This Blog Is Obsolete! Here’s where to go:

It hasn’t been updated since 2011. If you want to read my writing, go instead to:

My Google+ Page, +YonatanZunger. Yes, G+ is still a thing – and it’s where I post the most pieces, and have the most active conversations. Follow me here if you want all the things.

My Medium Page, @YonatanZunger. Where I put some long-form essays.

My Twitter Account, @YonatanZunger. Where I put some very random things, and sometimes rant.

You’re free to subscribe to this blog, but you will find it very, very, boring.

Published in: on January 30, 2017 at 17:46  Comments (1)  

Books of the Year, 2011





So now, to the details!






























Rotten Tomatos





Differentiated Instruction

(As an experiment today, I’m actually cross-posting this, rather than linking it; you can see it directly on Google+, where I suspect the conversation may be more lively!)


The NY Times has an interesting debate going today about whether “differentiated instruction” — i.e., putting all skill levels in a single classroom and relying on the teachers to teach appropriately to all of them — is a good or bad idea. If I can boil down the arguments a great deal, it comes down to:

OT1H: If top students are separated into advanced tracks and resources are allocated to those, that will come at the expense of lower-performing students, especially minorities and the underprivileged.

OTOH: Teachers can’t actually provide this level of differentiation; if all students are lumped together, teachers will teach to the middle, or more often, the bottom; and as a result the best students will suffer, and the overall top-skilled group in America will atrophy.

It’s a difficult tradeoff and one which I remember vividly from high school (yes, even after all these years); our district was perpetually fighting over whether the existence of honors classes was “elitist.” It was ultimately resolved by budget: the state had marked money for students with special needs, including both the extreme top and bottom end, but earmarked more than the total amount (!) for the bottom end. It was a political decision, of course, not an inability to do math. Nowadays, the problem is shaped more by testing requirements; since schools have been ordered to ensure that certain percentages of students are proficient in all subjects, the effort clearly needs to go into making students not yet proficient be proficient, and keeping students at the lower edge of proficiency above it. The mandate is clearly to focus on raising the bottom end.

The logic of this is tied somewhat to our economy; we see jobs at the bottom disappearing rapidly (although nowadays, that “bottom” doesn’t mean unskilled labor, it means something far more complicated) and people who lack the proficiencies needed to get jobs outside of those collapsing areas are going to be permanently un- or underemployed. From a societal perspective, we can’t afford that.

But I personally can’t advocate the sort of aggressive grouping, and emphasis solely on the bottom, as wise policy. It’s true that we want to avoid further social stratification and prevent the formation of a large permanent underclass; but it’s also true that the innovations which keep this country being a world leader, and which create all of those new jobs, are coming from the top performers. When we place them in learning environments which basically tell them “sit down, don’t make noise, let us teach the slower students” (and this is very much what they are told) they tune out. Those students who don’t drop off the high-performance track altogether (and quite a few do that; I remember a lot of very smart junkies when I was in high school, all of whom reported “boredom” as their chief problem) don’t get the enrichment required to turn someone initially promising into a leader.

In fact, when you do this sort of grouping, the only smart students who get this sort of enrichment are…. the children of the wealthy and privileged, who can get them that enrichment elsewhere. So this sort of grouping is actually antiegalitarian in an important way: it guarantees that the next generation of leaders will come even more exclusively from the previous generation. And worse, it makes that generation smaller, and picked from a smaller pool, which makes it weaker.

If we want this country to succeed, we need to change our academic goals away from simply making sure that the bottom doesn’t fall. This could be achieved by some fairly simple tweaks: for example, if testing goals focused not only on percent proficient but percent advanced, incentives for schools would be radically changed in an instant.

There’s a flaw here, and it’s purely a policy flaw. I think we should change it.

Published in: on October 3, 2011 at 11:11  Comments Off on Differentiated Instruction  
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What I’ve really been up to: The Google+ Project

So, I can finally tell you all what it is I’ve been working on in so much secret. For the past few months, I’ve had the honor of being chief architect for Google’s social systems, and today we launched the Google Plus Project at last. This isn’t a final thing — as its name implies, it’s going to be evolving and improving very rapidly. As the news stories say, the purpose is to make sharing more social; to make it match the way we actually relate to our friends in the world. And it has some amazing other features, like Hangouts, Huddles and Sparks, which just make it lots of fun to work with.

To find out more, check out our blog post, or this news story, which I think really got it. And of course, visit to find out more.

Published in: on June 28, 2011 at 11:04  Comments (21)  
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bin Laden, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the value of disproportionate response

I’d like to do something very unusual in this post: argue that a policy of George W. Bush, and not just any policy, but his policy of starting land wars in Asia, may have had a good effect.

I’ve been thinking this week about the death of Osama bin Laden, and in particular how it profoundly changes the narrative of the American military presence in central Asia over the past decade. Prior to this, there were plenty of stories about “the US is only there for their own interests” (which is undoubtedly true, and continues to be so) as well as a story about bin Laden as a sort of terrorist Robin Hood: he smacks the Americans in the nose and gets away with it, escapes to fight another day. Now, his political capital has greatly eroded over the past decade; after the disassembly of his logistical infrastructure in Afghanistan, and perhaps even more so after his faction’s behavior in Iraq (both their bloody-mindedness towards Iraqis and their inability to function against direct, prepared American resistance), he has long-since ceased to be a figure of much veneration, even among the bulk of the radical lunatic community. So his “Robin Hood” points are mostly evaporated.

But in the context of last week’s raid, there’s a new story: if you pick a fight with the United States, they will hunt you down. Even if it requires an absolutely absurd expenditure of human lives and resources, even if it means starting not just one but two wars which frankly make no logical sense. And this story has tremendous value to the US, quite independently of bin Laden’s actual significance; it’s the threat of disproportionate response, the visible reminder that the US has a truly tremendous range of assets which can be brought to bear on any potential enemy. And in an era when people may have believed themselves to be immune to such response because of their small size or non-state nature, while still capable of causing asymmetric harm by means of modern “force multipliers,” the vivid embodiment of that warning may have a powerful effect on the next few decades of our history.

Am I recanting my earlier opposition to these wars? Only in small part. There has been tremendous mismanagement of these wars at the policy level, and I shudder to think how many more people were killed than needed to be. There are going to be many other long-term consequences of these wars, such as increased regional power for Iran, which may be considerably greater in scope than we can guess today. But as time progresses and more consequences fall out, our analyses of these events will have to change, and of their rightness or wrongness in retrospect.

Perhaps more to the point, what we’re seeing here is the notion of the “enforcer” in repeated games. (See Boyd et al., “Coordinated Punishment of Defectors Sustains Cooperation and Can Proliferate When Rare,” and Posner, “Social Norms and the Law: An Economic Approach,” two classic papers on the subject) Humans seem to have evolved such that a certain fraction of our species is prone to disproportionate reaction in response to “cheaters” (i.e., violators of norms); even though these enforcers tend to win less on the whole than the average person, because of this tendency to spend more energy than they rationally (individually) ought to, the society as a whole turns out to win considerably from the presence of a certain number of such people. It’s the deterrence scheme of the madman; you never know when they might flip out and kill everyone in sight.

Our system of government seems to have found a unique method of amplifying this in political or military situations; when something sufficiently severe happens, the enforcers in society raise an outcry, and everyone else’s attempt to mute this is tepid or restrained at best. As a result, even if the sitting president isn’t an enforcer by nature, he will find himself under pressure to become one – or rapidly be replaced by someone who is. It’s a way of pulling enforcers to the fore on an as-needed basis, which acts as a tremendous boost to the credibility of the threat.

But there’s a problem, of course. To have the deterrent that the leader of the United States just might be a violent madman and capable of anything, you need to have (at least occasionally) as leader of the United States a violent madman who is capable of anything. Enforcers are fairly specifically chosen for their irrationality, not for their ability to make wise or reasoned decisions; and they tend to wrack up a tremendous body count (of their own people) in the process. The fact that we had an extreme enforcer already in office at the time of 9/11 actually strikes me as somewhat alarming; he went off for the right reason, but even so did it in far from the wisest way, and we as a society will be paying the consequences for a long time to come.

A side benefit of the fact that Obama was the president who ended this is that he isn’t known as an enforcer; he was hailed from the moment of his election as a wiser, more understanding (and more rational!) president. The signal that even if a “calmer” person is in office, the rules of an appropriately timed disproportionate response are still in play, is an extra and valuable booster to this policy of deterrence. Waiting for someone else to come into office is not a good strategy. This is a nuance which is particularly commonly seen in Israel; every time a new PM comes to the fore, Hamas &co. start trying some terror attacks, to see if this one will be easily pushed around. It never works, but it gets tried every time nonetheless.

With all this said, there was a deep and significant victory achieved this past week. It wasn’t a victory over a particular terrorist; it was a victory over hostile state and non-state actors as a whole. It wasn’t just the victory of the team that did it, and it wasn’t even the victory of one administration or the other; it was a victory for our society as a whole.

And with that I can say, to all those who sacrificed for this moment – in their lives, in their families, in their economies – this sacrifice has bought our country, and our world, something of great value which could not have been bought in any lesser way.

(Addendum: It occurred to me after posting that I should have mentioned that the fact that Iraq was completely irrelevant to 9/11, bin Laden, etc., doesn’t affect this reasoning. It’s the fact that the President might go off and lay waste to two countries which just happened to be in the wrong area, and to have pissed off the wrong people, just in order to make the point which is the deterrent. We live in a strange world.)

Published in: on May 6, 2011 at 21:28  Comments (3)  
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He’s dead, Jim.

So I know that everyone is expecting me to write a long post about bin Laden’s death, and I was planning it, but then I saw this LOLbama (thanks to David Nachum) and it just said it better than anything else could:


Serious kudos (and areté, and timé, though those are not in my power to grant; but they have been earned, indeed) to everyone who was involved in this, from the initial intelligence gathering and assessment all the way out to the strike team that actually did the deed. It really couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. A few interesting points to mention:

  • Looks like a notably flawless execution. Zero US casualties, and on the other side bin Laden plus three other henchmen dead, two women wounded. For an operation like this, that’s absolutely amazing.
  • Pretty importantly, we recovered the body and buried it at sea. This is actually very important, and tells me that Obama really gets how to play this game; in the Islamic world, funerals are often the initiating points for mass movements, and tombs of martyrs become pilgrimage sites. I had been hoping they would at least do unmarked-grave-in-the-desert; the sea is even better. Top marks for strategy.
  • Obama’s remarks indicated thanks to the Pakistani government and so on, but were notably vague about whether they were notified before or after the operation. Not that I really give much of a damn, but it’s an interesting bellwether of our relationship with Pakistan.

On a slightly more general note, I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff which could be written about America’s changing attitudes towards assassination over the past few decades, going from loud protestations of “oh, we would never do that” to the President coming out to give a press conference about it. But that’s an article for another day.

In other Middle East news, Syria has been continuing to heat up, with protests continuing unabated despite a serious attempt to shut them down (very violently) by the government. al-Assad has signaled that he’s willing to play this one Hama-style, with a siege in progress at Dara’a that could easily turn into a massacre of the entire city. But I heard an interesting report this morning that Hezbollah has decided that the risk is too high, and is voting with their feet — they’ve started to move their heavy weapons stores out of Syria and into Lebanon. This could be a very tempting target, so if you hear that Israel decides to bomb the crap out of some targets in Lebanon in the next few weeks, don’t be surprised.

Published in: on May 2, 2011 at 10:46  Comments (3)  
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What you need to know about radiation (The non-tech version)

I recently posted a copy of my old radiation safety notes. Those were written for young physicists, so they aren’t exactly models of clarity. Since people asked, here’s a completely nontechnical summary of the key things to know about radiation.

Radiation consists of high-energy particles of all sorts. They can injure you by crashing into cells. If they hit DNA they can damage it, and if enough DNA gets damaged then some damage will make it past your body’s bad-DNA-removal systems and turn into cancer. If you get really a lot of radiation, it can kill cells directly, especially in internal organs; this causes radiation sickness and is quickly (and unpleasantly) fatal.

Elements are the different types of atoms which exist in the world. Each atom has a nucleus which is made out of a mixture of protons and neutrons. The number of protons, a.k.a. the atomic number or simply “Z,” determines all of the chemical properties of the element, and so which element it is. (For example, Carbon has Z=6, Uranium Z=92) The total number of protons and neutrons is called the atomic weight, or sometimes “A.” Isotopes are variants of the same element with different atomic weights. (“Uranium-238” is the isotope of Uranium with a total of 238 protons and neutrons) Most combinations of protons and neutrons aren’t perfectly stable; over time, they tend to fall apart (“decay”) and emit small parts of themselves, i.e. radiation. Substances like these which naturally emit radiation are radioactive materials. The more unstable a nucleus is, the faster it will decay; the amount of time it takes half of the nuclei in a sample to go away is called the half-life of the nucleus. This can range from milliseconds to millions of years. Radioactive materials with short half-lives will be very radioactive for a short while, but then stop quickly; radioactive materials with longer half-lives will stay moderately radioactive for a very long time.

Because chemistry only depends on Z, different isotopes of the same chemical will mix thoroughly and can’t be separated by chemical means. This means that if you need a lot of one particular isotope, you have to do something complicated and mechanical. This also ties in to one of the main dangers of radioactives, below. “Low-Z” materials are materials with a Z up to about 20; this includes most organic materials, plastics, and so on. These materials are relatively transparent to radiation, which is why airport backscatter X-rays can’t see explosives. “High-Z” materials include most metals (except Aluminum!), and absorb radiation well.

There are four common types of radiation. Alpha particles, which are light atomic nuclei,  can cause a lot of damage (because they’re relatively heavy, and being made of nuclear matter interact a lot with other nuclear matter). However, they’re relatively easy to block; even paper or clothing offer considerable protection. They can be very dangerous if ingested, though. Beta particles are electrons and positrons, and penetrate more deeply than alphas, though they do less damage. Gamma rays are simply high-energy light (part of a wider category including UV light and X-rays) and are the most penetrating. Betas and gammas are most effectively blocked with a thick layer of high-Z material such as lead, or several feet of concrete. Neutrons are emitted by the decay of certain very large radioactive elements, including those used in nuclear power. They can cause as much damage as alphas, but because they have no electric charge they are much more penetrating. Also, high-Z nuclei tend to absorb neutrons into themselves. This makes them good at shielding neutrons, but in the process they tend to turn into other, often radioactive, isotopes. This means that metals used in neutron-rich environments like reactors tend to become radioactive over time.

The common units for measuring radiation doses are the Sievert and the rem.* This chart can give you a notion of some effects of radiation; section 5.6.3 of The Nuclear Weapons FAQ goes into more detail and talks about acute doses.

Danger levels: For a normal adult, up to 5 rems per year total (up to 1.5 for a pregnant woman) is safe and should cause no adverse effects. Doses up to 50 rems will cause increasing risks for cancer; generally, each 0.01 rems you get is about one “micromort” (a one-in-a-million increase in your chance of dying, about the equivalent to driving 230 miles) Doses above 50 rems can cause acute radiation sickness. Children are more vulnerable because they’re smaller, so they get more radiation per unit of body mass.

Normal levels: By simply walking around and existing, you pick up about 0.3 rems per year, from natural radiation in rocks, from space, and so on. A chest X-ray is good for about 0.01 rems; an airplane flight, about about 0.04 rems; a mammogram, about 0.3 rems. The most radioactive fruit is the banana, which is rich in Potassium. (The radioactive isotope Potassium-40 is about 1% of all Potassium in nature) Eating a banana is good for about 0.01 mrem, or one Banana Equivalent Dose. You can learn how to protect yourself from them here.

Nuclear fission is a reaction in which a large, unstable nucleus breaks into two smaller nuclei, generally throwing off some spare protons (and a lot of excess energy) in the process. Only a few isotopes do this. If one of these isotopes is hit hard by a neutron (which is heavy but electrically neutral, so it can get in close to the nucleus) it can be enough to break that nucleus, causing it to fission and emit more neutrons. This can cause a chain reaction; if enough neutrons hit other nuclei, rather than being absorbed or escaping, the total number of fissions keeps increasing. An assembly of fissile material which can do this is a critical mass.** Nuclear reactors work by having a large pile of fissile material, generally a 3-5% solution of Uranium-235, which is just at the level of criticality but no more. These are mixed in with control rods, which are rods of some neutron-absorbing substance like Cadmium or graphite, which can be moved in and out to control the speed of the reaction. Together these form the reactor core, which gets very hot from all this energy release; that heat is used to heat water or some other fluid, and ultimately to make steam which turns a turbine, like in any other power plant.

Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two small nuclei are rammed together to form a slightly larger nucleus. For certain combinations of nuclei, this will create a net release of energy. Fusion releases more energy than fission, and its result products are nonradioactive.*** This is great for clean energy, but it’s much harder from an engineering perspective.****

At the Fukushima-Daiichi power plant, seismometers detected the earthquake and immediately shut down the reactor by driving the control rods fully in. However, even with control rods fully in and the chain reaction stopped, the baseline radioactivity of the core requires constant cooling. The earthquake knocked out the power to the cooling system, and the tsunami destroyed the backup systems. Plant operators moved on to the next level of backup cooling methods, which involve pumping seawater directly into the hot bits. While the cores of several reactors have melted, the core containment units have held, and so none of the core materials were released. Another problem at the plant was that pressure was building up in the cooling system, because what water was there initially was boiling (and also being decomposed into Hydrogen and Oxygen – water does that at high enough temperatures) and the automatic venting system had lost power as well. This was dealt with by manually venting the steam. Some of this steam was radioactive, and this is where the radiation releases happened. A third problem are the spent fuel rods, which were in temporary (cooled) storage in the reactor as well; their cooling water was not being replenished, and humans have had to go in and assist. All of this has been complicated by problems such as “the building is on fire” and “if hydrogen builds up in an area and isn’t vented quickly enough, that part of the building will explode.” Heroic work by the reactor crew has so far minimized the effects.

At Chernobyl, on the other hand, thanks to a combination of poor design, poor maintenance, and poor operations, the core temperature went out of control and this caused the control rods themselves to burst into flame and explode. This destroyed the core’s containment vessels, and spewed bits of the core itself into the air and the environment. The worst radiation doses in the Fukushima area have been in the ballpark of 0.3 rems per day, for about two days; the worst radiation doses in the Chernobyl area were several thousand rems.

The difference between the two has to do with the amount of stuff emitted, and the chemistry of the stuff emitted. The radioactive steam from F-D got its radioactivity by being ordinary water bombarded by neutrons from the reactor itself. Low-Z materials tend to transform into relatively safe isotopes with short half-lives. (For example, Oxygen in nature is 99.7% O-16, which gets turned by a neutron into O-17 (stable); 0.04% O-17, which turns into O-18 (also stable); and 0.2% O-18, which turns into O-19 (beta source, half-life of 27 seconds; turns into Flourine-19, which isn’t healthy but isn’t radioactive). [You can look this stuff up here] So if you irradiate the oxygen in water, you get a very small amount of a source which decays quickly) The contents of the core, on the other hand, include such exciting isotopes as U-238, Cs-137, and Sr-90. Anything which spews that into the air is likely to be Very Bad.

Strontium-90 is a good example of a dangerous isotope. It’s a beta source with a half-life of 28.9 years. More importantly, Strontium is chemically very similar to Calcium; if you get it inside your body, your body will try to build bones out of it. Radioactive bones, which come with little radiation sources shining straight in to your bone marrow. Cesium-137 is similar to Sodium, although not as much as Strontium is to Calcium; Cs-137 is commonly used for radiotherapy for cancer. Plutonium-239, used in nuclear weapons, is one of the worst; it’s a powerful alpha and beta emitter; it’s chemically a more reactive version of Iron, and so reacts with Hemoglobin to form Plutoglobin, which your body then transports into your bone marrow; and when exposed to air, it forms a pyrophoric oxide which not only burns, it oxidizes itself (think Magnesium) and so can’t easily be extinguished.

So to summarize: Radiation is made of energetic particles which harm you by ramming into cells and damaging them; radioactives are materials which naturally emit radiation. You can naturally heal radiation damage, and block many kinds of it, but ingesting radioactives is particularly dangerous. Some radioactives look like elements used by your body, and so your body will ingest them particularly thoroughly. Others (like those in the steam) are fairly neutral and nonreactive, and so once they stop being radioactive themselves are safe. If you hear about a radiation dose, remember that anything up to a rem per year (10 mSv per year) is not cause for panic.

* The roentgen is a unit of radiation emission. The rad measures how much radiation you absorb; one rad is 0.01 Joules of energy per kilogram of your body mass. (More body = more ability to absorb things) The rem (short for Radiation Equivalent in Man) multiplies rads by a factor which takes the different damage levels from different kinds of radiation into account; betas and gammas are 1, alphas and neutrons (depending on their energy) anything from 1 to 20. The Sievert is roughly 100 rems, but Sieverts use a different table of medical effects. You’ll commonly see milliSieverts (1 mSv = 0.1 rem) and microSieverts (1μSv = 0.0001 rem).

** There are actually two different kinds of critical reaction, prompt critical and delayed critical. The former is used in nuclear bombs, the latter in nuclear power. Achieving prompt criticality isn’t something you can do by accident; nuclear reactors can never undergo the sort of reaction that triggers a nuclear bomb.

*** The stability of a nucleus depends on the difference between the energy of the nucleus as a whole, and the energy it would have if broken up into pieces. If this difference is negative, then the nucleus is stable; if it’s positive, then it’s unstable, and the bigger it is, the more unstable it gets. (Which means a shorter half-life) Energy-producing reactions work by making something more stable and using the energy difference you get. Fission works by taking a big, unstable nucleus, and kicking it so that it breaks into two smaller pieces; that energy difference is released as kinetic energy. But the smaller pieces aren’t guaranteed to be stable, just “more stable than what you started with.” Fusion works by taking two nuclei and combining them into something which is more stable than the originals were; once again there’s a difference, but this time by definition what you’re left with is stable. There’s no “chain reaction” for fusion; you need some way to keep the particles fusing, even though they electrically repel one another, and keeping that pressure up is the hard part. Some techniques are crushing the matter with a nuclear bomb (useful for H-bombs), compressing it with lasers, compressing it with giant magnetic fields, or crushing it with gravity. (Which is how the Sun works)

**** Practical fusion energy is about 20 years away, and it has been for the past 50 years.

Published in: on March 24, 2011 at 09:15  Comments (7)  

The Hazards (and not) of Radiation

Since everyone has radiation on their minds right now thanks to the situation in Japan, and since XKCD was nice enough to post this handy chart, I thought it might be useful to put up a link to my old “basics of radiation” guide from teaching radiation labs to undergrads many years ago.

(PDF Link: Handy Facts About Radiation)

A big thing this doc tries to do is explain the difference between things which will and won’t kill you. XKCD’s diagram is good at showing you the relative dangers of different levels of “primary radiation” — things like gamma rays and neutrons hitting you directly. What it doesn’t talk about is the relative dangers of radioactive substances, which can mostly kill you by getting inside your body and continuing to emit small doses of radiation.

For reference, so far the Fukushima-Daiichi plant has mostly emitted steam with radioactive noble gases in it, which is great from a safety perspective — those decay quickly and bond chemically with nothing, so they’re probably the safest radioactive leak you could ever get. XKCD’s diagram is appropriate for those. If the core were to be breached and spray some of the heavier materials inside there, like Cesium or Uranium, the results would be much nastier.

Also, a footnote: This doc works in units of rems, while a lot of the recent news reports have used Sieverts. 1 Sv = 100 rems.

Published in: on March 22, 2011 at 10:03  Comments (4)  

A few quick Middle East notes

Libya: This post by Barkley Rosser is, I think, bang on. The most likely outcome at this point is partition; Qaddafi will maintain control of the western (Berber) half of the country, based out of Tripoli, while the (Arab) East will separate out into its own country. This may slightly increase the highlighting of the line between the Arabs and the Berbers as you move westward through North Africa, and Qaddafi will continue to be bugfuck insane and bloodthirsty, but that’s not really so far out of the ordinary for the Middle East.

Egypt: The news from Egypt is, I think, positive. True to its word, the Army helped organize a nationwide election about revising the constitution, and the proposal passed what appears to be a fair election with 77% of the vote. However, the support was largely from the countryside, and the measure was backed by a coalition of the old ruling party and the Muslim Brotherhood, and opposed largely by the cities (esp. Cairo and Alexandria) and by the activists who had led the revolution, including Mohammed el-Baradei. Their main contention is that rushing elections will be counterproductive to democracy. I’ll refer back to my previous notes that, if the Mubarak regime were to go away, power would likely flow into the hands of those best-prepared to take advantage of a relative vacuum – and lo and behold, the biggest supporters of prompt elections etc. are the most organized forces. So I’ll count this overall as neutral-positive; on the one hand, I would rather that the election had gone the other way, but on the other hand, I’m pretty happy that there was an election, period. Let’s hope that the resulting government which forms will be committed to maintaining democracy going forward.

Bahrain: This is where I think the most dangerous action is right now. The Saudis sent a thousand troops in to help quell the uprising, but it’s just highlighting all of the problems I mentioned before. 20% of the world’s oil going through Manama, and the 5th Fleet and CENTCOM are based out of there, so it’s very important to the US that it still be run by a friendly regime. That, in turn, makes it very important to Iran that it instead be run by a regime friendly to them. The large Shi’ite population gives Iran a natural means of infiltration and a natural excuse to try to take power, but also gives the Saudis a really good incentive not to let them – the last thing they want is a hostile regime land-adjacent to them from yet another side. Within the country, the conflict seems to be hardening along sectarian lines, much to nobody’s surprise. My guess is that the Arab League (by which I principally mean “the Saudis and whatever other forces they buy”) will come down pretty hard in favor of the regime, and the US and Iran will both play somewhat more subtle games, but that ultimately the old regime will win. And it will be violent.

Elsewhere: Protests have actually started to happen in Syria, and are being met with predictable violence. It’s not yet clear to me if these will gain any traction. Yemen’s president apparently sacked his cabinet, after troops opened fire on protesters and killed 45. This one is going straight to hell in a handbasket, but I don’t think it should come as a tremendous surprise that Yemen is falling apart; its government always struck me as having only nominal control over much of the country. (But, of course, it’s got some critical locations too – Aden is a major port, and Yemen sits on one side of the pinch-point at the end of the Red Sea, opposite Djibouti and Somalia.) (I almost wrote “the Pirate Kingdoms of Djibouti and Somalia” there, those being the first descriptives which came to mind – and although those countries do have nominal governments, this does raise a rather important point about the state of that sea right now)

Published in: on March 21, 2011 at 09:00  Comments (2)  

State of the Middle East Update

So, after all of the excitement, I haven’t posted an update in a few weeks. Apologies; daily life intervened. Quite a bit has happened; not as much as you may think on some fronts, and more than you may think on others.

Let’s start with Egypt. Mubarak stepped down, the Army has stepped in. Democracy in action, right? Well, maybe. So far, the Army seems to be saying the right things – elections in 6 months, new constitution early next week – but several things remain to be seen. First, who will be running in these elections? It’s not like opposition parties have been able to get amazingly well-organized under Mubarak. (But honestly, I think this one will resolve itself; unlike many other dictatorships, this one didn’t completely grind any potential political opposition into dust, it simply kept them from doing anything. People like el-Baradei can exist in Egypt in a way that they never could in, say, Syria) Second, will the Army follow through, or will it try to hold on to more power for itself? (Which is how we’ve gotten most of our secular dictatorships in the past) Some role for the Army isn’t a disaster, necessarily; if Egypt follows the Turkish example, with the Army viewing itself as the guarantor of secular democracy (and if you do anything they think threatens that, they’ll shoot you) you can end up with something at least basically functional. On the other hand, if they follow Mubarak’s example, well…

The big question still on the table in Egypt is the economic one. Revolutions don’t happen in a vacuum, and pervasive poverty, unemployment, lack of opportunity, and so on are rampant; and they didn’t go away when Mubarak did. As a result, protests have been continuing (although not at quite a frenetic pace as the ones from a few weeks ago); the risk is that these could turn into lots of general strikes, and during this interim phase when there’s not much central government, that could start to destabilize a lot of local-level “keep-the-trains-running” sorts of government, which could make things fall apart badly and open the game up for (e.g.) the Army or another dictator to take power.

But that said, I’m still guardedly optimistic about Egypt’s future. The prevailing attitude appears to have been one of the people getting together to fix things, which I think is one of the best predictors of a successful revolution.

For an example of a different attitude, let’s go to the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula, over to Bahrain. Here the protests have gotten violent, with the BDF (the local army) opening fire with live ammunition against demonstrators early today. (I listened to audio recordings from journalists; they were definitely firing freely, and by all accounts aiming low and with live ammo.) No good estimates of casualties yet, but the violence is brewing fast. On the other hand, there are angry counter-protests in favor of the local absolute monarchy. Why? This is a pattern that’s very common in the eastern Middle East (the various emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, etc) with a large, and fairly poor Shi’ite majority being ruled over by a small and fairly rich Sunni minority. The tone of the rhetoric in Bahrain is very different from that in Egypt; it’s sounding like it’s all about the ethnic* anger here, and this could quickly manifest as a bloodbath.

Two things which further complicate Bahrain: the US and Iran. The US Navy has a major base in Bahrain, which is the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet and CENTCOM. This is a key, key location and not one which the US is likely to give up. (It’s the major logistical support point for all activity from the eastern coast of Africa all the way to the Pacific, which therefore also means logistics for Iraq and Afghanistan) The US made deals with the monarchy in order to set up shop there, and so it has a vested interest in the place staying stable.

Iran, on the other hand, learned some very important arts of infiltration and subversion from the Soviets. Every country with a significant Shi’ite population – and several areas without one, such as Gaza – has been set up with a fairly deep penetration by Iranian intelligence, which sets up, trains, supplies and supports local “organizations.” When it’s convenient (as it recently was, e.g., in Lebanon and in Gaza) those organizations take over the local government and set up satellite Iranian regimes. This one looks awfully convenient for Iran, and they would have to be fools not to make a play for it. (And needless to say, an Iran-backed regime would not be friendly to a US naval base, nor vice-versa)

So we have a major regional power and a (possibly overextended) superpower both with serious, and conflicting, stakes in a local revolution which could easily slip into ethnic bloodshed, with all sides having very large volumes of armaments sitting around in the region.

Meanwhile in Libya, it’s even harder to get information on what’s going on, but what we can tell for sure is that there have been large demonstrations in the two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi, and the government has cracked down with great force. The numbers I’m hearing (although unconfirmed) are dozens of dead, hundreds wounded, and the situation is escalating rapidly. The “good” news is that this is unlikely to act as a tinderbox for anything else in the region; its three Middle Eastern neighbors are Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, all of which are already part of the situation.

And what about the calls for protests in Syria? They largely didn’t happen, because the military turned out in force, and the Syrians have figured out by now that the al-Assad family isn’t exactly gentle about the way it handles dissent. The Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and the Jordanian government have all managed to keep protest levels fairly low without resorting to quite as much violence, but it’s pretty clear (especially in the case of Hamas) that violence is most certainly an option if needed. Yemen continues its violent protests, and my guess is that the already-weak government will collapse; this is probably the biggest boon to the preexisting rebels (nothing whatsoever to do with the current run of protests, much more to do with Islamist terror groups) who will be able to firmly grab control of… well, whatever they decide to grab control of.

So looking at the map, my current estimate is:

  • The more peaceful Middle Eastern countries – Egypt, Jordan, Morocco – will probably fare the best, with either mostly peaceful regime changes or with existing regimes remaining in power and making varying amounts of concessions. These will be the bastions of stability.
  • Less stable countries which don’t have a deep background of ethnic instability, such as Libya and Yemen, will see more violence, and if their governments collapse the results are likely to be long-lasting and strongly favor the most brutal groups around. At the best they’ll trade one dictator for another; at the worst, they’ll dissolve into failed states.
  • States with sufficiently brutal governments, such as Syria and Iran, will remain quite stable, because anyone who tries anything will rapidly end up disappearing. Along, possibly, with their entire neighborhood. Some less stable countries may decide to copy a page from their playbook in order to keep their status quo.
  • States with a deep background of ethnic tension, especially ones with a deep Sunni-Shi’ite split, will likely fare the worst. Their governments will likely follow the brutal route, but the likelihood of Iranian intervention, and the likelihood of pent-up tension erupting far beyond anyone’s control, will remain high. If the dam breaks in such a country the result is likely to be similar to Iraq in 2004-5, or Bosnia in 1992-5, with localized “ethnic cleansing” (gods, what a euphemism for genocide) and equilibration only after the country has ended up effectively physically segregated.
  • Places with a lot of money (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, etc.) or with key strategic value (Bahrain) are likely to play out a much more complicated game, because outside forces have a lot more reason to intervene, whether they want to or not. Bahrain in particular looks like it could be the first flashpoint for many things, and the way it plays out could easily determine the fate of the eastern Middle East. Serious violence there could easily and rapidly spread up the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, into Kuwait, and thence back into Iraq in an unpredictable way.

Oh, and just to make it more fun? Iran is asking permission to send some warships through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. Where they would be in an excellent position to support Gazan and Lebanese forces in an attempt to hold on to power. Or in an attempt to invade, oh, I dunno, someone…

Remember when I said the protests in Egypt could turn out very, very badly for the Middle East as a whole? I really wasn’t kidding.

* I really need to make a post sometime about the relationship of ethnicity, language, religion and tribe in the Middle East.

Published in: on February 18, 2011 at 19:00  Comments (3)  
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