Every year around this time I find myself asking myself two questions:

1. When is Turkey going to grow up?
2. When is the foreign policy establishment of the mighty United States of America going to stop letting itself get pushed around the schoolyard by some punks in Ankara?

They’re unlikely to be answered satisfactorily any time soon, but I’m not going to let that spoil the mood. And I’m not ready to consider them rhetorical questions.

In the meantime, here’s something nice Congress can do: it can reduce its annual aid to Turkey by exactly the amount Turkey spends on public relations in the United States. The American taxpayer is, in effect, paying for Ankara’s attempts to quash legislation and influence our own foreign policy.

During the 2008 campaign Obama trashed the Bush administration for not boldly sending in the forces necessary to get bin Laden when he was holed up at Tora Bora, excoriating Bush for making the wrong bold move two years later—invading Iraq. Good so far. But Obama would go on to prate about how Afghanistan was/is the focal point of the revenge campaign against bin Laden and al-Qaeda. “Was” is correct. “Is” is not. By all accounts, bin Laden is now in an ungovernable region along the Afghan–Pakistani border. One cannot undo the mistake Bush and his crew made in 2001. I had hoped Obama was just trying to outhawk the already sufficiently hawkish Hillary Clinton, protect his flank from the war machine, and so on. You know, campaign sparring. Hope against hope, I knew, but I thought the smart law professor would figure out a way to do the right thing and explain away his change of mind.

And yet, in perhaps the boldest move of his not very bold presidency (as we knew it would be), Obama has decided to send an additional 30,000 troops into the geopolitical shithole that is Afghanistan. One wonders why we even give it a name with “stan” at the end, as if it were a country. Too much of it is just a collection of valleys filled with families/tribes that speak different dialects and hate each other almost as much as they hate foreigners. And they just happen to be the best, most tenacious, stubborn, punishment-absorbing fighters in the world. I think maybe the Russians learned that, after an unhappy vacation there, as did the Brits before them.

In other words, Barack Obama has shown that he believes in “magic history.” He seems to think genies can be put back in bottles, and that if you click your ruby slippers three times, bin Laden will be found and killed and that will be that. (How many times during his campaign did he repeat that odious incantation about finding and killing bin Laden, placing special, almost loving, emphasis on the word “killing,” as if he thought his predecessor or his opponent was incapable of murderous thoughts, as if he really thought killing bin Laden would solve the problem of bin Ladenism and militant Islam and the subhuman conditions in Gaza and everything worth addressing in an adult way.) What on earth does Obama hope to accomplish in Afghanistan? Why is this the one campaign promise he will actually keep—not just keep, but expand, elaborate on, aggrandize, inflate? He used to talk about sending “at least” two brigades (six or seven thousand soldiers). How very clever of him. He will indeed be sending at least that many soldiers. Michael Moore is right to be outraged, but he has no basis for feeling betrayed.

Back in the sixties, what Obama is doing was known as an “escalation” (the Orwellian term “surge” had not been invented). LBJ made a few escalations of his own, even after he eventually came to see that Vietnam was a lost cause. But Johnson couldn’t withdraw from his inherited war because he felt his manhood was at stake. Or “too much blood and money had been spent.” Or “America does not walk away from unfinished jobs.” Etc. Plus ça change … (And, indeed, the French will politely decline to send more troops to Afghanistan. Don’t you just hate it when the French are right?)

Addendum 2009.12.01: Obama gave his speech tonight and says he will start pulling forces out in July 2011, after adding his 30,000 by June 2010. So it starts to quack like a “surge,” not an open-ended escalation. Does that make it right? Does this approach make sense with people who measure time in hundreds (or thousands) of years, not hundreds of days? It’s like the kid who wants to stop the fight, but doesn’t want to look chicken, so he throws one last punch before he says, “Let’s quit!” That’s the positive spin. The scary alternative is: he really does think we can fix Afghanistan with nineteen more months of heightened US military intervention—and will probably keep lots of US troops there well beyond that point to keep it from backsliding. Ah, the follies of Empire … if only they were the Ziegfeld and not the body bag variety.

It is typical of this dysfunctional relationship that no date has been set for such relations to actually kick in, and none of the thorny issues dividing the two countries (the genocide, Nagorno-Karabagh, etc.) are close to being resolved. But it’s as if both sides have been reading B.F. Skinner and decided that they would start acting as if they could talk to one another; over time perhaps they would begin to feel as if they could talk and do even more with one another. By acting as if things were normal, normalcy would become a habit, with cycles of positive reinforcement, and trust could be established; difficult topics could be addressed calmly, and the faces of the present would replace the ghosts of the past.

Undoubtedly the thinking behind this joint action was more complex than this, the rationales more nuanced. One can only hope that the simple act itself will blossom and bear fruit, not just in Turkey and Armenia but in the diaspora as well.

Case in point: the Armenian genocide. (We’ll get to more “topical” issues involving Obama’s fine talk and wobbly walk in a subsequent post.) We can imagine why Obama merely alluded elliptically to the genocide while speaking to the Turkish parliament recently, and sidestepped a direct question at a photo op by saying his “views are on the record.” Maybe he thought it impolite to restate them in those venues. True, it would have given a tiny bit of encouragement to brave Turks who risk jail and worse for talking openly about it, but as the leader of a country with deep and twisty entanglements of mutual self-interest vis-à-vis Turkey, it was prudently ingratiating perhaps to keep mum about it while on Turkish soil.

On April 24, 2009, back in the USA, Obama chose to commemorate “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century,” in which “1.5 million Armenians [were] massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.” He used an Armenian phrase—Meds Yeghern—in referring to it, and he called for “a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.”

Obama seems to intend to imply that meds yeghern means “great atrocity.” The “great atrocity” is the continued Turkish denial that a genocide took place, and that an American president chooses to refer to it in Armenian rather than plain English. As Harut Sassounian writes in “Et tu, Obama? Letter from a Former Admirer”:

You may want to know that “Meds Yeghern” does not mean genocide; it means “Great Calamity.” Armenians used that term before the word “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in the 1940′s. “Genocide” in Armenian is “Tseghasbanoutyoun,” which is a much more precise term than “Meds Yeghern,” in case you decide to use it in the future.

Not only did your aides come up with the wrong Armenian word, but they failed to provide its English translation, so that non-Armenians could understand its meaning. What was, after all, the point of using an Armenian word in an English text? Did your staff run out of English euphemisms for genocide?

It just so happens meds yeghern fits nicely with the official Turkish position that the murder and death marches “just happened”—that a big war was going on and everyone suffered, Armenians and Turks alike. Sorry, a government-run genocide doesn’t just happen. And there can be no doubt, unless you have been paid off, that it did happen.

The ABC News blog Political Punch has collected some of Obama’s previous remarks on the genocide. Most compelling is his July 28, 2006, letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, protesting her decision to recall the US ambassador to Turkey for letting slip the G-word:

“That the invocation of a historical fact by a State Department employee could constitute an act of insubordination is deeply troubling,” then-Sen. Obama wrote. “When State Department instructions are such that an ambassador must engage in strained reasoning—or even an outright falsehood—that defies of common sense interpretation of events in order to follow orders, then it is time to revisit the State Department’s policy guidance on that issue.”

Obama told Secretary Rice that the “occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 is not an ‘allegation,’ a ‘personal opinion,’ or a ‘point of view.’ Supported by an overwhelmingly amount of historical evidence, it is a widely documented fact.”

Well put.

Obama has had plenty more to say on the subject, often to audiences filled with Armenian Americans, who voted heavily for him in 2008. As reported by Political Punch:

Mr. Obama said that “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president.”

In a January 2008 letter to the Armenian Reporter, Mr. Obama said he shared “with Armenian Americans—so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors—a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history.”

Naturally, many Armenian Americans—and any person who thinks (1) words matter and (2) history not only matters, it isn’t even past—are disappointed. Others appear to be in shock: not a peep from my wife’s cousin in Colorado, an ardently voluble Obama supporter from the start. As for myself, I was never enchanted enough to be disenchanted. He’s an improvement—how much of an improvement remains to be seen.

The sound of crickets chirping from Yerevan after Obama’s statement on the 24th has led some to believe that his meds yeghern moment is part of a sophisticated bargaining strategy, as the US tries to broker an agreement between Armenia and Turkey that would normalize relations. Among other reasons, this is why I have put off commenting on this textbook example of how to go back on your word. And maybe the purported bargain will pay off. I tend to think it gives cover to the hardliners in Turkey and will not help heal the rift. But if it allows him to play hardball with Turkey in the background while playing patty-cake in public, it’s probably a small price to pay. The problem is, longstanding geopolitical thinking puts the ball and bat and bases (pun intended) and just about the whole playing field in Turkey’s hands, and Obama has shown no interest in slaying the beast of conventional wisdom in US foreign policy.

Okay, here’s the joke, recorded ca. 1900 BCE by a Sumerian who shall remain nameless:

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.

Hey, I didn’t say it was the world’s best joke.

Speaking of farts, listen to this snippet from the second movement* of the Haydn I mentioned:

Ah, that good old south German humor. Now, Haydn’s music in general is full of jokes and surprises. But this is a doozy. I’ve heard other conductors play it safe, letting the bassoon play in the usual suave manner (well, as suave as a bassoon can ever get). After all, this is clahssical music. But in this summer of audacity, I must say George Szell got it audaciously right.
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*Butt-head: “Huh-huh … you said ‘movement’!”

So—where was Hitchens? Can he really remain silent in the face of the campaign to kill the resolution, launched by the Turkish government and abetted by countless well-paid Americans of high (or formerly high) standing?

Today, at long last, Hitchens speaks. In true Hitchensian fashion, he gives us a good chunk of history, with Kurds, Jews, and Greek Cypriots added to Armenians in the pot where nothing ever melts. But he puts his finger in the self-inflicted wound that Turkey continues to keep from closing:

So, let us be clear on a few things. The European Union, to which Turkey has applied for membership with warm American support, has insisted on recognition of Kurdish language rights and political rights within Turkey. We can hardly ask for less. If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would ensue from our Congress affirming the truth). Then there remains the question of Cyprus, where Turkey maintains an occupation force that has repeatedly been condemned by a thesaurus of U.N. resolutions ever since 1974. It is not our conduct that should be modified by Turkey’s arrogance; we do a favor to the democratization and modernization of that country by insisting that it get its troops out of Cyprus, pull its forces back from the border with Iraq, face the historic truth about Armenia, and in other ways cease to act as if the Ottoman system were still in operation.

Precisely.

I left these rambling comments at the Post:

It’s ironic that, given the amount of aid we send to Turkey (millions and millions of dollars), U.S. citizens are in effect subsidizing Turkish meddling in our own democratic processes. As for the objections of the former secretaries of state: these are the same “wise old men” who basically sat on their thumbs during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the greatest foreign policy disaster of our time. They are so used to being blackmailed by Turkey, I think they might actually enjoy it by now. Putting the Armenian genocide in scare quotes—talking about it as if it is merely an “accusation”—is disgusting. The death marches and massacres happened; they were ordered by the central government of Turkey; they culminated decades of abuse against the Armenian population by the Turkish government. Year after year nonbinding resolutions are passed about the Holocaust, without a peep from the Post. Why? What makes them not “frivolous”? What makes them so special? Turkey needs to face its own past honestly (and the Post needs to stop enabling it to avoid that). It can’t help but lead to better things in the present.

Thomas Nephew rips the Post a new one—he has more patience (and a stronger stomach) than I do.

Addendum—8:30 pm: The Foreign Affairs Committee approved H.Res. 106 by a 27–21 bipartisan vote. The pressure is bound to increase as the measure heads to a vote by the full House. Slate has a nice roundup of blogger reaction to the Administration’s efforts to squelch the resolution. One link of particular interest goes to Joey Kurtzman’s post at Jewcy: “Denying the Armenian Genocide should be the last atrocity perpetrated by the ADL chief [Abe Foxman].” One of the comments (defending Foxman) notes that Israel’s only military airbase outside Israel is in … Turkey. However, the story is old (July). In August, the ADL decided to acknowledge the Armenian genocide as genocide (sort of). And, for good measure, here’s an article from October 2006 by the inestimable Robert Fisk.

Addendum: 2007.10.19: Finally, after letting the despicable Washington Post dominate the discussion for weeks with a steady stream of slipshod, slippery, and downright slimy op-eds and articles, the New York Times publishes a piece that makes the case for why American Jews need to support the Armenian genocide resolution—how it is a moral imperative for them, as victims of a genocide, to recognize genocide when it involves others, regardless of the short-term consequences, real or imagined.

Photo by Alexander Fiebrandt at Wikipedia

They may not have discovered the wheel (and for good reasons), but their building skills astounded the city slickers from Europe:

At the heart of the new [ca. 1463] Qosqo was the plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by 550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific and raked daily by the city’s army of workers. Monumental villas and temples surrounded the space on three sides, their walls made from immense blocks of stone so precisely cut and fit that Pizarro’s younger cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported “that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints.” —Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 79.

By the way, 1491 is a wonderful, eye-popping read. It will change the way you think about the “New World” and everything you learned in school about virtually empty continents waiting to be populated and developed.

The idea of “mentoring” came, of course, from the mythic Greek figure Mentor. I grew up in a town called Mentor, so I suppose I have a personal interest in this matter. But even if I didn’t, I’d be nauseated by the back-formation mentee. Mentoree is awkward, but it’s English. Mentee is … crap. (I think James A. Garfield, scholar and president, pride of Mentor, would have agreed.)

Months before this book went into production, I was tangentially involved in a website devoted to so-called e-mentoring. The education professionals behind this were talking about mentors and mentees, and I tried to get them to accept an alternative: the mentored, or mentorees, or beginners, or simply new teachers.* I would have loved to have them introduce the term tyro, because a mentor–tyro relationship is exactly what they’re talking about, but that was hoping for too much. I lost. And, I fear, the English language has lost. Mentee is worse than crap. It is poison. It teaches you that you can do whatever you want to English and no one will care.

“Oh, but there’s a logic to it,” someone will say. Of course there’s a logic to it! It was coined by “science types.” It’s not a matter of logic. The lunatic asylums are full of impeccable logic. It’s a matter of history. It has to do with remembering where things came from and where we came from. Some of the smartest people I work with don’t care much for history—don’t care much about history. They are obsessed with novelty, and so with neologisms. Just like the rankest marketer. Sad, but true. I hope you’re accustomed to being a marketee by now.

To help me keep my sanity when I’m at the office, I hereby resolve to refer to recipients of sage guidance as manatees.

Manatees being mentored at the bottom of the ocean.
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*Or how about “protege”? Today (2007.09.15) I discovered a thread at the Volokh Conspiracy, predating mine by a fortnight or so, that revolved around using this word in pairings with “mentor” (as a viable, at-hand alternative to “mentee”).

August 19, 1991: Mikhail Gorbachev is ousted as President of the USSR and a short-lived State Emergency Committee is put in charge.

August 9, 1999: Boris Yeltsin appoints Vladimir Putin acting prime minister (the appointment is confirmed seven days later by the legislature); the significance of this becomes clearer later in the year, when Yeltsin resigns (on December 31) and Putin becomes the acting president.

Seeking support for his hypothesis, Trunov posed two questions to three Russian political scientists in early August 2007:

1. Might something happen this August that will fundamentally change the direction of politics in Russia?
2. Is it a historical law or merely a coincidence that many pivotal moments in Russian history have occurred in August?

Short answers:

1. Unlikely.
2. August is an slow month, politically and generally. Those who try to take advantage of it fail, by and large.

That said, August 2007 brought a pleasant surprise: the Prosecutor General of Russia, Yuri Chaika, announced that ten persons were arrested in connection with the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and will soon be charged. (That number changed slightly a few days later.) Among those implicated are a Chechen crime boss and current or former employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the Federal Security Service (FSB), who allegedly tracked the journalist and provided other intelligence to whoever ordered and perpetrated the murder. In this regard, Chaika cast suspicion on “people and structures that aim to destabilize the situation in the country, change the constitutional order [and] create a crisis in Russia” (as quoted in the New York Times). Commentators assume Chaika is referring to exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Alexei Simonov of the Glasnost Defense Foundation said the staff of Novaya Gazeta (Politkovskaya’s newspaper) feared the authorities would try “to steer the case in the direction of London” and blame Politkovskaya’s killing on Berezovsky.

Simonov is apparently a bona fide home-grown gadfly, and I tip my hat to him. But am I the only person west of Pskov who does not find it implausible that Berezovsky was behind not only this murder but others as well? And who continues to believe it is not in Vladimir Putin’s political interest (and certainly not worth the risk) to bump off noisy opponents? Those who are suspicious of Putin will point to the participation of MVD and FSB personnel and say, “Aha!” But for anyone conversant in US history, the phrase “rogue elements” will not sound foreign. And the bottom line is, the Putin government is prosecuting these people. Maybe, just maybe, Putin’s hands are clean in this matter. Or is it probably?

Certain elements in the US have a lot to fear in the person of Vladimir Putin. But their handwringing over how he treats his own people strikes one as disingenuous. Their real worry is that Putin is starting to rebuild a Russian counterpoise to US power—that their dream of a unipolar world is being disturbed.