Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Raymond Tanter

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton declared, “That’s where the money is.” Following the money trail has led to U.S. and UN sanctions on Iranian banks involved in the financing of terrorism and WMD technology purchases.

In January 2008, as I approached Hotel Parc Hyatt Paris Vendôme at 5 Rue de la Paix to hold a press conference on Tehran’s evasion of UN sanctions, I noticed that just down the street stood a Paris branch of Iran’s Bank Saderat, which has transferred millions of Euros to Hezbollah. Farther down the street is Bank Sepah, whose proliferation activities have been curtailed by UN sanctions. Indeed, Under Secretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey visited France in July 2007 to build consensus in Europe for removing Iranian banks from the international financial system.

Despite sanctions on banks Saderat and Sepah, Treasury has yet to sanction Iran’s Central Bank. According to Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes Daniel Glaser, “Another method Iranian banks use to evade controls is to ask other financial institutions to remove their names when processing transactions through the international financial system…This practice is even used by the Central Bank of Iran to facilitate transactions for sanctioned Iranian banks.” Furthermore, Glaser has said that the “From 2001 to 2006, Bank Saderat transferred $50 million from the Central Bank of Iran through its subsidiary in London to its branch in Beirut for the benefit of Hezbollah fronts in Lebanon that support acts of violence.”

Consistent with Glaser’s testimony, information obtained during Iran Policy Committee research on Iran’s opposition parliament-in-exile—the National Council of Resistance of Iran—indicates that Ebrahim Sheibani, a former head of Iran’s Central Bank, is a senior member of Tehran’s task force to evade sanctions. Also, the IPC has learned that Iran’s Central Bank pays Bank Keshavarzi (Agriculture Bank) and Bank Refah to set up banks abroad as middlemen for Bank Sepah to make illicit financial transactions for Iran’s Ministry of Defense.

Because of such illicit activities, Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has advised U.S. banks to be cautious of the Central Bank of Iran, which is using deception to mask involvement in nuclear proliferation and terrorism. But, the governor of the Central Bank has said he is “proud” the Central Bank has helped other Iranian banks with financial commitments, “regardless of the pressures on them.”

At issue is whether such pressures are enough. Treasury has been incrementally ratcheting up sanctions against Iranian financial institutions. So far, sanctions have made the international financial system an increasingly difficult environment for Iran to conduct illicit transactions in support of terrorism and pursuit of nuclear weapons. But the Central Bank governor’s comments suggest that such pressures are insufficient, given the role the Central Bank is playing in evading sanctions.

When asked why the Central Bank of Iran has not been sanctioned, Glaser told the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, “Taking action against the Central Bank of Iran is an extraordinary step. It is certainly something that is within our toolbox.” In response to Glaser’s testimony, California Democrat Brad Sherman, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, said, “In effect, he’s [Central Bank of Iran governor] announced that his Central Bank is helping other banks evade the various sanctions that you’ve [Glaser] applied.”

The words of Iran’s Central Bank governor and Treasury’s own warning to U.S. banks strongly suggest that the Central Bank of Iran should be next on Treasury’s list for sanction. To be sure, as much as Banks Saderat and Sepah, the Central Bank “is where the money is” when it comes to terrorist financing and purchasing nuclear weapons technology.

From Barry Rubin

There was a great item on the Harry’s Place blog by the anonymous Davem who spent a long time in Syria studying Arabic. (If you haven’t read his long “Syria Diary” posted on the site some months ago, you have missed what is probably the best piece of first-hand reportage from that country in a long time.)

Now Davem has written a shorter item about some of his experiences. In it he quotes a high-ranking Syrian official as insisting that there is freedom of speech in Syria, and that people are only arrested for subversive actions. The problem is the same official had earlier spoken as follows:

Riyad Na’san al-Agha: Of course. I accept the placing on trial of whoever curses the resistance [Hezbollah]. I accept the placing on trial of anyone who wants to take part in the Greater Middle East plan, with which the United States controls our nation. I agree with the placing on trial of anyone who questions the identity of this nation, anyone who wants to shatter national unity to racial and ethnic pieces, and anyone who wants to instigate tensions between the different minorities.

In other words, he says: if you say something we will put you on trial; likewise if you “want” to take part, if you “question,” or if you “want to instigate.” In other words, we will imprison you for thought crimes.

One of the responses to the post was from an angry Syrian named Jabar, who complained about one of the anecdotes told by Davem. Davem had recalled that he had gone to hear a well-known Syrian comedian who, in the middle of the show, shouted out the name of former Syrian vice-president Khaddam, who had fled the country (probably one step ahead of being suicided by Bashar al-Asad), headed for Paris, and joined the opposition. Davem recorded that the audience laughed nervously, but he cited the event as evidence that there is a little freedom of speech, if only to serve as a pressure valve to let Syrians blow off steam.

Jabar, however, says that he went twice to the comedian’s show and it was not true that he had just said the name. No, afterward, the comedian had denounced Khaddam from the stage as a running-dog flunky of the imperialists or whatever terms they are using nowadays. In other words, Jabar wanted it to be clear—speaking with pride—that there was not even the tiniest space for free speech. In the best Stalinist fashion, he had to insist that everyone at all times loves Big Brother with no deviations.

If academics actually listened to what the leaders, officials, and mouthpieces of Middle East dictators said—many more examples can be cited—many of the fantasies (or outright repetitions of regime propaganda of which so large a portion of regional studies often seems to consist) would dissolve.

Isn’t this called working with primary sources?

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Priya Satia is assistant professor of modern British history at Stanford University. Her new book is Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East.

From Priya Satia

There was something fittingly fateful about how I came to write Spies in Arabia. Exactly a year before the 9/11 attacks, when the war in Iraq was but a twinkle in George W.’s eye, I stumbled into the Mesopotamian quagmire from the east. While exploring British Indian efforts to “develop” that region during World War One, I came across frequent complaints by local British officials about their difficulty gathering information in the country.

I assumed their problems arose partly out of a cultural mindset that had long seen the Middle East, and the “Orient” more generally, as essentially unknowable, mysterious, inscrutable. Here, I thought, was a question worth pursuing further: How did long-circulating cultural representations about the Middle East influence the practical unfolding of empire on the ground? How did they shape military and intelligence operations? The question promised to inject new life into the somewhat tired subject of European perceptions of the Orient. And so, I embarked for the UK to research the history of British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East, without an inkling that the topic was about to seize center stage in American political debate.

My clever academic question soon acquired a more sinister and politically urgent aspect when the records of the Air Ministry revealed the true significance of the subject of British surveillance in the Middle East: After World War One, Iraq became the first colony policed from the air, bombardment forming a routine part of administration. The Royal Air Force’s obsessive emphasis on “ubiquity” of surveillance seemed in some way to be connected to those earlier complaints of blindness, a hypothesis I set about proving by tracing the culture of intelligence-gathering in the region before, during, and after the war. As I read official records alongside agents’ personal papers, contemporary fiction, scholarly journals, and the press, the extent to which secret histories—the history of espionage—can produce immense effects in politics and culture became increasingly and eerily apparent.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the book that I had launched for its apparent intellectual merits inexorably acquired a new purpose and an increasingly polemical subtext. The more I thought and wrote, the more I grew convinced that the contemporary echo of my historical topic was neither a coincidence, nor evidence of my political prescience, nor even the tragically farcical repetition of history; it was in fact the unfolding of a new chapter in that unfinished history. What came to be known as the “group think” of our intelligence community was, I found, partly a legacy of the British intelligence establishment’s earlier incursion in the region, as was the mentality guiding American counterinsurgency.

Intelligence, it turns out, is not simply the matter of collecting objectively true, but hidden facts. It depends on prior epistemological choices, as we are now painfully aware—and those are liable to be shaped by cultural understandings. If a certain Edwardian-era hankering after romance and fascination with Bedouin inspired the eccentric community of British Arabist agents (T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, St. John Philby, and John Glubb being among the most well-known) to volunteer to spy in the Middle East, that very “genius”—and their claim to such a genius—ensured that all that the British state did in the region was similarly inventive—and often with horrific consequences, as in the case of the aerial surveillance regime. The book’s purpose is partly to make sense of how those who claimed the greatest empathy with Arabs—those most committed to “Arab freedom”—became the most enthusiastic supporters of a regime they knew to be unprecedentedly lethal and highly error-prone: How it came to be, in George Orwell’s words, that “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: [and] this is called pacification.”

Conversely, today’s events helped me understand the historical significance of the new imperial style ushered in with air control, what I call “covert empire.” At the very moment that Britain’s democracy became truly inclusive after the war, and began, somewhat self-consciously, to assert its right to check the power of the British state, particularly the extravagant expenditure and brutality in Iraq, those activities became increasingly hidden from public view; administrative and military power fell into the hands of unaccountable intelligence bodies. There was a lesson in here for us—about the perils of democracy, its fostering of a paranoid official secrecy simply by virtue of its insistent demand for openness. Somewhat counter-intuitively, when a democracy attempts imperial occupation, there is a lot of lying and a lot of unrecorded death. Indeed, today’s conversation about official secrecy about violence and corruption in Iraq seems almost to parody the parliamentary debates of 1920s Britain. Then, too, “spin,” euphemism, and spurious declarations of success accompanied the creation of an ethnically-ordered, militaristic, and corruptly developmentalist security state in Iraq.

The secrecy of British intervention was not lost on Iraqis. They too grew suspicious, indeed paranoid, about the extent of their independence once it was nominally granted in 1932, and even after the RAF finally departed in 1958—with good reason, since a mere two years later, the CIA made its first attempt to assassinate the Iraqi head of state. My hope is that Spies in Arabia will not only help us think about the follies of Britain’s imperial past (and dispel the myth of Britain’s success in Iraq) but will also remind us of the all-too-recent historical memory shaping reception to Western occupation in formerly colonized countries, however benevolent its stated objective; people simply can no longer swallow that much unfairness—or that much paternalism (except perhaps under UN auspices).

At a practical level, the lesson from the past is that the local spawn of covert empire is inevitably doomed: today’s blinkered conversation about why the Iraqi government is failing to step up so that we can stand down is founded on the fallacy that an only nominally independent government can ever have any legitimacy. Collaborationist regimes are, by their very nature, prone to paralysis and/or oppression. And making the U.S. presence more discreet—for instance, by replacing troops with airpower, as has been suggested—will only further compromise local authority. Iraq needs to belong fully and without reservation to the Iraqis; my own hunch is that if we depart, we will be pleasantly surprised by their possession of the heroic yet ordinary human capacity to avert the chaos that we claim to fear—and that we have in any case delivered to them.

Spies in Arabia has morphed into a rather different book from what I had foreseen. As much as it attempts to explain the past, it provides an unwitting but insistent comment on our present discontents. Flying in the face of our usual assumptions about the relatively benign and retiring nature of the inter-war British empire, it tacitly questions any modern government’s presumption of the oxymoronic role of peaceful empire.

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From Daniel Byman

The Washington Post’s reporting on the weekend that “all the defendants convicted in the [2000] attack [on the USS Cole] have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials” will hardly surprise anyone watching how Yemen has handled the issue of terrorism since 9/11. While Yemeni security forces have at times made important arrests of Al Qaeda members and like-minded groups, the government is often lenient to violent Sunni jihadists, particularly those who direct their activities outside the country. Sanaa’s solution seems to be to balance its crackdown with efforts to divert the jihadists’ focus from Yemen to other countries. As Gregory Johnsen and Brian O’Neill contend, “Since 2003, the Yemeni government and Al-Qaeda in Yemen have reached what could best be described as a tacit non-aggression pact.” Many jihadists who went through the government’s “reeducation” program reportedly later went to Iraq to fight against U.S. forces there. As Murad Abdul Wahed Zafir, a political analyst in Yemen, contends, “Yemen is like a bus station—we stop some terrorists, and we send others on to fight elsewhere. We appease our partners in the West, but we are not really helping.”

Why does Yemen tolerate this? In part, anything that smacks of cooperation with the United States is unpopular, while the anti-U.S. Sunni fighters in Iraq are lionized as heroes. But it is more than this simple story of anti-Americanism. Yemen has suffered a persistent low-grade insurgency from Houthi rebels since 2004, and it is concentrated among Yemen’s large population of Zaydis. (The Zaydis are a Shi’a community, but their beliefs and traditions differ from the better-know school of Shiism practiced in Iran.) The government has used the Shi’a-hating Sunni jihadists to fight this insurgency, as it used the same group in the early 1990s when it faced a civil war from southern socialists. Moreover, many of the jihadists are linked to strong domestic political groups like the Islah party. So Yemen’s leaders find it best to try to tolerate and divert the jihadists rather than confront them directly.

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From Raymond Tanter

On April 30, the U.S. Department of State released the 2007 edition of Country Reports on Terrorism, which reports descriptions of State Sponsors of Terrorism and groups listed as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Country Reports rightly identifies the Iranian regime as the “most active state sponsor of terrorism,” which is consistent with evidence of terrorist capability and intent: The regime ships to Iraq “rockets, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, mortars that have killed thousands of Coalition and Iraqi Forces… and improvised explosive devices (IEDs)… specially designed to defeat armored vehicles.”

However, Country Reports is inconsistent in its application of principles of capability and intent in listing the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) as a foreign terrorist organization. By omitting the 2006 Country Reports allegation of capability and intent in the 2007 edition, State indicates a movement toward reconsideration of designation, which is due for mandatory review in October 2008.

Country Reports 2006 had alleged terrorist intent and capability: “MEK leadership and members across the world maintain the capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United State [sic], Canada, and beyond.” To its credit, State omits this allegation in Country Reports 2007; hence, there is no basis for designation of the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization: State relies on non-terrorist allegations to make its case.

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tehran’s terrorism has been on the rise since 2003, despite the State Department’s conciliatory efforts toward Iran. The United States, unprovoked and at the request of Tehran, bombed the bases of the MEK in Iraq, disarmed the group, and limited its activities to its main encampment in Ashraf, Iraq. Washington hoped that by complying with Iran’s demands, Tehran would cease supporting the insurgency in Iraq. To the contrary, American conciliation only produced Iranian intransigence as Tehran escalated its shipment of roadside bombs to Iraq.

De-listing the MEK would be consistent with the legal criteria of the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act, because the allegations on which designation is based are false, misleading, or irrelevant. Additionally, de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq.

Regarding the veracity of terrorist allegations against the MEK, a November 2007 decision by the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission (POAC), a UK Court, found that such claims were invalid:

There is no evidence that the [MEK] has at any time since 2003 sought to re-create any form of structure that was capable of carrying out or supporting terrorist acts. There is no evidence of any attempt to “prepare” for terrorism. There is no evidence of any encouragement to others to commit acts of terrorism… continued proscription could not be lawfully justified.

In light of the UK court ruling to delist the MEK in the UK and the absence of evidence for terrorist capability and intent in Country Reports 2007, Secretary of State Rice should de-list the MEK when the organization’s designation comes up for mandatory review in October 2008, if not immediately. To do otherwise would be inconsistent with the principle that designation should be dependent upon evidence of capability and intent.

From Mark T. Clark

I am happy to report that the inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (AMESA) on April 25-26, 2008 went extremely well. The title of the conference was “Evolution of Islamic Politics, Philosophy and Culture in the Middle East and Africa: From Traditional Limits to Modern Extremes.” In six months’ time, ASMEA has grown to about 500 scholars from 40 countries representing 230 colleges and universities from 35 academic disciplines. Nearly 250 people attended the first conference.

Six panels and two roundtables covered such subjects as Islamic philosophy, religious obligation, current case studies in the Middle East and Africa, and more. The chair of the Academic Council of ASMEA, Bernard Lewis, gave the keynote speech on the subject of “Studying the Other: Different Ways of Looking at the Middle East and Africa.” In his speech, Lewis demonstrated that no civilization in history has made the study of “the Other” for its own sake important, except for Western civilization (for which the West is nevertheless disparaged in many a Middle Eastern studies program). Click here to watch Lewis’ speech. Media reports on the conference can be found here and here.

I invite you to consider joining ASMEA to help us build a strong academic society dedicated to defending free inquiry into the important regions of the Middle East and Africa.

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MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Tamara Cofman Wittes is Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution, and a member of MESH. Her new book is Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy.

From Tamara Cofman Wittes

When I began writing Freedom’s Unsteady March, four years ago, I set it up as a two-part argument: why the United States should promote democracy in the Arab world, and then how. I thought the “why” part of the argument would be relatively uncontroversial, but the “how” might be very useful. After all, the notion that democratic growth abroad is in America’s national interest has been a tenet of both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, but implementation is often complicated both by bureaucratic factors and by misgivings regarding democracy’s impact on other US national interests.

But the fallout from the Iraq war drastically shifted the context in which the book now appears. Today’s presidential candidates are all running away from President Bush’s foreign policy in various ways, and Bush’s “Freedom Agenda”—in particular its association in the public mind with the Iraq war—is a big part of what they are running away from. So today, a book arguing for assertive U.S. efforts to cultivate Arab democracy seems not merely against the tide, but out-of-place entirely: naïve, foolhardy, and simply irrelevant.

My fear is that the book’s argument will be dismissed too quickly in this environment, by those foreign policy commentators who are more focused on bashing Bush than on figuring out what to do instead, and more concerned with America’s global reputation than they are with our global position. My hope is that Freedom’s Unsteady March will help keep open a debate which should not be foreclosed: about whether, when, where and how the United States should seek to advance democracy in the Arab world.

I finished writing the book and sent it to press in the firm belief that, regardless of the whisperings of neo-isolationists on both the left and right in America, regardless of the inevitable onset of ABB (”Anything But Bush”) orientations in U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East is not going away—and despite the wishes of some in the commentariat, the United States is not walking away from the Middle East either, not in any fundamental sense. Given that, it seems to me that the domestic political and economic trends in the region that are challenging governance and legitimacy—trends that are driving leaders’ threat perceptions, shaping their attitudes toward regional issues, and constraining their cooperation with the United States—will remain matters of crucial interest here in Washington. The question is not whether America will influence the future shape of the Arab world, but in what manner, and to what end.

Freedom’s Unsteady March focuses on how regional and global realities affect the durability of Arab autocracies and the environment within which America must continue to pursue its regional interests. Some argue that a pro-democracy American stance will threaten strategic cooperation with Arab allies, and will enable Islamists with questionable democratic credentials to take over the governments of major Arab states. These two concerns long prevented America from even trying to advance democracy in the Middle East, and these same two concerns (and some crucial bad judgments) ultimately doomed Bush’s revolutionary “Freedom Agenda” for the Middle East as well. My book takes on these two problems and unpacks them, showing how America can promote democracy while protecting its other interests. In the silly season of a presidential election, and more importantly when a new administration takes office, I hope my book will help shape a realistic, pragmatic debate about how to do in the Middle East what America has done for every other region of the world: integrate democracy promotion into the daily conduct of American foreign policy.

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