Marc Lynch vs The Game

The Game is heading to New Zealand, and commenting on the growing body of international relations theory centered around his spat with Jay-Z:

Wellington, Aug 7 NZPA – American rapper The Game doesn’t know much about New Zealand, except that “it’s pretty new”, and says if he comes across any sheep, “maybe I’ll make me a jacket”. [...]

In a recent Foreign Policy article, George Washington University Professor Marc Lynch, likened the feud to the battle of global hegemony — with Jay Z in the role of the United States, and The Game as the “erratic wildcard”: Iran and North Korea.

The Game asks for an explanation of why that’s not a favourable comparison, before likening Lynch to Greenland — isolated from the top writers in the world — and Jay Z to Iceland “coz he’s gone cold”.

Now as Spencer Ackerman observes this seems to be a serious blunder. Lynch wasn’t trying to diss the guy, he likes his work and was just making a general observation about his strategy. But by lashing out, The Game has, I think, illustrated Lynch’s general point about the dangers of this kind of erratic behavior:

In other words, The Game is treating a reconcilable as an irreconcilable. He’s like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi! Marc Lynch is a middle-class, fence-sitting Sunni Iraqi — surely an academic — in Diyala or Anbar or Baghdad, judiciously able to see both sides of the U.S. and AQI feud and not particularly inclined to throw his lot in decisively with one or the other. And here’s The Game, trying to humiliate Marc in public for apostasy or cut his fingers off because he enjoys a cigarette. Defeat sets in right there. Soon will begin Marc Lynch’s Awakening. Which is a good name for a mixtape.

I’ll just also point out that Greenland is much colder than Iceland.