According to a message sent today by the UCSC Chancellor’s office, UCSC is about to launch “a bold advertisement” that purports to “capture the essence of UCSC.” It is to appear today “in the first of four national publications.” The message continues:

This ad speaks to UCSC’s core identity as a place with an unshakable commitment to students and to the fearless, bold inquiry that propels pathbreaking research. Our students learn how to think, not what to think. We care about social justice and the health of our planet. These qualities define UCSC’s distinctive culture, and these ads are part of an overarching campus strategy to raise awareness and build our national profile in an era when fundraising is more important than ever. Check it out and let me know what you think.

It is a poorly designed poster. The use of yellow is to be expected for UC and the banana slug, as is blue for the lettering. But the red hand looks so strange. What is it trying to point to? A past anarchic spirit, now tamed and channeled, thumb up, towards research, fundraising, and economic, global success? Or is the red thumb a badly drawn mollusk? The text gives an idealized story about backbone, energy, originality. The poster invites the viewer to buy the notion this spirit is still at the core of the present institution, when the real message of such an ad is that the university is a business. In this case, a business with an attitude.

How much did this poster cost?

Red Riding Hood in the forest and Big Bad Wolf hurrying to swallow grandmother and lacing on her big homey cotton bonnet, that is what came to mind after reading Putin’s disingenuous call to return to civilized diplomacy and to respect divinely blessed equality dans la différence. Global capitalism is a rough neighborhood. In his appeal to international law and stability, he is sailing downwind: many in the US are questioning the legality and ethics of a limited, unilateral act of war on a sovereign nation, there is on-going obstructionism at all levels, plus war fatigue, and finally there is the fact that the Obama administration inherited the wreck of the Bush Middle East policy regarding Iran and Iraq. Useful image burnishing by Putin and playing the clock.

He is all too quick to say that “Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria.” It may be becoming true but this was not the case two years ago, as Juan Cole explains in his review of basic facts about Syria (Top Ten Things Americans need to Know about Syria if they’re going to Threaten to Bomb).

Number 4 is about the economic and social reasons for the conflict. I quote:

The Syrian revolution and civil war did not begin as primarily sectarian. It is to some extent a class struggle. High population growth rates and economic stagnation made the state unable to provide jobs to a burgeoning youth population. Droughts and the bad effects of global warming also created a water crisis that harmed farmers and pushed youth off the farms into city slums where, after the 2008 world crash, there were no jobs. The big protests in 2011 originated in the slums around the cities in the center of the country, where young men who had moved there for work from the countryside found themselves locked into long-term unemployment. The governmental and business elite in Damascus benefits from the regime and has mostly remained loyal or neutral, whether they are Sunnis or Alawites. About half of the large northern city of Aleppo is still with the regime, as well. Because the upper ranks of the ruling Baath Party are disproportionately dominated by the Alawite minority, and because so many discontented youth in the cities of the center are Sunni, the conflict took on a sectarian tinge. But its underpinnings are economic.

It is also rich for Putin to say “force has proved ineffective and pointless.” Today’s Kremlin politics seems guided by the use of force rather than true sharing of power. The NYT‘s title for the Putin opinion piece misnames it as A Plea for Caution from Russia. This appeal to caution is garnishing for a stalemate that means continued violence in Syria at the hands of the Russia-supported government and the now-competing rebel factions.

Things are moving fast diplomatically and militarily regarding Syria. Today, Kerry said somewhat in passing in London that the only way out for the Syrian regime would be to hand over its chemical weaponry within a week. Blunder? No matter, the Russian government quickly moved and proposed to ask the Syrian government not only to accept to put their stocks of chemical weapons under the control of international observers (whatever that means), but also move towards destruction of those weapons, and join the treaty on prohibition of chemical weapons (I suppose what is meant is the 1992–93 Chemical Weapons Convention. I’m only quoting from The Guardian). It presents an out for the players, certainly for Obama. Most importantly, it opens the possibility of going back to the UN (I mean the Security Council), as well as resuming negotiations eventually with Iran. All in good time. What moved the Russian authorities? Were they concerned that the strike contemplated by the US was going to seriously degrade Assad’s forces and make it more likely that Free Syrian Army forces, competing al-Qaeda forces, and other groups armed by Saudi Arabia and US allies would become strong enough to topple the regime?

This recent development makes it more difficult for the present conservative government of Israel to contemplate an eventual strike of Iran’s nuclear installations. Such a dangerous move was becoming a possibility as Obama, who is distrusted by the Israeli right, not to say despised, was preparing to go to Congress and would almost certainly walk back from the “red line” he drew regarding the use of chemical weapons by Assad’s regime. Israel has its own red lines, especially regarding Iran, Syria, and the Hezbollah. It can now relax a bit and continue to watch Obama. I hope the US government seizes the opportunity of opening a new round of negotiations with Russia and China at the Security Council, while aiming at some uneasy balance of power between Turkey, Iran, Irak, Egypt, Israel, and the petro-monarchies.

Striking the Syrian dictatorship’s military facilities and degrading them makes no sense without a broader political agenda. The moral argument Obama and Kerry are using to defend limited armed intervention is understandable but too little too late and, much worse, senseless without a political framework. By avoiding any mention of a political framework, it leads us further away from difficult solutions that could be developed if we were willing to consider the real economic and defense interests of Iran, Turkey, Kurds, and Russia, to mention a few actors. All of this has become harder than ever, yet more needed precisely because it is harder and there is no good option. There would have been more possibilities if we had sat down with Russia and China two years ago and established some ground to negotiate the sharing of power in Southeast Asia, the Causasian area, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. And of course if we lowered our military posture regarding Russia by keeping NATO within narrow boundaries after the fall of the USSR. Or regarding China in the Pacific. Things might have been very different now if we had begun real negotiations with Iran instead of conducting war against it via sanctions and going nowhere. Now the administration is proposing to plunge again into a conflict that is all too easily framed religiously in the absence of other economic, social, legal frameworks. If we strike, we are on the side of Sunni rebel forces in Syria (some of them hostile to the US) and perceived to be with the Sunnis in control of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc., in a mounting conflict with the Shi’as of Iran, Irak, Lebanon (Hezbollah), and the Alawites of Syria. Read Juan Cole and especially today’s opinion by Alex de Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic on the need for a political roadmap and the absurdity of using military punishment alone.

The Stevenson apartments at UCSC were recently christoed: