I Can’t Believe I’m About To Say This…

but Michelle Malkin had a point in the entire Rachael Ray business. Sure, on the specific points, she was horrifically wrong. Ray isn’t wearing a keffiyeh, keffiyeh’s aren’t necessarily “hate couture” and enforcing this type of conservative political correctness is just stupid. But she still had a point about the proliferation of the keffiyeh as a hipster accessory. Although in the Middle East, the keffiyeh is hardly terrorist wear - in Jordan its red and white, in the Gulf it’s just white and Palestinians of all stripes sport the black and white one - but it’s only popular in the West because of its terrorist chic. Just like Che shirts, or more accurately, the spate of khaki and leather military-esque jackets that proliferated in the 60s and 70s, they are only cool because of the inherent association with revolt and violence. Now, I don’t particularly mind people wearing keffiyeh’s, they are remarkably useful and look really cool, but the argument that they’re totally innocuous and have no association with violence, nationalism or revolt just ain’t true.

Full disclosure. I own a keffiyeh. I bought it when I was ten in Palestinian East Jerusalem. It’s really cool.

UPDATE: If you dare look below, I’ve uploaded some really crappy pictures of me sporting my authentic Palestinian keffiyeh in both relatively traditional and hipster fashion. View at your own risk

Dignity Promotion Isn’t All It’s Stacked Up to Be, Part II

According to Spencer Ackerman, the concept of “dignity promotion is at the heart of Obama’s outlook on foreign policy.” Dignity promotion is the idea that if the US can drawn the swamp of misery in much of the developing world, it can greatly reduce anti-Americanism and allow “liberty, justice, and prosperity” to take root. This notion is supposed to counter the neoconservative idea that the roots of terrorism can be found in a lack of responsive, democratic governments in the Middle East.

As an example for why a dignity-based perspective is valuable, Ackerman points to the Muslim Brotherhood making gains in Jordan because the government is viewed as illegitimate and nonfunctioning as a result of the run up in food prices. And his argument makes intuitive sense: if we had more humane and sensible food/poverty policies, it would prevent Islamist extremists from being so popular in the Middle East:

And here’s where the choice really is between whether you want to win or lose a winnable fight against extremism. If you want to win, you’ll support what it takes to feed people. If you want to win, you’ll ask yourself who you want a poor family in Jordan to turn to in its hour of crisis: the U.S. or the Muslim Brotherhood. If you want to win, you’ll stand with the politician that wants the U.S. to be the ones that family turns to…And if you don’t want to win, you’ll say that what happens in Jordan is a Jordanian problem and we can’t feed the world and anyway poverty and terrorism are different issues.

At the risk of not wanting to win, I’ll say that while poverty in the developing world is a huge issue (actually, by many utilitarian reasonings, the hugest), it has very little to do with the fight against terror and extremism - and Spencer’s example proves it.

The problem with Ackerman/Power/Obama approach is that it adopts some of the crucial premises of the expansive, neoconservative approach to terrorism. Namely, it aggregates all extremist, Islamist and jihadi groups into one hulking terrorist mass. The approach necessitates this aggregation because the one terrorist group that actually has the capabilities and intentions of attacking the United States (with the exception of groups in Iraq) is Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda has nothing to do with poverty or hunger.

If you look at the 9/11 hijackers or those who have attempted AQ attacks, they are hardly the wretched of the earth. Instead, they’re generally college educated and middle class. Al Qaeda, as opposed to the traditional guerilla/insurgent/political terrorist group, doesn’t actually depend on the type of grass roots support that such a group would generally need to survive. They, instead, depend on the donations and support of ideologically motivated types that want to bring about the global caliphate, get American troops out of the Holy Kingdom and generally hate the United States.

And so, the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in Jordan, although a regrettable side-effect of our essentially taking on the British imperial mantle in the Middle East, probably doesn’t increase the risk of anti-American terrorism all that much. Especially in Jordan, where because of the 2005 Amman bombings, the public mood has turned decisvely against Al Qaeda. And although Jordan isn’t exactly the most pro-American place around, it’s hard to interpret their embrace of the Islamic Brotherhood - which, as Ackerman notes, is greatly opposed to Al Qaeda - as a sign that terrorist attacks against America are going to be launched from Jordan. If Jordanian public support for the US is important, than the dignity promotion agenda seems like an odd place to start.

That’s because, when you ask Arabs about why they don’t like the US, they point to policies that the US is currently engaging in - occupation of Iraq, one sided support for Israel etc - not the lack of development assistance or Peace Corps volunteers in their countries. Of course, Ackerman supports changing those policies, which would then lead to some change of Arab opinion of the US and help drain the swamp of anti-Americanism. But the effect of that real policy change is likely to be much, much greater than some vague committment to “dignity.”

And here’s my initial post looking at “dignity promotion.”

John Bolton Does Not Control the Uniqueness

John Bolton tells us in the WSJ that negotiation with Iran, a state supporter of terror, will confer upon them legitimacy, and thus allow them to expand their support for sundry forces:

When the U.S. negotiates with “terrorists and radicals,” it gives them legitimacy, a precious and tangible political asset. Thus, even Mr. Obama criticized former President Jimmy Carter for his recent meetings with Hamas leaders. Meeting with leaders of state sponsors of terrorism such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il is also a mistake. State sponsors use others as surrogates, but they are just as much terrorists as those who actually carry out the dastardly acts. Legitimacy and international acceptability are qualities terrorists crave, and should therefore not be conferred casually, if at all.

Moreover, negotiations – especially those “without precondition” as Mr. Obama has specifically advocated – consume time, another precious asset that terrorists and rogue leaders prize. Here, President Bush’s reference to Hitler was particularly apt: While the diplomats of European democracies played with their umbrellas, the Nazis were rearming and expanding their industrial power.

In policy debate, there’s a concept called “controlling the uniqueness.” In simple terms, uniqueness is whether or not some bad chain of events is happening in the status quo or not. If it is not happening in the status quo, then one could argue that there of risk that implementing a policy could set off those bad chain of events. If, however, the advocates for the policy policy could prove that said chain of events is already happening in the status quo, then the risk of implementing that policy is not as great. This is exactly what Bolton gets wrong. Iran is already supporting terrorism in Lebanon and in Iraq, and our current “policy” - if you can even deign to call it that - isn’t doing that great a job of preventing Iranian support for terror.

What’s especially odd is that Iran does not support Al Qaeda style, purely ideological, global terrorism. Although, in the past, they’ve engaged in global terror (Salman Rushdie and support for Hezbollah airplane hijackings and attacks in Argentina), Iranian support for terror can mostly be interpreted as them promoting their interests in the Middle East. And such, they don’t really need more “time” or “international legitimacy” to engage in them. Bolton’s analysis makes especially little sense in the context where Iran is doing the most anti-American terrorism: Iraq. And where Iran’s support for terrorism concretely effects US interests in the region, we’ve had some sort of discussions or negotiations with Iran. There weren’t any concerns about granting legitimacy to Iran’s actions: instead, the military leaders in Iraq understood that it only made sense that Iran was meddling in Iraq, and that whether or not they had “legitimacy” wouldn’t effect the fact that a hostile global superpower was occupying their next-door neighbor.

Bolton also complains that there are opportunity costs in pursuing negotiations. He claims that we can draw a direct line between the Annapolis conference and the current breakdown of Lebanon. In Bolton-world, had the Bush administration not gotten around to devoting any sort of effort into the Peace Process in its final year in office, they could have done something about the current situation in Lebanon. What, exactly, could we have done to prevent Hezbollah from re-igniting the civil conflict that was prevented by Annapolis? Bolton doesn’t say. That’s because we don’t have all that many levers in Lebanon, which is a reality that uber-hawks like Bolton can’t really get their minds around. Of course, we could gain a lever in Lebanon through some sort of “grand bargain” with Iran, but that would require negotiations…

What Would Kojeve Say About The Right To Return?

One of the oddest and most intractable issues in  the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Right to Return. Since 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled/were expelled by Israeli forces/left at the urging of their leaders, there has been this massive, intractable refugee problem in Israel and the surrounding Arab countries. Now, it’s not uncommon for there to be large refugee and population flows in a postcolonial war: just look at most of Africa or India and Pakistan; what’s weird about Palestinian refugees is that they’ve remained refugees for so long. That’s because Arab states - like all states - have generally not wanted to take them in. The country that took in the most - Jordan - had a huge Palestinian terrorist problem in the 1970s, and Lebanon also has had to deal with Palestinian refugees turning into another armed group in their seemingly never ending civil war. One also has to consider that Arab states have something to gain from the festering of the refugee crisis - it makes Israel look a whole lot worse then them for refusing to take in these refugees.

Although it’s true that the refugee problem is a common one for states that emerge from the wreckage of imperial empires, the durability of the Palestinian crisis is unique. And it will continue. Even though one can imagine a world in which Israel allows for and recognizes a sovereign Palestinian state, one can not imagine a world where they let three to four generations of Palestinian refugees into Israel’s pre-1967 borders. And so this seems like a great injustice/political problem - what are we to say to those Palestinians who still have the deeds to their homes in Haifa? - will continue on perpetually. In other cases, these types of post-colonial expulsions and what not have been resolved by two things: the creation of a state for those expelled and some recognition of what happened.

This all brings me around to Daoud Kuttab’s Washington Post Op-Ed claiming that the priority for Palestinians is a state, not return to Israel. Kuttab argues that Palestinians want Israel to realize that while they (and their American Zionist supporters) celebrate 60 years of statehood, Palestinians recognize 60 years of Nakba, Arabic for “The Catastrophe.”

Palestinian refugees who have lived away from their homes for 60 years have established themselves elsewhere. Few have a sincere desire to live in today’s Israel. Respected Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found in 2003 that only 10 percent of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were willing to move to the areas that today constitute Israel.

What Palestinians want is for Israel to admit its historic and moral role in creating the refugee problem and its moral responsibility to them. Such an admission by a courageous Israeli leader would satisfy, and neutralize, many Palestinians who hold their keys and demand the literal right of return. As part of a bilateral agreement, surely Israel would allow divided Palestinian families to reunite with relatives who stayed in what became Israel after 1948.

This is quite similar to  what many displaced peoples expect from those that have displaced them. In Turkey, another post-Ottoman state like Israel, what minorities who suffered massive repression and even genocide in its creation (Kurds and Aremenians) want is not for Turkey to give them money or let them resettle, but instead recognition that what the Turks did to them was wrong. Thus all the Armenian activism surrounding the recognition of the genocide as well as the Kurds’ struggle to be able to speak their own language. Also, the massive expulsion of Jews from their generations-old communities in the Arab and Muslim World (Baghdad, Cairo, Yemen etc) is not really talked about more, and is thought to have been “dealt with” by the creation of a Jewish state.

The struggle by the Palestinians, Kurds and Armenians for “recognition,” as opposed to specific restitution, should not surprise anyone who has read Kojeve, and especially Kojeve-as-read-by-Fukuyama. Kojeve posits that the driving force behind History is man’s desire for recognition. The reason why liberal democratic capitalism will ultimately win out is that it, compared to monarchy or socialism or any other political-economic arrangement, best allows man to be recognized. I think what we’re seeing among the Palestinians is a vindication of Kojeve’s thesis.

Not only do they not have a state, they are also regularly told that they aren’t a “real” people and that their victimization is mostly their fault. It doesn’t matter whether or not these claims are “true” (the Palestinians are just as imagined as most imagined communities), it matters because this desire for recognition is a powerful one, and unless it can be channeled into something productive and cooperation (like a state) many more Palestinians and Israelis will die.

More On Said…and a little on Foucault

Alan Johnson, a writer of the Euston Manifesto and the editor of Democratiya, has responded to my post about Edward Said, and more particularly, my argument that many in the Eustonite left - and especially those at his journal - have been going after Said particularly vehemently, partially because his arguments in Orientalism are being horribly borne out.

When I was referring to Democratiya’s Said criticism, I was obliquely talking about three pieces by David Zarnett. The first two are substantive attacks on Said’s politics, and namely his opposition to intervention in Kosovo and his commentary following the Iranian revolution. I don’t wish to argue the merits of either piece - I’m not a Said scholar, per se - but I do wish to argue about the motives for these pieces. Said was something of a neophyte when it came to the two issues that Zarnett discusses. His specialty in academia was a very broad conception of literary theory and criticism, it’s in this strain that Orientalism clearly falls. And when it came to politics, his passion and what he devoted the bulk of his commentary to was the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He was even a member of the Palestininan government. I’m sure that Zarnett disagrees with Said on Israel-Palestine, and I think that his time would be much better sent examining Said’s thought there.

What Zarnett is doing - finding tangential issues that left-wing academics were wrong on - is just another example of a strategy among Eustonite types to discredit a whole host of left-wing academics. Another great example of this type of intellectual distraction was Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, a book that looked at the great French philosopher’s short-lived and incredibly odd infatuation with Khomeini. Although the work is interesting in a historical standpoint - the more we know about Foucault the better - it came along at a time when many on the left were looking to go after their own for not being hawkish enough about war in the Middle East or about culture war against Islamism in Europe. And so we take a philosopher who was mostly concerned with the nature of knowledge and history, and look at his idiosyncratic, far-left political committments. And although Foucault’s politics and his thought can’t be completly separated from each other, obsessively focusing on his politics can often lead to missing the larger picture.

To bring it all back to Said, Zarnett is essentially using a shot-gun strategy to discredit his thought. Before his review essay about Orentialism itself, we only heard about Said’s rather common - but no less obtuse - political committments. And at a time when we have an imperialistic war in the Middle East that was partially justified by racist and “scholarly” depictions of Arabs as the totalistic inverse of the “West” and also at a time when the Palestinian problem is at its gravest and most intractable, it’s indeed interesting that some are so interested in going after Said.

Ideology v Behavior

I get really confused when, on one hand, conservative hawks say that Iran is being all wiley and peddling influence in Iraq in an effort to cause us trouble there, while on the other hand, that they don’t operate like a normal state, and  instead think that, ““mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent factor, but rather an inducement.”

Noah Pollack - and everyone else who pushes this line of “country as suicide bomber” - does a really bad job of pointing to Iranian behavior which shows that they really don’t care about their own preservation. While he may be right that an Iranian bomb would give them freer reign to cause trouble in the Middle East, he still can not show - from the perspective of American interests in the region - that Iran is implementing a single policy that is reflexive of them actively courting a nuclear confrontation with the United States or Israel.

Although it may be true that the continued development of a nuclear program could bring on a strike from the US or Israel, it’s also true that not having a nuclear program could so as well. All in all, excluding Ahmadinejad’s public remarks, the idea that Iran is absolutely undeterrable, doesn’t act at all like a normal state, and views massively destructive war with its neighbors as either not that bad or even desirable is just not based in any observable reality I’m aware of.

Extensive Al Qaeda Connections

Here’s a shocking new report showing that a repressive, dictatorial state has extensive financial and logistical ties with Al-Qaeda:

WASHINGTON —XXX remains the world’s leading source of money for Al Qaeda and other extremist networks and has failed to take key  steps requested by U.S. officials to stem the flow, the Bush administration’s top financial counter-terrorism official said Tuesday.

Stuart A. Levey, a Treasury undersecretary, told a Senate committee that the XXX government had not taken important steps to go after those who finance terrorist organizations or to prevent wealthy donors from bankrolling extremism through charitable contributions, sometimes unwittingly.

“XXX today remains the location where more money is going to terrorism, to Sunni terror groups and to the Taliban than any other place in the world,” Levey said under questioning.

Iraq pre-2003? No.  Iran today? No.  It is, of course, our long-time ally Saudi Arabia.

Not My Kind of Secularism

Turkey is a weird country. Among Muslim countries, it is the most secular, which is good, but it also enforces it by having the military essentially act as an unelected, unaccountable supra-government who gets to remove/kill political leaders if they don’t match their brand of hard-core, state-enforced secularism.  This becomes a problem when the mildly Islamist government wants to remove the head-scarf ban in state schools, and not only does the military oppose it, but the chief prosecutor accuses the ruling party of violating the constitution and wants to remove the prime minister and much of his government from political power - permanently.

It’s really disappointing that this type of blatant illiberalism is not rightly condemned by observers like Anne Appelbaum, who mostly shrug it off and assume that the price of secularism in a Muslim country is having such an overbearing, undemocratic military to enforce it.   The thing is that, as far as problems in Muslim countries go, it’s been secular military dictators who have been especially pernicious, while it’s unclear if democratically elected, mildly Islamist parties are at all negative.  There’s an obvious trade-off, and since it doesn’t seem likely that Tayip Erdogan is about to be the next Khomeini, people who discuss the middle east should be telling the military to stop interfering in totally legitimate democratic decision making.

Fouad..

Fouad Ajami is quite dependable to play “Native Informer” for American audiences who will feel more assured that the Bush Doctrine is the right idea because, hey, that guy has an Arab-sounding name.  His WSJ editorial evaluating the Iraq War is one of the more embarrassing kiss-ups to Bush and his imperial adventures I’ve ever seen.  Like so many war supporters, Ajami had to jettison the “Saddam Will Kill Us All” justification and quickly pivot to democracy promotion.  But since democracy promotion in the Arab world has been an inconsistent focus for the administration, you get embarassing quotes like this:

Mr. Bush made freedom in Arab-Islamic lands his cause. He rejected laments that Arabs do not possess a freedom gene, and that they are fated to tyranny. “The liberty we value is not ours alone,” he told this Nashville convention. “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to all humanity.”

One could certainly debate whether Iraq is meaningfully freer today than five years ago, but to say that Bush has consistently supported democracy in the “arab-Islamic” world is just false.  He has been downright subservient to Saudi Arabia, the most repressive and least democratic state in the country, and has been every cautious with promoting democracy for a another stalwart ally, Egypt.  If one’s democracy agenda consists entirely of hectoring some countries to democratize while allowing your allies to maintain their autocracies, then it’s hard to say that Bush has “made freedom in Arab-Islamic lands his cause.”

Ajami continues his contortions to defend the war by putting aside all the evidence that Hussein had little to do with any terrorism that greatly threatened the US, and make one the more baffling claims I’ve seen from him:

But those looking for that smoking gun did not understand that the distinction between secular and religious terror in that Arab landscape was a distinction without a difference. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad was a correct one. Radical Arabs attacked America on 9/11, and a war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism.

Baghdad was the proper return address, as a notice was served on the purveyors of terror that a price would be paid by those who aid and abet it. It was Saddam Hussein’s choice — and fate — that he would not duck and stay out of harm’s way in the aftermath of 9/11. We have not fully repaired the ways of the radicals in the intervening years. But the spectacle of the dictator’s defeat, and the sight of him being sent to the gallows, have worked wonders on the temper of the Arab street.

Ajami couldn’t be more wrong.   What, exactly, is “arab radicalism.”  While all the 19 hijackers were indeed Arab, I’m pretty sure that they weren’t Maronite Christians or Iraqi Shiites, instead they were Sunni radicals.  The term “Arab radicalism” is one of the more useless phrases I’ve ever seen a purported scholar throw around in the context of Islamic terrorism.  That’s because it’s not a real scholarly term at all - for Ajami - it instead is a way to put the square peg of Saddam’s secular regime in the  round hole of Islamic terrorism.  Because even Ajami admits there was no real connection to the group that actually threatens US interests - Al Qaeda - he needed to concoct some “deeper” connection between terrorism and Iraq. Of course, if there was a “proper return address” for “arab radicalism” it was Riyadh, but Ajami doesn’t seem to be concerned with repressive states that breed terrorism as long as they are erstwhile American allies.  The fact that this guy is considered a scholar never ceases to astound me.

PS - Another really unfortunate thing about Ajami’s “arab radicalism” is that it was a real phrase in the academic literature.   For instance,Uriel Dann’s King Hussein and the Challenge of Arab Radicalism looks at King Hussein of Jordan’s challenge in dealing with the radical pan Arabism sweeping the Middle East when he came to power.  Dann, unlike Ajami, is referring to a real phenomenon.

Anti-Genocide, Anti-War, No Contradictions.

Michael Young’s most recent Reason column celebrates Samantha Power’s fall from grace, because apparently she’s a hypocrite for writing about America’s silence in the face of genocide and yet still advocating a withdrawal from Iraq:

Power’s sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the U.S. leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.

What Young, and he’s hardly alone, gets wrong is his notion that sectarian conflict will just magically spring up as the US leaves. The problem with Iraq is that despite increased troop levels, all the ingredients for a bloody civil war are still there. Even as we’ve put in more troops, gotten Sadr to declare a ceasefire and bribed the Sunnis to turn against Al Qaeda, we have a weaker central government, more distrust between Sunnis and Shiites, no effective national army and generally, no steps towards political reconciliation. What this means is that when a troop draw down happens, as it inevitably will, a huge blow up is all but inevitable. There have already been hints that the (relative) respite in violence may be ending, like the car bomb that killed more than 40 people in Karbala. So it’s wrong for Young and his ilk to say that withdrawing from Iraq will inevitably lead to ethnic conflict and then just assuming that there’s anything current or any propose US policy can do to stop it. If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that the US presence hasn’t done much to resolve the root causes of violence in Iraq, if anything, it has and will continually exasperate it.

What makes Young’s lame game of gotcha even less convincing is this quote he dregs up from Obama, which apparently proves that the “truth” of the War is that no one actually supports a quick withdrawal:

And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: “The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died…It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”

Young assumes that the exact same analysis could be made today. And, superficially, he’s correct. But notice one major difference. In 2004, there were 900-plus American war dead, today, there are over 4,000. What Obama has come to realize - and what Young hasn’t - is that our strategy there is futile. If another 3,000 dead has gotten us nowhere close to eventually being able to leave behind a stable Iraq, why are we to assume that the next 3000 dead will be able to accomplish anything more? What we’ve seen since 2004 is continual assurances from people like Young that the situation in Iraq is improving and that there will be horrible violence if we withdraw. What instead has happened is that the violence has remained and the underlying causes of the sectarian violence remain. To call Power and Obama hypocrites for trying to resolve our greatest strategic failure in generations is just galling. The hypocrites are those who, after five years of futile war and brutal occupation, think that the only answer is more war.

Reporting in the Middle East

New York Times: Top Hezbollah Leader Commander Killed in Syria Bombing”

 Al-Jazeera: “Hezbollah Mourns Senior Leader”

The Cold and the Dark

Considering my political priors - fiercely anti-occupation, anti-Likud, anti-Lebanon war - I’m surprisingly sanguine about Israeli security policies like assassination of Hamas leaders and the wall. As far as I see it, any policy that leads to a net-reduction in suicide bombings is both wise and justifiable, it’s certainly unreasonable to expect any society to put up with random killings of teenagers in pizza parlors etc etc.

It’s this commitment and basic love of Israel that makes me so horrified at the freezing and locking off of Gaza that is only recently being let up. The Times reports that Ehud Barak is “lifting some of the restrictions imposed on Gaza and that on Tuesday morning he would allow delivery of a week’s supply of industrial diesel for the local power station, as well as 50 trucks of food and medical supplies. ” The logic of collectively punishing Gaza escapes me. This is the territory that picked Hamas in their elections, knowing full well that economic and political isolation would result. Moreover, Hamas feeds of the suffering and resentment of the Palestinian people, meaning that the only beneficiary from the policy of collective punishment is the very people we’re trying to punish — assuming, as I do, that the center-point of Israeli defense policy isn’t ensuring the misery of the Palestinians.

The larger problem is that whenever Israel crosses the proverbial line, they face a torrent of criticism from Arab governments and NGOs. But those same groups throw up waves of opprobrium every time Israel lifts a finger to deal with its terrorist problem, so you get a situation where the Israeli government doesn’t take international criticism very seriously and sometimes has knee-jerk reaction against it. This is where the US ought to step in. The US has plenty of credibility to criticize Israeli behavior and is generally seen by the Israelis as a fair broker. We’ve earned our stripes by constantly being the lone voice of support for Israel and the UN and they know that they don’t have any other steady, powerful ally. So we should be the ones nudging them away from these destructive, disproportionate and counter-productive actions. But usually, when it comes to policies we on-face oppose, like the expansion of settlements, we do nothing concrete or we simply support bad policy, like the invasion of Lebanon.

I don’t know which presidential candidate could best play this nuanced, productive role in the Middle East. Certainly not Giuliani, and probably not Romney. McCain mostly just hates terrorists and it’s hard to imagine him being to the left of Senator Lieberman. Clinton has largely signed on with the AIPAC say jump, she says “how high” paradigm of US middle east policy. I guess, as always, on a question of foreign policy, I just feel that Obama could deal with Israel best, but this is a biased conjecture. As usual, after spending more than five minutes thinking or writing about Israel, I feel bewildered, conflicted and depressed.

Knowledge is Overrated

Matthew Duss makes the point that, in light of Norman Podhoretz asking Jeffrey Goldberg “what’s a Kurd” before the Iraq war, we should be castigating neoconservative hawks more for not knowing anything about the Middle East:

Given that it’s pretty hard to read a magazine article, let alone an entire book about modern Iraq without coming across at least some mention of the Kurds, this does not speak well of the expertise of our leading neoconservative warmongers. Podhoretz’s innocence will come as no surprise to those who have read his World War IV, which is similarly untroubled by anything like actual knowledge of the Middle East whose forcible transformation he advocates. His new article on why we should just bomb Iran regardless of the NIE, in which he continues to flog the “nation as suicide bomber” theory of Iranian foreign policy so prevalent in Michael Ledeen’s kitchen, indicates that he hasn’t bothered himself reading much about Iran, either. As always, Podhoretz is less interested in understanding the history, culture, and internal functioning of countries he’d like to bomb than he is in questioning the fortitude of those who disagree.

The underlying point is that “knowledge will set you free” when it comes to discussing Middle East policy.  This is a bad conceptual frame for adjudicating among which Middle East experts you chose to follow. For example, there are probably few American journalists who know more about the Middle East than Eli Lake.  When you see him on bloggingheads, he is always spouting off about five years of political history in each country he’s talking about, who the leaders are, who the relevant power-players are, how certain countries relate to each other, how religious movements influence the politics and foreign policy of any Middle Eastern nation and so on and so forth.  But yet, while I’m impressed by his descriptions of the Middle East, his prescriptions are still poor, in my opinion. Podhoretz, on the other hand, is almost a special case in how extreme his ideas are, and how unsupported those ideas are by knowledge of the region.

But I think liberal foreign policy wonks and Middle East experts would do better if they didn’t just assume that more knowledge of the region means better and more liberal policy.  There are a whole lot of other factors besides just knowing all the inter-ethnic conflict in the region when it comes to formulating policy.  Jeffrey Goldberg, for instance, was the one Podhoretz sought out when he wanted to know what a Kurd was, and he was one of the most vicious advocates for war in Iraq, accusing Bob Wright (who isn’t a Middle East expert) of being soft on genocide.  Ultimately, big policy decisions come down to a lot more than who knows the most details, but rather the application of certain principles (like, say, preventive war is in most cases wrong) to a situation.  The debate is rarely about the details, so it’s better to focus on who’s best at matriculating the principles.

Caption Contest

This shouldn’t be too hard, should it?

He’s So European!

Mona Charen’s column discussing Obama and Clinton’s foreign policies is almost a how-to guide for conservatives who want to denigrate liberals in the most reductionist, lazy way.  She tries to say that because Barack Obama emphasizes fairly internationalist foreign policy ideas and because Clinton teared up when talking about how she wanted to lead the country, Clinton is the “patriotic” candidate and, we’re left to assumed, that Obama hates America.

While Charen’s questioning of Obama’s patriotism is par for the course, what’s really interesting is her off-handed dismissal of the committment to nuclear abolition as a way to prevent proliferation.  She says:

What would they talk about if they did meet? Perhaps they’d discuss Obama’s plan to eliminate the world’s nuclear weapons. He has said, “Here’s what I’ll say as president: ‘America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.’”

While at first blush, the idea that the US committing itself to a nuclear weapon free world doesn’t seem like it would do much to deter Iran and North Korea, this idea actually has a lot of backing among people that Charen wouldn’t claim aren’t patriotic.  For one, Ronald Reagan himself was a nuclear abolitionist, and at the Reykjavik Summit, he seriously discussed with Gorbachev the prospect of abolition.  Is Reagan not patriotic enough for Charen?  Surely, if Reagan could get he leader of the “Evil Empire” on board for abolition, then North Korea and Iran will be a piece of cake.  More recently, noted America haters Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and William Perry have signed on for nuclear abolition.

But going back to Obama: yes, he could talk to Kim Jong Il about a world free of nuclear weapons.  We don’t like to talk about it, but the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in war was the US.  And it happened not very far away from Korea.  For most of North Korea’s history, it has been colonized and brutalized by outside forces, and today, there are tens of thousands of US troops just south of their country, so it’s actually clear why they want to pursue a nuclear program.  More specifically, during the Korean War, MacArthur and Truman both spoke of  using nuclear weapons in Korea and Manchuria, Truman even requested 34 bombs for possible use in the war.  University of Chicago historian Bruce Cummins details in a piece for Le Monde Diplomatique exactly how seriously nuclear weapons use was considered by top American military officials in Korea. In short, a commitment to abolition probably could change the mindset of the North Korean leadership and make them more amenable to getting rid of their own nuclear program.

What I find most odd about Charen’s column is that describing a foreign policy as “European” still has currency as an effective put-down.  Was it not many Europeans (by which she must mean the French) who opposed the Iraq War, which most Americans now think was a mistake?  What’s even better is the weird phallic imagery she uses, not only is Obama’s foreign policy “European,” it’s also “utterly flaccid, squishy.”  I wonder what Charen thinks about developing bigger, longer rockets?  Do I really have to ask?

Why Did Iran Halt the Weaponization Program?

When the NIE came out, some hawks like Norman Podhoretz just called it a lie, but others like Victor Davis Hanson said it was a vindication of Bush’s nonproliferation strategy — namely the invasion of Iraq.  The argument had some superficial plausibility to it: we invaded Iraq in March of 2003, and Iran gave up its program in late 2003.  Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch makes the argument* that not only die the NIE itself point at “international pressure” as the proximate cause of Iran abandoning its weaponization program, but that right before Iran called off the program, the IAEA board of governors found them to be in violation of its rules and promised some sort of unspecified consequences.  International organizations, they can work!

*This is “dingalink” to a diavlog that Goldberg had with Matthew Lee. So don’t freak out when a video player opens.

Wondering Why Iran Is Worried

The lack of self awareness Contentions’ Abe Greenwald displays in his latest post about Iran is almost surprising.  He complains that Russia is selling an anti-aircraft system to the Iranians and claims that there’s just no way Iran is buying because they want to defend themselves.  Instead, Greenwald points out that the S-300 system, when deployed in China, could reach into Taiwanese airspace.  The relevance of this factoid has to Iran buying the s-300 system is totally illusory.  If Greenwald is so confused as to why Iran is buying these missiles from Russia, maybe he should read some of his own magazine.  Read Contentions for a few days and you won’t be confused as to why Iran thinks it needs some better Surface to Air missiles.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: Iran Edition

Matt Yglesias made a good point re: supply side quackery - pieces like Justin Fox’s are nice and all, but what we really need is that every time a GOP presidential candidate says that tax cuts will increase revenues there needs to be articles written calling them out as liars.  I feel that much the same thing should be done when presidential candidates or influential conservative pundits give the impression that Ahmadinejad is the most powerful figure in Iran, sets their foreign policy or controls the military.  Because it just isn’t true.  And any Iran expert will gladly tell you this. Vali Nasr, for instance:

Khamenei transformed the top job, taking many of the powers of the presidency with him and turning the office of the supreme leader into the omnipotent overseer of Iran’s political scene. Today, mandarins around him manage the interplay among the country’s bickering centers of power: the parliament, the presidency, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the military, the intelligence services, the police agencies, the clerical elite, the Friday prayer leaders and much of the media, not to mention a constellation of formal and informal foundations, organizations, councils, seminaries and business associations.

This is a rather obvious fact about Iran: the Supreme Leader is, well, the supreme leader.  So why then would people, like the President, take every thing Ahmadinejad says for domestic and Muslim audiences as proof positive that Iran is a suicide-bomber state hellbent on destroying Israel and America, when he isn’t even the most powerful figure in the country? I’ll let yall figure that one out…

Podhoretz on the NIE

While most neocons and Iran hawks are interpreting the NIE as a vindication and further justification for their stance, only (to my knowledge) has Norman Podhoretz gone so far to say that the estimate is a fake put out by intelligence community with the goal of protecting Iran from air strikes:

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

While it would usually be easy to dismiss such paranoid rambling as inconsequential, Norman Podhoretz just so happens to to be a senior foreign policy adviser to Rudy Giuliani.  I hope that some enterprising reporter asks Rudy a these questions.  1) Do you think the NIE reflects the honest assessment of the intelligence agencies that prepared it.  2) Do you agree with your adviser Norman Podhoretz’s opinion that the estimate is in fact a lie put out by the intelligence agencies to undermine the President? If so, why so, if not, why not? 3) As president, would Mr. Podhoretz advise you on what action to take and what level of consideration to give intelligence reports?

In related news, Mike Huckabee, who has taken a significantly less crazy line on Iran than Rudy, is approaching Giuliani in national polling.  While I’d like to think the GOP primary electorate is rewarding Huckabee for his stance on Iran,  I have a sinking feeling that is not the case.

Herf’s Poor Timing

Jeffrey Herf has written yet another one of those tiresome “Ahmadinejad is a Nazi, so why isn’t the Left more active in opposing him” pieces, entitled “Where Are the Anti-Fascists?” for TNR.  He goes through all the usual motions — Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad hates Jews and wants to wipe Israel off the map and that Iran can’t be deterred through normal means.  While he does acknowledge the NIE briefly, he seems to ignore why its important.  He complains that Germany isn’t doing enough to oppose Iran and their nuclear weapons, but that all assumes that Iran is in fact pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity.

He also blithely ignores very real arguments that Ahmadinejad isn’t the main source of power in Iran and that most of his blustery anti-Israel rhetoric and is for domestic consumption.  He doesn’t even attempt to refute these arguments, and instead just asserts that “While I have heard such arguments from political scientists in the United States, many of whom tend to dismiss the causal significance of ideological fanaticism in international affairs, such reassuring tones sound particularly peculiar when voiced in this country. To put it mildly, German politics and intellectual life is not famous for sunny optimism.”  This just makes no sense  If we accept as true that 1) Iran isn’t pursuing nuclear weapons 2)Ahmadinejad isn’t serious about this threats 3) Ahmadinejad isn’t the most powerful figure in Iran and 4) Iran can be deterred like a normal country then it really doesn’t matter if Germany, or the European left in general, isn’t reacting to Iran as Jeffrey Herf wishes they were.  The NIE itself says that Iran can be deterred, and there is really no evidence to suggest that it is controlled by “mad mullahs.”

What’s even more bizarre about the piece is the cherry picked nature of the evidence Herf cites.  His evidence seems to be that there aren’t enough media expose about German companies assisting Iran’s nuclear program.  But, as he points out, a Brandenburg prosecutor “has been conducting an ongoing investigation into the role of German firms in the building of the Iranian nuclear plant at Bushehr.”  And that “Angela Merkel has denounced his threat with great analytical and moral clarity. She has called for U.N. economic sanctions against Iran.”  So it turns out that the German political system is responding to Iran as Herf would like them to.

Herf seems to think that Germany has a special historical obligation to take the (incorrect) neoconservative on Ahmadinejad, because it’s possible that Ahmadinejad really is as bad as Herf says he is and that Germany should err on the side of thinking that every two-bit dictator is the next Hitler.  And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that Germans should be more sensitive to anti-Semitism and genocide than most countries, if Herf’s analysis of Iran and Ahmadinejad is largely incorrect, than it’s hard for me to care that Germany hasn’t adopted Herf’s views.  Can we really blame Germans — or anyone for that mattter — for not being taken in by yet another “Middle Eastern Dictator = Hitler” routine?

PS - One has to wonder about the timing of this piece.  It was originally published on Dec 2 in Germany, and the NIE came out on the  3rd, making it much of the piece obsolete.  While I imagine Herf had previously arranged with TNR to publish the piece, putting it online with the NIE so fresh in everyone’s mind is just going to encourage snarky bloggers to savage it way more so than they would have otherwise. Suspicious…