ABSTRACT: Alexander Wendt begins his paper “Why a World State is Inevitable” with the following concise formulation of his intent: “In this article I propose a teleological theory of the ‘logic of anarchy' which suggests that a world state is inevitable …” (Wndt, 2003). I offer the following equally concise opposition: In this article I propose a teleonomic theory of the ‘logic of panarchy' which suggests that a world state is not inevitable. I suggest that the stable “state” for this teleonomic process is a global “complex adaptive system,” or governance network, in which the ‘logic of anarchy' gives way to the ‘logic of panarchy.” It is essential to note that Wednt and I agree on far more than we disagree, but the pointson which we disagree are fundamental.
Core Quote: “In a teleonomy, the focus is on the adaptive rules, i.e. the processes by which the system explores and exploits new possibilities. Because the system's identity is enacted through a program and not by virtue of an outcome, lourality, diversity, democracy, abnd the navigation of competing rules and norms take on a new urgency. That urgency is enshrined in the voluntary and “freely given” intentionality that is possible only in panarchy.”
The American sources in the attached report of the New York Times blast Turkey, essentially because it refuses to be a US lackey. Even the report’s title drips with contempt and reflects a myopia that is typical of the ego centric view of the perquisites of empire held by the American foreign policy establishment, including the mainstream media. The report's wishy-washy “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” style feeds this overall impression.
Any rational observer of Turkey knows that big things are happening in that country and its part of the world.
Turkey has a large growing economy, is populated by more than 70 million hard working, industrious, increasingly well educated people. It sits on an ocean of fresh water in a parched area of the world — Israel, Iraq, and Syria especially want access to water Turkey controls. Turkey does not even use all its arable land, yet it is a major food exporter in a region of food importers, and local meats, vegetables, grains, and fruits are of the highest quality. The country is metamorphosing into a energy pipeline crossroads, and the Bosporus is the most heavily traveled waterway in the world.
Turkey is a secular democracy, and although many, no doubt a majority of its people are religious, there is very little religious fundamentalism, certainly less proportionally than is evident in either Israel, Iran, or the United States. By an large Turkey’s historic traditions of religious tolerance seem intact — I was recently surprised to learn that there is still a substantial Jewish community in Istanbul that speaks a dialect of 15th Century Spanish at home and Turkish in professional life (a relic from the time when the Ottoman Empire gave sanctuary the Jews in Spain who were persecuted by the Inquisition). I met a member of this community, a prosperous businessman with a magnificent yacht, and he impressed as being Turkish through and through. Interestingly, he told me he was pursuing an offer dual citizenship from Spain (sort of a right of return being instituted by Spain) but had no interest in accepting his automatic offer of citizenship by Israel.
Regardless of whether Turkey eventually enters the EU, it is a country that is moving and being sucked into a regional vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Part of this movement is caused by policy, but part of it is caused by the impulse of unpredictable events.
The Turks, to their credit are trying to make the best of this by forging a regional good neighbor policy with all their neighbors, and until recently, this included Israel. To this end, the Turks have, among other things, opened the border for visa free movement between Turkey and Syria, tried to broker a peace deal with the Syrians and Israelis (which the actions of the Israelis scuppered), made overtures of friendship to Armenia, been active in the Black Sea Initiative (basically an effort to protect the environment and delineate the rights and responsibilities of the states bordering on the Black Sea), made commercial overtures toward Iraq and Iran, and most recently, in partnership with Brazil, launched an innovative initiative to defuse the Iranian nuclear problem (which the Obama Administration is petulantly trying to scupper). Meanwhile the Turkish government has been trying to reduce tensions with its own Kurdish minority in eastern Anatolia. While this is a serious problem (and I don’t pretend to understand it), Kurdish separatism and outside agitation by Kurdish insurgents based in Iraq (with some indirect Israeli and American support) and Iran, as well as a history of heavy-handed policies to limit the Kurdish autonomy, all contribute to it. On the other hand, it is also important to acknowledge the fact that Kurds have every right to participate in the Turkish economy and culture as individuals, should they choose to exercise it. And many have done so. One finds Kurds living throughout Turkey, in harmony with their neighbors, working and living prosperously.
Interpreting Turkey’s actions negatively through the lens of America’s imperial pretensions, together with our knee-jerk support of every outrage perpetrated by Israel, is implicit in the statements by the American sources in this report. This attitude is a prescription for making trouble with a proud and independent people whose most recent actions have been focused on a policy of promoting regional comity.
Oh, and one other point — Turks are among the most gracious and welcoming people I have ever met, but push a Turk into a corner, where he perceives he is being treated unfairly and has no face saving exit, and you will have a real problem on your hands.
ANKARA, Turkey — For decades, Turkey was one of the United States’ most pliable allies, a strategic border state on the edge of the Middle East that reliably followed American policy. But recently, it has asserted a new approach in the region, its words and methods as likely to provoke Washington as to advance its own interests.
The change in Turkey’s policy burst into public view last week, after the deadly Israeli commando raid on a Turkish flotilla, which nearly severed relations with Israel, Turkey’s longtime ally. Just a month ago, Turkey infuriated the United States when it announced that along with Brazil, it had struck a deal with Iran to ease a nuclear standoff, and on Tuesday it warmly welcomed Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, at a regional security summit meeting in Istanbul.
Turkey’s shifting foreign policy is making its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a hero to the Arab world, and is openly challenging the way the United States manages its two most pressing issues in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”
Jun 10, 2010 – Aug 07, 2010
Eyebeam Atelier
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From the Eyebeam Press Release: “With participation now a dominant paradigm, structuring business models, creative and activist practice, the architecture of the city, and the economy, we are all integrated into structures of participation whether we want to be or not. The exhibition will examine models of participation and participation as a model, presenting work that encourages subversive participation, intervenes into existing systems, or envisions new alternatives.”
The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media's most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals — it's time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:
Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players — the United States, India and Israel — change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan's collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here. . . . The problem is more than a peculiar domestic phenomenon for Pakistan. It has grown into a narrative of national victimhood that is a nearly impenetrable barrier to any candid discussion of the problems here. In turn, it is one of the principal obstacles for the United States in its effort to build a stronger alliance with a country to which it gives more than a billion dollars a year in aid.
Initially, it's worth asking how these “conspiracy theories” compare to this: from the front page of The New York Times, September 8, 2002:
More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. . . . In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. . . . An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi opposition leader also gave American officials a paper from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein has authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the United States attacks.
From the front page of The Washington Post, April 3, 2003:
WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.
. . . . . .
The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.
The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Intelligence Community is totally out of control and stupid as well. Keith Alexander,[1] like Mike Hayden [2] before him, is an administrative piss-ant with zero ethics–he means well, but he simply does not have the strategic brain-power to be honorable in the sense that every US citizen has a right to expect. Across the board, US intelligence is being administered rather than led, and the time has come for the President–if he wishes to retain a semblance of credibility with the US public as well as the international community–to bring in a wrecking crew. Not likely, but eminently necessary.
[1] On very ignorant legal advice, while administering the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), Alexander destroyed ABLE DANGER and destroyed the early warning on two of the hijackers that ABLE DANGER produced, rather than hand over the information to the FBI as he was supposed to.
[2] While administering NSA, Mike Hayden was the first to violate the Constitution and the law with warrantless wiretapping, and then went on to pioneer rendition and torture at CIA. He is the epitomy of well-intentioned generals who sacrifice their ethics and their integrity in favor of loyalty to a political chain of command that is abjectly corrupt irrespective of which of the two-party tyranny wings holds the White House.
On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage
If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it's tempting to consider that the agency's time has passed. “Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system,” a former senior CIA officer told me. “It's time to close Langley.”
I'm not prepared to go quite that far. The United States still needs a civilian intelligence agency. (The military cannot be trusted to oversee all intelligence-gathering on its own.) But the CIA—and especially the directorate of operations—must be stripped down to its studs and rebuilt with a renewed sense of mission and purpose. It should start by getting the amateurs out of the field. And then it should impose professional standards of training and experience—the kind it upheld with great success in the past. If it doesn't, we're going to see a lot more Khosts.
Phi Beta Iota: Robert Bear, a most-respected colleague, only scratches the surface. While we endorse his condemnation of Clinton and Deutch specifically, Robert misses the deeper history and the broader implications. CIA was “Flawed by Design” as Amy Zegart puts it so well, and has always been a loose-cannon shoot from the hip organization with what Tim Weiner now calls the “Legacy of Ashes”.
