Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Robert Satloff

The late Peter Rodman said and wrote many wise things on a wide array of topics. One set of remarks that stands the test of time is the following presentation he delivered at a Washington Institute conference in 1992. The triggering event was Algeria and the debate over whether the United States was right to accede to the Algerian military’s cancellation of the second round of parliamentary elections that almost surely would have brought Islamists to power. But, as was usual with Peter, the context was much broader—it was how the United States should approach the rise of radical Islamist politics across Muslim societies. Peter’s message—no less appropriate today, a time when the United States looks approvingly at political rules that enable Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood to gain ground, than when uttered more than fifteen years ago—is poignant, moving, and timeless: “Our response to Islamic fundamentalism is not only a question of foreign policy, but of our faith in ourselves.”

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Remarks by Peter W. Rodman to the Soref Symposium on “Islam and the U.S.: Challenges for the Nineties,” Washington, April 27, 1992.

There is no kind of issue as agonizing to a policymaker as this one. People in government are used to dealing with tactics—the last cable, the next meeting. This kind of problem forces them to think not only about strategy but about basic questions of political philosophy. Thus they naturally turn to scholars for guidance. But they also cannot escape the responsibility to ask crude questions like: Does Islamic politics pose a threat to us? If so, what can we do about it?

More than a dozen years after the Iranian revolution, it is now clear that Islamic fundamentalism has spread to the Sunni world as well as the Shi’i, and is a growing factor in regions from North Africa to the West Bank to Afghanistan and Central Asia. It is filling the vacuum left by the discrediting of other outlets for popular frustration, pan-Arabism, nationalism, and socialism. On its face, it looks to replace those “isms” as the main strategic challenge to moderate or pro-Western governments in the region.

Ironically, as the end of the Cold War seemingly marks the final victory of liberal democracy in a 200-year struggle in European political thought, the West now finds itself challenged by an atavistic force hostile to all Western political thought.

Experienced scholars remind us that militant Islam reflects deep-seated social grievances and causes. They caution us against looking for a new “enemy” now that Communism is defeated. They suggest it is a historical phase that will probably have to be endured. This is wise advice. Yet there is little comfort for the policymaker in the idea that this new source of anti-American radicalism will play itself out in twenty years or so. We do have a right to defend our interests. In doing so, there are some guidelines a policymaker ought to follow.

• First, it is true that we should not initiate hostility where there is none, and we should coexist with whoever is willing to coexist with us. The burden of making our relationships hostile, if hostile they are to become, should rest with the Islamic forces themselves.
• Second, however, we cannot avoid taking Islamic ideology seriously. Where a radical anti-Western philosophy is coupled with concretely hostile policies, we have a problem. It is patronizing and even insulting to dismiss as mere rhetorical exuberance a philosophy one of whose central tenets is rejection of the West as corrupt and evil. Much of the Islamic world is indeed bitter and resentful at Western cultural influence, driven by what Bernard Lewis calls “the politics of rage.” Iran’s military buildup and support for terrorism make it still a strategic threat.
• Third, we must recognize that a political movement can come to power through democratic means and not itself be democratic. Constitutional democracy means, at a minimum, political pluralism, limitations on government power, guarantees of individual and minority rights, the possibility of alternating parties in office. No Islamic leader subscribes to this. Islamic parties, rather, seek (out of moral conviction) to make institutional changes that would negate the possibility of their removal once in power, not only through political action but by reshaping educational and cultural life. Such movements do not deserve enormous deference from us for their political virtue. There is an abject quality to much Western discussion of this issue, which reflects a collapse of belief in our own democratic values.
• Fourth, the way to encourage moderates and weaken radicals is not to try to find three guys in the leadership entourage to bribe with TOW missiles, but to demonstrate by our firm resistance that radical policies are counterproductive. Hostile foreign policy moves must be resisted and penalized. That’s the way to strengthen the hand of any moderates there may be.
• Fifth, Western fatalism as to the inevitability of the Islamic trend is a grave disservice to the millions of moderate, modern men and women in Muslim countries whose own reasons to fear fundamentalism are even greater than ours. Appeasement would sacrifice them as well as our own principles.
• Sixth, we should be wary of pushing friendly governments into risky experiments. It is not our job to accelerate the delegitimization of friendly governments that seem not to meet our standards, only to have them succeeded by something infinitely worse, as happened in Iran.

In sum, our response to Islamic fundamentalism is not only a question of foreign policy, but of our faith in ourselves. We should not be paralyzed by guilt as to our own presumed inadequacies or those of our friends as we face a movement whose most basic tenets reject the best of what the West has to offer. We may well have to coexist with it in a literal sense for a long period, but the notion of coexisting peacefully is more our concept than theirs. The rage against us is too great, as is the concrete threat of the nuclear, conventional and terrorist weapons it continues to marshal against us in the service of its rage.

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Remembrances of Peter Rodman are posted here.