Flogging Mali II

Jan. 17

When I wrote about the situation in Mali a couple of days ago, little did I know just how much get-up-and-go this story would acquire. In just about fifty hours, from the time I left off writing on Tuesday to the present, at least five significant developments have widened the aperture of this episode—some of them because they occurred, some because certain earlier developments became public, and some because ongoing events have matured in a certain way.

Here are the five developments of the past two days that have changed the shape of what is happening in and around Mali:

1. Agreement on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) force to go into Mali.
2. The announcement of an increase in French ground forcescommitted to the theater, and their engagement in combat.
3. The revelation that the French government has requested U.S. military assistance, and the initial U.S. public reactions thereto.
4. The difficulty that the Malian army has achieving even modest military objectives.
5. The attack on a gas-processing plant in southern Algeria, and the taking of foreign-national hostages, a few of whom are U.S. nationals.

Let’s take these five items in turn.

The multinational ECOWAS force agreed to, after nearly a year of dithering, amounts to a mere 3,300 generally under-trained and varyingly organized soldiers. This number of troops cannot do the job, even with the help of the French Air Force and an estimated 2,500 French soldiers either already in place or on the way. While it may be politically useful to many parties to send ECOWAS troops north into combat, it is morally repugnant to put them in harm’s way under a circumstance we may summarize succinctly as follows: enough of them to die, but not enough to prevail.

It is true that all of Mali’s neighbors see a threat in the putative Tuareg/al-Qaeda menace digging in in the north of the country. But they do not have dogs of equal size in this fight. The Nigerians have a large dog, mainly because they see their own problems with Boko Haram as liable to get lots worse if northern Mali becomes an Islamist terrorism base. But the Ghanaians have no such compelling motive, which is why they agreed to send only engineers, not combat troops.

Of course, engineers do know how to die when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point, however, is that the asymmetry of the participants’ capabilities and interests, along with their different standard rules of engagement, is very liable to render the force ineffective—a lot like the ECOWAS Congo force and a little like the ISAF mess in Afghanistan. To Afghans, it was as though a kind of military theme park, festooned with colorful banners aplenty, fell out of the sky one day and landed in their country. One can only imagine what Tuareg villagers will make of assorted armed and mostly non-Muslim, black, sub-Saharan Africans wandering around their desert.

Before very long, then, the French will have to decide whether Mali is worth doing pretty much all by themselves, along with some probably very modest British and perhaps other allied help at the margins. Committing 2,500 French soldiers to the fight is not nothing, but it will take a lot more than that to prevail if ECOWAS and the Malian army both prove more or less useless.

What scale of problem are we talking about here anyway? Judging from publicly available news sources, the enemy looks small and manageable, certainly no larger in plain numbers than what the French faced, and faced down, in the Ivory Coast not that long ago. There are four groups making up what I will for the sake of simplicity call “the bad guys.” There are secular Tuareg units, two Islamist militias, and some non-Tuareg “guest fighters”, almost exclusively Arabic-speaking and associated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The Arabic-speakers seem to hail mainly from Algeria, being the residual cadres of Algeria’s civil war (now in remission), and from Libya. The total adds to around 3,000, operating in an environment unusually kind to airpower. We’re reduced virtually to guesswork at this point as to how these four groups relate to and cooperate with one another.

I don’t trust these numbers. There are about 1.2 million Tuareg living in a contiguous area that drapes over several international borders, and these are but notional borders that for the most part don’t actually exist on the ground. Even if we subtract the women, the elderly and the very young, we still have a male fighting-age population of at least 250,000. Even if only 5 percent of that number were mobilized in some way, we’d be talking about 12,500 “bad guys.” But let’s assume an even smaller number. To subdue around 5,000 rebels it would take, by standard General Templar calculation at the ten-to-one counterinsurgency ratio, about 50,000 troops. Let’s assume further that the French are super-French, so that they need only half of that: 25,000 troops. Well, folks, 2,500 is not 25,000, and 25,000 is a very large number for the contemporary French order-of-battle.

Moreover, the very best way to stimulate the swelling of Tuareg and Islamist-guest-fighter ranks is to mount a noisy, European-led intervention. There may be only 3,000 bad guys right now, but that’s right now. In another fifty hours there could be 4,000, then 7,000, then…

As to the Malian army, it has struggled mightily to recapture the town of Konna, taken last week by a small rebel force. Konna is within southern Mali, meaning that its population of about 40,000 is mostly black African, not Tuareg. It is on a main road, by Malian standards. There are military camps able to provide a logistical tail not all that far from the town. The rebel force there probably totaled no more than 300, though no one seems to know for sure, since they wear no uniforms and do not muster in groups larger than six or seven. And its aims, most likely, were not to hold the town but merely to discombobulate and complicate an expected attack northward. And still the army struggled to retake the town, even with an assist from French airpower.

In short, from a strictly military point of view, what’s going on in Mali is going to keep going on in one form or another for a while. This will not end soon. It is also fairly likely to spread to Niger, possibly to Mauritania, Burkino Faso, Chad, Algeria and back into Libya, too, where the Tuareg live. And, as I have already suggested, a serious French-led intervention in Mali may help to spread it faster. There’s nothing like an “imperialist challenge” to stimulate resistance and high morale. On the other hand, an expansion of Tuareg activism might dilute the Islamist element within it, and might make the Arabic-speaking guest fighters unpopular and unwelcome, much as occurred in Iraq.

I suggested a few days ago that the French were likely to ask the United States for “specialized assistance.” That’s the term I used to not say what I am about to say now, since it has lately become more or less common knowledge. The French need help with airlift and logistics; they need to get themselves to the theater and they need to get the ECOWAS force lifted and delivered.

I remember once—back in August 2003 I think it was—sitting with Secretary of State Colin Powell in his inner office, just the two of us, discussing some speech or something, when he broke off to take an emergency call from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The UN urgently needed helicopters to ferry personnel into Liberia. Annan didn’t know how many helicopters he needed or what kind, so Powell succinctly explained the logistical facts of life to him (it can be useful to have an army general as Secretary of State) and made a few suggestions about whom he might want to call next.

Lesson? These things are not simple, easy or obvious, even once the political ducks get lined up. Details don’t take care of themselves. So fine, ECOWAS agrees to do such-and-such. Now what? Now the French call us and, in effect, say, “Umm, can we borrow some planes and helicopters and stuff?”

Now, you would think that, given the situation, we here in the relevant parts of the U.S. government—NSC, DoD, State, intell—would have anticipated this request (and one other I’ll get to in a moment). I don’t know if we did or not; lately we seem to be completely reactive. From the way Defense Secretary Leon Panetta responded in public yesterday, as if he had just walked out of the dentist’s office before the nitrous oxide had worn off, it’s hard to know.

Either way, the preternaturally low-keyed U.S. response has already gotten some people wondering just what we’re thinking, or better, ifwe’re thinking. Are we ticked that the French went off to the fight without us, when we had counseled more “watchful waiting”? Are we leery of being dragged into an endless mess? Are we even possibly thinking, hey, why not let the Tuareg have their independent Azawad, since reconstituting Mali is neither doable at reasonable cost nor all that significant one way or the other? Nobody knows.

Aside from airlift and logistics, no doubt the French are seeking some help with targeting. We have the requisite modest presence, and we have the technology to do that. Can what we supply match up with the French aircraft flying out of Chad and Ivory Coast and other platforms to make them effective? We are just not going to talk about that here, sorry. But that’s okay because, again, this is not really a technical issue. It turns on how the Obama Administration is judging this entire problem set, and we don’t know much about that yet. The body language so far suggests an extreme reticence to get too far out in front on our skis. That may be good. But it suggests as well that no one of any senior import has taken time to think any of this through. That’s not good.

For several hours, a budding hostage “crisis” in Algeria seemed primed to force some energy to attach to the subject. But as I write, there is apparently an Algerian military attack going on at the In Amenas gas-processing plant. So far there are conflicting accounts of what is going, or has gone, down.

What matters, first, is that Algerian authorities did the right thing by not letting the situation fester and by not negotiating with the attackers. What also matters is that Algeria is in a tight spot over Mali and the Tuareg. On the one hand, the Arabs who run the country have no interest in a Tuareg redoubt in northern Mali, especially one with an Islamist tinge. But on the other, they don’t want to piss off the Tuareg in Mali, lest they ignite a similar insurrection in Algeria—of which the attack on the gas plant is a very scary portent. What the Algerians are saying, in effect, is we’re not going to come after you if you leave us alone, but if you mess with us we will show no mercy. Certainly, too—just in case anyone is trying to think so far out of the box that he falls through the floor—the idea that Algerian soldiers would ever fight along side the French in a former French colony, notwithstanding some coincidence of interests, is, well, crazy.

But the most serious question concerns the extent to which the attackers were or were not a functional part of a larger al-Qaeda network. If they were, and if Ansar al-Dine and Boko Haram and other groups on the loose in the Sahel are in effect al-Qaeda, then that’s a problem, and U.S. policy needs to be shaped one way. If these are instead weak and essentially independent groups of fanatics, that’s something else again. My guess is that we’re dealing with the latter scenario, but my mind is open to reliable intelligence suggesting otherwise. Until we reach some kind of at least halfway sensible conclusion on this point, it will not be possible to do a reasonable analysis of how high a price we should be prepared to pay to help the French in Mali, and in the broader region. If that’s among the main reasons for the Administration’s reticent posture thus far, credit is due them. But we just don’t know yet.

Flogging Mali

As often happens, my TAI colleague Walter Russell Mead, with his team of intrepid assistants ever at the ready, has beaten me into print—or electrons, as the case may be—over what is going on in Mali. He takes his cue from the extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. Pardon me for repeating any of Walter’s points here; I may need to do so in order to get a running start on the one or two additional insights I would like to bring.

The Times story, written by Adam Nossiter, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazetti, and datelined Bamako, Mali, really was extraordinary, but in what has become a depressingly common way for the most part. In the twenty paragraphs that make up this news story, the word “Libya” is not mentioned until the ninth paragraph, and then only in passing along with several other countries. The word “Tuareg” is not mentioned until the fifteenth paragraph. The article is suffused with superficial contemporary description and amply populated with quotations mostly from unnamed sources, but anything about motives or interests or critical background circumstances is almost completely missing. You get a lot of “what” and “where”, and you get a tad of “who” (within which lies one real data nugget of genuine interest, of which more in a moment). But you don’t really get much “how” or “why.” Is this because the reporters have not done their homework and really have no idea where they are or what is going on around them? Or is it because that’s just not how such newspaper stories are supposed to be written anymore? I wish I knew.

The upshot is that unless a reader brings his or her own stock of knowledge to bear, he or she would never know that Mali is an extreme example of a modern state cobbled together from various ethnic and religious groups. (Look up an ethnographic map of Mali and you will see that, even by West African standards, it looks like a jigsaw puzzle.) One would never know, until a passing phrase toward the very end of the article, that the Tuareg are the main group that has been in periodic revolt against the central government for decades. One would never know that the catalyst for what has been going on in this country, as well as in neighboring Niger for many months now, was the Obama Administration’s decision to start a war in Libya. One would never know that the Tuareg are kindred to the Berbers who are rising, and raising hell, all over North Africa. One would never know that the Tuareg founded a vast empire long before the advent of European colonialism, and that their capital was then, as it is again now, Timbuktu. One would not even know from this article that the victorious Tuareg declared the independent state of Azawad in what they consider to be reclaimed, liberated territory, back in the beginning of last year.

Students have asked me frequently how it is possible to actually find out what is going on in relatively off-the-radar places like the Sahel, and I have to confess to them that, these days, with serious foreign affairs journalism having declined so dramatically in the United States since the end of the Cold War, it really is difficult. It’s virtually a day job, and one that requires knowledge of much history, anthropology and some language skills so that one can read, in this Malian case, the better-informed French press.

Speaking of full-frontal ignorance, this brings me to the only real revelation in the New York Times story—that data nugget I mentioned just above. Way down at the bottom of the piece we learn that the U.S. counterterrorism training mission in Mali made the stupefying mistake of choosing three of four northern unit commanders to train who were Tuareg. As the article says, when the Tuareg rebellion in Mali gained steam after the denouement of the Libya caper, greatly stimulated by the return of heavily armed Tuareg brethren from that fight, these three Tuareg commanders defected to the rebels, bringing soldiers, vehicles, ammunition and more to the anti-government side. Anyone who was surprised by this is an idiot, or at the very least a terminal ignoramus. And anyone in the U.S. military who failed to understand the ethnic composition of the country’s politico-military cleavages, such that he let U.S. Special Forces training be lavished on Tuareg commanders, was clearly insufficiently trained to do his job. And believe me, that’s about as nice a way to put that as I can summon.

How do things like this (still) happen, after what we should have learned from years of dealing with Iraqis and Afghans and others on their home turf? I happen to know someone who teaches in the U.S. military education system, and this person happens to be a field-experienced Harvard Ph.D. in anthropology. This person tries very hard to clear away the thick fog created by the innocent Enlightenment universalism that pervades the American mind—the toxic fog that tries to convince us that all people, everywhere, are basically the same, have the same value hierarchies, the same habits of moral and tactical judgment, and mean the same things by roughly comparable translated words.

Sometimes this person senses success, because the Special Forces officers in class who are still climbing the promotion tree tend to “get it.” They “get it” because they have collected personal experience—whether in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or the Philippines, or even in Mali—that what they are learning in class corresponds to the realities they know. I have been to this person’s classes on several occasions to guest-teach, and I agree: A lot of the guys (and the few women in the spec ops field) who have been on the ground do “get it.” But it seems that a lot of their senior officers don’t yet get much of anything at all. It is almost inconceivable to me that we could screw-up so badly. Understanding basic Malian circumstances isn’t rocket science, as they say, so why did this get botched? I am trying to find out; so patience, please.

Alas, as useful as the Times article is for revealing this critical datum, it is misleading in other ways. Now that the election is over, Walter supposes, it’s okay for the Times to call a failed policy what it is. That’s true about the Times and the election being over, so that the paper can now switch off the political advocacy button for a while. But it obscures two things that are more important.

First, the article makes it seem as though the training missions in the Sahel area are the brainchild of the Obama Administration. This is not so. This special forces anti-terrorism training has been going on for quite a while. It certainly was going on when I was in government in the 2003–05 period. Indeed, there was a certain natural muss and fuss associated with small complements of marines going into places like Mali and Niger to train local antiterrorist special forces. I remember a certain American Ambassador (whom I will not name) in one of these places objecting strenuously to the arrival of the marines and, with them, a very few serious embedded journalist like Robert Kaplan.

Second, not only is the policy nothing new, but it did not have to fail. Even reasonably intelligent policies that, as in this case, are designed to be hedges against worst-case developments can fail if oblivious, poorly prepared officials get their hands on implementation. (This is a good case for State Department officials helping the military rather than trying to foul their grub.) I still refuse to believe that the nitwit factor is an inevitable one in the U.S. military or in the U.S. government as a whole. And what exactly was, and is, a better reasonable alternative than training local forces? Do the Times reporters think that sending large numbers of American or allied soldiers to these countries, even in the absence of manifest threats to their governments, would have been a good idea? The article bristles with criticism, usually imported through piquant quotes that enable the reporters to distance themselves from it if challenged. But they offer nothing as substitute except implied praise for French boldness.

And this is crap. Obviously, things in Mali have come to a point where the Tuareg, in the form of a radical Islamist coup that has displaced the traditional national movement, have become capable of threatening the capital. That is the reason, one has to assume, that the French government has unleashed its air force against the rebels. The press, both here and in France, are characterizing this act of war in a former French colony as a bold step by the heretofore meek-seeming Socialist Party President François Hollande. It is no such thing, at least not yet. This was, and still is, a defensive operation cobbled together quickly to avoid catastrophe. Only if the French and their allies try to retake independent Azawad and reattach it to the Malian state—a policy for which they would very likely seek American support and specialized assistance—can the policy be said to qualify as bold.

Is that likely to happen? In Paris anything is possible, but I frankly doubt that it will. The price of success would be hard to calculate but probably quite high, since one cannot retake and hold territory just by using airpower. The price of failure would be even higher. I doubt that the French President, who has to sense the increasing fragility of the domestic economy these days, would take that on.

Hence, what’s going on in Mali is going to keep going on, in one form or another. It is likely to spread to Niger, possibly to Mauritania, too. I can barely wait for the next drive-by, nomad-journalism New York Times potshots aimed at trying to convey the shape of this burgeoning mess. Maybe one day they’ll even figure out how to connect the dots back to Libya. Maybe…

The Khedive's Revenge?

When, on Tuesday morning, I finished reading David Brooks’s column in the New York Times [“Another Fiscal Flop”], I scribbled two words at the bottom of the newsprint. First let’s hear how his typically excellent column, this one on the nature and scope of the debt we are amassing and are refusing to responsibly address, ended:

The country either doesn't know or doesn't care about the burdens we are placing on our children. No coalition of leaders has successfully confronted the voters, and made them heedful of the ruin they are bringing upon the nation.

And then let’s look in on the two words I cursively scribbled in blue ink from my fountain pen:

Khedive Ismail

When I wrote those two words I had no inkling whatsoever that I would see in today's news the announcement that Al Jazeera had purchased Current, which the New York Times describes as “the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore. . . and his business partners seven years ago.” According to the paper, Al Jazeera––which really means the government of Qatar––paid something like $500 million for Current, about $100 million of which will supposedly end up in the former vice president's pocket.

The reason for the purchase, supposedly, is that Al Jazeera is trying to convince Americans that it is a legitimate news organization, as the New York Times put it, “not a parrot of Middle Eastern propaganda or something more sinister.” The problem is that Al Jazeera does have a selectively propagandistic bias, not in all of its English-language reporting, but in virtually anything that has to do with Arabs, Israelis, the Middle East and Islam. Over time that bias, subtly and effectively communicated, can make a difference in American opinion. My guess is that's the real motive for the purchase.

Now let's take a step back and connect some dots. Why did my mind flit from the end of David Brooks's column on the debt to the Khedive Ismail to the unanticipated Al Jazeera purchase of Current? Because I'm crazy, some of you might propose. Well, you may be right, but not all forms of insanity are created equal. Here, in any event, is the method to my particular madness.

To understand how I connect these dots, I realize that it would be helpful if my readers knew who––yes, who, not what––the Khedive Ismail refers to. From my experience teaching undergraduates and graduate students alike about the Middle East, I am prepared to wager that not one in a million Americans recognizes this biographical phrase; so let me introduce you.

There once was a fellow named Mohammed Ali––no, not the boxer, but presumably the man after whom Cassius Clay renamed himself. He is known to historians as the Albanian adventurer who rose to power in Egypt and, after failed Ottoman attempts to remove him, set out in 1831 to conquer Syria and Crete from the Sublime Porte. What happened next is complicated enough to have filled several books, and we will not concern ourselves with that. All you need to know for present purposes is that Mohammed Ali established himself as ruler of Egypt, and the man who, following on and in some respects imitating Napoleon’s attack on Egypt in 1798, crushed the ruling centuries-old Mamluke order in that country. His son, Ibrahim Pasha, continued in his brief rule his father's modernizing and reforming ways, turning carefully to the European powers for assistance in that regard. Ibrahim Pasha was followed both literally and in terms of policy direction by two other relatives until Ismail Pasha rose to head the dynasty in 1863. In 1867 Ismail was formally recognized by the Ottoman sultan as the khedive, a term that roughly means viceroy—in the Ottoman period designating an independent ruler whose status was nevertheless below that of caliph.

It was during Ismail’s reign as khedive that the main symbol of Egyptian–European cooperation—in this case mainly Egyptian–French cooperation—came into being: the Suez Canal, constructed in 1869. The British had opposed the canal, seeing it as a vehicle for French influence in and around Egypt. But then, in 1874, the Khedive found himself in considerable financial difficulty. He couldn’t decide whether to spend money on Egypt’s modernization or on himself, so he did both. Now, as a means to secure the rights to construct the canal, the Egyptians in the person of the Khedive himself had been allotted a large number of foundation shares in the Suez Canal Company. To alleviate his financial distress, the Khedive let it be known that he wished to sell his shares.

There then occurred one of the most storied dramas of 19^th-century European colonial history. (It is so wonderful that someone ought to make a movie of it.) At the instigation of the then new British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, the British government quickly came forward as a buyer. It purchased the Khedive’s shares for the then enormous sum of £4 million, the vast majority of which Disraeli borrowed on the fly from banks owned by various Rothschilds. In a trice, the British government found itself the majority shareholder in the Suez Canal Company, and there was not a thing the French could do about it. (The fact that a lot of the borrowed money came from the French wing of the Rothschilds suggests that le banquier and the French government of the day were not exactly getting along; that would have to be a major subplot in the movie….)

Unfortunately for the Khedive, the money he got from the British for his shares did not really turned the trick for him financially. Such was his extravagance and the incompetence of his administration that he again found himself deeply in debt, chiefly to British and French bondholders, just a year later. Much as the United States did in the Caribbean a century or so ago, the British government determined to take action in order to secure repayment of its nationals who had lent money to Egypt. The French, meanwhile, encouraged by none other than Otto von Bismarck, whose motive was to distract the French from their contemplation of a war of revenge over Alsace-Lorraine, joined with the British to depose the recalcitrant Ismail in favor of his son Tawfiq.

What happened next would turn the movie into something of a wry comedy. The British and the French found it far more difficult to extract money from Egypt than they had anticipated. All that cash somehow defied auditing, let alone recovery, along the Nile. Here is how the remarkable Clara Erskine Clement described it in her revised and enlarged 1903 edition of Egypt:

Then began a series of investigations of the Finances of Egypt, conducted by Mr. Cave, Mr. Goschen, Mr. Romaine, and by a Commission of Inquiry. All these investigators were unable to come at the exact truth, for they were met at each and every point with deceit and falsehood, so that the results shown by their figures are probably but an approach to the whole truth of the rottenness of the Khedive’s government [pp. 454-55].

The French eventually gave up, leaving the British to continue the effort. By 1881 the task transferred unwillingly to the new Gladstone administration, which, at first sincerely anxious to be rid of ancillary imperial commitments, found itself with no choice but to take over control of financial matters within Egypt. Tawfiq Pasha was in no position to object, and neither was the Sultan in Istanbul, over whom the British held a certain amount of useful influence. Control of financial affairs grew willy-nilly into essential control of the Egyptian economy and before long to de facto control of the whole country—sparking a failed proto-nationalist uprising in 1882. Indeed, before long British involvement spread to fighting a war in the Sudan (movies have been made about that—Chinese Gordon, the Mahdi and the rest).

And so it was that, despite the inner convictions of the Liberal cabinet, Britain was drawn ever further into Egyptian affairs. Having defeated Prime Minister Disraeli at the polls on the very issue of colonial expansion, Gladstone found himself driven to adopt the policy of imperialism, if not always the rhetoric, that he and his colleagues had themselves denounced. It was in reaction to Gladstone’s episodic if feckless idealist leadership that Macauley had written: “There is nothing so ridiculous as the British public in a periodic fit of morality.” But a Prime Minister captured by the fates to do what he never intended is sort of ridiculous in its own way, too. I can’t stop myself from remembering this episode whenever memories of the Obama Administration’s “surge” and nation-building fantasies in Afghanistan come upon me; ah, but that is another story.

Our story, to get back to the point and to contemporary matters, is that Britain insinuated itself into Egypt because that government allowed its finances to deteriorate to the point that it made itself prey to foreign influence. I'm not suggesting that the U.S. debt will ever allow American sovereignty itself to be pocketed by its many foreign creditors. After all, the Japanese in their heyday financially bought a lot of American real estate back in the 1980s, even Rockefeller Center in New York City, and a whole lot of good it did them. But while it differs greatly in scale, the Qatari purchase of Current really does not differ in kind from the sort of dynamic that ensconced the British in Egypt. When George W. Bush was fine with Dubai managing some ports in the United States back in February 2006, it caused a political firestorm. I doubt that these days, under current conditions, the purchase of Current will raise so much as an eyebrow, despite its probably being a far less innocent affair.

Yes, and some American states are renting tolled highways to foreign governments. American for-profit hospitals are increasingly importing lower-cost nurses from abroad—in-sourcing—because they don’t want to or can’t afford domestic-trained labor. What else in future will we ask foreign companies, with foreign governments looking on, to do for us that we can’t do for ourselves because we’re unable to toilet train our budgetary habits? What are we dealing with here, the Khedive’s revenge?

New Year's Eve: A Guide to What You're Celebrating

Dec. 31, 2012:

It’s one thing to be a Jew on Christmas in a majority-Christian land like the United States, a meme made famous (infamous?) by recent cultural creations stretching all the way from Adam Sandler to South Park. But it’s another to be a Jew on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. That meme isn’t famous at all. Yet.

Now, as everyone knows, the evening of December 31 is New Year’s Eve. And that’s right, if one reckons by the common calendar, used pretty much worldwide these days thanks to the antique successes of European imperialism, in which this coming year is 2013. But why is December 31 the eve of the new year? How did it get to be that way?

If you’re like most normal, sensible, historically oblivious Americans or Europeans, or most others who live in a majority-Christian society, this question simply does not come up. It’s New Year’s Eve on December 31 because it is and always has been, and the year ahead is 2013 because it follows 2012, dummy—so what on earth are you talking about?

A moment’s reflection, however, can convince even the densest person, sober or not, that, no, it hasn’t always been this way—“always” being a pretty long time when pointed backwards as well as forwards. Here is a very short history of the matter.

In 46 or 45 BCE, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar established January 1 as New Year’s Day even as he introduced a new calendar that was far more accurate than the one Rome had been using up to that point. The old calendar had only 304 days, divided among only ten months. Not good if you want to concord solar and lunar cycles and have years that are roughly symmetrical astronomically from one to the next. Ceasar named January after the Roman god of doors and gates, Janus, who had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. This was a terrific idea.

Unfortunately, Caesar celebrated the first New Year by ordering a major attack on Jewish insurgent forces in the Galilee. Blood flowed in what then passed for streets. Some time later, Roman pagans began marking December 31 with drunken orgies. They apparently thought this constituted a re-enactment of the chaotic void that existed before the gods brought order to the cosmos. Even way back then, people would take any excuse to booze it up and screw someone whose name wasn’t particularly important at the time.

But December 31/January 1 did not remain the start of the year for long. (And never mind for now how the Romans numbered their years. Ceasar obviously didn’t think it was 46 BCE in 46 BCE!) As Christianity spread, and then became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 (Constantine had allowed the toleration of Christianity in 313, but it was left to Emperor Theodosius to do the deed for which Constantine is often credited), pagan holidays were either incorporated into the Christian calendar or abandoned. In the case of January 1, it very conveniently became the Festival of the Circumcision. Yes, that’s right, if you count inclusively from December 25 to January 1 you get eight, as in the eight days of circumcision. That was painfully obvious to 4^th-century Christians.

January 1 thus became an important day in early Christianity, but not as New Year’s Day. The Festival of the Circumcision came to symbolize the triumphal rise and reign of Christianity and the would-be death of Judaism—the supersession of the Church over the Jews as God’s chosen. By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, this interpretation was standard fare, and it seems to have been formally ratified theologically at that Council.

Now, it so happens that the Pope at the time, whose name was Sylvester, convinced Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem. At the Council of Nicaea, too, Sylvester promulgated a host of new anti-Semitic legislation. Not surprisingly, Sylvester became a saint in the Church for this and other achievements, and his Saint’s Day is (you guessed it) December 31. That’s why Israelis today call the secular New Year’s Eve revelries and New Year’s Day (since Jews mark the beginning of a day at sunset) “Sylvester.” Why they do this I don’t know, since Sylvester was sort of an ass from a Jewish point of view, and since over the centuries in medieval Europe the night of December 31 was often enough reserved for synagogue and Hebrew book burnings, tortures and standard-issue murder-for-sport.

But already by that time, as I have suggested, January 1 was not New Year anymore. It was still associated with pagan Rome, and Christians wanted to separate themselves from that image. Most of Christian Europe regarded March 25, Annunciation Day, as the beginning of the year. That made sense, too, because it was near the vernal equinox, the new year for many of the European tribes the Church sought to convert. The one exception worth noting, starting in the 11^th century, was England.

William the Conqueror was crowned King of England on December 25, 1066, and at that time (his transition team was very efficient) he decreed that January 1 should once again be the New Year. He thus ensured that, with Jesus’ birthday aligning with his coronation, Jesus’ circumcision would start the new year and symbolize the supersession of the Normans over the earlier inhabitants of Britain. He tried, in other words, to make the calendar of Christian Norman England align with his personal biography.

This was very clever, but William’s innovation eventually lost favor. England’s Catholic clergy realigned English custom to fit the rest of the Christian West. March 25 it was to mark the new year, and there it remained for roughly half a millennium.

Then, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII moved it back to January 1. Like Caesar, the occasion was the introduction of a new calendar, the “Gregorian” one used today. The problem with the Julian calendar, as is well known, is that its slight inaccuracy caused Easter to creep too far back from the vernal equinox at the rate of about one day per century. That creep had amounted to 14 days by the time Gregory XIII became Pope, really screwing up the religious calendar. The Pope based his new calendar on the day, 1,257 years earlier, when Council of Nicaea convened on the vernal equinox: March 21, 325. Otherwise, the vernal equinox would have fallen in 1582 on March 11, way off from where the sun and stars were supposed to be for an equinox. He kicked the calendar ahead ten days, turning the day after October 4, 1582 into October 15, 1582.  January 1 again became the new year.

Except in England and, by extension, its American colonies. The English resisted the change, not because they were still ticked at William the Conqueror’s vanity, but for reasons having to do with the Reformation and resisting the Pope’s authority and all that. The Gregorian calendar did not win adoption in England and in America until 1752, and oh what a mess that caused. To get the math to work out, 1751 consisted of only 282 days, from March 25 to December 31. The year 1752 began on January 1, but January 1 had to be advanced 11 days to catch up the Gregorian count, so 1752 had only 355 days. I’m sure this is the origin of wild drunkenness in Britain and America on New Year’s Eve. How else was a typical person to cope with such disturbing stuff? (This explanation does not apply to the Irish.)

What does this have to do with the Jews? Well, back on New Year’s Day 1577 Pope Gregory decreed that all Roman Jews had to attend a Catholic conversion sermon given in Roman synagogues after Friday night services. The penalty for skipping out was death. Then, on New Year’s Day the next year the Pope signed a law forcing Jews to pay for a “House of Conversion” whose purpose was to convert Jews to Christianity. The sermons and the House did not work so well, however, so on New Year’s 1581 he confiscated all of the Roman Jewish community’s Hebrew books. That caused a lot of violence; the Jews took it in the neck, as usual, when, virtually unarmed, they faced a vastly superior military force.

Does any of this matter? It might, except that very few Jews know this history, whether they live in Israel, America or anywhere else. Very few non-Jews in the West associate New Year’s Eve and January 1 as New Year's Day with Pope Sylvester or with the Festival of the Circumcision. Indeed, the whole shebang is presumed to be secular in nature, having nothing to do with any church calendar (Catholic and Anglican, anyway) going back some 1,680 years. Except that it very much does. Besides, if New Year’s Eve and January 1 as New Year’s Day really were secular in origin, then they could not be much older than a few centuries—which would contradict the “always” premise, would it not? But to answer the question; no, it doesn't matter. It's just harmless historical fun to know these things.

I guess it comes down to this: If you join in the revelry of New Year’s Eve, you can do it because of Julius Caesar and the gods turning chaos to cosmos (perfect for pagans), you can do it in memory of Pope Sylvester (perfect for anti-Semites), you can do it to commemorate William the Conqueror (perfect for Anglophiles), you can do it to mark the advent of Pope Gregory’s calendar (perfect for math/science types), you can do it to celebrate Jesus’s bris (my personal favorite), or you can do it just because it’s a convenient pretext to get hammered (everyone else’s favorite, judging by all appearances). So Happy New Year…whatever your reasons.

And next in this series…yes, you guessed it, the origins of Groundhogs Day!