August 24, 2011

People Will Be People

Adam Garfinkle

I really cannot resist commenting on two phenomena that seem quite different in nature but whose simultaneity suggests a few curmudgeonly observations. I am of course still on curmudgeon alert, but I can’t get to my real work today until I get these observations off my chest.

First, about Washington’s earthquake yesterday early afternoon. There isn’t much to say about the earthquake that everyone does not already know, but there is something to say about the reaction to it downtown yesterday. When I got home from my downtown office, a commute made much more laborious by the extra precautions taken by Metro, I heard on the news that a lot of people had at first thought that a terrorist attack was in progress. This fact was corroborated in today’s Washington Post.

I have to say that it never occurred to me that what was happening had anything to do with terrorism, a subject about which I have written a great deal and about which, I think it is fair to presume, I know more than the average bear. When the first shaking occurred, I wondered whether there had been some construction accident not too far away, like a crane falling or something like that. By the time the second wave began just a few seconds later, I was sure that this was an earthquake.

Objectively speaking, given the pathetic operational capacities of al-Qaeda, even before the death of Osama bin Laden, the probability that a terrorist attack could possibly have created rumbles of such magnitude is fairly close to zero. So why did so many people at first rush to such an irrational judgment?

No doubt there are many facets to a complete explanation, but the main explanation turns on the cumulative consequences of the bureaucratized paranoia that we have so counterproductively engaged in since 9/11. It reminds me of George Gerbner’s famous “mean world syndrome”, which, for those who do not know, is the name Professor Gerbner gave to the phenomenon wherein people who watch a lot of commercial television think that the world is far more prone to violence, perversion, infidelity and general mayhem than it really is. People cannot, or at any rate do not, typically distinguish the motives of television executives wanting to create excitement on the screen to gain market share and the way the real world actually works. People model their behavior after these erroneous assumptions, so it’s not an entirely harmless or theoretical issue. In this case, it’s our own government that has helped to create a terrorist equivalent of the mean world syndrome. What a bunch of idiots we are.

I can elaborate that conclusion. After giving it a moment’s thought, the reaction I saw out on the street yesterday afternoon reminded me at least a little of the completely irresponsible behavior of most people after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On that day, nearly ten years ago, most people in this town started running around like chickens without heads. They clogged the streets, they clogged the airwaves, they clogged the Metro, so that emergency staff could not get to their critical jobs. On a far less significant level, the same thing happened yesterday. Everybody got on their cell phones, or tried to surf the Internet for news, the result being that emergency staff again were thwarted in doing their jobs. A lot of people rushed to leave the city, creating what amounted to a near stampede in Metro station entrances.  It is true that some of these people, being government bureaucrats let out from their jobs or contractors let out from theirs, can be expected to act more or less like school children, relishing a free vacation day, or half day in this case. But that doesn’t take anything away from the conclusion one has to reach, which is that despite (or because of, far more likely) all of the bureaucratized paranoia, the average Washingtonian is no more stoic, sensible, or rational that he or she was almost ten years ago. Clearly, our government has been working on the wrong aspects of the problem, making things worse rather than better. (You’re totally surprised, aren’t you?) We would be much better off ten years after 9/11 if, instead of all these ridiculous “Is that your bag?” noise pollutions in the subway system, people had been systematically advised not to use their damned cell phones (except, of course, in cases of urgent medical need) for twenty to thirty minutes after a significant incident.

Now let’s head off to Tripoli. A little while ago I wrote in this space that, it seemed to me, there was a better than average prospect of significant bloodshed in Tripoli if and when the rebels brought their advance that far. Obviously, they brought it that far in a dramatic fashion, and the regime elected not to put up a frontal fight to prevent it. In that post, I also noted that in tribal Arab societies it has been traditional to make sure that a defeated party is thoroughly defeated so that the vanquished cannot rise up to take revenge against the victor. You can refer back to that post to see my exact words, but to paraphrase myself, I said that, in this traditional mindset, an enemy had to be decapitated politically, economically, and sometimes literally.

I never said that a victorious force in such a circumstance would literally wish or try to kill every one of their enemies. That is absurd. I never said that tribal Arabs were savages, or barbarians, or that they were morally or in any other way deficient as human beings. I was trying to describe, as any anthropologist or social scientist would, the objective reality of the situation.

Nevertheless, people will be people, and some people will be ignorant, mean-spirited and ethno-racist idiots. Before very long, commentary on this piece got loose from its chain, and people started commenting on latter comments rather than on my original language. People began to refer to Arab tribes as composed of savages, barbarians and worse. Then, yesterday afternoon, I got a call from a radio station in Toronto. This talk radio station wanted to interview me on the air because, the producer said, he had heard—indirectly of course, for no one actually reads the original of anything if it can be avoided—that I had said that the rebels would kill every Qaddafi supporter to the last man. This is the modern IT-aided version of whistle down the wind.

I told the producer that I had never said or written any such thing, and that it might be a good idea for him to read what I actually did write. He wasn’t interested. He merely wanted to know whether I would go on the show. I decided to go on the show, if only to correct any wild impressions that these folks might have conveyed about my views to their audience. I have nothing against Toronto. I rather like the place. If I visit there again, I would like to do so in circumstances where I do not have to fear that people there think I am either a bloodthirsty madman or a garden-variety idiot.

So I did the show, which amounted to about an 8-10 minute spot. I found it frustrating, as I usually do on such talk radio shows. The questions were not the right ones if the aim of the program had been to actually educate the audience. They were the right ones if the purpose of the show was to present ever so slightly highbrow entertainment. As I say, I find these things frustrating. Every time I do one, I ask myself why I did it. Then time passes and I forget. As I say, people will be people, even including myself.

Just to finish the point on Libya: The rebel advance on Tripoli was pretty remarkable. And frankly I doubt whether the regime is clever or strong enough to really mean it when it says that all this was deliberate, all of it a trap to lure the rebels into the maw of a vicious counterattack to come. It could be, I suppose, but I really doubt it. Far more likely, however, is that the remaining towns and villages still under regime control will put up some kind of a fight, especially if Qaddafi is among them. The reason is that Muamar Qaddafi, naturally enough, is from the Qaddafi tribe, which is one of Libya’s smaller tribes, its homeland lying to the southeast of the capital. The Great Green Book Loon was able to rule Libya from the basis of this rather small tribe by, among other means, trading on and elaborating traditional alliances with the larger tribes of Tripolitania to balance off the power of the tribes of Cyrenaica. (If you do not know where these places are and are a sentient adult claiming to be interested in this subject, that would be amazing. But be that as it may, you can always look at the map below.)

I am not expert enough in contemporary Libyan affairs to know how these tribal alliances have shifted and changed over the past several months of civil war. The fact that a lot of the residents of Tripoli seemed happy at the rebel advance into their city suggests that these tribal alliance ties have frayed to a considerable degree, but that is not a studied conclusion, merely an impression based on information whose veracity and reliability I do not know. Assuming for a moment that they have deteriorated, and that the small Qaddafi tribe is now more or less on its own, then I don’t think we can expect a protracted, let alone a successful, resistance to rebel forces—unless, of course, the rebel forces start fighting among themselves before they finish off the last regime supporters. That is not as far-fetched a possibility as one might suppose. But all this is conjecture on my part. I am not there, and I am not privy to the intelligence traffic from the ground.

Any experienced observer of this part of the world is concerned that, even though we did not see a bloodbath visited upon the civilian population of Tripoli, revenge killings by the score might still be in the offing. Wars of this kind stir up extremely strong emotions. Men who have lost their fathers, brothers or sons often feel obligated to exact revenge from those responsible, and if those specifically responsible cannot be identified, as is usually the case, then any male member of the offending family, clan or tribe will often do. The feud is a traditional way of evening scores in the absence of any central formal authority. It is a form of balanced opposition that works tolerably well, though its side effects can seem rather misanthropic to those who are not used to it.

But as is well known to residents and students of the region, feuds can get out of hand. A tit can lead to a tat, which can lead to another tit, another tat and so on. That is why it is so important that the new government, however it is cobbled together, manages to establish at least a rudimentary rule of law based on the reality that there be just “one gun”, which is to say a monopoly of force in the hands of duly constituted authority. Unfortunately, if the descriptions in this morning’s newspapers are to be believed, the looting of the Great Loon’s compound of tons of weapons does not bode well.

One of the things I tried to point out on the radio yesterday for the benefit of the citizens of Toronto was that it’s a good idea to resist conflating different kinds of phenomena and dropping them into one huge basket. But in this case I cannot resist mentioning that the current situation in Libya, and specifically in Tripoli, bears an eerie resemblance to what happened in Baghdad after that statue was pulled down. There were revenge killings aplenty, although in Iraq these killings tended to have a sectarian as opposed to a tribal basis. Nonetheless, we all know what the failure to establish basic order led to in Iraq. Let us hope the Libyans avoid a similar fate. Let us hope, too, that outsiders stay outside and let the Libyans work this out for themselves. After all, our credentials on this score are pretty pathetic.

One last remark about Libya before I try to tie earthquake and Tripoli together: Speaking of differences and distinctions, what is happening before our eyes in Libya illustrates a very important development. What happened in Egypt was the end of the Mubarak dynasty, not the end of the regime (at least not yet). The same may be said about Tunisia. The fact that most American observers missed this “minor” point and thought that the end of Hosni Mubarak was tantamount to the end of the Egyptian military-bureaucratic regime is a stellar example of the impulse to conflate that I just mentioned. But in Libya a regime is late in the process of actually falling. This is the first time in modern Arab history (by which I mean the independence period beginning in the various countries from around the 1930s to the 1950s) that any Arab regime has fallen as the result of a mass armed uprising of its own citizens. (The Sudanese regime of General Ibrahim Abboud fell to angry mobs in 1964, but that was, on balance, a minor affair with eccentricities of its own.)

This is a big deal. But we are so set on pushing disparate phenomena together that when a real event marking a significant, distinct departure from the norm occurs, we are not interested. We don’t even notice.

Which leads me to what yesterday’s downtown Washington reaction to the earthquake and the very strange misinterpretations of  happenings in Libya have in common: People increasingly seem to base their judgments and behavior on shards of information entirely bereft of context. Worse, many people do not seem to realize that they are doing this, and so they experience no doubt about what they come to believe. Few people are checking their own work anymore, it seems.

This is not the place to speculate about why this is. Besides, maybe things have always been this way (but I don’t think so, at least not to this extent). If you’re curious, let me suggest that you go back and read Sven Birkerts’s review of Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows. That will get you started thinking about some very interesting questions, if you have not started thinking about them already.

Finally, I want everyone out there to know that I do not undertake this particular comment lightly, given the bizarre interpretations festooned by so many on my last one. I can’t help what people think. People will be people, after all, in their many less attractive qualities as well as in their great nobility. I suppose that’s better on the whole than the alternative. We wouldn’t want people walking around acting like ducks, now, would we?

Posted in Libya | 3 Comments
August 16, 2011

And Now for a Real Slaughter

Adam Garfinkle

I have not written in this space on Libya, and the Western intervention therein, since March 22—just days after some $350 million worth of U.S. cruise missiles commenced the NATO campaign against the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. That is nearly five months ago, in a war that was supposed to be over in days, not weeks. I have been content instead to merely watch as all the predictions I made came true. And they all have.

So why write again now? We are at a tender spot in this war. Over this past weekend it appears from press reports that rebel forces have seized reasonably firm control of Zawiya. Zawiya is the first town to the east of the Tunisian border, and it is a supply and transportation hub serving Tripoli. Rebel control of this strategic spot puts the regime in a kind of vise, an observation so obvious that it has been repeatedly made even by journalists in recent days—if you take my point. Anyone can see that the regime is in a vise by the fact that some of its principals are defecting, including reportedly one of its intelligence chiefs.

Now, in a set-piece military situation of the sort described by textbooks concerning Europe, one might expect that at a certain point the regime will simply surrender to its adversaries after enough military pressure and a consequent sufficiency of humble introspection on the part of the besieged have been applied. That is very unlikely to happen in Libya.

For all the brutality of European wars, in reasonably modern times these wars were fought against the background of certain rules. It was possible, sometimes at least, to surrender with the expectation that one would not be slaughtered. This made an enormous amount of sense. If you don’t give your enemy an honorable way out, then everybody suffers from fighting to the last man on the losing side. Given what has happened in Libya, and more importantly the fact that Libya remains to a considerable extent a tribal society, no such expectation is warranted. Qaddafi, like Bashar al-Assad in Syria and President Saleh in Yemen, have nowhere to go in defeated retirement.

There are rules in places like Libya, but they are different from the rules applied in Europe in recent centuries. The main rule when one tribe or one tribal confederacy conquers another is that the defeated party is politically, socially, economically and, often to some extent, literally decapitated. The defeat must be total, unmistakable and irreparable. That is the best way, indeed, in many cases the only way, to make sure that the rank-and-file of the defeated group will not find some way to rise up again in revenge.

Now what does this mean in the Libyan case? It means that if the rebels centered in Benghazi are going to overthrow by force of arms the Qaddafi regime, they are going to have to fight for Tripoli, possibly down to the last square block of the regime’s stronghold. Qaddafi and his tribal loyalists and allies will not surrender peaceably. There is therefore going to be, quite possibly, a crimsoned slaughter of the civilian population of Tripoli.

I do not know this for certain, but neither did the Obama Administration know for certain five months ago that there was going to be a slaughter in Benghazi. There are reasons for thinking that the likelihood of the slaughter in Benghazi was far lower than the likelihood of a slaughter coming soon in Tripoli. Qaddafi may have thought back then that just the threat of mass violence could dissipate the rebellion, or weaken it fatally. Arabic is very good for threat making, and Arabs over the years have become masters at using language as votive acts. (There is a long tradition, just by the way, of leaders hiring poets to curse their enemies. There is as a result a whole genre of Arabic literature of this sort. And to those familiar with the Hebrew Bible, it will occur that this is not just an Arab hobby, but one practiced widely in the ancient Near East as well, as the used-to-be-very-well-known story of Balak and Bilaam attests.) Westerners eavesdropping on this internal conversation frequently take what is being said much too literally.

At any rate, as I say, the likelihood of a very bloody fight for Tripoli is high. Note that the Benghazi-centered rebels are not threatening anything like what Qaddafi threatened them with some months ago. That is not a good sign in this context; it is a very bad sign.

NATO is not in a position on the ground to do anything about it. NATO, fighting without the United States, has not been in a position to do very much about anything, which raises a point I will follow up just below. Clearly, the rebels who might be soon advancing on Tripoli do not recognize a clear distinction between civilians and combatants. Tribal rules say that all adult males are fair game. Given the widely available military technology of our time, however, and the Libyans’ lack of training in using that technology surgically, it is very unlikely that women and children will remain safe regardless of traditional prohibitions against harming them.

If the Obama Administration intervened in the first place to prevent mass murder against Libyan civilians in Benghazi—and on this point I take the Administration at its word—what will it do to prevent mass murder against Libyan civilians in Tripoli? Will NATO forces now suddenly switch sides, and begin suppressing the military activities of the Benghazi rebels it has been supporting and trying to build up for the past five months? That would be logically consistent in terms of the way the Administration does its moral reasoning; it is also completely unthinkable under present circumstances.

So perhaps the Administration and its NATO allies will try instead to simply persuade the rebels not to be brutal when the triumphal end of their campaign comes into sight (assuming it does). If they succeed in that task, highly unlikely though it is, the result will be to further prolong the war and muddle the possibility of a definitive endpoint. That would be inane, if not insane.

I don’t really know what they will do. I can’t wait to find out. All I know is that when a government engages in military activity on the basis of a nonsensical premise, there is a price to be paid always down the road. We are now pretty much down the road.

* * *

Finally, as I promised, there is NATO and its performance to be assessed. NATO has not impressed in the Libya campaign. Without the United States taking the lead, the NATO allies have been hard-pressed to maintain even a modest operational tempo in the air war. So difficult has it been to maintain even an ineffective campaign that dissension and hints of de facto surrender have been lately in the air. Some weeks ago the Italian government began hinting that perhaps some sort of compromise solution, with Qaddafi still in country and possibly even in power, might be worked out. The Italians may have had certain commercial interests in mind that they wished to preserve, but in any event this sort of proposal amounts to surrender in so many words. One even heard such noises, though not at a high official level, in London and Paris. Not a good optic for the world’s strongest and most benign military alliance.

The best thing that one can say about NATO’s actions in Libya is that they have not yet been a complete failure. But they certainly have done nothing useful for the image of NATO as a deterrent to bad behavior worldwide, which suggests that we may now have more of it. In the Balkans, perhaps. Or maybe from the Russians, at a time and place of their choosing. A superpower and its associates are essentially in the protection business. If it appears that the superpower either cannot or will not provide protection, then its stock falls and the stock of its rivals rises. That’s just the way things are. The moral reasoning of the well intentioned can do nothing about it.

A last note, if I may. Muammar Qaddafi and his associates will not go down without a fight, and the fight that they are capable of mounting may not be limited to Tripoli and environs. I do not see the intelligence traffic anymore, so I don’t know what the U.S. government’s estimate is of how much damage the remnants of the Libyan terror infrastructure can do. But I can assume, I think, that the estimate is not “nothing.” If Qaddafi has a way of reaching out and slapping us as he himself hits the turf, I suspect he will use it. American interests and personnel, especially abroad (possibly especially in places like Aviano Air Base in Italy), may be entering a notably dangerous period. Guys, look out for large green books with bombs inside.

Posted in Libya | 29 Comments
August 5, 2011

Why Iran’s Blue-Water Naval Ambition Matters

Jamsheed K. Choksy

Last month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) chief Ali Fadavi declared, “The frontline of the Islamic Republic is the sea. Our enemy, the United States, has a military capacity at sea and has secured hegemony by the means of its naval capacity. . . . It is necessary that the Iranian navy counters the enemy.” Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi told the local press “Iran plans to strengthen its naval forces to maintain security of the open seas … the message to regional countries is that there is no need for the presence of foreign forces.”

Iran’s naval force, which include the IRGCN in addition to the more conventional Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN), has been neither a major force in nor highly visible on the world’s waterways. However these conditions are changing, as the Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to regain the maritime might that Persian empires enjoyed during antiquity and the Middle Ages. This effort also represents the revival of a program begun under the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The current quest to project power on the high seas has been endorsed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who claims that even in its early stages it “has intimidated” other nations, referring no doubt to the United States and Israel in particular.

Tehran’s blue-water ventures are gaining attention not just in nearby Israel and the United States, but in the European Union too. However, Washington, London and Paris, although they feel stymied by foreign wars and debt, remain too confident in their militaries’ capacities to handle an Iranian naval threat; the problem, they think, is still well over the horizon. They fail to recognize that Iranian leaders have proven adept at opening new fronts along which to challenge American and European global dominance and incrementally increase their country’s capabilities and influence on a global stage.

Up to now, the Iranian navy comprised a small fleet of speed boats, corvettes, frigates, destroyers, supply ships, and submarines. Its theater of action was restricted to the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman by technological limitations. Yet even there Iran’s government has proven detrimental to regional and world safety by aiding terrorists. The IRGCN and IRIN are suspected of having facilitated movement of al-Qaeda operatives across the Persian Gulf to and from Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan for many years. More recently, as Tehran’s global ambitions have expanded, so has the deployment of its navy. This deployment has gained considerable significance within Iran—even being encouraged in a khotba, or sermon, after Friday prayers at Tehran University.

Many of the IRIN’s larger vessels were put into service before the 1979 revolution. In order to modernize the fleet, over the past decade the IRIN was linked with the IRGCN, which has access to manufacturing services and concentrates on offensive and defensive missions along the coastlines. As resources and capabilities grew, the IRIN expanded its mission scope into the Indian Ocean. There Iran began to find common strategic cause with the People’s Republic of China in ensuring the uninterrupted flow between the two countries of oil and gas eastward and technology westward. Iran’s navy, like China’s, began regular visits to the harbors of Indian Ocean nations, and Iran, like China, has been funding construction of deep water ports along the coastlines of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.

Now Iran’s naval ambitions are reaching beyond Asian waters. Ostensibly to thwart Somali pirates, Tehran’s submarines have navigated the Gulf of Oman since 2008, and they entered the Red Sea this June. Testing the thaw in relations with post-Arab Spring Egypt, Iran’s warships passed through the Suez Canal and docked at the Syrian port of Latakia in February, much to Jerusalem’s chagrin. Since then, Tehran is suspected of supplying Bashar al-Assad’s regime with munitions, advisers and IRGC troops to quell the populist uprising against its Syrian ally. The IRIN even aims to enter the Atlantic Ocean, although no date for deployment has been set for what would largely be a symbolic action.

Iran’s naval expansion has other, more duplicitous dimensions as well. Merchant vessels linked to the IRIN, often sailing under the flags of other countries, are known to transport illicit cargoes. In 2009, for example, twenty tons of explosives were seized in Cyprus during transit from Bandar Abbas to Latakia in violation of United Nations sanctions. An Anglo-American record-breaking speedboat was procured in 2010 through a similarly illegal transaction by the IRGCN and is believed to be undergoing modification and duplication for combat use. The possibility of nuclear technology shipments from China via North Korea to Iran, again in violation of both UN sanctions and the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has also been raised by the respected Institute for Science and International Security.

Distinctions between the IRGCN, IRIN and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) are deliberately obscured by the authorities in Tehran. By doing so they are trying to stay ahead of international sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and terrorist support networks. So Western nations suspect many ports, wharfs, berths, piers, warehouses and other facilities of the three maritime organizations are jointly controlled, operated and shielded by military secrecy.

In early July, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while attempting to rein in military leaders who oppose him, exposed the existence of these covert ports: “If a product is for military or security purposes, it can be imported without customs duties. But it does not mean the ports involved should not be registered.” IRGC Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari acknowledged that “some wharfs are controlled for military purposes.” Presidential Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei’s office responded by demanding to know why some “southern and eastern ports are without government oversight?” The Iranian Students’ News Agency, which is allied with the president’s political faction, then published a list of secret sites on the Persian Gulf “used by the military outside regular supervision.”

It was at one such port, on Kish Island, that former FBI agent Robert Levison went missing in March 2007. The Iranian military’s involvement in smuggling worth at least U.S. $12 billion each year is no secret at home or abroad. So perhaps persons associated with Iran’s shadowy activities believed it unlikely that an ex-agent of the U.S. government was there merely to stem the flow of consumer-related contraband. The U.S. Department of State believes Levinson is alive and being held against his wishes in the region, perhaps to ensure he cannot disclose what was learned during his investigation.

Technology transfer from abroad, by circumventing UN sanctions, coupled with domestic augmentation, have given Iran’s land-based missiles an operational range that places American forces in the Middle East and Israeli territory at risk. Iran  test-fired missiles with more restricted ranges from submarines in the Persian Gulf in 2006; it is only a matter of time before the IRIN and IRGCN gain capacity to launch long-range ones. As Iran moves steadily toward nuclear capability, the eventual prospect of unconventional warheads on its seafaring vessels’ missiles cannot be discounted either.

Iran’s navy still ranks only 12th in the world, so it is building up capabilities in asymmetric warfare. For now, the threat it poses to the West is mostly directed at crude oil and natural gas shipping lanes in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf. “Due to the strategic location of the Strait of Hormuz,” blocking maritime traffic off Iran’s southern coastline is “always on our agenda,” Major General Jafari commented to the press in July 2011.

Jafari, like other Iranian commanders and politicians, is not shy about stating that the Iranian navy aims to do much more: “We have not restricted ourselves to this region and have not stopped at this point.” Indeed Iran regularly conducts naval war games to demonstrate its military might is expanding beyond West Asia. Just in case America and its allies missed the point, IRIN Deputy Commander Rear Admiral Gholam Reza Khadem Begham declared to reporters that such exercises should serve as “a warning to countries which are trying to prevent Iran from becoming an extra-regional power.”

Even if patrolling the Atlantic becomes a reality, Iran’s navy will not risk actions that place it on the receiving end of a Trafalgar-like battle. Shaping perceptions through power projection is the route that Tehran traditionally takes, not military confrontation. So the new naval doctrine fits well into expanding nuclear, missile, satellite and sanction-busting programs as Iran gradually slips beyond Western safeguards and demonstrates it is a rising power whose views on global geopolitics must be heeded and can be forced upon others.

Jamsheed K. Choksy is professor of Iranian, Central Eurasian, and International studies and former director of the Middle Eastern studies program at Indiana University. He is also a member of the National Council on the Humanities at the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here are his own.

Posted in Iran | 6 Comments
May 26, 2011

A Guide for the Perplexed, the Partisan or the Merely Clueless

Adam Garfinkle

Watching the political circus here in Washington, and not only in Washington, often throws up no little bit of frustration. People in this town say the damnedest things sometimes. The typical think tank event here is rich in posturing and positioning, far poorer in any capacity to recognize, let alone follow, rules of evidence normal, for example, in any halfway serious university discussion. As a recovering speechwriter for a cabinet level principal, I am well aware of the various techniques of impression management that are honed to fine art here and in other political capitals. That doesn’t mean, however, that I like a steady diet of them.

At my age I thought myself appropriately jaded, so that nothing could surprise me or deprive me of my normal supply of oxygen. I was wrong. The orgy of idiocy that has broken out over one paragraph of President Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East has shocked even a veteran observer like me. I am referring, of course, to the statement the President made about the 1967 lines being, with land swaps, the basis for negotiating secure and recognized borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

I commented on this statement and on the fracas that began to erupt within hours of the President’s speech in an earlier post, one called “79 Notes”, in which I annotated the President’s remarks. I want now to revisit and expand my analysis because so much has happened even in the past few days that my original commentary now seems inadequate and outdated.

Let me preface my remarks by reminding readers that in “79 Notes” I rued the fact that the President spoke of Israel/Palestine matters at all. In my view, that decision was a deflection from the main purpose of the speech, which was to give the so-called Arab Spring its due, and to enunciate U.S. policy toward it. As I said then, the President rightly noted that the Arab–Israeli conflict had been used by generations of Arab autocrats to deflect attention away from their regimes’ inability to provide for the citizens of their countries. It therefore seemed to me unwise for the President, in essence, to contribute to that deflection. Given what has happened since Thursday, there can be no doubt that this has been the result. For every thought or commentary that has been devoted to what the President said about the Arab Spring, at least a hundred thoughts and commentaries have been devoted to this silly business about the 1967 lines, what the President said, what it meant, what he meant to say, what the Israeli Prime Minister said a few days later, and so on and so forth literally, in my case, ad nauseum.

Why do I say that this business is silly? Because the President literally said nothing new. Even in the way he said it there was nothing particularly new. For those who have been following the intricacies of Arab-Israeli diplomacy over the years, the truth of this statement will be manifest—at least to those who wish to make an effort at objective assessment. For those who have not been following it, or for those who are too young to have had a chance to follow it, there must be an abiding confusion over just what the hell is going on. So at the risk of boring the initiated, let me explain, in terms as simple as I can make them, just exactly what the hell is going on.

Let us start with what the President actually said, shall we? (Alas, some commentators seem to have been content to take their lead from other commentators without having actually heard or read what the President said.) Here, exactly, is what he said: “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

You will notice that the phrase “land swaps” is included within the selfsame sentence in which the 1967 lines are mentioned. Indeed, it is mentioned without there being even a comma to separate the two parts of the sentence. Aside from the explicit mention of the year 1967, I cannot see how this logically departs from the Clinton parameters in any way.

Ah, the Clinton parameters—what are they? To make a very long story very short, the Clinton parameters, announced in the year 2000 just days before President Clinton left office, represented the distillation of the discussions at Camp David in the summer of that year and in certain discussions thereafter. This was an American attempt to preserve what appeared to be major areas of agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian delegations as they met at and after Camp David to discuss then Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s proposal for a peace settlement. There is no text of what President Clinton said to the delegations but there are authoritative notes that capture the essence, and neither side disputes the accuracy of these notes. (At least they can agree on something, it just goes to show.) In the Clinton parameters the President talks about the West Bank being given over to a new Palestinian state in the mid-90s, which means, as later explicitly stated, between 94 and 96% of the West Bank. If Israel were to annex between 4 and 6% of the West Bank, wherein live more than 80% of the settler population, it was presumed that to compensate Palestinians for that small area, agreed chunks of pre-1967 Israel would be turned over to the Palestinian state.

The Clinton parameters represented an attempt to detail what had always been U.S. policy since the 1967 war, which followed the U.S. interpretation of the relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions, namely resolution 242 and, somewhat less centrally in this case, resolution 338. The American interpretation of resolution 242 has always been that Israel would withdraw from territories occupied as a result of the June 1967 war. Territories, not the territories or all territories. That is not what the resolution says and that was deliberate: the man who drafted it, Eugene Rostow, knew exactly what he was doing, and I know all this because he told me so.

The American position has always recognized that the 1967 lines, as they are commonly referred to today, were really the 1949 armistice lines, based on the series of bilateral armistice accords worked out in Rhodes after the 1948 war. These armistice lines differed from the dividing lines between Israel and Egypt, and between Israel and both Syria and Lebanon. Those lines were and remain international borders. Given the transitional nature of the armistice lines separating Israel from what Jordan called the West Bank, resolution 242 focused not on lines for their own sake, but rather on borders that are defensible. Therefore, it has always been U.S. policy, since the Johnson Administration, to see the 1967 lines as a basis for negotiation between the parties, but no one ever expected the lines themselves to be the final borders. The Clinton parameters, by specifying the degree of change from the 1967 lines—4 to 6%—and by creating the concept of land swaps, may be fairly said to have advanced and detailed U.S. policy rather than to have changed it.

Now, in April 2004, President Bush codified this understanding by stating, privately but authoritatively, to the Israeli government that the U.S. government did not expect Israel to withdraw from all of the territories it occupied in the 1967 war, but this statement had particular reference to settlements very near, in most cases, the 1967 lines and in which, as already stated, the vast majority of Israeli settlers lived. One could argue that defensible borders and borders that took in major Israeli settlement blocs are one and the same, but they are not exactly the same. Nevertheless, in a sense, the April 2004 letter serve the same function as the Clinton parameters: namely, it further specified what had already been long-standing U.S. government policy.

There have been differences among administrations over other questions, notably Jerusalem. But on the question of borders there really has not been any variance to speak of. And there still isn’t any variance.

As I said in my earlier posting, I can only think of three possible reasons as to how a normal, English-literate adult could so egregiously misread the President’s remark made last Thursday. One of these reasons is sheer ignorance. It is possible, I suppose, that people who know none of the history that I have just briefly sketched heard the President and thought that he was invoking the 1967 lines for the very first time. A second reason has to do with politics—partisan politics, that is. I can imagine some listeners understanding exactly that the President had said nothing new, but nevertheless took the opportunity to claim that he did in such a way as to make hay politically against him. Avaricious Republicans may well have been thinking about the vote in Florida in 2012 upcoming. Florida has proven recently to be a tight and a critical swing state in presidential elections, and it is one of only a very few states where the Jewish vote matters. Of course, in order to peddle a falsehood to people, one has to count on either their ignorance or their credulity. And that brings me to the third reason for why some people seem to have misunderstood what the President said.

There are a lot of people out there who just don’t like Barack Obama. Their minds are made up before he opens his mouth that whatever he says they are determined to disagree with. Most Jews in the United States supported Obama, as they have supported virtually every Democratic candidate for the last century and more. But early in the administration President Obama said and did things with regard to Israel that gave many of these supporters second thoughts. Some concluded that he had no warmth in his heart for Israel. This led some people to conclude, however irrational it is, that he feels antagonistic toward Israel. So their minds are already predisposed to hear bad things out of the mouth of Barack Obama even when no such sounds are in fact present. Credulity thus combined with ignorance to allow politically partisan entrepreneurs to create impressions despite a total lack of evidence to support them. And that, in a nutshell, is what I think has happened.

Things have gotten even stranger as a result of two additional speeches: Obama’s speech at the AIPAC convention on Sunday, and then Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress a few days later. Let’s carefully review, at least in brief, what happened.

When president Obama addressed AIPAC on Sunday night, he was obviously distressed that, in his view, much of what he had said three days earlier had been misinterpreted. He was right that what he said had been misinterpreted, though he did not offer a theory as to why. Again, it is important to focus on exactly what the President said. He said:”Let me re-affirmed what ’1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps’ means. By definition, it means that the parties themselves—Israelis and Palestinians—will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. That’s what ‘mutually agreed swaps’ means. It is a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation.” The President also added, just in case anybody still didn’t get it, “there was nothing particularly original in my proposal.”

It’s enough to drive you completely crazy, but even after the President clarified what he meant, and did so in no uncertain terms, there were still people urging him to clarify what he meant! The TV cameras roamed the floor at the AIPAC convention after the President spoke, trolling for newsworthy comment, and one hapless interviewee said to a reporter, in effect—I am paraphrasing here—”Well, I’m confused; I don’t know what to believe—what the President said on Thursday or what he said here tonight.” The fact that the President said on Sunday night exactly what he had said on Thursday seemed to make no impression on this fellow or on many of his associates. The Thursday remark had already been so much spun beyond reality, that the spin itself had taken on a life of its own. Now, was this person ignorant, partisan, or credulous? It is very hard to know. He may have managed to be all three, and he was hardly alone.

In defense of those who mistook what the President said, there were and there remain contextual issues to be considered. Although hardly anyone has mentioned it, other things the President said on Thursday did depart from the Clinton parameters and really were news, at least news within the glass bead game labyrinth of Arab-Israeli diplomacy. One of these departures concerns the question of whether Israeli military facilities of any kind can remain within a Palestinian state at least for a transitional stage after the implementation of an agreement. In the Clinton parameters, there was an understanding that three Israeli facilities—essentially early warning stations manned by a relative few individuals—would and could remain. But on Thursday the President spoke of complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, and he did not mention any such facilities. This was clearly a tilting in the Palestinian direction. Even more dramatic, but again virtually ignored since Thursday because of the 1967 lines nonsense, the President proposed separating the four standard issues presumed to be engaged in a final settlement: borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. The idea expressed on Thursday was to hammer out a deal on borders and security, and leave Jerusalem and refugees for later in the hopes that by compartmentalizing the problems they would be easier to solve.

It is not particular surprising to see this idea in the President’s speech. It is a notion propagated in a book not long ago co-authored by David Makovsky and Dennis Ross. Dennis Ross is, as I think everyone knows, an employee of the U.S. government right now, yet again. In point of fact, he is the President’s key official on this area of the world in the National Security Council. If anything, his influence has risen lately with the resignation of Middle East special envoy George Mitchell. It is not surprising, as I said, to see this idea in the speech, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. It might be, but I am not persuaded that it is. From the Israeli point of view, the refugee issue is very difficult to separate from security. I do not think any Israeli government can afford to negotiate a deal over borders and security without an understanding about refugees, because any deal over borders and security can be undone de facto by Palestinian insistence on the “right of return.” That doesn’t mean they would get their way on such an insistence, but an inability to close the deal over the last two issues—Jerusalem and refugees—means that the negotiation can’t get to the end-of-conflict stage, which from the Israeli point of view is really the main point of the whole effort. Israelis are willing to trade real assets, real land, and even to take some risks on security issues if the payoff is a genuine and binding commitment to end the conflict. To give over real assets for anything short of that, I think, most Israeli governments that I can imagine would demur. And who could blame them?

So it is fair to say, perhaps, that taken as a whole the President’s remarks on Thursday tilted toward the Palestinians. And a lot of people have remarked that, in the aftermath of Fatah’s agreement to join a unity arrangement with Hamas, still unreconciled to Israel’s existence, such a tilt amounts to rewarding bad behavior. I agree with this, as I have said before. But that’s not the same as accusing the President of introducing pro-Palestinian novelty on the question of borders.

Now, on an even finer point of interpretation, some have said that that President Obama in effect had earlier repudiated the Bush statement of April 2004. That led some to read into his remarks on Thursday more than was literally there, but which might be a fair interpretation in light of context. There is some weight in this argument, and it is important, too, to understand that for one President to repudiate a solemn promise given by a predecessor sets a very bad precedent. It devalues the word of the President of the United States, not the man but the office. Who will believe a presidential promise in future if prior promises can be so easily removed from play? Some have suggested, therefore, that President Obama needs to explicitly reinstate the essence of the April 2004 statement. That is probably too much to ask at the present time. I still think, however, that the President’s words, as stated on Thursday and as clarified and repeated on Sunday, mark no literal change of U.S. policy.

Nicholas Carr wrote a book a little while ago called The Shallows. The book is about IT technology and the effects it may be having on our cognitive processing abilities. Many people wonder whether attention spans are being shortened by the nature of the technology, whether time-honored rules of evidence are being smothered by the rapid-fire shoot-from-the-hip subculture of the blogosphere, whether there is a tendency to equate information with knowledge in a situation in which so many people have no context to interpret information, and really—what it all comes down to—whether a genuine lack of seriousness now pervades our political discourse. I confess to some concern about all this, but coming up with actual evidence isn’t easy. But when I behold the almost unbelievable outpouring of ignorance and sheer nonsense over what the President said last Thursday, I think I am as close to evidence as I am likely soon to get that our political culture has stopped being even remotely serious. Never before in my life have I witnessed anything quite like this, where facts and common sense have been so rapidly and thoroughly been tossed out the window in favor of cant, spin, venom and a whole wheelbarrow full of dogshit dumb stupidity.

As I noted a moment ago, is not only President Obama’s Sunday night speech to AIPAC that forms the context of the current craziness, but also what Prime Minister Netanyahu had to say to Congress. As speeches go, Netanyahu’s speech was very good. It was quite well-crafted. And in the speech, as everyone knows, Netanyahu objected to any use of the 1967 lines as the basis for anything. If one did not understand the history of what the President said in the first place, one could get the impression that Netanyahu was taking issue with something new, something that just been introduced on Thursday. That, apparently, is what most people think. But this is not the case. Netanyahu and his Likud Party have never accepted, never been in accord with, U.S. policy on the question of borders going all the way back to 1967.

The Likud has in fact come a long way from its views a quarter-century ago, when it was still dedicated to what in Hebrew transliterated as eretz yisrael shleyma, the greater Land of Israel, or better translated, the whole or complete land of Israel. In this original Likud view, which dates back to the party’s founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, all of what became the West Bank in 1948–49 really belongs to Israel, and that if there is to be a Palestinian state that state already exists in what is called Jordan. This theory is based on a misinterpretation, actually a willfulness interpretation, of the history of the Palestine mandate, the Churchill White paper, and the nature of the Mandate itself. (We don’t have time here to go into all this; I have done it before and if anybody is interested they can let me know and I can pass along the relevant materials.) Back at its ideological peak, so to speak, the Likud view was that no land west of the Jordan River should pass back into the hands of any Arab sovereignty, and some Likud proponents argued that the way to truly secure the land west of the river for Israel was to expel or in other ways incentivize the departure of the Arabs who live there.

As I say, today’s Likud Party is a long way from this view. Indeed, a long-time Likudnik become Kadima Party Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, offered Mahmud Abbas a peace deal in 2008 not all that different from the one Barak had put to Yasir Arafat in the summer of 2000. This would’ve been inconceivable twenty years earlier. Nevertheless, as anyone familiar with the history of the Likud Party knows, it has never accepted the standard Israeli Labour Party or U.S. interpretation of resolution 242 and it still does not.

Now it is interesting to note that because of the confusion that has arisen over what Netanyahu was talking about, and the spun misinterpretation of Obama’s statement in the first place, it now looks like Netanyahu has the support of Congress, including even many prominent Democrats, against something the President presumably he tried to introduce as new policy. Since, as I have shown, Obama intended no such thing, it will be easy now to characterize his view as one that has been backed down, when he has done nothing of the sort.

Strange as it may seem, the argument between Obama and Netanyahu, real as it is—though it has nothing to do with any attempted U.S. policy innovation concerning the 1967 lines—actually helps both men in a way. It certainly helps Netanyahu, who can now pose as having outflanked the President of the United States in his own legislature and thus strengthen his coalition and burnish his popularity at home. In a way, all of this helps Obama because, even though it isn’t true, to those who believe in the almost mystical power of the Jewish lobby, he appears to be brave, besieged, abused, and hence altogether lovable to those prone to exalt victims of all sorts. He is a political martyr, though in this case without actually having done anything fatal.

In the longer run, however, this argument doesn’t really help either person or their constituencies. It is not a good thing when Israeli Prime Ministers try to insinuate themselves into American domestic political affairs. The last time this happened was in the mid-1980s when Itzhak Shamir tried his hand at a similar ploy, and it backfired badly. Politicians may not know a lot about the facts in an area like the Middle East or the Arab-Israeli conflict, but they have very long memories when it comes to political combat. Those whom Netanyahu may get the better of now will bide their time and look for a way to exact revenge. But it won’t be revenge against Netanyahu—it will be revenge against Israel.

Nor is President Obama really helped by any of this. It is not as though he can easily translate the sentiment of conspiracy theorists at home and abroad into anything useful either with regard to his own political ambitions or the foreign policy interests of United States. Nor, of course, can it change the fact that Obama has proved completely feckless in Arab-Israeli diplomacy.  The parties are farther away now from negotiations than they were before he tried to bring them together, and that is no coincidence. He has screwed up royally, and there is no way to avoid a price for that.

Well, in conclusion, the trouble the President has gotten himself into, unfair as it is to some extent, is nonetheless his own fault. He should not have spoken about Israel/Palestine issues in Thursday’s speech—he should’ve saved all that for Sunday at AIPAC. The real error he made, however, is one he seems to make all the time: He tries to split the difference when he cannot make up his mind on a point and when his advisers disagree with each other over it. So in this case there were some people in the administration close to the President who advised him to lay out a detailed U.S. plan for Arab-Israeli peace, and there were others who tried to warn him not to do this at a time when prospects for progress are so unavailing. So what did he do? He split the difference. He laid out some general parameters, but they fell far short of a detailed U.S. blueprint. He would have been better off not being the master of the half measure in this case, but rather of either having shut up or of having gone full bore.

It is an interesting practical and philosophical enterprise to examine the question of when half measures, or incremental approaches, to put it more formally, makes sense in political life and when they do not. There are certain structural aspects of problems that seem to mitigate either for or against the success of incremental approaches. But this is a very complicated and difficult question, not one to be explored in depth in a mere blog post. The point here is that President Obama is by his nature diffident when it comes to all questions except those he has really thought through. This tendency to split the difference identifies him, as I have argued before, as having the personality not of a professor—as so many have claimed—but rather the personality of a judge. That kind of approach can work in American politics, or at least it used to be able to work. But it does not work well as an approach to diplomacy. In diplomacy most of the time, including the diplomacy of war, as in the Libya case, the last thing a President should want to do is get himself and the country stuck in the hell of half measures. That’s the specific precinct of hell the President got himself into this time. Let’s see how he tries to get himself out.

Posted in Israel | 21 Comments
May 6, 2011

Brave Enough

Adam Garfinkle

As it turns out, I was brave enough to read this morning’s press. Let me follow up on my earlier posts with just two confirmatory comments.

The first is that the U.S. military has reportedly killed two high-level terrorists in Yemen, two brothers named Mubarak, with a Predator strike. This operation derived from the intelligence taken from Sunday’s operation. This is precisely what I said I had hoped to see in yesterday morning’s news, as well as this morning’s and tomorrow morning’s and so on. Now I have seen it. Good for our side.

Be clear what this means: A very old-fashioned race is going on now, which comes down to kill or be killed, or, in more elegant language: Do unto others before they can do unto thee. The bad guys know that we know where they are now, some of them, and that we know what they’re planning. They don’t know exactly what we know, but they know we know more than we did before Sunday. So just in case we know something dangerous to them personally, they are trying to rush their murderous plans against civilian targets while we are rushing our efforts to kill them before they pull the trigger. This may be a bloody time, on all sides, for a few weeks or months. We must be brave enough to get through it, even though we may not be able to stop all of these rushed and revenge terror attacks. That just comes with the territory when someone like bin Laden is eliminated. This is nothing we did not know before, and it is certainly nothing that should have caused the least hesitation about Sunday’s raid.

On the second point, we now hear from government sources that bin Laden had within reach during the critical moment before his death a handgun and an AK-47. This may or may not be true; I am prepared to believe it because it has the feel of verisimilitude. If the guy had getaway money sown into his clothes, he is very likely to have had heat close to hand. I am made happy by this news, because it means that bin Laden was not living in relaxed luxury these last several years. The chances are that he lost a lot of sleep looking over his shoulder. This is good to know, although it is still tragic by any measure that he lived as long as he did after September 11, 2001.

Why did this piece of news emerge now? Well, maybe the President’s order to everyone to shut up did not quite reach all ears. But I think the more likely explanation follows from yesterday’s analysis: that these guys are trying to avoid the appearance that this was an extra-judicial execution. John O. Brennan’s original account of a firefight, in which he claimed not to know if bin Laden squeezed off any rounds before he was shot and killed, had the same purpose—again, whether it was actually true or not. That was the right lie, if it was a lie. The subsequent stuff that came out—about bin Laden not being armed—was very definitely not the right stuff, which led to the embarrassing stuff about suicide belts and the like. And now this tidbit, it seems to me, is designed to re-balance the tale back toward the right stuff, legally speaking. And above all, it is designed to end the conversation insofar as that is now possible. It seems a sign that the White House is again back on message, at least temporarily and at least with respect to this issue. That is a relief.

As I said two days ago, the basic policy decisions—to kill the bastard to avoid a circus trial and to ditch the body to minimize the danger of martyrdom—were the right ones, and there was no need to dissemble about them. The sooner all this chatter stops, the better.

Which is why I found Alan Dershowitz’s criticism of the President so wrongheaded. Dershowitz thinks that an autopsy and full forensic workup would have been the right thing to do. That way, he says, the truth about the manner of death would have been clear to all—as if that would have had the slightest impact on conspiracy mongers and other willful nitwits in our own country and in the Middle East. But an autopsy would have left us with a body, which is exactly what we did not need. (You can’t bury a body at sea unless you do the autopsy there, and an aircraft carrier, despite the fine medical facilities aboard, is not the place to do a professional forensic autopsy.) Dershowitz’s opinion is yet more proof, as if we needed it, of why there are too many lawyers who are politically challenged, too many lawyers in government, and way too many lawyers in the Defense Department.

Why is this observation especially relevant today? Because today’s big news is not the President’s very judicious remarks at Ground Zero, but the public revelation that a late summer 2007 raid just on the Afghan side of the Durand Line was a scaled down and slightly delayed version of an effort to get bin Laden. As the press has it, the attempt was scratched at the last moment because a bunch of lawyers concluded that too many civilians might get killed by the bombs. This is a pattern that has plagued us for a long time at less portentous moments: intelligence identifies a target, but before the target can be bagged by a Predator strike or some other means, the intelligence has to pass through the scrutiny of the lawyers; by the time that happens, even if the lawyers eventually give their blessing to shoot, the target is usually long gone. For this same protocol to have been applied to an effort to kill bad guy number one was a travesty.

I certainly am not in a position to know if that prospective raid would have killed bin Laden more than three years ago. There are still arguments over that, apparently. But if there was even a 25 percent chance that it would have, in my view the original plan should have been implemented. Everyday he remained alive we ran risks better avoided. There was a moral as well as a symbolic need to eliminate him. (That same point may well apply today to certain Libyan tyrant, but that’s a point for another day.)

I have nothing against the law, even international law, though it is of a different character than civil law because of the glaring absence of any prospect of independent third-party enforcement. But I do not think the now far-going juridicalization of war in the West is a good thing because it deranges the balance between fixed procedure and the need for prudential judgment. Had a catastrophic terror attack been ordered by bin Laden and implemented between the late summer of 2007 and his death on Sunday, the blood of the innocent would have been on the hands of those lawyers, and of the high-level politicians who allowed them to usurp their responsibility to the American people. We are fortunate that did not happen.

And finally on this point, in my view the same logic applies to the question of torture, and it is no big surprise that arguments about torture and waterboarding and Gitmo and special renditions have been raised again in the aftermath of Sunday’s raid. Well they should, for we as a political community have not yet finished arguing this important subject out.

Leaving aside the question of definition, which a blog is hardly the place to treat, it is self-evident to me both that, as a matter of law, torture properly defined should be illegal and that it should be quietly permitted in special, extraordinary cases where there is some reasonable chance that torture can short-circuit a terror attack that would kill scores of innocent people. Whether harsh interrogation methods actually did that in the past is clearly a matter of heated disagreement. But the real issue is not a case-specific practical one, but a more abstract moral one.

Obviously there is a slippery slope problem here; whose judgment of what is special and extraordinary should we trust? Nevertheless, in a constitutional system we should enable our elected leaders to exercise prudential judgment at key moments, and not have them bound in inflexible legal straitjackets. Risks attach to all consequential choices, and morality is not all to one side or the other. It is the essence of freedom to enable democratically ratified choice within the rule of law, whereas it is license leading to despotism to encourage choice in the absence of the rule of law. The political framework makes all the difference. As long as the lines of accountability are clear, it is in my view not only permissible but morally obligatory to allow the bending of the law in certain extraordinary circumstances, for no law can foresee all of its applications and challenges.

I am certain that many observers will disagree with me on this point. So be it; that’s why it’s a free country.

Posted in Afghanistan, Libya | 3 Comments
May 5, 2011

The Beating Goes On

Adam Garfinkle

Today’s news brings yet more frustration with how the government, and the White House in particular, is handling the aftermath of the bin Laden killing. But at least the news is mixed. The good news is that the President has made the right basic decision not to release photographs that are gruesome, that would incite violence, that would be seen as trophy mongering, and that would not persuade real crazies that bin Laden is dead anyway, anymore than tapes of bin Laden taking credit for the World Trade Center destruction persuaded very large numbers of Arabs that Al Qaeda had anything to do with 911. If the President had to overrule members of his cabinet, then so much the better: that speaks well of his leadership.

The bad news is that we have still more cross messaging coming from the Administration. In this case it is composed of CIA director Leon Panetta saying that the photographs would be made public at some point, though he did not say when. What Panetta should be trying to do is bury this story, not say things to extend its life.

The decision to say no more about the raid, the other significant news of the day on this story, seems to me to be an obvious result of the embarrassments of yesterday’s news. I can pretty easily imagine the President being quite annoyed by his subordinates’ failure to tell an efficient lie, and simply ordering everyone to just shut up before they cause even more damage and look even more incompetent than they already do.

The responsibility for keeping everyone on the same sheet of music in and near the White House is not directly that of the President. It is the responsibility of his Chief of Staff. In this case, it seems to me obvious that this official has failed in that responsibility. The President reportedly does not like instability in his personal staff, but he needs to make a decision about whether failure in this case, if not others, ought to be overlooked or even rewarded. If he does not cashier his Chief of Staff, that, it seems to me, would be a poor reflection on his leadership.

I have been asked by a magazine different from my own what I think the death of bin Laden really means. My answer will be published as part of the symposium I think in a few weeks. In the meantime, lest anyone be forced to wait beyond the limits of their patience, let me summarize my views here.

First, the assertion that bin Laden’s death ends what used to be called the war on terror is mainly not true. It is not true that his demise will cause all of the salafi terrorists in the world to say, well, that’s the end of that—let’s think of something else to do with our time. The real sources of this form of terrorism, as I have written on several occasions before, reside in the blocked modernization of Middle Eastern societies, and the outwardly pointed chiliastic religious energies that have flowed from it. The deeply social frustrations that give rise to this form of religious violence, deposited into politics in a political age, will not end just because one charismatic leader has been taken out of the picture. Besides, there may be some truth to the argument that the diffusion of terror cells in recent years, the so-called franchising of al-Qaeda, may be a potent formula for more trouble. I have never been convinced by this argument, but I think it would be unwise to prematurely rule it out. Time will tell, I suppose.

So the problem we have with Islamist terrorism is not solved once and for all. But I think it has been exaggerated for much of the past ten years, and I think it is reasonable to conclude that bin Laden’s death is a significant inflection point in our favor. Bin Laden was charismatic, able to raise large sums of money from wealthy Saudis and others, and able to tie together the raucous factions of an under-institutionalized organization made up of fanatics from many countries. It will not be easy for al-Qaeda replace bin Laden. If Ayman al-Zawahiri replaces him, or tries to, it may lead to the disintegration of any central command. Not many Arab terrorists who are not Egyptian want to take orders from someone who is. Of course, all this is speculation; we will have to pay attention, wait, and see what the future brings.

Second, it does seem to me, however, that the death of bin Laden is an important symbolic bookend on what began on September 11, 2001. If we are wise, we will take the opportunity of this psychological closure to re-examine many of the policies set in motion after 911 that, in my view, were either ill advised from the start or which have since run off the tracks.

We should, in my view, examine very closely the reasons why it took the CIA almost a decade to find this man. Something is not right with the way our very abundantly endowed intelligence community spends its money. And it is not right now very long after the end of the Cold War.

We should, as well, rethink the two supposedly major reforms of the post-911 era: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and of the National Intelligence Directorate. In my view, both of these reforms were poorly conceived and poorly implemented. They have created bureaucracies with thick new layers of gratuitous busywork to confuse and retard the functions of these organizations. At the very beginning of the 21st-century, we essentially created late-19th century organizations. These arrangements are not conducive to our security. They have created circumstances in which very ponderous organizations, organizations in which responsibilities, budget authority and staff are misaligned, can never keep up with the activity cycle of likely enemies. And the problems that these organizations may cause far transcend the problem of Islamist terrorism. In the future there will be other kinds of challenges, and I don’t see that either arrangement is conducive to success.

There is more. Over the past decade we have either allowed or abetted the institutionalization of paranoia. The subculture of American media has contributed to this, for its technology conduces to present orientation and an almost complete lack of context in all it reports. But this has been a failure of leadership and of government primarily, not of the media which, for the most part, knows not what it does except to follow its sponsors and their money. Taking off our shoes at airports before boarding a plane, frisking elderly nuns so as to avoid being accused of profiling, putting messages on large signs above our highways saying “report suspicious activity”, and all such pointless nonsense has got to stop. The routinization of fear is very foolish. It actually diminishes the attentiveness of the public over time; it banalizes the problem, turning it into white noise. Nor does it contribute to the deterrence of attack. The institutionalization of paranoia actually invites attack. It tells would-be enemies how easy it is to terrorize Americans, and also how inexpensive since we do most of the psychological set up ourselves. The fact that we have not been attacked much since 911 here in the United States, and that nothing we have experienced has been on anything like the scale of September 11 itself, is more testimony to how much we have exaggerated the problem than it is to anything we have done in terms of homeland security to prevent follow-on attack.

Of course it is true that before 911 we were much too lax in our precautions. It is true that we needed a department of homeland security of some sort, because our three main border security organizations – – the Coast Guard, the Border Patrol, and Customs – – were in three separate executive departments. This made absolutely no sense. We had facilities on the border, in Arizona for example, that housed both Customs and Border Patrol personnel, and they did not have interoperable communications equipment. Clearly, something needed to be done. But what we did was not it. (This is a long story, and it has been told elsewhere; so no need to repeat it here.) All I am trying to say is that while we do need to be vigilant, and we do need to redesign government to align with changes in the security environment, we need to do these things intelligently, and we need to adjust when we see that initial efforts have been suboptimal. Bin Laden’s death provides an opportunity, and not just a pretext, to get busy.

This does not exhaust all the policy fixes we should be making. Just to take one other example, few Americans realize it but there are jihadi websites whose home bases are in the United States. Our government knows they exist, and it allows them to exist. You no doubt want to know why. One reason is that there are some people in the government, mainly in the Department of Justice, who think that by monitoring these sites, and by sifting through data of those who come and go to them, we can gain important intelligence information. Those of this view believe that there is more value in this monitoring process for national security then there is in shutting these sites down. I respectfully disagree. Our purpose should be to put an end to these activities, not to play games with them. I think I have the law on my side in this case as well, because those who host websites must sign an agreement pledging, essentially, that they will not be responsible for allowing the incitement of violence. But that of course is what these websites do.

Just as we should be turning down the volume on jihadi websites in our own country, and trying to cooperate with others to eliminate them abroad, we should finally, after nearly a decade of flailing around, get serious about our own counter-messaging strategy. As an article that will appear in the next issue of The American Interest argues, we have the perfect model: How al-Qaeda soiled its own laundry in Iraq. A very high-level terrorist even went to the trouble, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, to tell us how to harm his colleagues and their organizations in this regard. He knows what he’s talking about. We need to take his advice.

Alas, the problem here is not only or even primarily an intellectual one. Prestigious reports identified the essential problems many years ago; one by Ambassador Ed Djerejian stands out in my memory as being particularly important and well-crafted. The problem is really an organizational one focused on the absence of effective leadership. As with many aspects of American policy in recent years, not least the non-kinetic aspects of the effort in Afghanistan, we have not enjoyed unity of effort, let alone unity of command, in this area. There have been multiple organizations in multiple departments trying to do more or less the same thing and, not surprisingly to anyone who has ever worked in government, they have been tripping over each other and arguing with each other and trying to seize budget share from each other now for years on end. To the best of my knowledge, no one has even tried to assemble a functional budget for US counter-messaging strategy. We don’t know what we’re spending, how we’re spending it, and what we’re getting for our money. This is a failure of leadership, and it is a failure that falls on both Republican and Democratic administrations. We will not fix this problem until someone, probably the President himself, realizes that it is important and focuses attention on it.

Now, with the death of bin Laden, is a logical time to expect and to push for a renewed focus, one that can take stock of the situation after an important achievement, and that can conceive a strategy to capitalize on our success and drive al-Qaeda altogether out of business. This is a time to be pressing our advantage, but instead, what are we doing? We are arguing about photographs of a dead man. There are Republicans in the Senate who are even trying to take partisan advantage of the White House’s missteps. How pathetic.

I wonder if I’ll be brave enough to read tomorrow morning’s newspaper.

Posted in Afghanistan | 1 Comment
May 4, 2011

It’s a Sin to Waste a Lie

Adam Garfinkle

I have to admit that the killing of Osama bin Laden on Sunday put me in a halfway good mood. It seemed to me not only a victory against resolute and still dangerous enemies, but also an event that could help galvanize the national spirit at a time when so many Americans think that our country is running off the tracks. I even hoped that when I laid eyes on this morning’s newspaper, it would carry news about how our intelligence haul, which supposedly consisted of boxes of documents and many hard drives, had led us quickly to other high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan and elsewhere.

To my sorrow, what I found in the paper was indeed news of another take-down, but a take-down that the White House has administered to itself. I had to read the first four columns of the lead New York Times article three times before I could believe what I was seeing. On the first reading I was incredulous. On the second reading I was amazed. On the third reading, by the time I got to the end of the fourth paragraph, I was flat-out angry.

As everyone by now knows, the White House has changed its story about bin Laden’s final moments. The first debrief had John O. Brennan, the President’s chief counterterrorism expert, telling everyone that there was a struggle and that bin Laden was shot as it played out. Now it turns out that bin Laden was not armed, that one of his wives rushed a Seal and was shot in the leg, after which bin Laden was killed. Much worse, Jay Carney, the White House press spokesman, made a complete hash of explaining this to the press. Let me quote that astonishing fourth paragraph in full: “Mr. Carney said that bin Laden’s lack of a weapon did not mean he was ready to surrender, and he and other officials reiterated that this was a violent scene, but there was heavy fire from others in the house, and that the commandos did not know whether the occupants were wearing suicide belts or other explosives.”

Are we supposed to believe that bin Laden and his family regularly walked around wearing suicide belts and explosives? Assuming that we surprised the targets as planned, why would anyone say such an imbecilic thing, a thing that has the smell, sound and general tone of someone making shit up? White House press spokesman come and go, and some of the things that some of them have said over the years have been truly breathtaking. But nothing, at least in my memory, has been as moronic as this. So this is clearly a White House press spokesman who needs to go.

But that is the least of the mess these people have made. They have been caught in a lie. They have been unable to get their story straight. They look like a bunch of fraternity jocks after a night of carousing trying to explain themselves to the adults. This is disheartening for three reasons.

First, we are trying to get the Pakistani government to tell us the truth about what they knew and when they knew it. How can we demand that another government tell us the truth when our own government can’t even tell the American people the truth?

Second, getting caught in this lie destroys the élan of the moment. The White House has taken an opportunity and turned into a disaster insofar as public morale is concerned.

Third, most galling of all, there was no reason to lie. It made very good sense as a policy decision not to take bin Laden into custody alive. Noting the tremendous amount of trouble we have had with the trial of the 9/11 ringleader, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, it would have been an act of madness to invite a worldwide circus with a trial of Osama bin Laden, whether in a military tribunal or in some other form. A trial would have focused vastly too much attention on bin Laden and his causes, and it would have risked raising all sorts of gratuitous opportunities for vengeful violence. I think the American people would have understood this, whether it was explicitly explained or left more subtly expressed. One is reminded, yet again, of Sam Rayburn’s famous advice, that you should always tell the truth because that way you don’t have to remember what you said.

Mr. Rayburn was being folksy, to be sure. There are times when national leaders must keep secrets and even when they must lie on behalf of a higher purpose. But it is a sin not only to tell a lie, as that wonderful song lyric has it, but also to waste a lie. Here the model is not Mr. Rayburn but rather President Dwight D. Eisenhower. When Gary Francis Powers’s U-2 spy plane were shot down over the Soviet Union, Eisenhower decided that a lie would be pointless and so he told the truth. That was the wise thing to do then under the circumstances, and it would have been the wise thing for the White House to have done now.

Perhaps the President, being a lawyer, was particularly sensitive about being implicated in what by any definition is an extra-judicial killing. But the drone attacks he has ordered in Pakistan against specific targets also amount to extra-judicial killings, and I, for one, am all for them when they make good tactical sense and are not counterproductive. (I do have some qualms when the target is an American citizen, as is the case with one Yemeni named Awlaki, but that is a discussion for another time.) The U.S. government has already been attacked by the press in Britain, Germany and elsewhere for engaging in a behavior not proper for any constitutional state, so the concern is broadly political as well as narrowly legal, and so is perhaps not entirely baseless. But if it was really worthy of a lie, in the White House’s judgment, why such a pathetically bad one?

Perhaps it was inevitable that what has been a sloppy process all along should end sloppily, at least wherever civilians have touched the wheels of decision. It took civilians nearly a decade to acquire this particular target, and it then took an inexplicable eight months from acquiring it to pulling the trigger on Sunday’s mission. Once the military got involved, everything went very well indeed, save for one malfunctioning helicopter. And then once matters were turned back over to civilians, within just hours, they managed to screw the pooch anew. If this were not the United States of America, there would be murmurs beginning about how lovely a military coup might be around now. Thank God this is the United States of America.

Posted in Pakistan | 4 Comments
May 2, 2011

Osama Goes Down

Adam Garfinkle

Well it’s (expletive deleted) about time! That is both my analytical and emotional bottom line on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden yesterday, on May 1, 2011. It is embarrassing, even humiliating, that it took the US government, notably the CIA, nearly a decade to chase down and take out of play this horrible man. We spend well in excess of $45 billion a year on intelligence, and it’s hard not to conclude that much of this money is not well spent, particularly that portion that does not go to directly support our warfighters.

One could even make the case that most of the US national security tragedies of the past decade and beyond have been in the main the fault of the CIA. The CIA played a part, if not perhaps the major part, in allowing the September 11 attacks to succeed in the first place, and that it was the CIA, notwithstanding its brilliant successes at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, that allowed bin Laden, Zawarhiri and most of the rest of Al Qaeda’s top leadership to escape at the battle of Tora Bora.

Let us not forget, as well, that CIA’s mishandling of the weapons-of-mass-destruction portfolio in Iraq is largely to blame for that war. Had there not been a national security case based on the potential leakage of Iraqi nuclear weapons or fissile materials, there probably would not have been sufficient support for a war even amid the other, lesser arguments that some Administration officials made for one. Rarely noted, too, the CIA also either did not have or failed to communicate a sophisticated analysis of what a post-Ba’athi situation would look like in Iraq.  This was a failure that did nothing to help Phase IV planning, such as it was. The CIA seems also to have completely ignored the question of what a Shi’a government in Baghdad would mean in the longer term for regional politics, and this was not a second-order, but rather a first-order question that somebody should have asked.

The blame for all this does not lie on the CIA alone, of course.  The problem with American intelligence is complex and the blame for it is widely shared. But it is a huge problem. David Petraeus will really have his hands full if he understands the full measure of the challenge that he apparently has agreed to undertake.

*  *

One of the most interesting questions about the context of yesterday’s raid is the role that Pakistan has played in all of this. There are essentially three ways to interpret the Pakistani role. One way is to believe that neither the government, the army, nor the ISI knew where bin Laden was. The second way is to believe that at least the ISI knew where he was but, for reasons of its own, decided not to tell anybody. Third is to believe the second, but add that for some reason, not too hard to guess, the ISI, with the army leadership most likely, decided that this was a good time to trade bin Laden to the United States in return for something they want in the context of what is today a very roiled relationship. Maybe what they want is a free hand in Afghanistan after we leave, and maybe they think that this will contribute to that in some way. I am not privy to the discussions on this point lately, so I simply do not have the raw data to connect the dots.

Whatever turns out to be true of Pakistani foreknowledge of bin Laden’s whereabouts, it is quite possible that this event will have a major effect on US relations with Pakistan. If it turns out that they have been diddling us all along—hardly a far-fetched possibility—then one consequence may be to ignore Pakistani concerns and go directly after Mullah Omar and the rest of the Quetta shura. One large “daisy cutter”, properly placed, might just do the trick.

If it turns out that Pakistan has been more part of the problem in tracking down bin Laden than part of the solution—if, in other words, this has been part of Pakistan’s double game all along—then it reflects backward on a comment I made just days after 9/11. I was very struck by President Bush’s call for “moral clarity” just after the attacks. And my reply to this at the time was that moral clarity is all very nice, but in this case it would be very hard to achieve. In President Bush’s “us versus them” world, the world in which one was either for us or against us—reminding us old enough of John Foster Dulles’ similar locution—he apparently had not reckoned with the fact that the sources of the 9/11 attack came most proximately from three countries that we counted as allies: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. It was Saudi Arabia that brewed the radical stew in its Wahhabi schools, Egypt whose repression helped produce and then push out Ayman Zawahiri and his cohorts into bin Laden’s arms, and Pakistan that had helped create the Taliban regime in its effort to keep its hand firmly on the collar of Afghan politics. Moral clarity is hard to achieve when three of your closest regional allies are in fact responsible for the problem you are trying to solve in the first place.

What do things look like now, 10 years out? We’ll see about Pakistan. As for Egypt, it is now in flux, true, but its army is still capable of brutal repression against Islamist opposition should the need for brutality arise, and it could have the same exportive effect in the future that it has had in the past. As for Saudi Arabia, if you look at Saudi textbooks a dozen years ago and look at them today, you will see that very little if anything is changed. The Saudis are still stirring the stew. So while bin Laden is dead, the contributions of these three so-called allies remain much too similar to what they were before 9/11. We are more vigilant today than we were then, but it would be too much to say that the sources of those attacks have gone away.

President Obama was nice enough to say last night that Pakistani intelligence was useful in the unfolding of this event, but it was also clear that we did not inform the Pakistani government or any other government of exactly what we were about to do and that Pakistani forces did not contribute in any way to the actual operation. One does this—or in this case one does not do this—for two possible reasons. One reason is that one does not want to implicate Pakistan in the operation in order to lessen its potential cost of participation at the hands of its domestic foes; this is a reason one chooses if one wishes to act like a faithful ally. A second reason is that we did not want the plan to leak and thus fail. (It would not have been the first time.)  This is a reason one chooses out of sheer self-interested prudence.   I’d be willing to bet that reason number two took pride of place in the run-up to yesterday’s raid.

*   *

Speaking of leaks and intelligence matters generally, one of the things our government should be and no doubt is doing right now is to assess what, if any, additional intelligence can be gathered from the house where bin Laden was living and from those left alive from the raid. It would be nice, certainly, if there were an intelligence windfall from all this.

If there is, it should look both backward and forward. It should look backward to assemble a timeline of where bin Laden has been since escaping at the battle of Tora Bora. It’s important for us to know why we have had such trouble finding him. It will help us re-examine our sources and methods against the future. More important, perhaps, if we can find out where other senior al-Qaeda figures are hiding out, we will need to act very quickly on whatever intelligence we have before they move. So we should be watching the news cycle for the next 72 hours or so to see if any immediate benefit from the intelligence haul is to be had.

Looking further into the future, there is a question about how important bin Laden’s death will be for what used to be called the war on terror. Notwithstanding the problem we still have with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, it could be very important. Symbols matter, and they matter in a special way in the Middle East, where politics are at the same time highly “us-versus-them” polarized and personalized, and where oaths of loyalty are taken seriously. It is also a place where conspiracy theories are very popular, and one of those theories has had it in recent years that if the omnipotent United States wanted bin Laden dead, he would be dead; so that if he isn’t dead, the Americans must be up to something dark and sneaky. This is in almost every respect unhelpful thinking, and so the fewer pretexts there are for it the better.

Some observers have claimed that the Bush Administration, in its second term, de-emphasized the search for bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda leaders. I don’t know if this is true, but if it is it was a mistake. If it is true, and if the Obama Administration reversed that judgment upon assuming office, then good for it, and it deserves to take political credit for yesterday’s success.

Finally for now, it seems fairly obvious that closing the book on bin Laden will make it easier for the White House to withdraw maximum numbers of US forces from Afghanistan before the next presidential election. In my view, this policy has been foreordained by American politics and the President’s personal interest in it. But this success will certainly help politically in every way. President Obama did say, of course, that taking bin Laden out does not mean we are finished with the task of protecting the country from Islamist terrorists. It is good he said that. But that does not change the raid’s proximate political impact on the war in Afghanistan: It makes withdrawal easier.

Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan | 3 Comments
April 28, 2011

Libya and Syria

Adam Garfinkle

Tuesday’s newspapers made for some interesting reading on the subject of the Middle East. First, I take note of a New York Times op-ed called “Finish the Job” by James M. Dubik, who is described as a retired Army Lieut. Gen. who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops from the 2007 to 2008. General Dubik argues that we are in quite a mess in Libya, that we have three policy choices, none of them attractive. I agree with his basic assessment, but then of course I sort of have to since back on March 22, in my piece called “Down the Rabbit Hole“, I predicted that air power alone would not be able to depose the Libyan regime and that we would in fact be faced—hold it, let me rephrase that—the Obama Administration would be faced, with a nasty dilemma: either go in to finish the job lest the wounded loon become quite dangerous, or let the situation fester in the hell of half measures.

Actually, General Dubik posits three choices: do nothing and fail, do only enough to prevent failure, or go in and finish the job. I don’t see these as really three options, because doing only enough to prevent failure is merely a stopgap, albeit such “strategy” can go on for a long time, as the Johnson Administration’s approach to Vietnam proves. Eventually, barring genuine dumb luck, good or bad, the Administration still has to decide one way or the other. Still, that minor criticism aside, I think Gen. Dubik sees the situation very clearly. I want to make my own position very clear: I would rather have stayed away from this Libyan intervention altogether,  but having started a war we cannot afford to lose it, and I define any outcome that leaves Muamar Qaddafi in power a loss.  To listen to Administration spokesman, time is on our side. To listen to most other analysts, it is not.  As with most things, time will tell whether the Administration is indulging in Micawberism—waiting futilely for something to turn up—or if its sense of patience will in the end be vindicated.

Yesterday’s Washington Post, on its front page above the fold, grabbed my attention in a very different way. In a news article signed by Scott Wilson, under the headline “Syria escalates gleeful crackdown”, there appears this sentence, functioning as the article’s entire third paragraph: “The government’s show of force, the largest in weeks of street demonstrations, is sharpening the choice facing President Obama, who has attempted to balance calls for democratic reform in the Arab world with concerns of allies that have counted on President Bashar al-Assad to preserve stability in the volatile Middle East.”

When Wilson speaks of “allies that have counted on President Bashar al-Assad to preserve stability in the volatile Middle East”, it naturally raises the question of which allies he’s talking about. One construction is that he means Arab countries that are friendly with the United States, with the possible addition of Israel and perhaps Turkey. We finally figure out what Wilson means when the article meanders over to page A8. This is what he says: “Many US allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, hope that Assad finds a way to remain in power.”

We will come to Israel and Turkey in a moment, but first we will need to find oxygen. Because the idea that Saudi Arabia favors the maintenance of the Assad regime in Syria is truly breathtaking.  I would love to know how Wilson came to this conclusion. The fact of the matter is that there are no Arab regimes, and certainly no Sunni Arab regimes, with any affection whatsoever for Assad and his thugs in Damascus. As far as the Arabs go, the Syrian regime is isolated. It has no friends, not even among its fellow military government in Algeria. By allying itself with Iran and murdering scores of Sunni politicians in Lebanon, the Syrian regime has made enemies to one degree or another out of all of them, not least Saudi Arabia, but also including every single Gulf regime except, perhaps, those high-wire diplomatic gamblers in Qatar, the kind of Arab Bedouin magicians who take our money for basing rights and use it to fund the pandamonically anti-American TV station Al-Jazeera.

There is a remote possibility, I suppose, that the Jordanian regime would fear a refugee crisis on its border should things get a lot worse in Syria, particularly so since the town of Dera’a, near the border, has been an epicenter of revolt. But the idea that the Hashemite monarchy would prefer an Alawi-ruled Syria in perpetuity to a Sunni-dominated one just because of that is very difficult to credit.

Now what about Israel? Walter Russell Mead lays out a basic strategic analysis of the Syrian dilemma very nicely in his American Interest blog post of April 23, “War in Syria Next?” One of the comments he makes is that Israel has a stake in the Assad regime. As he put it, the Israelis don’t love the Syrian regime, but it has provided a certain predictability. Actually, Walter isn’t wrong, but he understates and perhaps slightly oversimplifies the situation.

Israelis have for many years disagreed about the role that Syria has played in the region and how it has abutted on Israeli interests. At the risk of simplifying somewhat myself, the Israeli military, and those Israelis who see the world more or less like the military does, have viewed the Alawi regime as the least bad of alternatives in Syria. Why is this? Basically, three reasons.

First, the Alawis are very repressive. They repress Sunnis as their speciality (see Hama, 1982). They repress the Muslim Brotherhood. They repress Salafi fanatics who want to destroy Israel even more than some non-Sunni Syrians say they do.  If the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend, then the Syrian regime is a friend to Israel of a certain Middle Eastern kind.

Second, the Syrians are afraid of Israel militarily, and so they renew the United Nations mandate concerning the Golan Heights regularly without complaint or comment. This has made the Golan Heights one of the safest places in the entire region, unless you happen to be a bulgar-eating cow who steps inadvertently on an old Syrian landmine, thus turning itself into many kilos of kibbie. This creates military stability on one of Israel’s borders—not a small matter as such matters go.

Third, the Syrian regime, by insisting on a command economy for political reasons, keeps Syria an economic basketcase. The country is so poor and so lacks economic dynamism that the prospect of it replacing its rusting Soviet order of battle for cash on the barrelhead is about nil. This, of course, is related to the first comment: The Syrian regime is afraid of Israel because it cannot keep up with Israel militarily. That fact may be a main reason that led the Syrian regime to collude with North Korea in trying to create a nuclear weapons capability. Such a capability could leapfrog its conventional inferiority. Of course, that didn’t work out so well for the Syrians either.

Together, these last two circumstances also explain why Israel need not feel particularly pressured to compromise territorially on the matter of the Golan Heights. Experts on this part of the world know that the Alawis, whose home turf is in Latakia province, feel no special attachment to the Golan Heights which, in Syrian terms, amounts to Jebel Druze, or the mountain of the Druze. These two minoritarian groups within Syria have never particularly liked one another or gotten along. The idea that the Alawis would risk their tenure in Damascus for an equity that belongs to the Druze doesn’t make a lot of sense. This doesn’t stop some Americans and others from imagining that the Assad regime, that of the father as well as that of the son, are sincere believers in Syrian nationalism and pan-Arab nationalism, and that they want the Golan Heights back desperately for nationalist reasons. To the extent that one knows little about Syrian history and political culture, this argument makes sense. But of course it’s wrong.

For Israelis who for one reason or another don’t want to return the Golan Heights to Syria, or to anybody else, the Alawi regime thus functions as a kind of guarantee that negotiations will never get that serious. That negotiations may have seemed to get very serious in the fairly recent past is an illusion. The negotiating process itself was valuable to the Syrian regime, but an actual deal that required implementation would not have been. A deal would have deprived the regime of its excuse to funnel money and other resources into the military, which, in addition to the Ba’ath Party, is under the control of the Alawis. It would have ended the pretext that has justified Syria’s emergency laws all these years. It would have created demands for a more normal politics, a normality that sooner or later would undermine Alawi control of the country and the economy.

Here is some evidence that supports this interpretation. Every time a deal seemed to be within reach, the Syrians would predictably haul out a demand that the new border ratified by the peace treaty to be specify the one that existed on the day before June 6, 1967. But the border before June 6, 1967 was not the international border; it was instead the result of demilitarized zones established in the armistice arrangements of 1949 and by subsequent tactical creep in the years after 1949. The de facto border of June 5, 1967 had the Syrians dipping their toes in the Sea of Galilee, while the international border, as drawn between the British and the French mandatory authorities after World War I, did and does not.

It is only a matter of couple of meters really, but it is a critical couple of meters, because it determines whether Syria is entitled to riparian rights to the Sea of Galilee, and hence to the outflow of the sea into the lower Jordan River. There was and there remains no way that any Israeli government, no matter what its politics or its coalition circumstances, would ever agree to allow Syria riparian rights on the Sea of Galilee. Since the Syrians know this, making this demand is a no-fail showstopper.

The Syrians must have been privately terrified at one point, the last time this sort of thing got going, when some clever Israelis, assisted by some clever Americans, reasoned that because the Sea of Galilee had receded in size over the years since 1967, it might be possible to let the Syrians come back to where they were literally on June 5, 1967 without being able to dip their toes into the sea. The idea was to give in to the Syrian demand, thus allowing the sealing of a deal, but without jeopardizing fundamental Israeli security over access to water. According to some accounts, that is when the Syrians pulled the plug and ended the negotiations, since they had run out of excuses not to say “yes.”

This point of view, in which Israelis see some strategic benefit from the Alawi regime in Syria, also explains why at least some Israelis did not disparage particularly Syrian domination of Lebanon between the onset of the Civil War in 1975 and the Cedar Revolution. The reasoning went something as follows: The Syrians, out of their own interests, would enforce limits on how crazy Lebanon might get. Left to their own devices, the Lebanese might collapse themselves again into civil war, one in which Iran might now prove decisive in support of Hezbollah and the Shi’a in general. Better the Syrians to control or balance matters, thought many Israelis, then a Lebanon left completely free to destroy itself, and allow the creation of a new security nightmare in the south of the country even worse for Israel than was the case before the 1982 Israeli invasion.

Moreover, according to the same logic, Syria would never let Lebanese territory pose a genuine military threat to Israel, because if it did, Israel would go to war to upend that threat, and that by definition would have to include Syria. That meant, in essence, that Syrian influence in Lebanon inherently moderated Syrian policy as well as any prospective threat from Lebanon. For many Israelis, that was just fine. Besides, reasoned many, an Israeli peace treaty with Lebanon wasn’t worth very much, even if one could be acquired. Lebanon by itself, as a state, poses no existential threat to Israel, so beyond the symbol of a peace agreement there would be no strategic substance to be gained from it.

This Israeli way of thinking with regard to Syria has not been immune from challenge. It has been challenged by other Israelis, of which more below, but it has also been challenged by reality. The truth of the matter is that Syrian influence in Lebanon did not decisively constrain Hezbollah’s ability to harm Israel. It probably limited it, true, which may be inferred from the fact that since the Syrian military was forced to leave Lebanon in April 2005, Iran’s arming of Hezbollah has accelerated both in quantity and quality. It is precisely that post-Syrian growth that helped lead to the summer 2006 mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah. But it would be a stretch to say that Syrian influence kept the Hezbollah menace controlled within a box. The Syrians wagered, in essence, that they could use Hezbollah’s growing threat to Israel as a kind of stick or asset, propitiate their Iranian ally by doing so, and at the same time not let that threat grow so large as to catalyze an Israeli preemption.

This was always risky business, and the net result today represents a real irony as far as the Syrians are concerned. Whatever role Damascus may have played as a modulator in Lebanese affairs, it now stands vulnerable to the outflow of Iranian behavior such that its alliance with Iran has actually increased the danger to itself. Iran has armed Hezbollah with so many rockets and missiles that it has become a very serious threat to Israel’s civilian population. It is by no means far-fetched that at some point in the near future the Israeli government and military will determine this to be unacceptable. If Israel takes military action to eliminate the threat posed by Hezbollah, it will probably have no choice but to preemptively attack Syrian targets so that Israeli aircraft will not be vulnerable to Syrian air defenses.  The Syrians are likely to get smashed but good. Ironically, too, however, Israelis who value the stability that the Alawi regime has provided are not about to do such a thing anytime soon, for fear that it would be the last straw on top of the regime’s funeral pyre.

Now, if you happen to be an Israeli who thinks that a peace deal with Syria is the key to all manner of good things, then the present Syrian regime is and has long been an obstacle to all those good things. And there are many such Israelis. They are not particularly worried that a post-Alawi Sunni regime would be friendly toward, prone to or a victim of Salafi fanaticism. They believe that if the Syrians were not there to mess things up, Israel and Lebanon could sign a peace agreement that would in truth be worth something. And they believe further that an Israeli-Syrian peace deal would make a peace deal with the Palestinians much easier to acquire, implement and enforce. So this is the rationale for those Israelis who think that a peace deal between Israel and Syria is the key to an end-of-conflict series of negotiations. Since the present Alawi regime will not make such a deal, most members of the school by now believe, it stands to reason that its fall is in Israel’s ultimate long-term interests.

I hope no one is surprised to learn that Israelis have taken amongst themselves different views of this issue over the years. Israelis disagree about a great many things. And this is why I said above that Walter’s assessment here is not so much wrong, but perhaps a little on the lite side.

Now Turkey. As Walter points out, Turkey is another country that has invested a fair bit with the Syrian regime in recent years. But I don’t think that the current Turkish government would shed any tears for the Alawis were they to fall to a Sunni-dominated government. After all, the AKP is itself very seriously Sunni, and is likely to see a Damascus restored to the Sunnis as a better potential ally in the long run then the Alawis could ever be.

If there are in Turkey centers of power that look kindly upon Assad and the Ba’ath for the sake of stability, these consist of the army and secularists still in thrall to the Ataturkist legacy elsewhere in the country.

From the U.S. point of view, it is almost too easy to make a list of good things that would, or at least could, happen if the Syrian regime should fall, assuming, of course, that what replaces it isn’t even worse for Western interests (not an assumption that can be made glibly). First, Iran loses a key ally. Its ability to pollute Lebanese politics decreases. It’s ability to arm Hezbollah decreases. Its ability to foil Saudi desiderata goes away. Second, the ability or inclination, or both, of Damascus to support terrorism far and wide presumably decreases as well, if not ends altogether. That includes its ability to continue making trouble inside Iraq.

A reduction in the mischief-making potential of Syria is of course a good thing. It might make Palestinians a bit more pliant, since reining in Hezbollah would also hurt Hamas. This might help the so-called peace process along, but it needs so very much help that this alone is unlikely to be decisive.

The fall of the Assad regime might also give the Iranian regime pause. Walter suggests that it might make the mullahs more flexible in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, but I doubt that. I think the Iranians see the nuclear program as essentially nonnegotiable because it represents the ultimate ace in the hole against Western efforts toward regime change. Walter also suggests, more plausibly in my view, that it might curtail Iranian risk-taking, which might in turn reduce the prospect of a major fight between Iran and the United States. But then again, many factors play in such considerations, some that may be reasonably said to be controllable and some we should  very reasonably assume not to be.

It is true, obviously, that the United States has divided interests in what is going on in the Arab world today in general. On the one hand, we support the right of free speech, assembly and peaceable protest against authoritarian regimes, and we wish true democrats (few as they may be) and those fighting for their rights well in such a contest. Indeed, we support them even in the knowledge that their success might well lead to a long period of general political instability. Rapid political change and rapid economic growth are not stabilizing; quite the contrary, as any reading of history will tell you. The success of the anti-authoritarian pulse in the Middle East is more likely to create space for al-Qaeda to plot and take shelter than its failure, and this is true despite the fact that the success of anti-authoritarian protest movements would undermine the appeal of al-Qaeda’s pitch, which is that only its brand of resistance can change the unacceptable status quo.

But pace Scott Wilson, Syria does not manifest this dilemma. Of all the cases in the Middle East, the Syrian case is the one in which there is the closest parallel between American strategic interests and American principles. Aside from Israel’s special interpretation of the present Syrian regime, it is clear that, from the American point of view, the upside overwhelms the risks when it comes to Bashar al-Assad. Americans should want him and his murderous Ba’ath regime gone. The risks that a post-Alawi Syria could be worse then the present regime are not zero, but they should not paralyze us. This is a case where American interests and principles are not in conflict, but it is a case in which U.S. interests and Israeli interests, at least as interpreted by many Israelis, may be in conflict.

As to more abstract issues, Walter put his finger on the obvious discomfort that the situation in Syria creates for the Obama Administration, but it’s not the choice, as Wilson would have us believe, between interests and principles. Rather it’s a matter of principles inconsistently applied.

We still don’t know if there would have been a massacre in Benghazi. What we do know is that since March 17, when the cruise missiles started flying toward Tripoli, the death of innocent civilians in Libya, and perhaps not-so-innocent ones in rebel formations, has not ceased. The ordeal in Misurata stands as bleak testimony to that reality. Yet as the Libyan regime has increased the indiscriminate shelling of that town and others, and killed scores of civilians, the Obama Administration has reduced U.S. participation in the air campaign. As Walter points out, the potential for mass murder by the regime of its own people is greater by far in Syria than in Libya. Yet despite some tough words, there is no indication whatsoever that the United States is contemplating military intervention in Syria on behalf of the same principles, embodied in the UN resolution, that we say is the basis of the NATO intervention in Libya. Looked at from the humanitarian perspective, the issues in Libya and Syria are the same, but the gravity of the situation is much worse in Syria. Yet the U.S. government intervenes in the lighter case, however indecisively, but shows no sign of intervening in the latter, heavier case.

As Walter also suggests, but which no one can prove, it is possible that the willingness of the Syrian people go into the street has been buoyed by the sight of NATO aircraft at work in Libya. If that is true, then what United States has done in Libya has made it complicit in developments in Syria. This reminds some of us of the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, when the actions and words of the United States led the Kurds and the Shia to rise up against Saddam Hussein only to be left hung completely out to dry. It also reminds some of us of the American role in stimulating Hungarians to take to the streets against their Soviet occupiers in October 1956, when it was always clear—on this side of the Atlantic anyway—that the United States was not about to start World War III over Budapest. Have we gone and done the same thing again? Have we proved once again that our idealistic posturing, which makes those who do it feel so noble within, is not free of a price, at least not for others?

Walter has a couple of choice questions on this very point for Samantha Power, as if she had made the critical decisions over Libya and not the President. This is a satisfying way of writing about the problem, even if it’s not completely fair. But again, Walter has alluded to the key issue even if he did not name it as such: moral hazard. If the United States acts such a way that it elicits violent anti-regime behavior hither and yon, but does not then come to the aid of those thus elicited, it is morally responsible, at least in part, for the consequences.

This is not just a theory. U.S. behavior and language combined to persuade the KLA in Kosovo that if it started a terror campaign against the Serbs, the Serbs would retaliate in an oafish and disproportional manner such as to draw the United States in on the side of the Kosovars. And that is pretty much what happened, for better or for worse—and I think probably for some of both. But the inarguable fact is that a lot of people got killed as a result of that war, and the United States cannot absolve itself from being at least partly to blame. Whether the outcome justifies the price, a price that, as usual, was paid mainly by others, is a matter on which honest people disagree. Obviously, not acting can carry a price, too.  No one is trying to imply that these things are easy or simple.

What this means at the least, however, is that when American Presidents and other leaders utter idealistic statements that make for good applause lines, and that make them feel good inside, and persuade themselves and others that they are being good citizens of the world in affirming the so-called responsibility to protect, it ramifies in practical ways that can lead to very bloody consequences. All high-profile political speech must contend with the problem of multiple audiences. It is never easy to do this, but people who take moral issues seriously should be the first, not the last, to make an extra effort.

We could do worse than to end with a quote from George Orwell. Orwell once said, reportedly at least, that all saints should be presumed guilty until proven innocent. I cannot improve on that.

Posted in Libya, Syria | 1 Comment
March 29, 2011

Egypt, for Real

Samuel Tadros

A couple of days ago, I was asked a few questions about what chances liberal forces had in Egypt after the referendum. My response was in the negative. The young activists so often described in the Western media as liberal, democratic or secular stand no chance in the next parliamentary elections scheduled for next September.

This judgment is not only based on the existence, or non-existence, of either those forces or their strength, but also on the nature of the elections system in Egypt and the way the districts are drawn. The overrepresentation of the countryside and the two-candidate-district design means that the “liberal” forces only stand a chance in 21 districts out of 222. Even if they win all of those seats, they will hold less than 10 percent of the seats in parliament. Of course, some traditional opposition politicians will win elsewhere, but they will totally rely on their family connections in those districts and will run as traditional patriarchal candidates.

The next question I was asked was, naturally, “So what can they do?” Initially, my response was again in the negative. There are historical and institutional reasons that liberalism has failed in Egypt in the past and will continue to fail in the future. For the past couple of days, however, I have continued to think about that question. Do we really stand no chance, and how can we overcome those overwhelming odds?

Let us begin with the historical crisis.

The Crisis of Egyptian liberalism is a long and sad story. It is the story of intellectuals who emerged—not from an independent middle class like that of the European bourgeoisie—but from the state bureaucracy. Their most-cherished dream was a self-contradictory program of a state-sponsored modernization forced upon the rest of the population. It is a story of a complex love-hate relationship with the West as a representative of modernity; this group neither fully embraced nor ever rejected it, but it always regarded it with a sense of betrayal. It is also a story of a failure to understand modernity—a failure to distinguish between it and the Enlightenment—thus forever dooming them with an inability to deal with religion. The current crisis in Egyptian liberalism is not a new one; it is rather the latest manifestation of a crisis that Nadav Safran dealt with fifty years ago in his book Egypt in Search of Political Community.

Egyptian liberalism’s goal was always a state-sponsored project of modernization. With this goal in mind, Egyptian liberals were always writing and talking to the one actor that could enforce their project: the state, or more precisely, the ruler. If the ruler held all the chips and if he alone could enforce the dream, why bother talking to anyone else? Why bother addressing the Egyptian population? Thus the natural outcome was a tendency to ignore the Egyptian population, and from this tendency arose an elite that was detached from the rest of the population, that was inclined to ignore, ridicule and show them disrespect. When this elite was forced to address the rest of the population, nationalism was the chosen mechanism.

Egypt’s intellectuals could never overcome their love-hate relationship with the West. Since the day that Napoleon landed in Alexandria and introduced modernity to Egypt, the inescapable question was the one voiced by Bernard Lewis: “What went wrong?” The initial answer to his question was an effort to copy the advanced technology of the West. The intellectuals viewed science and technology as a mere collection of findings, showing no acknowledgment of the underlying philosophical spirit. When that project failed, the answer changed to one of unity. Gamal El Din El Afghani struck the initial note with his insistence that the West was a unified entity and that the East had to achieve the same unity if it hoped to compete. Nationalism in the Middle East might have been, as Elie Kedourie had argued, an idea imported from the West, but it was also a way to confront the West. In the process, and following the spirit of the age in the 1930s, it was inevitable that nationalism would lose whatever liberal tone it initially carried and adopt an anti-liberal tone in imitation of the various totalitarian ideologies of the day—initially fascism, then Arab Nationalism, and, lastly and inevitably, Islamism.

The Egyptian liberal project was modeled on France. Student missions were sent to France and ideas were imported back to Egypt bearing “Made in France” labeling. France, then a world power standing against Egypt’s occupier, was the greatest source of inspiration. It should thus come as no surprise that the French understanding of the world shaped that of the Egyptian intellectuals. The French Enlightenment became the benchmark and, as a result, its form of secularism became the model. While the Egyptian intellectuals could never follow Atatürk’s footsteps, their ideas were not that different from his. They could never accept or understand religion or the role it plays in the public sphere. In a nutshell, they read plenty of Voltaire and Rousseau—but nary a line from Burke.

This is the historical crisis, and this is also the current challenge. Egyptian liberalism has never been able to find a coherent voice that addresses the rest of the population. It has further suffered from the various totalitarian ideas that crept into its discourse. It is thus no surprise when you find self-described liberals adopting anti-Semitism or anti-Western slogans in their rhetoric and suggested policies.

While it is impossible to change this historical problem in one day or even one year, there are certain steps that might change liberalism’s chances in the next elections. So without further delay, here is a plan of action for Egyptian liberals:

1. Split

You read that correctly: The various liberal groups need to split, and they need to split ideologically. Let me begin to explain why by asking a simple question: What do a free market liberal academic, a socialist movie director, and a religious group with 300,000 members have in common? (No, this isn’t the beginning of a joke.) In Egypt, they all come together in a political party.

Why would people who have no ideological common ground form a party? The answers are the obsession with unity and a lack of ideology. Egyptian liberals’ response to every historical setback thus far has been, “We need to unite.” This reflex action is precisely problem. When people who share no ideology unite under a common banner, they fail to settle on any coherent program. Try for a second to imagine what the groups described above would have for a party platform: some catchy slogans on freedom and democracy, a bit of social justice, and nothing else. Their very obsession with unity prohibits them from forming coherent programs based on clear ideological views. If liberals are to stand a chance in elections, they need to form parties based on clear ideas, and thus clear programs. People will not elect a party that has nothing to offer but slogans that have no tangible effect on their daily lives. It is an insult to the Egyptian people to suggest otherwise.

2. Choose Where to Run

It is a joke for an emerging party without grassroots organization to attempt to compete in every district in the country. It is a total waste of resources and, quite frankly, nudges such a party into offering one-size-fits-all plans for the whole country that end up suiting no one in particular. The Law of Comparative Advantage is of paramount importance here. Let me cite an example. Suppose a member of a free market political party: Should this person run in Helwan, where the district is mostly made up of labor voters? Of course not. And it would be pure insanity, for example, to run in any of the desert districts, where the vote falls along purely tribal lines.

3. Tailor Your Programs for Your District

The obsession with unity and the accompanying obsession with offering a nationwide program ensure that any platform you come up with will be content-free. People in the various districts might be interested in what your overall plan for Egypt is, but what they mostly care about is how you can address problems in their particular district. Let me again cite an example: Economically, I am a libertarian. I would like to limit the state’s interference in people’s lives and its role in the economy. Almost every expert would tell you that I stand no chance in any district in Egypt. But I am willing to bet that, with my ideas, I could compete or even win in any rural district in Egypt. Let me explain how.

First, as a believer in private property and the withdrawal of the state from the economy, I would demand that the peasants be allowed to build on their agricultural land. The Egyptian elite, in its obsession with keeping the agricultural land in Egypt intact and its concomitant obsession with making Egypt agriculturally self-sufficient, has banned people from building on the agricultural land that they own. My campaign slogan would be, “This land is yours. Build on it.”

Second, no government should tell you what you have to plant in your land, nor should it be allowed to decide that a certain percentage of Egypt’s land is allocated to wheat, or any other specific crop. My slogan, “It’s your land. It’s your decision.”

Third, as a believer in taxing only income and not property, I would demand that the government cancel all forms of fixed taxation on agricultural land.

The possibilities are endless, of course. The important thing to note is that I didn’t give up on my principles; I just tailored them to suit the specific district I hoped to represent.

4. Respect the Egyptian People

For so long intellectuals have dealt with the Egyptian people as ignorant and uneducated. They have cried for many hours over their sad fate at being born into such a country. That has been their weakness. They never respected their countrymen, and in turn their countrymen never respected them, having recognized their slogans for what they are: empty. They need to talk to the Egyptians, offer them coherent ideas, and trust in man’s capacity to understand his own self-interest. Egyptians are not from Mars. Like all other people in the world, they seek their own good. Egyptian liberals’ job is not to educate them from on high; it is to use their ideas to create programs to further Egyptians’ own interests.

5. Reframe the Debate

The need to reframe the debate follows from all of the other points above. Because liberals have been obsessed with unity that lacks any meaningful ideological content, they’ve forgotten that they don’t really share many interests between themselves. They don’t share an economic outlook. They differ on social policies. They also differ on foreign policy. The only thing they have in common is what they are not. They are not Islamists. Note that, perhaps without anyone even noticing, this ends up framing the debate as one between Islamists and the rest. This is a losing debate for the liberals,—ot because Egyptians are ignorant religious people who blindly obey their religious leaders, but because, given the choice between an incoherent political message and a coherent Islamist message, Egyptians will choose the latter.

Drawing battle lines between ideological camps that differ economically is a means of reframing this debate. This forces the Islamists to play in a field in which they don’t have any natural advantage. Imagine for a second that the political battles in each district is driven by a clash of economic ideas: What would an Islamist candidate have to offer? What is his economic policy? He has none; he has never needed to. Now he has to come up with one, which creates the real possibility of a split within the Islamists ranks is possible.

6. Overcome Your Hatred of Islam

Religion and tradition are not evil forces in the world. In contrast to what Egyptian liberals might have learned from French secular books, there is a positive role for religion. In fact, religion and public morality are essential to a truly free society. Egyptian liberals have been blinded to this truth by their inability to distinguish between Islam and Islamism as a modern ideological construction. They need to overcome their hatred of religion and obsession with Atatürk and the French model. There are other models out there. The United States is but one. Egypt’s model might be slightly different, but Egyptian liberals need to find a formula that allows religion to play a role in the public sphere without controlling it.

This is the action plan. Does it ensure victory? No. But it gives Egyptian liberals something they have never had before: a fighting chance. In the long run, to be sure, they face enormous challenges. A society that swims in a huge vacuum of ideas will not turn into a liberal democracy overnight. A liberal democracy is not a ballot box, nor can it be equated solely with the current obsession with free and fair elections. A liberal democracy is a free society, where dissent is tolerated, private property is vigorously defended, the rule of law upheld, religious freedom protected, and individual liberties understood as the real guarantor of freedom. Building a liberal democracy depends on two things: liberal democrats and democratic institutions. Both of these require ideas. Of course, people do not read Jefferson and suddenly become liberal democrats overnight. Nevertheless, it is impossible to build a country without the ideas that have shaped modernity as we know it. Ideas matter, and Egypt’s liberals had better start realizing that.

Posted in Egypt | 5 Comments