE) programs, which entail buying long-term bonds, have drawn ire from Republicans, as have other supposed instances of the Fed dabbling in fiscal policy. Representative Paul Ryan slammed the Federal Reserve in an op-ed for what “looks like an attempt to bail out fiscal policy” by purchasing longer-dated Treasuries. The implication was clear: Ben Bernanke is complicit in Obama’s interventionist, big government agenda.

And then, finally, there are the inflation hawks. The idea that inflation can be too low is counterintuitive to the average voter, who associates inflation with less discretionary income. The simple calculus, as Sumner told me, is that “more inflation is bad and less is good.” The psychological scars of the stagflationary 1970s magnify this predisposition. “Most of the people in power remember waiting in gas lines,” says Thoma. The result, in Thoma’s estimation, is that “our collective memory is more European than it’s ever been, in terms of remembering the evils of inflation.” This thinking epitomizes what National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru told me amounts to “an ongoing calcification of conservative economic thought.” Ponnuru describes this mindset as the idea that “the solution to a weak economy in the late 1970s, when the economic views of today’s conservatism formed, was cutting the top marginal tax rate and tightening money; therefore it must be the solution today.”

It is not clear if this intellectual Dark Age will pass. Bernanke has become such a persona non grata in Republican circles that it is easy to forget he is a Republican. Among these competing theories for Republican Fed-bashing, the scariest, of course, is that the attacks are not just cynical, but represent genuine belief. It’s enough to make a liberal long for Milton Friedman.

The End of History?

As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe

Saudi Men Go to Polls; Women Wait

CAIRO — Saudi men voted in local elections on Thursday for just the second time in the history of the conservative kingdom, but the polls remained closed to a majority of the Saudi population, including women, who were promised the right to vote in municipal elections scheduled for 2015 in a royal decree issued last week.

The elections were for local advisory councils with no lawmaking authority or ability to alter the status quo in one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies. Also barred from voting were men employed by the police and security forces as well as all men under the age of 21. Official figures estimate the number of eligible voters to be 1.2 million out of more than 18 million Saudi citizens.

As I watch the rioting in Cairo on CNN I think about the so-called "liberal left."

I've been following foreign affairs since the Cold War ended and have been disappointed with the so-called "liberal-left" on the subject. I agree on Vietnam, but most were uninspiring about Bosnia or Rwanda. They were good on South Africa but not much else. During the Naughties they mocked color revolutions. On Egypt they are silent.

David Weigel writes:

There's a lot of focus right now on what members of the administration have said publicly about the situation in Egypt; if you're a conservative, Joe Biden saying that Hosni Mubarak is no dictator, or Robert Gibbs meekly saying the country should turn the Internet back on, tell you everything you need to know about the weakness of the Obama administration.

It's rather worse than that. The Obama administration is flat-footed here, sure, but it's only acting out the role we've been playing with Egypt for decades. It continued sending $800 million in direct economic aid and $1.3 billion in military aid -- that's the military on your TV now, trying to break up riots. Mubarak has been an incredibly resilient and effective strongman who has kept us from worrying about a fundamentalist takeover of the country. It's worth reading the WikiLeaked cable our ambassador wrote in 2009:

He is a tried and true realist, innately cautious and conservative, and has little time for idealistic goals. Mubarak viewed President Bush (43) as naive, controlled by subordinates, and totally unprepared for dealing with post-Saddam Iraq, especially the rise of Iran,s regional influence. 

On several occasions Mubarak has lamented the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the downfall of Saddam. He routinely notes that Egypt did not like Saddam and does not mourn him, but at least he held the country together and countered Iran. Mubarak continues to state that in his view Iraq needs a "tough, strong military officer who is fair" as leader. This telling observation, we believe, describes Mubarak's own view of himself as someone who is tough but fair, who ensures the basic needs of his people.

The Obama administration's response to this has not been uniquely distaff. It's been traditional. It's worth reading Shadi Hamid on this.

President Obama has also weighed in, but more by what he chose not to say. On Jan. 18, he phoned his Egyptian counterpart, President Hosni Mubarak. They discussed a number of issues, including Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict. They did not, however, discuss the need for political reform in Egypt.

The United States has backed its rhetoric, or lack of it, with action. On Jan. 12, more than three weeks into the Tunisia uprising -- and after protests had spread across the region -- the State Department granted $100 million in new funding to the Jordanian government to boost employment and strengthen the health and education sectors. Presumably, this will help the Kingdom diffuse popular anger over worsening economic conditions.

These actions have a clear intent -- to protect the stability of a state perceived as strategically vital to US interests.