All posts tagged Putin

The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips (revised edition, 2020)

There are quite a few book-length studies of the Syrian Civil War. The distinctive thing about this one is that academic and author Christopher Phillips insists that other regional countries weren’t ‘drawn into’ the conflict once it had got going but, on the contrary, were involved right from the start, helped to exacerbate the initial protests into a civil war, and then were vital elements which ensured that the war continued and has proven impossible to end. The six countries he considers the key players and interveners are the US, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, each of whose motivations and actions are considered at great and fascinating length.

Disaster

He opens with the claim that the Syrian civil war is the greatest human disaster of the 21st century. Over 500,000 have been killed, as many as 1.9 million wounded. Over 5 million have fled the country and 6 million been internally displaced i.e. more than half the pre-war population of 21 million. By 2013 Syria had regressed 40 years in social development. By 2015 half Syria’s schools had closed, half its children didn’t attend school, over 80% of Syrians were living in poverty, 30% in abject poverty. The average life expectancy of a Syrian dropped from 70 to 55 in four years.

The Arab Spring

The Syrian civil war began as part of the Arab Spring at the start of 2011. The whole thing kicked off when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, as a protest against yet another act of petty harassment and humiliation inflicted on him by municipal officials, the kind of low-level harassment most people in most Arab countries have had to put up with all their lives. When news got around, Bouazizi’s act inspired street demonstrations in Tunisia which then spread west to Morocco and East to Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and Syria, and on into Bahrain and Oman in the Gulf. What all these places had in common was they were ruled by small elites run by old men who had gathered power and money to themselves, their families and followers, resulting in grossly unequal societies which, above all, had large youth unemployment.

The unrest was to lead to the overthrow of corrupt old rulers – Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. And yet the newish, youngish leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, managed to not only contain the protests, even as they escalated in scale and violence, but, 12 years later, is still very much in place, discredited ruler of a permanently devastated Syria. Why? This is the basic question Phillips sets out to address in this long, thorough and engrossing study. First some background.

Modern Syria

Modern Syria’s boundaries were drawn up by French politicians after the Great War when, in the light of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the area known as the Middle East was carved up by the victors, France and Britain. Britain got Arabia, Palestine and Iraq; the French got Lebanon and Syria.

Syria, like Lebanon, was a complex web of religious, ethnic and cultural groups, including Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians (10%), Kurds in the north and east (10%), Alawites (a spin-off of Shia Islam; under 10%), Druze, with pockets of Turkmen and Aramaic speakers, Circassians and Armenians.

Between the wars

Syria and France negotiated a treaty of independence in September 1936 but France fell to the Nazis before it could be implemented. Syria came under the control of Vichy France until the British and Free French occupied the country in the Syria-Lebanon campaign in July 1941. The British forced the French to evacuate their troops in April 1946 and give Syria independence – events covered in James Barr’s excellent book, A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East.

As in so many post-colonial countries, the parliamentary institutions left by the colonial masters were weak while the army emerged as the strongest national institution. There followed a bewildering series of coups, eight in total between 1946 and 1968. In 1958 Syria joined the United Arab Republic with Egypt but left this union in 1961 after another coup. In 1963 came the decisive coup, carried out by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.

The Ba’ath party has ruled Syria as a totalitarian one-party state ever since, taking control of all aspects of education, culture and religion. It maintains its grip through the powerful Mukhabarat (secret police). In 1966 there was an intra-party rebellion against the Ba’athist Old Guard. In 1970 the last of these disruptions took place, when the formal head of state was overthrown in November 1970 by Defence Minister Hafiz al-Assad. Assad instituted a cult of personality, his face plastered on public hoardings, his voice dominating radio and TV, state propaganda declaring he and his family would rule in perpetuity. Hence political slogans such as ‘Assad or We Burn the Country’.

Brief mention of the various wars with Israel during this period, the 1973 war as a result of which Israel occupied the Golan Heights in the far south of Syria; the long series of troubles in Lebanon, namely its civil war 1975 to 1990, the Israeli invasion of 1982 and so on. Most relevant event of Hafiz’s rule was his assault on the city of Hama which was taken over in a rising led by the Muslim Brotherhood, and which he proceeded to raze to the ground, killing up to 40,000 civilians with another 100,000 deported.

Hafiz al-Assad ruled as a brutal dictator till his death from a heart attack in 2000. He groomed his oldest son, Bassel, to succeed him but Bassel died in a car crash in 1994, whereupon Assad recalled his second son, Bashir, who was studying to be an opthalmologist in London, and quickly promoted him through the ranks of the army.

There’s no time to go into detail about the troubled history of the region during Assad’s 30 years in power: enough to mention the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Syria and Egypt united to attack Israel and lost. In 1975 the civil war began in the Lebanon which Assad was closely involved in, and which was to drag on for 15 blood years. Assad deployed the Syrian army to the country, maintaining an armed presence until 2005.

The Cold War

Phillips is an academic. This means he likes to identify issues and then cite conflicting interpretations or opinions about them. Thus, he tells us, it was received wisdom that, during the long Cold War, Middle Eastern states sided with one or other of the two superpowers. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel leaned towards America; the more Arab nationalist regimes, such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq, had stronger ties with the Soviet Union.

It’s about here in the narrative that Phillips starts to weigh rival interpretations of established narratives, citing modern scholars who claim that, contrary to Cold War conventions, the countries of the region always had their own agendas and only called on support from each super power as it suited them. Apparently it is a ‘globalist’ view to think of the Middle East as one more region in which the Superpower rivalry played out; it is the ‘regionalist’ view to say that local countries had more agency than the simple Cold War model allows. So, for example, Syria and Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 against the wishes of their Soviet sponsor; in 1982 Israel invaded south Lebanon against the wishes of its American patron (p.16).

America the only superpower in the 1990s

America has had a long ill-fated involvement in the Middle East, above all, of course, supporting Israel, making periodic attempts to find some solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Phillips suggests that between the fall of the Soviet Union and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, America was credited with having emerged as the world’s only superpower, creating a ‘unipolar’ world, and emboldening the country to intervene in conflicts such as the First Gulf War, Somalia, former Yugoslavia and so on.

Effects of the Iraq War

However, this received opinion was seriously damaged by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which it slowly became clear to all the region’s countries that America was not the superpower everyone had thought it to be, far from it. America had lots of money and men but turned out to be staggeringly incompetent, and easily pinned down by local insurgencies. America’s bluff was called. The superpower was cut down to size. Phillips itemises the seriously destabilising impacts of the Iraq War:

1. Rise of Iran

Iran was the great winner of the invasion of Iraq. Saddam, a Sunni, had imposed his rule on Iraq which is a majority Shia nation. Once he was overthrown and something like democratic elections were held, then Shia parties and Shia religious leaders quickly came to the fore. Many of these had spent decades in exile in Shia Iran, owed their lives, livelihoods, rise to power to Iranian sponsors, militias, to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The most notable example was Nouri al-Maliki, who had been an exile in Iran and went on to become Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014, implementing aggressively pro-Iranian, pro-Shia policies (which helped to stoke the Sunni resistance). At every level Iraqi political life came to be dominated by Shia Iran.

2. The Kurds become players

Except for the Kurds, who lived in and, as a result of the overthrow of Saddam, got to run the northern third of Iraq. The Kurdish guerrilla movements had fought Saddam Hussein throughout his brutal rule (1968 to 2003). As Iraq sank into sectarian civil war (Shia against Sunni) the Kurds effectively sealed off their northern part of the country from the madness of the Arab south. The success of the Kurds in Iraq emboldened their brother groups and militias in Syria and Turkey.

3. Saudi Arabia stirs

Back to Iran: the rise of Iranian power and influence in Iraq sparked paranoia among Sunni states, none more so than Saudi Arabia. About 15% of Saudi’s population is Shia, mostly living in its eastern provinces which, coincidentally, is also where the oil is. Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s the Saudi regime was happy to fund Saddam Hussein who acted as a Sunni barrier against Iranian ambitions. They funded his long ruinous war against the new Iranian Islamic revolutionary regime, the Iran-Iraq war 1980 to 1988. Phillips calls it a policy of ‘dual containment’. However, Saddam burned his boats when, having brought his country to the brink of bankruptcy, he invaded Kuwait in 1990, thus forfeiting the aid he’d been receiving from Saudi and the Gulf states.

Since Saddam was removed in 2003, Saudi has found itself combating the ever-growing influence of the regional superpower, Iran. Phillips points out that it’s not just power, or the Shia religion, that threaten the Saudis, but the fact that revolutionary Iran embodies a radically different political model. The Saudis are run by an old-style hereditary monarchy, conservative and repressive. Iran presents a completely different religio-political model, with far larger elements of democracy and popular say. This model represents a threat to the Saudi model (p.19).

The rise of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry was perhaps the most dramatic regional shift caused by the Iraq war… (p.20)

4. Rising sectarianism

Talk of Saudi and Iran raises the issue of Muslim sectarianism i.e. the radicalisation of religion. The Americans converted Iraq from being a secular dictatorship which kept a tight check on religious extremism into a hotbed for all kinds of Islamic fanaticism (p.22). Al Qaeda moved into Iraq and grew hugely, countless other sectarian militias were set up and carried out brutal ethnic cleansings. Then, in the early chaos of the Syrian civil war, ISIS arose, mostly led by former Al Qaeda in Iraq soldiers, themselves former officers in Saddam’s army, made homeless when Paul Bremer sacked the entire Iraqi Army.

Why the Arab Spring failed in Syria

Phillips doesn’t make the comparison with Libya but I find if pretty obvious. The Libyans managed to get rid of their dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, but failed to replace him with one unitary government; instead Libya has collapsed into two rival governments because the opposition wasn’t strong or united enough to enforce unity. Same with Syria. There was much opposition to Assad’s regime but a) it was very split along regional, ethnic and sectarian lines and b) the regime managed to keep support from a wide enough range of groups, probably, in the end, the majority of the population which, although not keen on Assad’s repressive regime, feared the alternative i.e. chaos.

For this fear of chaos was another legacy of the Iraq War. Assad simply had to remind his people what had happened next door, in neighbouring Iraq, when an established dictator was overthrown i.e. chaos, sectarian massacre, ethnic cleansing and civil war. Probably the entire Alawi population rallied behind him (10 to 13%), as did the Orthodox Christian minority (8%). The Kurds took the opportunity to rebel but that just reinforced conservative fears that the rebellion would lead to the country’s collapse.

As I understand it, the one key decider for the fate of Arab Spring protests was whether the army and security services went over to the protesters or not. In Tunisia and Egypt they did and the old rulers were overthrown. In Libya it was a split, some did, some didn’t and the country collapsed. In Syria, the army and the network of security services referred to as the Mukhabarat was closely allied with Assad and remained loyal.

As to the splits in the Syrian opposition, this reached almost ludicrous levels, with virtually every town and village in rebel areas setting up their own councils, while a congeries of umbrella groups made up of exiled politicians, based in Turkey, Saudi or Qatar, fought to claim leadership of the movement. Phillips has one hugely telling statistic. At the peak of confusion in the Lebanon Civil War there were some 30 identifiable named militias; whereas, by 2013, a US centre identified 1,050 anti-Assad brigades and 3,250 smaller companies (p.127). It was, and is, like herding sheep.

The Kurds

For a century the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey have been seeking, in one form or another, some kind of autonomy if not a self-ruling state. The Kurds make up to 10% of the population of Syria, about 10% of the population of Iran, 18% of Turkey and 20% of Iraq. But as well as engaging in permanent conflict with the Turkish army, enduring periodic genocidal assaults by Assad in Syria and especially Saddam in Iraq, the Kurds have often been divided among themselves.

Phillips gives a clear account of the confusing manoeuvring of Kurdish groups on page 111. In May a Kurdish National Movement was formed which brought together 17 different political parties including the Democratic Union Party or PYD, Syria’s branch of the long-established Kurdish separatist party, the PKK. This broke down because of PYD demands and was replaced in October by the Kurdish National Council, which was more enduring but only contained 10 of the original 17 groups and not the PYD.

The PYD’s militia was named the People’s Defense Units or the YPG. When Assad forces withdrew from some areas held by the YPG, other Kurdish groups and Gulf backers accused it of being in league with Assad, something it strongly denied.

When the Syrian National Council was formed in August 2011 as an umbrella for opposition groups it refused to remove the word ‘Arab’ from its motto of calling for a ‘Syrian Arab Republic’, thus prompting a walkout by the Kurdish delegates. Despite repeated attempts at mediation both sides have refused to compromise. So you get the picture. It is with the Kurds, as with the Arabs in general, a picture of endless bickering disagreement.

Not only this but there is interference from Kurds outside Syria. The collapse of the state in Iraq led to the creation of a Kurdish autonomous area in northern Iraq, but rule of this was contested between the Iraqi branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a hard-core Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), a much more conservative nationalist movement, led by Masoud Barzani. So, very broadly speaking, the Kurds were at odds with their Arab partners in the opposition to Assad, and were also divided among themselves.

ISIS

However, the Kurds received a boost in 2014 after the catastrophic fall of Mosul, the main city in northern Iraq, to Islamic State, because this triggered the Americans to become involved. Barack Obama’s administration refused to intervene in the war against Assad but was prepared to give direct support to the YPG in its battles against ISIS. The Americans supplied and organised the fierce campaign, fought 2016 to 2017, to seize back the city of Raqqa in north-eastern Syria, which had become the Islamic State’s de facto capital.

Turkey

The situation of the Kurds is, of course, complicated by numerous external factors, the most obvious of which is that Turkish governments of all flavours remain vehemently opposed to the slightest flicker of Kurdish independence and so have declared the YPG a terrorist organisation, in this respect aligning it with the much more long-established Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which actually has carried out terrorist attacks, for example, on police stations, in Turkey.

It was concern about the ‘infection’ of Kurdish independence spreading from Kurdish autonomous regions which led Turkey to invade and occupy key areas in the north of Syria, where Turkish forces remain to this day.

Outside forces

1. US

Barack Obama was US President 2009 to 2017. The criticism made of his foreign policy was that he was too optimistic (thought other leaders were as rational and consensual as him) and believed America had more power than the Iraq invasion showed that it actually does.

Regarding Syria, Phillips records how the Obama administration, after initial caution, moved by August 2011 to call for Assad to go. This was what Phillips calls a ‘conflict escalator’: it misled everyone. It misled the Russians and everyone in the region into thinking America might be about to intervene (as in Libya) to arm the opposition and force Assad’s overthrow; thus stiffening Russia’s support for Assad. It stiffened the resolve of opposition groups who thought America would soon come riding to their rescue. It stiffened the resolve of the Assad regime hard-liners who thought they had nothing to lose by behaving more brutally.

Then there’s the issue of intelligence and leverage. America had been bankrolling the Egyptian state for 50 years or so, paying for its food and bankrolling its army. Therefore America had many levers to pull when they decided it was time for long-serving Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (president from 1981 to 2011) to go.

But the Americans then mistakenly thought they would have the same kind of influence in Syria which, on the contrary, was a) a much more closed repressive regime than Egypt b) had been a Soviet client state since the Ba’ath took power. I.e. the Americans found it easy to topple Mubarak, impossible to topple Assad.

In 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and head of the CIA David Petraeus presented a plan to vet, train and equip opposition groups (p.143). Obama rejected it and some critics said ever afterwards that this was a lost opportunity to give the rebels the boost they needed to overthrow the dictator and a decade of misery would have been prevented. Phillips, here as everywhere, is enjoyably measured and balanced. He presents the counter-arguments that a) however much the US had given rebel groups events went on to show that Russia and Iran would have matched and superseded it; b) though Clinton et al reassured the Prez that the arms would only go to the good guys and not fall into the hands of ‘extremists’, they would have c) America spent a fortune vetting, training and equipping the police force and armies in both Iraq and Afghanistan who turned out to be either criminally corrupt or simply fled at the first sign of trouble. Seems to me Obama was right to be sceptical about everything to do with discredited foreign adventures.

2. Russia

Dmitry Medvedev, president of Russia 2008 to 2012, prime minister of Russia 2012 to 2020. Vladimir Putin president 2012 to the present. Russia had multiple motives. The Soviet Union had strongly supported Assad’s father, providing weapons and training, though this legacy wasn’t decisive. Similarly, Russia had trade ties with Syria but not as extensive as with Turkey or Iraq.

In 2011 there were protests in Moscow against Putin being elected Russian president yet again so Putin had a vested interest against the Arab Spring popular revolts. A bigger motive was blocking further US influence in the region. In a rare moment the UN Security Council approved armed intervention i.e. air attacks, to support the rebels in Libya; Russia blocked any similar gestures in Syria. If the principle of replacing unpopular/unjust leaders is allowed, it might at some point be used to justify overthrowing Putin himself.

Lastly, anti-jihadism. Fourteen per cent of the population of Russia is Muslim. Putin presented his murderous wars in Chechnya as campaigns against Islamic jihadism. Supporting secular Assad could be presented in the same light as standing up against jihadism, something which became easier when al Qaeda and then ISIS moved in.

There’s another interpretation, which is that Russia had precious little influence over the Assad regime, but shrewdly bet it would be difficult to oust, and gambled on its endurance. Then, once committed, and having been criticised in the West and the Arab world fir its support, it became a matter of prestige, sticking to its guns.

3. Turkey

The leading figure in Turkish politics for the last 20 years has been Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who was prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014, president of Turkey from 2014 to the present.

Turkey began to change its attitude to its neighbours in the Middle East after Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (the AKP) was elected to government in 2002. The AFK launched a pivot away from the West (and from the secular policies of Turkey’s modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), encouraging Islam and engaging more with its neighbours in the region (pages 35 and 70).

In this spirit Erdoğan set out to overcome decades of enmity with Syria – Turkey had for decades been part of NATO while Syria was firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence. Thus he cultivated a friendship with young Bashar, even flying to Damascus to sign a free trade agreement in 2004.

Turkey’s longest land border is with Syria (566 miles) so the two countries had a vested interest in coming to agreements about trade, crossing points and the vexed issue of water supply.

However, when the protests began at the start of 2011, and especially when Assad’s regime began to crack down, Erdoğan was quick to criticise the regime. By July Turkey was harbouring the group which announced itself as the Free Syrian Army. Erdoğan continued to try to persuade Assad to stand down behind the scenes, but by September had given up and in November made his first speech publicly calling for Assad to go and comparing him to Hitler (p.72).

Phillips suggests a number of reasons for this volte-face. One was that Erdoğan felt personally let down by Assad’s behaviour, and then chagrined that he turned out to have so little influence over him. Second reason is Erdoğan’s Muslim faith and his policy of making Turkey a more Muslim country. Much of the opposition to Assad was Islamic in nature and devout Muslims turning against a secular-militarist regime in Syria exactly mirrored what the AFK was doing in Turkey, trying to dismantle the military, Kemalist ‘Deep State’ in order to make Turkey more Islamic.

Lastly, Erdoğan is a populist and he wanted to make Turkey a leader in the region by appealing directly to the people, to ‘the street’. Hence his support of the Arab Spring revolts, and hence his quick realisation that his position would be jeopardised by association with a man who was hell-bent on turning into a genocidal tyrant (Assad). (This, for example, explains Erdoğan’s recent speeches in support of Hamas; all part of his ongoing campaign to make Turkey leader of the Arab ‘street’, with Erdogan still polling as the most popular leader for Arab youths.)

The situation quickly became very complex but three major facts emerge: 1) Turkey has taken over 4 million Syrian refugees, at obvious cost and burden; 2) Erdoğan remains implacably opposed to the Kurdish forces in Syria and any attempt to set up an independent Kurdish entity; 30 despite much criticism, Turkey appears to have supported al-Nusrah and ISIS, the two most extreme jihadist groups.

4. Saudi Arabia

Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has been King of Saudi Arabia since 2015 and was Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia from 2015 to 2022. Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, is Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia.

For decades Saudi worked behind the scenes and kept a low profile. The Iraq War changed that by significantly boosting Iran’s reach and influence. The Saudis perceived the rise and rise of Iran as a threat to be countered, so when the Arab Spring came along in 2011, they reacted in two ways. They were, in general, against populist uprisings because they feared something similar might happen in their own tightly controlled kingdom. And they were against the kind of radical jihadism which had struck several times within the kingdom (p.120). Nonetheless, the biggest decider for the Saudis in Syria was Assad’s traditional alliance with Iran. Being anti-Iran meant they were anti-Assad, and so the Saudis from very early on a) supported anti-Assad forces and b) jostled with Qatar to take control of, host and organise the anti-Assad opposition.

Saudi Arabia is run by a large extended family which have created a complex bureaucracy. Part of the reason it likes ‘leading from the back’ is because it often takes a while to develop a policy position. Compare and contrast smaller, nimbler, quicker Qatar.

5. Qatar

When the war broke out Qatar was ruled by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. He abdicated in 2013 in favour of his son, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who is current Emir of Qatar. Qatar has developed, over the past two decades, increasingly ambitious plans to be a player in the region. A central symbol of this was the establishment of the Al Jazeera 24-hour news channel in 2006.

Qatar took the lead in the Arab League in the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, which gave it an inflated sense of its own power, and its ability to sway the West. Its rulers thought they could pull off the same thing in Syria (p.135).

Phillips not only explains how Saudi and Qatar developed new foreign policies in the aftermath of the Iraq War, he goes on to explain in immense detail, the rivalry and jostling between the two states to support, host and finance the Syrian opposition and how this had the unintended consequence of further splitting and dividing an already highly fractured opposition.

After an initial optimistic moment in 2012, the intervention of the two rival Gulf states had the net effect of making whoever they nominated as leaders of the opposition seem just that, external nominees with little support in Syria itself (p.117). It was damaging and promoted factionalism (p.124).

Qatar supported the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia loathed it. Thus Qatar was livid when Riyadh backed the Egyptian military’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo, in July 2013 (p.193).

6. Iran

Iran supported Assad with money, munitions, men and loans, with food and oil for his population. Most importantly Iran lent Assad Qassem Sulemanei, a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, from 1998 until his assassination in 2020 commander of the Quds Force, an IRGC division primarily responsible for extraterritorial and clandestine military operations. According to Phillips Sulemanei was responsible for organising Shia militias in Iraq in their insurgencies against the occupying US forces. Therefore, on the one hand, he had immense experience at organising armies for asymmetrical warfare. On the other hand, the Iranians found the command structures of Assad’s security forces less controllable than they expected.

Sulemanei brought in experienced fighters and officers from Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, to strengthen and organise the National Syrian Army which was felt to be weak and undisciplined by comparison.

At its most extreme some critics accused Iran of effectively annexing Syria and keeping Assad on as a figurehead. But Phillips rejects this theory, stating that Assad was always his own man, irritating his Iranian patrons by his obstinacy.

(Israel)

Israel was never a player in the Syrian civil war like the six countries described above. Israel had been enemies with Syria since the latter was one of the Arab nations who attacked the new state at its inception in 1948. Syria then lost the Golan Heights neighbouring north Israel in the 1967 war and failed to retrieve them in 1973.

That said, Assad father and son were content to mostly keep the peace with Israel, preferring to work through proxies in civil war-torn Lebanon. When the protests broke out in Syria in spring 2011 and as the situation deteriorated into civil war, Israel’s position was relatively straightforward: a civil war in Syria kept all its enemies nicely tied up, so Israel was content to watch and not intervene.

The worst case scenario for Israel was the overthrow of Assad by either an Iranian-backed Shia regime (disaster), or a militant Sunni regime (bad), either of which would feel tempted to attack Israel to appease their domestic constituencies. But as the protests turned to conflict and this descended into chaos, it suited Israel for the civil war to be dragged out indefinitely (p.174). Over the 12 years of the war Israel has mostly limited its interventions to local air strikes on what they thought were transports of missiles to Hezbollah forces along their northern border, or the occasional targeted assassination of Hezbollah leaders.

The same continues to be the case in light of this new Gaza Crisis i.e. Israel wants to keep its northern border quiet in order to finish off Hamas (if it can).

An academic study

Phillips is very much the academic, being Professor in International Relations at Queen Mary College, University of London. Sometimes academic studies can be a bad thing and Phillips’s book is certainly dry and schematic instead of dramatic and journalistic. But in his case it’s a good thing. The war quickly developed into a multi-player game of 12-D chess, with a confusing array of forces both inside and outside Syria, whose positions continually changed and evolved i.e. it is fiendishly mind-bogglingly complicated. So I liked the clarity with which Phillips presented the positions and interests of all the different parties: it was like a series of PowerPoint slides, clear and logical.

Actually, more than that, on each slide he does the academic thing of presenting all the reasons for an interpretation (action or decision) and then all the reasons against and I found this very neat and satisfying. It is like a series of hundreds of little academic debates. Could the Kofi Annan peace plan ever have worked? Could the opposition have been organised quicker and more effectively but for the rivalry of Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Might early pressure from Russia have forced Assad to the negotiating table? Phillips notes hundreds of decision points on the journey into anarchy, describes them lucidly, and then assesses with logic and clarity.

It’s quite a hard book to read because it is so dry, and because the situation is so bewilderingly complicated: by about page 150 I was drowning in names and acronyms, and sometimes struggling to focus on his many balanced analyses of the pros and cons of the positions adopted by scores of different countries, leaders, foreign secretaries, armies, militias and so on. It’s a lot to take in and process. But ultimately very worthwhile. I enjoyed it and I respected Phillips’s approach.

Papers and studies

Throughout the text Phillips cites academic studies, papers and theories and some of these are worth recording. He cites the work of J. Michael Greig on civil wars which suggests that peace cannot be achieved until both sides reach ‘a hurting stalemate’ and that this doesn’t occur until about 130 months of fighting and 33,000 deaths (pages 102 and 192).

Russia steps up

The second edition of Phillips’s book was completed in mid-2020. From 2015 to 2020 I had the impression that events moved faster than in the first four years of complex stalemate.

The key turning point in Phillips’s account appears to be Putin’s full-on despatch of Russian forces to Syria in September 2015, the first time Russian forces had been outside the territory of the old Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War. Relations with the US had tanked after Russia annexed the Crimea in March 2014. Russian troops expanded old Soviet bases and runways and the Mediterranean port it had used in the olden days. Russia then mounted air strikes which it claimed to the world were against ISIS but as often as not were against other anti-Assad forces. It was able to assume a dominant role vis-a-vis its nominal partner, Iran. And having boots on the ground brought it into dangerous proximity with Turkish forces as the latter took an increasingly pro-active role, with a limited incursion in 2016 followed by a full-scale invasion of north Syria in 2019. This move, codenamed Operation Peace Spring, was designed to expel Kurdish forces from Turkey’s neighbour and create a 20 mile deep buffer zone. The Turkish aim was also to relocate some of the nearly 4 million Syrian refugees who had taken refuge in their country. Both attacking the ‘terrorist’ Kurds and resettling refugees were domestically popular policies in Turkey, but the brutality of the incursion brought condemnation and sanctions from the West, and Turkish and Russian forces came close to blows until Putin and Erdoğan signed a deal for join patrolling of some of the seized areas.

Anyway, from the Russian intervention of September 2015 onwards, the story speeds up with Assad’s forces, backed by Russia or Iran, slowly retaking key towns and cities and reasserting control in the most populous west of the country; Idlib in the north becoming a sort of safe haven for opponents, where those who surrendered in cities like Aleppo were bussed; uncertainty about how long Turkey will continue to occupy a strip of northern Syria as a ‘buffer zone’; and the fate of the sparsely populated east of the country, liberated by American and Kurdish forces, remains uncertain.

Summary

Having detailed events and turning points up to 2020, Phillips ends his text with a summary of winners and losers, mainly losers:

Turkey

Turkey’s goal of promoting itself as a regional ‘hegemon’ (power) has been ‘shredded’ (p.305). The ‘buffer zone’ Turkey created along its southern border also acts as a physical barrier to greater involvement in the region. The war:

  • resulted in at least 3.5 million Syrian refugees
  • increased domestic terrorism by ISIS and the PKK, who have reignited their violent campaign in eastern Turkey
  • helped a shift towards more autocratic government by Erdoğan

Qatar

Qatar is worse off as a result of the war. Its domestic situation is stable as is its alliance with the US, but:

  • its initial success backing the rebels in Libya soon came to be tarnished by the collapse of the Libyan state
  • it support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt came to an abrupt end in 2013 when the MB government was overthrown in a military coup
  • Qatar was eclipsed as main Arab sponsor of the Assad opposition by Saudi Arabia
  • relations with its Gulf neighbours reached a nadir when, in 2017, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates, along with Egypt and Bahrain, cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed a trade and travel ban

The outcome was the opposite of the region-bestriding influence Qatar had hoped to project after its successful support of the opposition in Libya in 2011.

USA

Barack Obama wanted to turn the page on the Bush wars and he succeeded in resisting siren calls for a full-on engagement against Assad in early and mid-2011. No more occupying Middle Eastern countries, good. When he did intervene it was in specific areas to help specific allies (the Kurds) destroy ISIS and, when that goal was more or less accomplished, he withdrew. I admire Obama for this.

But critics say he was responsible for a massive diminution of America’s reputation in the region. All the opposition groups were disappointed, as were regional allies such as Turkey and especially Saudi Arabia, by America’s failure to intervene. America’s limited intervention opened the space for the expansionism of Iran but especially of Russia.

Trump was worse. Despite claiming to be the opposite of everything Obama represented, Trump, following his instinctive isolationism, had the same general effect of undermining American authority and fostering a more multipolar Middle East. More chaotic, harder to control. Hence lots of articles like this:

Saudi Arabia

Experienced a mild succession crisis with the death of King Abdullah in 2015 but, in the event, he was smoothly succeeded by Salman and his activist son, Mohammed bin Salman. But MBS, as he’s known, hasn’t found foreign policy as easy as he thought. Saudi:

  • failed in its aim of overthrowing Assad
  • failed in its aim of stemming Iranian influence (although supporting the opposition in the field ensured that Iran drained its coffers supporting the regime and Hezbollah)
  • has found it difficult to end the civil war in Yemen which it exacerbated (the Saudis support Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government against the Houthi rebels who are supported by Iran; it’s a proxy war between the two, as is Syria)

Iran

On the plus side, Iran:

  • preserved the Assad regime and hugely increasing its say and influence in Syria
  • which meant also securing a land route to supply its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah
  • maintained sway over Iraq
  • three developments which go towards creating a crescent of Iranian influence from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria and into Lebanon

On the downside, Iran likes to project itself as a defender of all Muslims but its defence of Alawite Assad, using Shia Hezbollah, and fighting against the numerous Sunni opposition groups, badly damaged that unifying goal. Also, all this came at a large economic cost, exacerbated by ongoing US and Western sanctions (some about Syria, some ongoing squabbles about Iran’s nuclear programme).

Israel

Israel managed to keep out of the war and to stop it spilling over onto its territory, by a) coming to selective agreements with rebels holding the Golan Heights, b) by launching selective strikes against Hezbollah, with Russian acquiescence (after personal meetings and negotiations between Netanyahu and Putin, which Phillips describes in fascinating detail).

Russia

Russia is arguably the biggest winner from the Syrian civil war. Russia:

  • secured domestic security from Islamic terrorism (Russia was happy to see thousands of jihadis from the Central Asian republics head off to Syria to be killed)
  • continued to expand its economic reach into the Middle East
  • boosted its regional credentials at the expense of waning US power

However, with no end in sight to the war, there are questions about how long Russia can continue to pour aid into a broken country, and Syria is unlikely to ever become a profitable trading partner.

Credit

The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips was first published by Yale University Press in 2016. References are to the revised paperback edition, published 2020.

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Posted by Simon on November 3, 2023

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Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline by Anastasia Taylor-Lind @ Imperial War Museum London

The Imperial War Museum London is hosting a free exhibition of photos taken in the Ukraine by internationally renowned photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind from the Ukraine. It’s a smallish display, in just one room, of 17 big colour photos.

Maybe the Ukraine came to most people’s notice with Russia’s invasion of 24 February 2022. But something like that doesn’t come out of the blue and in fact Ukraine has been in a low-level war since 2014, the year when a complex political crisis in Ukraine came to a head. This explains why the exhibition is divided into three parts or ‘moments’ and 2014 is the first one:

1. 2014 protests (3 photos)

Background

In 2013 the Ukrainian parliament had overwhelmingly approved finalising a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), something which marked a decisive shift away from its eastern neighbour, Russia. Russia, for its part, offered Ukraine very favourable trading arrangements, large state loans and brought political pressure to bear on Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych who, as a result, at the end of 2013 abruptly cancelled the negotiations with the EU and reaffirmed Ukraine’s economic and political ties with Russia.

This led to huge pro-EU protests in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities which turned into violent clashes between protestors and security forces. Government buildings were occupied, there were running street battles, in all over 100 protesters were killed and over 1,000 injured. The protesters opposed what they saw as widespread government corruption and abuse of power, the influence of oligarchs, police brutality, and human rights violations. A large, barricaded protest camp occupied Independence Square in central Kyiv throughout the ‘Maidan Uprising’.

Eventually a bill was introduced into Parliament stripping Yanukovych of the presidency and a few days later another one called for his arrest. He fled to the Russified east of the country. This demonstration of people power came to be referred to as the Revolution of Dignity or the Maidan Revolution.

Photos

Taylor-Lind was in Kiev during the Maidan Revolution and took some cracking photos, in fact the single best image from the exhibition captures the messy defiance of protesters swarming over some grand statuary in central Kiev while thick black smoke from burning tyres gives the scene an apocalyptic vibe.

Anti-government protests, Kyiv, February 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

The 17 photos in the exhibition can perhaps be sorted into 3 or so categories: one is actuality, snapped on the hoof, as it appears, such as the image above. A completely different type is the photographs Taylor-Lind took in the makeshift studio she created which could be quickly set up in trouble spots. She rigged one up in central Kiev during the revolution and spend weeks photographing hundreds of protesters, including tired, injured Yevhen Shulga.

Yevhen Shulga, Kiev 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

There are four of these ‘studio’ portraits in the show and, interestingly enough, one of the other three is also of Shulga, but from 2022, showing his transformation from street protester to fully-fledged soldier in the Ukraine Army.

2. 2014 to 2020 the Donbas (4 photos)

Unfortunately, overthrowing an unpopular president wasn’t the end of it, the Maidan Revolution wasn’t as decisive or final as the overthrow of communism had been in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the other Eastern bloc countries 25 years earlier.

Ukraine’s situation is complicated and the war doesn’t make any sense unless you listen to the Russian side. The Russians have a number of grievances. Number one, in deep history, Kiev is actually the spiritual home of the Russian Orthodox Church, for it was here, in 987, that the Kievan Prince Vladimir married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor and concerted, along with all his subjects, to the Orthodox religion. To quote Michael Ignatieff’s excellent study of modern nationalism, ‘Kievan Rus is the beginning of the Russian nationalist experience’ (Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff, 1993, page 87). So there’s a deep Russian nationalistic claim to the capital.

During the nineteenth century the Ukraine was fully incorporated into the Russian Empire and the eastern part of the country heavily settled by Russian speakers. As a result of the Russian Revolution the aristocracy fed and the middle classes expropriated of their land. Between the wars Stalin pushed through the forced collectivisation of the vast fertile farms of central Ukraine and this led to one of the biggest man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century, when as many as 5 million Ukrainians starved to death between 1931 and 1933. The Russians also attempted to exterminate the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

This explains why, when the Nazis invaded as part of their attack on the USSR in June 1941, they were at first greeted as liberators from the yoke of the murderous, semi-genocidal Soviet regime, at least until it became clear that the Nazis were even worse. The whole brutal period is described in Timothy Snyder’s often stomach-churning book.

So Ukrainian nationalists, predominantly in the west of the country, found themselves fighting a three-way war, against the Soviets and against the Nazis and, a few years later, when the resurgent Red Army pressed the Germans back through the Ukraine, many nationalists fought the Russians. In fact Ignatieff says that some nationalist guerrilla forces weren’t completely neutralised until the 1950s. Ukrainian nationalists may remember these forces as heroes but the Russians, of course, lump them together with the Nazi enemy and this gives them a veneer of plausibility when Russian propaganda paints anyone who opposes Moscow’s wishes, right up to the present day, as ‘fascists’.

Back to 2014 and Russia didn’t take the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych lying down. Within a matter of weeks two things happened:

  1. Russia annexed the Crimea
  2. Russia sent paramilitary forces to bolster armed uprisings in the far east of Ukraine, on the Russian border

Bucha, April 2022 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

1. The annexation of the Crimea

Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This in-depth article gives the reasons why.

In summary, 1) the Russians had only just finished managing a violent little civil war in the newly annexed western regions of Ukraine, especially Volynia and Galicia; 2) the new Communist Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had himself been head of the CP of Ukraine and knew the republic well; 3) in the 1950s the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian.

In other words, assigning the Crimea to the Ukraine added nearly a million ethnic Russians to the troublesome Republic. It was a swift, administrative way of increasing the Russian minority in the country.

The downside was that the Crimea is host to Russia’s Black Sea ports and navy. This didn’t matter so long as Ukraine was under the thumb of Russia within the USSR. But amid the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was clear to the Russian military (Navy) that handing over Russia’s main Black Sea naval base to a different country was crazy. The status of the Crimean bases remained a source of controversy and tension throughout the 1990s, with Boris Yeltsin and successive leaders negotiating leasing and access deals.

In a way it’s a surprise that a leader as increasingly bullish and nationalistic as Vladimir Putin took until 2014 to annex the Crimea. You can see why, from his point of view, if Ukraine had remained under Yanukovych who would have been cemented to Russia by favourable trade deals, then Putin and the Russian military would have let the negotiated arrangements about Crimea continue; but how, when Yanukovych was overthrown, and the Ukraine parliament made clear its commitment to ally with the West, Putin and the Generals acted.

According to the 2014 census, Crimea had a population of 2.3 million, of whom 68% were Russian and 16% were Ukrainian. So although many in the West and international fora like the UN disapproved of the annexation, you can see both the a) military and b) ethnically nationalist thinking behind the move.

2. The Donbas

Back to the exhibition, the second consequence of the overthrow of President Yanukovych was that Russia supported rebellions against Ukraine’s government in areas along the border. I’ll just quote Wikipedia:

In March 2014, following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, anti-revolution and pro-Russian protests began in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, collectively ‘the Donbas’. These began as Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. Armed Russian-backed separatists seized Ukrainian government buildings in the Donbas and declared the Donetsk and Luhansk republics (DPR and LPR) as independent states, leading to conflict with Ukrainian government forces. Russia covertly supported the separatists with troops and weaponry, only later admitting sending “military specialists”. After a year of fighting, the conflict developed into trench warfare. There were 29 failed ceasefires. About 14,000 people were killed in the war: 6,500 pro-Russian separatist and Russian forces, 4,400 Ukrainian forces, and 3,400 civilians on both sides of the frontline. The vast majority of civilian casualties were in the first year.

Apparently, the conflict was very fierce in 2014 and 15 but then settled down to First World War-style trenches and attrition.

The exhibition includes four photos to cover this prolonged conflict. I mentioned categories of photos, above. The best photo here is an example of a hybrid form, which is posed, but not as posed as a studio photo. This, for me, is arguably the best image in the show.

A Ukrainian soldier, Donbas, 2018 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

At first I thought this was an interior, and the backdrop was some kind of old wood panelling, fitting for a comfy sofa and a framed oil painting. Only when I looked more closely did I realise that the ‘wall’ is made from a big stack of army ammunition boxes. In fact the wall label explains that the whole thing was set up under a bridge and completely outside. When you look closer you can see the sofa is a bit of old tat with rips in it and the painting is a cheap reproduction in a chipped frame.

So the whole thing represents a complex attempt to recreate the comforts of home in a war zone but is by way of being a sort of trompe l’oeil fabrication which, at the same time, beautifully captures the spirit of invention and blagging which characterises all front lines.

3. Spring 2022 Russian invasion (10 photos)

The third and largest part of the little exhibition contains 10 photos covering aspects of Russia’s invasion of the whole of Ukraine which started on 24 February 2022. By now you can see that this attack didn’t come out of the blue but had deep historical, cultural, political and military roots.

But if annexing the Crimea could, possibly, be justified by ethnic nationalism and politics, a full-scale attack on an independent nation state is clearly in breach of the United Nations charter and international law. It’s has been deplored by the International Court of Justice, the Council of Europe, and the International Criminal Court.

There’s widespread consensus (in the West, at any rate) that Putin intended his forces to mount a pincer movement on Kiev and seize it within a week, presumably intending to force the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy into exile, whereupon the Russians could impose their own Russia-friendly government and then hold some kind of rigged referendum or plebiscite. Their playbook really hasn’t changed since the deepest communist days of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

The most obvious thing about the war is it has revealed how rubbish the Russian army is. Despite the element of surprise and overwhelming superiority of numbers, their advances got bogged down on all fronts. As usual, their leadership was bad and the quality of the average Russian squaddie very poor. Discipline was bad, units fell apart, equipment was inferior to Ukraine’s western kit.

For humanitarians like Taylor-Lind and the IWM the focus is less on the historical and military roots than on the humanitarian tragedy the invasion has triggered. These 10 photos come from spring 2022 i.e. three or four months into the present conflict, and show: a grieving mother; one of Taylor-Lind’s makeshift studio portraits of two adult sisters who have fled the fighting and are now refugees; an older lady taking receipt of a coal delivery (since all the gas pipelines have been blown up).

There’s the shot of the back of a middle-aged woman receiving hospital treatment after a shell exploded in her back garden; there’s a sick old woman with a name tag tied to her wrist who’s being evacuated from a hospital near the front line. There’s a shot of four soldiers digging a defensive trench and another of five soldiers firing a volley over the grave of a local farmer.

There’s a mass grave being excavated at Bucha where the Russians are alleged to have carried out atrocities against civilians, tying their hands behind their backs, torturing them, executing them – a grim roll-call which recalls the behaviour of the Serbs during the Yugoslav Civil wars 30 years ago.

The brutal nature of this kind of hybrid warfare, with its paramilitaries and mercenaries, with its badly-disciplined troops encouraged by their officers to spread terror, hasn’t changed or evolved. Like a plague, like a scourge of God, it just visits different areas and leaves grieving relatives, burned out houses and mass graves. Above all it leaves destruction on an epic scale, and this is the fourth category of photo I’d identify in the exhibition – unpeopled ruins.

A damaged apartment block, Sumy region, April 2022 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

It’s not so much the deaths which appal me, it’s the unremitting, pointless, futile, death-drive destruction and devastation which forces like the Russians or the 1990s Serbs inflicted everywhere they went. Too weak, badly led and indisciplined to actually win battles, these forces nonetheless have the resources to destroy, mindlessly, pointless, for days and weeks and months, destroying home and offices, infrastructure, power plants, water. If they can’t have it, no-one can. It’s the pathetic infantile, teenage spitefulness of it which is so utterly soul-destroying. What wankers.

P.S.

Every photo has a caption. Initially, I thought these were the words of the people in the picture but, after counting, I note that only four of them are directly quoted, all the other captions are the comments of Anastasia Taylor-Lind or her long-term collaborator and friend, Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova. Some of Alisa’s comments are enlarged and painted directly onto the wall to create a textual commentary.

May also be worth commenting that all the text, from the introductory wall label to the photo captions, is bilingual, printed in English and Ukrainian. The curators tell us this is designed to ‘engage directly with the UK’s Ukrainian community’. As a matter of interest I checked and at its peak, in 2019, there were 25,000 Ukrainians in the UK. Since the war that number has been swelled by some 82,000 refugees i.e. a little over 100,000 in total.

The end

I’ve been rereading Michael Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd’s books about the Yugoslav Wars. Ukraine is a different situation but, based on comparable situations in Bosnia in particular, where neither side was strong enough to secure a convincing victory, my guess would be that:

  1. the war drags on throughout 2023
  2. if Western support for Ukraine doesn’t remain high i.e. keeping up a reliable supply of arms and ammunition, then the Russians might score some victories, but
  3. eventually the UN will draw a ceasefire line across the eastern and southern parts of the country, which will remain in Russian hands, and the line will be like the one which divides Cyprus or Korea

It’s hard to imagine Russia seizing the entire country; think of the permanent insurrection and guerrilla war they’d face. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Ukrainian forces pushing the Russians right out of their country. So some kind of stalemate / ceasefire / partition seems the most likely outcome. But war is unpredictable, so it’s anybody’s guess.

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The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray (2015)

Everywhere , the self-assured confidence of priests, scribes and intellectuals has been mocked by unexpected events…
(The Soul of the Marionette, page 143)

‘Humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. (p.145)

The Soul of the Marionette

The Soul of the Marionette is a short, easy and very stimulating read. Its brevity is indicated by the way it’s set in a larger-than-usual typeface for a Penguin paperback in order to pad the text out to 170 or so pages. In reality, it’s two extended magazine essays linked by a common theme.

John Gray (b.1948)

Gray is a retired political philosopher. He mainly taught at the London School of Economics with spells at Yale etc, so he’s an academic by trade. For the past thirty years or more he’s been writing non-technical and accessible books, as well as numerous articles and reviews, and from time to time popping up with thought pieces on Radio 4. All of them bang on about the same handful of themes over and over again:

1. Modern liberals are wrong

Modern progressive thought is wrong. Modern secular thinkers are wrong. How so? In several connected ways.

a) ‘Modern liberals’ think history is progressing towards a good end, think that there is some purpose or end-point of evolution, think that human societies are heading onward and upward, becoming more enlightened, liberal, permissive and diverse.

The belief that evolution is advancing towards some desirable end is ubiquitous… (p.61)

BUT

Evolution has no attachment to the attributes modern thinkers imagine are essentially human… (p.143)

There is no purpose, there is no end goal, there is absolutely no assurance that things are moving forward, it is perfectly possible that societies might regress, become less liberal, permissive, and more authoritarian, vide the USA and UK of our time.

Above all, modern liberals think human nature can be changed whereas all of Gray’s work represents a barrage of arguments designed to annihilate this position:

2. The survival of violence and barbarism disproves the idea that humans are ‘improving’

Evolution has no goal or plan or design or intention. Stuff is just changing and humans are mad if they think they can alter it very much. Progressives like to think that we ‘learn from history’ or that liberal values are succeeding around the world – but terrible, crude, sadistic violence, is still practiced all round the globe.

There may be no repeats of the two epic world wars, but violence and brutality haven’t gone away; they have merely been scattered and diffused into the form of asymmetrical conflicts in a variety of failed states such as Syria and Libya, or sudden eruptions of barbarism as in Myanmar, or the ongoing horrors of the war in the Congo.

Or else many states find themselves in a permanent state of civil unrest, where violent protests teeter on the brink of uprisings and armed conflict, Sudan. This is the new normal.

In a scathing passage, Gray describes how violence has been internalised in the West. He points to the ways that America, for example, the supposed ‘land of the free’, imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world, and experiences almost daily mass shootings, with the result that its entire police force is now a warzone militia armed with machine guns and bullet-proof vests.

About 40,000 people were killed by guns in America in 2017, compared to the 2,500 who died on D-Day. Gray’s point is that homicidal violence hasn’t gone away because world wars have ceased; it’s just become normalised in other ways.

The normalisation of amoral hyper-violence in American culture. This movie is a ‘comedy’.

3. The popularity of dictators demonstrates that human societies aren’t particularly progressing

On a purely political level, the elections of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, the endless rule of Putin in Russia, and the increasing authoritarianism of Xi Jinping in China – all show conclusively that human political or cultural history is emphatically not moving steadily upwards towards some progressive, liberal nirvana.

Even more disillusioning for progressives is that most of these leaders were democratically elected. This is because of the primal fact, so often overlooked by well-heeled progressives, that most people, in most societies, more than anything else want meaning, order and security in their lives. People prefer meaning, order and security to uncertainty and chaos.

4. We aren’t in control

You and I, being enlightened progressives, may think that the leaders I’ve listed above are not going to provide the meaning and security which they promised their electorates, but that only proves another of Gray’s points which is that none of us are really in control of our lives: we choose one thing, we get something completely different.

Most people’s lives are demonstrably in the grip of various impersonal, suprahuman forces – but almost all of us desperately want to feel that we’re in control. Electing strong leaders with assertive agendas gives us electors the illusion of control, a) both in the big bad world – that we’re taking part in a fightback against them, the nameless forces which seem to be ruining the world; but just as importantly, b) in our own lives. Identifying with strong decisive leaders helps us overlook the fact that we so often feel powerless and helpless in our own day to day existences.

5. Technology changes, but people don’t change

Above all (to repeat the point, as Gray does again and again), modern liberals think human nature can be changed and improved – but it can’t. The amazing technologies we have developed over the past 200 years or so have given over-educated and under-experienced Westerners the deluded sense that we can change human nature. But, repeat after me: Technologies may change, but people don’t change.

One of the book’s central strands is a brief and sketchy history of human attempts to create super-humans, from Frankenstein in 1816 to all the hype about artificial intelligence in 2020.

Gray makes the simple point: How can we hope to make better, superior versions of human beings, when we don’t even understand ourselves? Scientists still don’t actually understand how minds work, how consciousness arises from matter, how flashing synapses produce the strange thing called consciousness.

Eradicating evil may produce a new species, but not the one its innocent creators have in mind. Humans have too little self-knowledge to be able to fashion a higher version of themselves. (p.43)

And:

We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories that we tell ourselves are like messages which appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect. (p.137)

Freud would have approved, and I entirely agree: we are lived by forces we never fully understand.

6. Artificial intelligence is doomed to fail

For the simple reason that we don’t understand human intelligence. This is why the exhibitions I’ve been to recently showcasing artificial intelligence seemed so pathetic and inadequate. (And it’s not just me saying that: the BBC journalist sent to review the Barbican’s exhibition about artificial intelligence thought the best examples of artificial intelligence the curators could assemble from all around the world were, to quote him, ‘pathetic’.)

It’s because any ordinary person knows that machines which can climb up a flight of stairs on their own or a computer which can beat the world chess champion or one which does cumulative facial recognition, are trivial and irrelevant compared to what it is like to be a person – a confused, sleepy, fantasy-driven human consciousness making endless mistakes about bus times or shopping lists or homework or the countless other chores we struggle with every day, as well as trying to manage personal relations with family, friends and work colleagues.

Compared to the complexity of being human, beating this or that chess champion is so very, very narrow an achievement on the part of the programmers who have been slaving away perfecting chess programs for fifty years or more, as to be almost sublimely, hilariously irrelevant.

In fact the most telling thing about artificial intelligence – which comes over very strongly when you read interviews with the scientists developing it – is how keen they are to rush towards a post-human future. But why? Because, Gray says, they cannot cope with the human present.

Struggling to escape from the world that science has revealed, humanity has taken refuge in the illusion that science enables them to remake the world in their own image. (p.30)

7. Communism and other failed utopias

Gray reserves some of his most scathing criticism for communists, the followers of Lenin and Stalin, who – in effect – thought that it was worth murdering millions of people in the here and now in order to secure a remote future in which everyone will live in peace. And then in the Cold War era to foment small wars around the world (Africa, South America, South-East Asia) in order to bring an end to war.

Same with the Nazis, who thought they could create a better world by first of all exterminating all the Jews and then all the Slavs.

In the twentieth century the worst episodes of mass killing were perpetrated with the aim of remaking the species. (p.88)

All the atrocities of the 20th century were carried out in the name of building a better world. Gray mocks modern liberals who carry on the same mantra (obviously without the holocausts) because they are basing it on the same basic delusions – that you can remodel human nature. You can’t.

8. Humans are, at bottom, incapable

In fact, the reality is that humans barely understand themselves, and are laughably unable to ‘take control of their own destinies’:

Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. (p.145)

Thus the comedy of climate change is that these pathetic people, this pathetic species, having created a global catastrophe, thinks it can change or fix anything. Oh no it can’t. Watch and learn.

9. The fundamental basis of all modern liberal thought – that things will get better i.e. history has a direction and an end goal – is based on Christian theology

If you go back to the ancient Greeks or sideways to read the surviving works of the Aztecs, you find societies which were under no illusion that things – society of human nature – would ever change. Their religions and rituals were not linear and progressive but cyclical, based on the circular rhythm of the seasons plus the recurring astrological cycles.

Aztecs did not share the modern conceit that mass killing can bring about universal peace. They did not envision any future when humans ceased to be violent. (p.86)

The notion that history has a purpose and is heading for a Grand End-Point is a Christian idea (in fact it may be a Zoroastrian or Eastern idea originally, but it was picked up and incorporated in Christianity from its earliest days and thus spread throughout all Christian and post-Christian societies).

It is Christian theology which declares that history is heading to a Glorious End-Point when the Son of Man will return in glory and wind up history as we know it, at which point the dead will be raised and everyone will be judged and dispatched to heaven or hell.

Modern liberals unwittingly base their concept of history as a steady improvement towards some kind of nirvana or utopia on this very Christian theology, but without the subtle and complex insights into human nature developed by Christian thinkers over 2,000 years. Progressives have been:

reared on a curdled brew of Socratism and scraps of decayed Christianity… (p.160)

This is why progressive liberalism feels so shallow. It is piggy-backing on the back of Christian theology, but without the deep and penetrating insights into all aspects of the human psyche which tens of thousands of Christian theologians and writers carried out.

Secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. (p.19)

Instead, modern liberals join hands, sing Things Can Only Get Better and are shocked and amazed when they don’t. Their conviction that everyone is a progressive liberal at heart, if only they had enough education and the opportunity to read the right newspapers, cannot cope with the actual world in its often violent and even evil reality.

This basic naivety explains, in Gray’s opinion, the fact that ‘liberals’ are continually surprised at renewed outbreaks of human atrocity. ‘Liberals’ and ‘modern thinkers’ thought we had learned from the Holocaust and had ‘progressed’, and so they were unable to compute modern horrors like the wars in Yugoslavia, the Rwanda genocide or 9/11 or the Syrian civil war or the Rohynga massacres… and on and on it goes, the roll call of never-ending atrocities.

Events like that just don’t fit into the narrative that every day, in very way, we are becoming more tolerant and free and fair-minded and equal and ‘woke’ and aware. Oh no, Gray says, we aren’t.

Cherry picking from literature

The book’s strength is also its weakness. This is that it takes the form less of a sustained argument than of a kind of daisy chain of potted analyses of authors who Gray likes or whose works provide useful ammunition for his position.

It is very much not a work of political philosophy, in fact it references hardly any philosophers of any kind (apart from two or three pages about Thomas Hobbes and the same about Jeremy Bentham) and certainly no contemporary philosophers.

Instead, Gray takes us on a hugely entertaining and colourful journey through the thought of a bright and shiny array of creative writers through the ages, cherry-picking authors whose mordant and gloomy points of view echo, support or anticipate his own.

This is exactly what Christians do with the Bible. The Bible is so vast, varied and contradictory, that you can find quotes to support almost any point of view, from the most socially conservative (Honour your father and mother) to radical revolutionary (Blessed are the meek) to wacky science fiction fantasies (Ezekiel), if you search hard enough.

So, as a literature graduate, I know exactly the same is true for the corpus of secular literature, especially if you broaden it out to include all European literature, and extend it back in time to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages or, as Gray does, back to the ancient Greeks. There are now so many points of view, expressed by so many hundreds of thousands of authors, that – if you adopt Gray’s approach – it is easy to cherry pick ‘proofs’ and ‘evidence’ for any point of view imaginable.

But of course none of this is proof of any kind about human nature or human existence or consciousness or history or anything. Literature is just opinion – colourful, creative and beautifully expressed and plausible, but still only one person’s opinion.

Proof of the kinds of things Gray is claiming would require an engagement with the latest scientific literature in areas of consciousness, AI, sociology and so on, with properly carried out studies, and with a world of data and statistics.

Gray skips lightly away from any such engagement and instead gives us an entertaining stroll through some of his favourite authors. Each of these gets a thumbnail biography and then four or five pages summarising their thoughts and musings about human nature, history and so on.

So it comes as no surprise that all of the thinkers he’s carefully cherry picked, plus his interpretations of various historical cultural events (his scepticism about the so-called ‘scientific revolution’, his dazzling reinterpretation of Aztec culture), all go to reinforce his anti-liberal, anti-modern secular bias.

A daisy chain of authors

For my own amusement I made a complete list of the authors and works referenced in The Soul of the Marionette:

Heinrich von Kleist (1777 to 1811)’s essay The Puppet Theatre (1810) paradoxically suggests that it is the puppet who is free because he is not conflicted by a torn and agonised self-consciousness.

Novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell (1912 to 1990) in The Avignon Quartet describes a modern-day Gnostic.

Communist crystallographer J.D. Bernal (1901 to 1971) speculated that human society would be replaced by a Utopia of post-human cyborgs.

Director of Engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil (b.1948) published a book with the sub-title When Humans Transcend Biology.

Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz (1892 to 1942) wrote short stories on the theme of Gnosticism i.e that the world wasn’t created by a benevolent all-powerful God but by a blind or malevolent Demiurge, which explains why it is so botched and chaotic. Only those who come to know this (gnosis is Greek for knowledge) can, through an arduous apprenticeship and reading many mystical books, arrive at true knowledge of their place as souls trapped in fallen bodies in a badly made world, and break out towards the light of the True God.

Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798 to 1837) is famous for his sensuously melancholy verse but also wrote a long work of thoughts about human nature, the Zibaldone, which is bitingly pessimistic about human nature and ridicules the idea that science will improve humanity. He is particularly savage about Christianity which, he thinks (with plenty of evidence to back him up) promotes a universalist claim, Christ’s injunction to his disciples to convert the whole world, which – in practice – gave carte blanche to force everyone in the world to convert, at the point of a sword or under threat of being burned at the stake. This, in Leopardi’s view, explains why the barbarity of the Middle Ages far eclipsed anything known or comprehensible in the ancient, pre-Christian world.

American poet and short story writer Edgar Allen Poe (1809 to 1849) wrote some fictions which touch on the Gnostic theme in which characters have dreams which come true, or dream a better world into existence.

Mary Shelley (1797 to 1851) wrote Frankenstein, always predictably dragged out on these occasions as the forerunner of all ‘modern’ debate about creating artificial life or intelligence.

The Symbolist poet Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) coined the word ‘android’.

Gustav Meyrink (1868 to to 1932) wrote The Golem (1915) another novel about people creating new uber-humans.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 to 1986) in his story The Circular Ruins imagines a magician whose dreams come true before he realises that he himself is someone else’s dream.

Polish science fiction author Stanislav Lem (1921 to 2006) in his novel Solaris (1961) imagines a planet whose surface seems to be alive and conscious in ways we cannot conceive, and which communicates with the humans in the space station orbiting it by creating people from their past or creatures from their dreams.

American science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928 to 1982) wrote a whole series of novels exploring the possibility of alternative consciousness, and how individual consciousnesses might be able to bend and warp reality. Gray devotes an unusually prolonged passage to Dick and his works.

H.G. Wells (1866 to 1946) wrote The War of the Worlds suggesting other intelligences have no concern about us.

Michel Faber (b.1960) wrote Under The Skin in which aliens come to earth purely to capture and eat humans, whose meat is tasty!

Boris and Arkady Strugasky‘s novel Roadside Picnic is about people who venture into the forbidden zones where alien spaceships landed, settled, then took off again. The thrust of all three of these stories is why should we think artificial intelligences we create (if we ever do) will give a damn about us.

T.F. Powys (1875 to 1953) wrote a series of novels in the 1920s and 30s which featured God or Devil or Demiurge characters appearing as normal people, giving rise to a lot of discussion about creation and reality.

Thomas Hobbes (1588 to 1679) masterpiece Leviathan is based on the idea that people will do anything, and submit to a strong central authority to avoid violence. But Gray thinks this is a chimera, a far too rational view of human nature. All the evidence suggests that people can initiate and put up with a quite staggering degree of violence i.e. human nature isn’t as one-dimensional as Hobbes paints it.

John Dee (1527 to 1608) was Elizabeth I’s astrologer and magician and an epitome of Gray’s view that what modern secular thinkers like to think of as ‘the scientific revolution’ was in fact deeply intertwined with all kinds of magical and voodoo beliefs, the prime example being Sir Isaac Newton who formulated the laws which underpinned the new scientific view of the universe but was also a mystic and heretical Christian who devoted an enormous amount of energy trying to decipher the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelation.

Norbert Wiener (1894 to 1964), mathematician and philosopher, helped the Manhattan Project, is acknowledged as the father of cybernetics, and envisaged a future where man makes machines which outdo man.

John von Neumann (1903 to 1957), mathematician, physicist and computer scientist, also helped with the Manhattan Project and founded game theory. The ideas of both men underpin futurists’ confidence that man can remake man, or make a super-man machine, or machines which can help people achieve super-lives.

Guy Debord (1931 to 1994) is popular with students of the humanities and the arts because of his book Society of the Spectacle which expands on Marxist ideas that governments control us by getting us to buy into the mindless entertainments of the mass media. More than that, even political protests or extreme events like terrorist attacks, are all part of The Spectacle. Gray is, as you might expect, bitingly sceptical about Debord, concentrating on his career after the 1968 revolution failed to materialise, wandering the French provinces, slowly expelling all the members of his organisation, the Situationist International, drinking heavily, coming to the despairing conclusion that there can be no revolution because The Spectacle can assimilate anything and eventually committing suicide in 1994.

Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) the ultimate in rationalist philosophers who formulated the ideas of Utilitarianism and said social policy should be judged on whether it promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Gray describes Bentham’s idea for the Panopticon, a prison built in a circle so guards at the centre could monitor all the prisoners, and then goes on to claim that we live in a surveillance society infinitely more thorough and extensive than anything Bentham could have imagined.

E.M. Foster (1879 to 1970) famous for his novels of Edwardian upper class life, wrote a striking science fiction story, The Machine Stops (which I happen to have read and reviewed). Gray criticises the story for giving no indication of how the bubble world entirely controlled by some vast central machine came into existence. But he mentions it in order to speculate about how our societies might collapse and fall.

Samuel Butler (1835 to 1902) wrote his satirical vision of the future, Erewhon which predicted there would be labour-saving machines and robots in the future. Well, half of that was correct.

So you see what I mean by literary dilettantism, picking and choosing from the endless flowerbed of  imaginative literature, with no attempt whatsoever to engage with the professional, philosophical or scientific literature on the subjects he discusses.

Straw men

Most debaters set up straw men i.e. simplify the arguments of their opponents in order to caricature and counter them. I was struck by the way Gray does just this – establishing an entity or group or party or movement of ‘modern secular thinkers’ which he then proceeds to hammer from all directions – and in particular by the way that he doesn’t mention a single specific name. Instead, he rings the changes on a set of generic terms for ‘the Enemy’, which I began to find interesting in themselves:

  • many people today…
  • modern secular thinkers believe mankind can be recreated in a higher form…
  • it does not occur to these sublime moralists that in human beings the good and the bad may be intermixed…
  • those who aim to fashion a higher humanity with science…
  • … Gnostic themes that unnoticed or repressed, shape much of modern thinking…
  • this view of things is nowadays close to being incomprehensible…
  • The modern world inherits the Christian view…
  • … human impulses that modern thinking denies..
  • … how tenuous are the assumptions on which western thinkers base their hopes of peace…
  • … modern humanity insists that violence is inhuman…
  • … believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt…
  • modern individualism tends…
  • Today there are some who expect such machines to be among us within a few decades…
  • …this modern catechism is mistaken…
  • modern thinkers have imagined that humans can achieve a state of freedom…

You can see how the repetition of the central terms builds up an image of a straw man (or straw liberal) who is particularly dim and uninsightful – but without troubling to name names or quote any texts.

Mentioning specific named writers would, of course, instantly complicate the situation, because it is unlikely that any ‘modern secular liberal’ would be quite as dim as Gray likes to make out.

As with the cherry picking of authors, this approach allows him to unfurl his favourite themes and hobby horses with no fear of resistance or critique.

Sick writers

There are many ways to be entertained, amused and informed by this lovely jumble sale of a book. IN among the amusing stories and hobby horse diatribes against ‘modern liberals’ I began to notice another strand which unintentionally confirms one of my own bête noirs or obsessions: which is that  imaginative writers – poets and novelist and playwrights and philosophers – are, on the whole, among the very last people whose advice you would want to take about life and living, seeing as almost all of them have been sick misfits suffering from a variety of mental illnesses and substance addictions. Thus:

Kleist was forced to join the civil service which he hated, wanted to be a writer but struggled to produce anything which satisfied him, tried and failed to join up to Napoleon’s army and ended up committing suicide in 1811.

Schulz was forced to become a school teacher in order to support ailing relatives, hated his job, struggled to write, had a failed engagement to a woman, and, as a Jew, was murdered by the Nazis.

Leopardi was a hunchback with poor sight, who was frail and sickly all his life, having a long but unsuccessful involvement with a married woman, living most of his life in poverty, before moving to Naples and dying of TB aged 38.

Edgar Allen Poe was a disastrous shambles of a man, who never secured a regular income despite starting umpteen magazines and journals, living hand to mouth in poverty, a chronic alcoholic, before being discovered roaming the streets of Baltimore out of his mind and wearing someone else’s clothes, dying in a pauper’s hospital aged 40.

Philip K. Dick was mentally ill for most of his life, dosing himself with alcohol and amphetamines to fuel his prodigious output of disturbing novels until he suffered a full-blown mental collapse in 1974, during which he claimed to have a had a great Revelation about life which he spent the rest of his life struggling to understand. Psychosis, five marriages, heavy drug addiction, repeated suicide attempts.

Guy Debord heavy drinker, despair, suicide aged 63.

Not exactly role models, are they? More to the point, where are all the people of their times who lived healthy, happy, fulfilled and productive lives? Well, they were too busy living life to the full, to write anything.

In other words, writers, on the whole, are a self-selecting and self-reinforcing, self-supporting, self-promoting group of the sick, the mentally ill, the addicted, impoverished, failed and frustrated.

To put it another way, imaginative writers in their writings tend to give a wildly inaccurate picture of human nature and human society. The works and thoughts of any ‘creative’ writer should, therefore, be taken with a large pinch of salt and not treated as any kind of ‘truth’, let alone as lessons by which to live life. And definitely not as evidence about what the ‘society’ of their time ‘thought’.

Gray’s prescription – withdrawal

Seeing all around him chaos, resurgent barbarism, and an array of misguided beliefs in meliorism, social improvement and scientific advances, Gray recommends withdrawal. He recommends withdrawing into yourself and seeking to achieve harmony and mental peace through acceptance of the fact that you are an irrational, conflicted being which doesn’t understand itself, let alone the world it lives in – and by this acceptance, cultivating an inner freedom.

It’s worth quoting the book’s final passage in full as this turns out to be a surprisingly frank and candid piece of advice about how to live.

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being; we do not know what, if anything, comes when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are – though what we would like to be, we cannot say.

Why try to escape from yourself? Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by the Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all that you need. Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. (p.165)

My thoughts

I agree with him.

I too believe human nature is unchangeable, that Western progressive liberals make up a minority of the human population which they arrogantly and ignorantly claim to speak for, that their view of human nature is insultingly shallow (amounting to little more that shouting ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ at anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow parameters) and that their shallow ideology:

  1. fails to grasp, understand or prevent the failure of their political movements – as graphically represented by the election of Trump, Johnson, Brexit
  2. fails to understand why populations would democratically elect right-wing populists such as Bolsonaro or Erdogan – and above all:
  3. fails to understand or explain why people continue to be barbaric, violent and sadistic in terrible conflicts all around the world

It’s not that progressive liberalism is morally wrong. It is that it is factually inadequate, biologically illiterate, philosophically impoverished, and so politically and socially misleading.

It is doomed to fail because it is based on a false model of human nature.

As to Gray’s prescription, that we abandon the effort to understand either ourselves or the world around us, I think this is a nice idea to read about, here or in Ursula Le Guin, or in a thousand Christian or Eastern mystics. It is a nice fictional place to inhabit, a discursive possibility, in the same way that I – and billions of other readers – inhabit novels or plays or works of art for a while.

But then I am forced to return to the workaday world where I must earn a living and look after my family, and where simply ‘letting meaning come and go’ is not an adequate guide to life.

To thinking about life, maybe. But not to actually living it.

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Posted by Simon on January 15, 2020

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Life At The Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter (2013)

The future of biological research will be based to a great extent on the combination of computer science and synthetic biology. (p.204)

Who is Craig Venter?

The quickest way of getting the measure of this hugely clever, ambitious and visionary man is to quote his Wikipedia entry:

John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biotechnologist, biochemist, geneticist, and businessman. He is known for leading the first draft sequence of the human genome and assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), where he currently serves as CEO. He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. and Synthetic Genomics. He was listed on Time magazine’s 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of ‘The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010’. He is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Advisory Board.

So he’s a heavy hitter, invited to Bill Clinton’s White House to announce his team’s successful sequencing of the first human genome on 2000, founder of a thriving biochem business, a number of charities, pioneer of genomics (‘the branch of molecular biology concerned with the structure, function, evolution, and mapping of genomes’) and mapper of an ambitious future for the new science of synthetic biology.

In Schrödinger’s footsteps

Life At The Speed of Light was published in 2013. It originated as a set of lectures. As he explains in the introduction, in 1943, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had fled the Nazi-controlled Continent and settled in Ireland. Schrödinger was invited by the Taoiseach of the time to give some public lectures and chose the topic of life – the biology and physics of life. Schrödinger’s lectures were then published in the little book What Is Life? (1944) which inspired generations of young people to take up science (in his memoir The Double Helix James Watson describes how the book inspired him; Addy Pross named his book about the origins of life, What Is Life?, as a direct tribute to Schrödinger’s text).

Well, 49 years later Venter was invited by the Taoiseach of the day to deliver a new set of lectures, addressing the same question as Schrödinger, but in doing so, making clear the enormous strides in physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry and genetics which had been made in that half-century.

Twelve chapters

The twelve chapters are titled:

  1. Dublin, 1943-2012
  2. Chemical synthesis as proof
  3. Dawn of the digital age of biology
  4. Digitizing life
  5. Synthetic Phi X 174
  6. First synthetic genome
  7. Converting one species into another
  8. Synthesis of the M. mycoides genome
  9. Inside a synthetic cell
  10. Life by design
  11. Biological transportation
  12. Life at the speed of light

Each chapter contains a formidable amount of state-of-the-art biochemical knowledge. The first few chapters recap relevant forebears who helped figure out that DNA was the vehicle of heredity, beginning right back at the start with Aristotle, who made the primal division of living things into animal, vegetable or mineral, and then going on to namecheck other pioneers such as Robert Hook and, of course, Charles Darwin.

Biochemistry

But the real thrust of the book is to get up to date with contemporary achievements in sequencing genomes and creating transgenic entities i.e. organisms which have had the DNA of completely separate organisms stitched into them.

In order to do this Venter, of course, has to describe the molecular mechanisms of life in great detail. Successive chapters go way beyond the simplistic understanding of DNA described in James Watson’s book about the double helix, and open up for the reader the fantastical fairyland of how DNA actually works.

He explains the central role of the ribosomes, which are the factories where protein synthesis takes place (typical human cells contain about a thousand ribosomes), and the role of messenger RNA in cutting off snippets of DNA and taking them to the ribosome.

It is to the ribosome that transfer RNA (tRNA) brings along amino acids, which are then intricately assembled according to the sequence of bases found on the original DNA. Combinations of the twenty amino acids are assembled into the proteins which all life forms are made of – from the proteins which make up the cell membrane, to collagen which accounts for a quarter of all the proteins found in vertebrate animals, or elastin, the basis of lung and artery walls, and so on and so on.

I found all this mind-boggling, but the most striking single thing I learned is how fast it happens, and that it needs to happen so unrelentingly.

Fast

Venter explains that protein synthesis requires only seconds to make chains of a hundred amino acids or more. Nowadays we understand the mechanism whereby the ribosome is able to ratchet RNAs laden with amino acids along its production lines at a rate of fifteen per second! Proteins need to ‘fold’ up into the correct shape – there are literally millions of possible shapes they can assume but they only function if folded correctly. This happens as soon as they’ve been manufactured inside the ribosome and takes place in a few thousandths of a second. The protein villin takes six millionths of a second to fold correctly!

I had no idea that some of the proteins required for life to function (i.e. for cells to maintain themselves) exist for as little as forty-five minutes before they decay and cease to work. Their components are then disassembled and returned to the hectic soup which is contained inside each cell membrane, before being picked up by passing tRNA and taken along to the ribosome to be packaged up into another useful protein.

Relentless

It is the absolutely relentless pressure to produce thousands of different proteins, on a continuous basis, never faltering, never resting, which makes the mechanisms of life so needy of resources, and explains why animals need to be constantly taking in nutrition from the environment, relentlessly eating, drinking, breaking food down into its elementary constituents and excreting waste products.

After a while the book began to make me feel scared by the awesome knowledge of what is required to keep ‘me’ going all day long. Just the sheer effort, the vast amount of biochemical activity going on in every one of the forty or so trillion cells which make up my body, gave me a sense of vertigo.

Every day, five hundred billion blood cells die in an individual human. It is also estimated that half our cells die during normal organ development. We all shed about five hundred million skin cells every day. As a result you shed your entire outer layer of skin every two to four weeks. (p.57 – my italics)

Life is a process of dynamic renewal.

In an hour or even less a bacterial cell has to remake all of its proteins or perish. (p.62)

Venter’s achievements

Having processed through the distinguished forebears and pioneers of biochemistry, Venter comes increasingly to the work which he’s been responsible for. First of all he describes the process behind the sequencing of the first human genome – explaining how he and his team devised a vastly faster method of sequencing than their rivals (and the controversy this aroused).

Then he goes on to tell how he led teams which looked into splicing one organism’s DNA into another. And then he explains the challenge of going to the next phase, and creating life forms from the DNA up.

In fact the core of the book is a series of chapters which describe in minute and, some might say, quite tedious detail, the precise strategies and methodologies Venter and his teams took in the decade or so from 2000 to 2010 to, as he summarises it:

  • synthesise DNA at a scale twenty times faster than previously possible
  • develop a methodology to transplant a genome from one species to another
  • solve the DNA-modification problems of restriction enzymes destroying transplanted DNA

Successive chapters take you right into actual meetings where he and colleagues discussed how to tackle the whole series of technical problems they faced, and explains in exquisite detail precisely the techniques they developed at each step of the way. He even includes work emails describing key findings or turning points, and the texts he exchanged with colleagues at key moments (pp.171-2).

After reading about a hundred of pages of this my mind began to glaze over and I skipped paragraphs and then pages which describe such minutiae as how he decided which members of the Institute to put in charge of which aspects of the project and why — because I was impatient to get to the actual outcomes. And these outcomes have been dramatic:

In May 2010, a team of scientists led by Venter became the first to successfully create what was described as ‘synthetic life’. This was done by synthesizing a very long DNA molecule containing an entire bacterium genome, and introducing this into another cell … The single-celled organism contains four ‘watermarks’ written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and to help trace its descendants. The watermarks include:

    • a code table for entire alphabet, with punctuations
    • the names of 46 contributing scientists
    • three quotations
    • the secret email address for the cell.

Venter gives a detailed description of the technical challenges, and the innovations his team devised to overcome them, in the quest to create the first ever synthesised life form in chapter 8, ‘Synthesis of the M. mycoides genome’.

More recently, after the period covered by this book (although the book describes this as one of his goals):

On March 25, 2016 Venter reported the creation of Syn 3.0, a synthetic genome having the fewest genes of any freely living organism (473 genes). Their aim was to strip away all nonessential genes, leaving only the minimal set necessary to support life. This stripped-down, fast reproducing cell is expected to be a valuable tool for researchers in the field. (Wikipedia)

The international nature of modern science

One notable aspect of the text is the amount of effort he puts into crediting other people’s work, and in particular the way these consists of teams.

When Watson wrote his book he could talk about individual contributors like Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins, Oswald Avery, Erwin Chergaff or Rosalind Franklin. One of the many things that has changed since Watson’s day is the way science is now done by large teams, and often collaborations not only between labs, but between labs around the world.

Thus at every step of his explanations Venter is very careful indeed to give credit to each new insight and discovery which fed into his own team’s work, and to namecheck all the relevant scientists involved. It was to be expected that each page would be studded with the names of biochemical processes and substances, but just as significant, just as indicative of the science of our times, is the way each page is also freighted with lists of names – and also, just how ethnically mixed the names are – Chinese, Indian, French, German, Spanish – names from all around the world.

Without anyone having to explain it out loud, just page after page of the names alone convey what a cosmopolitan and international concern modern science is.

A simplified timeline

Although Venter spends some time recapping the steady progress of biology and chemistry into the 20th century and up to Watson and Crick’s discovery, his book really makes clear that the elucidation of DNA was only the beginning of an explosion of research into genetics, such that genetics – and the handling of genetic information – are now at the centre of biology.

1944 Oswald Avery discovered that DNA, not protein, was the carrier of genetic information
1949 Fred Sanger determined the sequence of amino acids in the hormone insulin

1950 Erwin Chargaff made the discoveries about the four components of DNA which became known as Chargaff’s Rules, i.e. the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units, strongly suggesting they came in pairs
1952 the Miller-Urey experiments show that organic molecules could be created out of a ‘primal soup’ and electricity
1953 Watson and Crick publish structure of DNA
1953 Barbara McClintock publishes evidence of transposable elements in DNA, aka transposons or jumping genes
1955 Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat and biophysicist Robley Williams showed that a functional virus could be created out of purified RNA and a protein coat.
1956 Arthur Kornberg isolated the first DNA polymerizing enzyme, now known as DNA polymerase I

1961 Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich J. Matthaei discover that DNA is used in sets of three called ‘codons’
1964 Robert Holley elucidates the structure of transfer RNA
1960s Werner Arber and Matthew Meselson isolate first restriction enzyme
1967 DNA ligase discovered, an enzyme capable of linking DNA into a ring such as is found in viruses
1967 Carl Woese suggests that RNA not only carries genetic information but has catalytic properties

1970 Hamilton O. Smith, Thomas Kelly and Kent Wilcox isolate the first type II restriction enzyme
1970 discovery of reverse transcriptase which converts RNA into DNA
1971 start if gene-splicing revolution when Paul Berg spliced part of a bacterial virus into a monkey virus
1972 Herbert Boyer splices DNA from Staphylococcus into E. Coli
1974 first transgenic mammal created by Rudolf Jaenisch and Beatrice Mintz
1974 development of ‘reverse genetics’ where you interefere with an organism’s DNA and see what happens
1976 first biotech company, Genentech, set up
1977 Boyer, Itakura and Riggs use recombinant DNA to produce a human protein
1977 Carl Woese proposes an entire new kingdom of life, the Archaea

1980 Charles Weissmann engineers the protein interferon using recombinant-DNA technology
1981 Racaniello and Baltimore used recombinant DNA technology to generate the first infectious clone of an animal RNA virus, poliovirus
1982 genetically engineered insulin becomes commercially available
1980s discovery of the function of proteasomes which break up unneeded or damaged proteins
1980s Ada Yonath and Heinz-Günter Wittman grow crystals from bacterial chromosomes
1985 Martin Caruthers and his team developed an automated DNA synthesiser
1985 Aaron Klug develops ‘zinc fingers’, proteins which bind to specific three-letter sequences of DNA

1996 proposed life on Mars on the basis of microbial ‘fossils’ found in rocks blown form Mars to earth – later disproved
1996 publication of the yeast genome
1997 Venter’s team publish the entire genome of the Helicobacter pylori bacterium
1997 Dolly the sheep is cloned (DNA from a mature sheep’s mammary gland was injected into an egg that had had its own nucleus removed; it was named Dolly in honour of Dolly Parton and her large mammary glands)
1998 Andrew Fire and Craig Cameron Mello showed that so-called ‘junk DNA’ codes for double stranded RNA which trigger or shut down other genes
1999 Harry F. Noller publishes the first images of a complete ribosome

2005 The structure and function of the bacterial chromosome by Thanbichler, Viollier and Shapiro
2007 publication of Synthetic Genomics: Options for Government
2008 Venter and team create a synthetic chromosome of a bacterium
2010 Venter’s team announce the creation of the first synthetic cell (described in detail in chapter 8)
2011 first structure of a eukaryotic ribosome published

Life at the speed of light

Anyway, this is a book with a thesis and a purpose. Or maybe two purposes, two sides of the same coin. One is to eradicate all irrational, magical beliefs in ‘vitalism’, to insist that life is nothing but chemistry. The other is for Venter to proclaim his bold visions of the future.

1. Anti-vitalism

The opening chapter had included a brief recap of the literature and fantasy of creating new life, Frankenstein etc. This turns out to be because Venter is a fierce critic of all traditions and moralists who believe in a unique life force. He is at pains to define and then refute the theory of vitalism – ‘the theory that the origin and phenomena of life are dependent on a force or principle distinct from purely chemical or physical forces.’ Venter very powerfully believes the opposite: that ‘life’ consists of information about chemistry, and nothing more.

This, I think, is a buried motive for describing the experiments carried out at his own institute in such mind-numbing detail. It is to drill home the reality that life is nothing more than chemistry and information. If you insert the genome of one species into the cells of another they become the new species. They obey the genomic or chemical instructions. All life does. There is no mystery, no vital spark, no élan vital etc etc.

A digression on the origins of life

This is reinforced in chapter 9 where Venter gives a summary of the work of Jack W. Szostak into the origin of life.

Briefly, Szostak starts with the fact that lipid or fat molecules are spontaneously produced in nature. He shows that these tend to link up together to form ‘vesicles’ which also, quite naturally, form together into water-containing membranes. If RNA – which has been shown to also assemble spontaneously – gets into these primitive ‘cells’, then they start working, quite automatically, to attract other RNA molecules into the cell. As a result the cell will swell and, with a little shaking from wind or tide, replicate. Voilà! You have replicating cells containing RNA.

Venter then describes work that has been done into the origin of multicellularity i.e. cells clumping together to co-operate, which appears to have happened numerous times in the history of life, to give rise to a variety of multicellular lineages.

Venter goes on to describe one other major event in the history of life – symbiogenesis – ‘The theory holds that mitochondria, plastids such as chloroplasts, and possibly other organelles of eukaryotic cells represent formerly free-living prokaryotes taken one inside the other in endosymbiosis.’

In other words, at a number of seismic moments in the history of life, early eukaryotic cells engulfed microbial species that were living in symbiosis with them. Or to put it another way, early cells incorporated useful microbes which existed in their proximity, entirely into themselves.

The two big examples are:

  • some two billion years ago, when a eukaryotic cell incorporated into itself a photosynthetic bacterial algae cell which ultimately became the ‘chloroplast‘ – the site where photosynthesis takes place – in all successive plant species
  • and the fact that the ‘power packs’ of human cells, known as mitochondria, carry their own genetic code and have their own way of reproducing, indicating that they were taken over whole, not melded or merged but swallowed (it is now believed that human mitochondria derived from a specific bacterium, Rickettsia, which survives down to this day)

This information is fascinating in itself, but it is clearly included to join up with the detailed description of the work in his own institute in order to make the overwhelming case that life is just information and that DNA is the bearer of that information.

It obviously really irritates Venter that, despite the overwhelming weight of the evidence, people at large – journalists, philosophers, armchair moralists and religious believers – refuse to accept it, refuse to face the facts, and still believe there is something special about life, that humans, in particular, have a soul or spirit or other voodoo codswallop.

2. Creating life

The corollary of Venter’s insistence that there being nothing magical about ‘life’, is the confident way he interprets all the evidence he has so painstakingly described, and all the dazzling achievements he has been involved in, as having brought humanity to the brink of a New Age of Life, a New Epoch in the Evolution of Life on Earth.

We have now entered what I call ‘the digital age of biology’, in which once distinct domains of computer codes and those that program life are beginning to merge, where new synergies are emerging that will drive evolution in radical directions. (p.2)

The fusion of the digital world of the machine and that of biology would open up the remarkable possibilities for creating novel species and guiding future evolution. (p.109)

In the final chapters of this book Venter waxes very lyrical about the fantastic opportunities opening up for designing DNA on computers, modeling the behaviour of this artificial DNA, fine-tuning the design, and then building new synthetic organisms in the real world.

The practical applications know no limits, and on page 221 he lists some:

  • man-made organisms which could absorb the global warming CO2 in the air, or eat oil pollution, turning it into harmless chemicals
  • computer designing cures for diseases
  • designing crops that are resistant to drought, that can tolerate disease or thrive in barren environments, provide rich new sources of protein and other nutrients, can be harnessed for water purification in arid regions
  • designing animals that become sources for pharmaceuticals or spare body parts
  • customising human stem cells to regenerate damaged organs and bodies

Biological transformations

The final two chapters move beyond even these sci-fi goals to lay out some quite mind-boggling visions of the future. Venter builds on his institute’s achievements to date, and speculates about the kinds of technologies we can look forward to or which are emerging even as he writes.

The one that stuck in my mind is the scenario that, when the next variety of human influenza breaks out, doctors will only have to get a sample of the virus to a lab like Venter’s and a) they will now be able to work out its DNA sequence more or less the same day b) they will then be able to design a vaccine in a computer c) they will be able to create the DNA they have designed in the lab much faster than ever possible before but d) they will be able to email the design for this vaccine DNA anywhere in the world, at the speed of a telephone wire, at the speed of light.

That is what the title of the book means. New designs for synthesised life forms can now be developed in computers (which are working faster and faster) and then emailed wherever they’re required i.e. to the centre of the outbreak of a new disease, where labs will be able to use the techniques pioneered by Venter’s teams to culture and mass produce vaccines at record speeds.

Scientific myopia

I hate to rain on his parade, but I might as well lay out as clearly as I can the reasons why I am not as excited about the future as Venter. Why I am more a J.G. Ballard and John Gray man than a Venter man.

1. Most people don’t know or care Venter takes the position of many of the scientists I’ve been reading – from the mathematicians Alex Bellos and Ian Stewart through to the astrophysicists Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies and Paul Barrow, to the origin-of-life men Cairns-Smith and Addy Pross – that new discoveries in their fields are earth-shatteringly important and will make ordinary people stop in their tracks, and look at their neighbour on the bus or train and exclaim, ‘NOW I understand it! NOW I know the meaning of life! NOW I realise what it’s all about.’

A moment’s reflection tells you that this simply won’t happen. Einstein’s relativity, Schrödinger and Bohr’s quantum mechanics, the structure of DNA, cloning, the discovery of black holes – what is striking is how little impact most of these ‘seismic’ discoveries have had on most people’s lives or thinking.

Ask your friends and family which of the epic scientific discoveries of the 20th century I’ve listed above has made the most impact on their lives. Or they’ve even heard of. Or could explain.

2. Most people are not intellectuals This error (the notion that ordinary people are excited about scientific ‘breakthroughs’) is based on a deeper false premise, one of the great category errors common to all these kind of books and magazine articles and documentaries – which is that the authors think that everyone else in society is a university-educated intellectual like themselves, whereas, very obviously, they are not. Trump. Brexit. Most people in western democracies are not university-educated intellectuals.

3. Public debate is often meaningless Worse, university-educated intellectuals have a bad habit of believing that something called ‘education’ and ‘public debate’ will control the threat posed by these new technologies:

Opportunities for public debate and discussion on this topic must be sponsored, and the lay public must engage with the relevant issues. (p.215)

Famous last words. Look at the ‘debate’ surrounding Brexit. Have any of the thousands of articles, documentaries, speeches, books and tweets helped solve the situation? No.

‘Debate’ hardly ever solves anything. Clear-cut and affordable solutions which people can understand and get behind solve things.

4. A lot of people are nasty, some are evil Not only this but Venter, like all the other highly-educated, middle-class, liberal intellectuals I’ve mentioned, thinks that people are fundamentally nice – will welcome their discoveries, will only use them for the good of mankind, and so on.

Megalolz, as my kids would say. No. People are not nice. The Russians and the Chinese are using the internet to target other countries’ vital infrastructures, and sow misinformation. Islamist warriors are continually looking for ways to attack ‘the West’, the more spectacular, the more deaths, the better. In 2010 Israel is alleged to have carried out the first cyberattack on another nation’s infrastructure when it (allegedly) attacked a uranium enrichment facility at Iran’s Natanz underground nuclear site.

In other words, cyberspace is not at all a realm where high-minded intellectuals meet and debate worthy moral issues, and where synthetic biologists devise life-saving new vaccines and beam them to locations of epidemic outbreaks ‘at the speed of light’. Cyberspace is already a war zone.

And it is a warzone in a world which contains some nasty regimes, not just those which are in effect dictatorships (Iran, China) but even many of the so-called democracies.

Trump. Putin. Erdogan. Bolsonaro. Viktor Orban. These are all right-wing demagogues who were voted into power in democratic elections.

It seems to me that both the peoples, and the leaders, who Venter puts his faith in are simply not up to the job of understanding, using wisely or safeguarding, the speed of light technology he is describing.

Venter goes out of his way, throughout the book, to emphasise how socially responsible he and his Institute and his research have been, how they have taken part in, sponsored and contributed to umpteen conferences and seminars, alongside government agencies like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, into the ‘ethics’ of conducting synthetic biology (i.e. designing and building new organisms) and into its risks (terrorists use it to create lethal biological weapons).

Indeed, most of chapter ten is devoted to the range of risks – basically, terrorist use or some kind of accident – which could lead to the release of harmful, synthesised organisms into the environment – accompanied by a lot of high-minded rhetoric about the need to ‘educate the public’ and ‘engage a lay audience’ and ‘exchange views’, and so on…

I believe that the issue of the responsible use of science is fundamental… (p.215)

Quite. But then the thousands of scientists and technicians who invented the atom bomb were highly educated, highly moral and highly responsible people, too. But it wasn’t them who funded it, deployed it and pushed the red button. Good intentions are not enough.

Related links

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Psychology

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by Simon on April 18, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 18, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/18/life-at-the-speed-of-light-craig-venter/