Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is Sarah Chayes. The panelists on The Nightly Show are Katie Nolan, Seaton Smith, Sherrod Small, and Jake Tapper and the discussion will be about sports and lying.
Sarah Chayes is a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former award-winning reporter for National Public Radio and she also served as special advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tonight she is on to discuss her book
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
The world is blowing up. Every day a new blaze seems to ignite: the bloody implosion of Iraq and Syria; the East-West standoff in Ukraine; abducted schoolgirls in northern Nigeria. Is there some thread tying these frightening international security crises together? In a riveting account that weaves history with fast-moving reportage and insider accounts from the Afghanistan war, Sarah Chayes identifies the unexpected link: corruption.
Since the late 1990s, corruption has reached such an extent that some governments resemble glorified criminal gangs, bent solely on their own enrichment. These kleptocrats drive indignant populations to extremes—ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion. Chayes plunges readers into some of the most venal environments on earth and examines what emerges: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government (but also redesigning Al-Qaeda), and Nigerians embracing both radical evangelical Christianity and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. In many such places, rigid moral codes are put forth as an antidote to the collapse of public integrity.
The pattern, moreover, pervades history. Through deep archival research, Chayes reveals that canonical political thinkers such as John Locke and Machiavelli, as well as the great medieval Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk, all named corruption as a threat to the realm. In a thrilling argument connecting the Protestant Reformation to the Arab Spring, Thieves of State presents a powerful new way to understand global extremism. And it makes a compelling case that we must confront corruption, for it is a cause—not a result—of global instability.
Chayes’ central premise is that structural corruption provokes resentment, which leads to revolts, protests and, in some cases, fuels extremist violence. In Afghanistan, where the U.S. has been at war, and in Egypt, where the U.S. has sponsored government tyranny, which culminated in 2011 with the nonviolent overthrow of long U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, Chayes argues that by countenancing corruption and even tacitly and actively enabling it, the U.S. is thwarting its own strategic aims, and likely helping Islamist extremists recruit legions of bodies to flesh out their ranks. She’s not the first to argue this, though she does so in an entirely unique way.
The book profiles corruption in Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Nigeria, and draws out interesting examples of official corruption leading, in one case, to the movement that became Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. She also holds up what disgruntled witnesses and ordinary observers have said in these places — in off-the-cuff remarks as well as responses to formal interviews — with a strange series of texts from Europe (and their counterparts in medieval Islamic literature) called “the mirrors of princes.” This was the genre that Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” in — a kind of targeted advice column from a kingdom’s subjects (scholars or clergy) to its monarch, or from the dying king to his successor. Their theme? Don’t do corruption.
The contradiction in the book is that if the military knew that corruption was a “force multiplier for the enemy,” and it chose not to heed her recommendations when she made them in person, why would they heed those recommendations now? Chayes is likewise muted on the key paradox of corruption: Getting the U.S. to prosecute corrupt Afghans skips the question President Obama failed to answer by choosing to look forward, not backward. Can an occupying power possibly resist corruption?
None of this is to suggest that “Thieves of State” is wrong in wishing to end corruption over there, just that it presents the corruption as emanating from the wrong source. If U.S. officials with the blackest of budgets put Karzai in power in the first place, as Gopal has shown, how they themselves can be made to rein him in is a puzzle that gets into accountability not over there but over here.
'Thieves of State,’ by Sarah Chayes
I think that brings up a valid point. While we should worry about the corruption of the various other governments in the world we need to start with the corruption in our own. It was our corrupted military-industrial complex that did and does business with corrupted world leaders. Obama was not in Saudi Arabia because the king was a good guy or even a good ally to the US, but was there because the spice must flow.
Katie Nolan is the host of No Filter, a sports and pop culture comedy show on Youtube and FoxSports.com.
Seaton Smith is a comedian and filmmaker.
Sherrod Small is a stand-up comedian and television personality.
Jake Tapper is a journalist and author and is not Jake from State Farm but is instead the Chief Washington Correspondent and anchor of The Lead with Jake Tapper on CNN.
This could be a very interesting topic considering the obsession of so many on the squishiness of the Patriot's balls. Also on that same subject:
In the wake of the recent controversy over Deflategate, there is a brew at a Connecticut soda company.
Avery's Soda has created a new flavor called “Deflated Ball Brew.” The soda is “is a citrus mix of grapefruit, orange and lime, and has a little less carbonation than normal.”
Read more: http://www.wfsb.com/...
Next Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Mo 2/2: Martin Short
Tu 2/3: Bill Browder
We 2/4: Wes Moore
Th 2/5: Bob Odenkirk