Daniel Byman :: The Obama administration made a decision to engage Iran well before it seemed like Ahmadinejad even had a chance of being unseated as president, so it is no surprise that the doubts over the current elections are not leading the administration to change course. The brief hope was that a Mousavi victory would usher in a government that would end Iran’s nuclear program and welcome closer ties to Washington. This was always unrealistic: Mousavi himself was not a cuddly figure, the nuclear program is popular across Iran’s elite, and Khatami’s experience as president painfully showed that conservative forces could easily undercut any attempt to reach out to the United States. So we are back to dealing with a conservative regime, albeit one whose legitimacy is dented. The silver lining to the cloud of dashed democratic expectations is that the odds of engagement succeeding are probably similar if not better under the conservatives, however noxious their overall policies.

In addition to their genuine hostility to U.S. policy, conservatives feared that moderates would exploit the political benefits of improved relations with the United States, which would be widely popular in Iran. With Ahmadinejad’s victory, however, conservatives are in power across of Iran’s institutions: any benefit of improved relations would go to them. In addition, conservatives could be confident they would control the pace of any rapprochement. Moreover, Iran’s economy is also declining, and even a return of higher oil prices will not rescue it. Battered economically, and with doubts about the regime’s legitimacy after the fraud at the polls, perhaps the regime will look for ways to improve its political position—like opening up to the United States—that would take the wind out of rivals’ sails. (Okay, this is a big perhaps.)

Some of the same logic, of course, held years ago as well, and it is likely that the rivalries in Iran and pervasive hostility of the conservative elite will prevail. Predictions of a rapprochement are made constantly, and they so far have always been dashed. With Iran, the safe bet is always against improved ties to the United States.

Yet it would be a mistake not to try for fear of failing. To capitalize on the regime’s newfound legitimacy concerns, Washington will have to recognize that efforts by Tehran to reach out may be accompanied by hostile rhetoric or other actions designed to shore up the conservative base. In addition, Tehran will prove especially sensitive to calls for regime change or other challenges to its legitimacy. Separating rhetoric and reality will prove difficult, and, as we try to glean insights into the regime’s thinking, Iran’s nuclear program continues to move forward.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: Autocrats the world over rely on elections to provide them with a veneer of legitimacy. Quite why this matters to them so much is something I’ve never fully grasped. Still, when even a horrendously flawed electoral process yields results that the Supreme Leader must further manipulate, what’s left of the system’s legitimacy degrades precipitously. Moral authority—if not the state’s monopoly on force—is lost and proves difficult to recapture, especially in tough economic times.

President Obama should take advantage of this moment of regime weakness to increase pressure on Tehran. This will require him to side strongly with the Iranian people and recognize the farce that these elections were. It does not mean using the phrase “regime change.” Instead he and other democratic leaders from around the world should speak to the hopes of individual Iranians who were robbed of a better future when the Supreme Leader undercut his own sham process. The Khamenei regime promises nothing but more misery and malaise; we in the international community offer something much better: opportunity and access.

In doing this, one of Obama’s key target audiences should be European public opinion. For some reason, Europeans seize much more forcefully on images of the Basij beating old women and students than on the prospects of mushroom clouds over Warsaw. Of course, siding with the Iranian people won’t do much to sway either Moscow or Beijing, especially as the latter recently managed to sweep Tiananmen under a Chinese carpet, but stiffening European spines is a first priority to applying sanctions with any teeth.

Beyond recognizing the need to sharply change his rhetoric, the President should now realize his engagement strategy as defined so far is bound to fail. To this point, the strategy has been predicated on a direct approach to the Supreme Leader as the sole decision maker within the system. If we can get directly to the Supreme Leader, the argument goes, he can be convinced through a combination of carrots and sticks of the merits of accommodating the West’s demands on the nuclear file. Within this strategy has been the implicit belief that the nature of the regime doesn’t matter. After the past few days, however, it should be clear how preposterous such a notion is. A regime prepared to shoot its own citizens to preserve itself will not negotiate away its nuclear program to the “Great Satan” and can’t be trusted even if it did. Engagement with this regime simply will not work. So what is Plan B and when do we implement it?

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Hillel Fradkin :: There is little doubt that the Iranian regime has suffered some dents in its legitimacy, both through the election campaign and its outcome. During the campaign itself, the leading candidates—Ahmadinejad and Mousavi—flung charges against one another of such vehemence and character as to taint the regime, its history and legacy. As for the elections, the speed with which the results were announced—speed which seemed physically impossible given the number of ballots cast—called those results and the fairness of the election into question. So too did the announced landslide for Ahmadinejad, which confounded expectations of a much closer race and brought hundreds of thousands of Iranians into the streets of Tehran in protest. In the short term the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has compounded the problem of legitimacy by first blessing the announced results as a “divine assessment” and then turning—in response to the protests—to the Guardian Council to perform a legally permitted review of the conduct of the elections.

It is of course uncertain what its verdict will be, although the safest bet is that it will confirm Ahmadinejad as the winner. There can be little doubt that he will pursue a radical and revolutionary policy. But can the controversy over the elections be turned to the ends of American interests, especially the attempt to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and even the interests of the Iranian people? Perhaps.

The necessary first step is for President Obama to speak out forcefully on behalf of democracy in accord with his own well-established statements in that regard. He should express his support for the Iranian people in stronger terms than he did in his Iranian New Year’s message. This would be tantamount to denying that Ahmadinejad was the legitimate representative of the Iranian government or its people.

Whether this would have some substantial and long-term effect within Iran itself—for example the “color” or “velvet” revolution which Iran’s leaders have claimed to fear and oppose—is very hard to know, but this is the most propitious time to try to find out. In the event that Iran continued to be disturbed by internal opposition, the United States would have laid the groundwork to lend whatever support was practicable.

Such an approach would require some alteration of current American policy. Practically speaking, it would mean an end to the effort to establish a dialogue with the Iranian government, which was unlikely in any case, and which now lacks the grounds of having a legitimate interlocutor. This would permit the administration to move quickly to what was likely to be the next stage of its policy: the attempt to impose “crushing sanctions,” Secretary of State Clinton’s phrase. The success of this effort always depended upon our capacity to persuade others to support such a regimen. Although that may still be difficult—as it was in the past—the dubious legitimacy of the Iranian government might now make that easier. For it could now be represented as a “rogue regime” from every point of view. And even if it should fail, the United States would have laid the ground for the proposal of other options.

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Josef Joffe :: You’ve heard about the “electronic herd” as moniker for those investors and venture capitalists who buy and sell exactly what the fad du jour demands. But what about a close relative, the “mooing media,” which so often reports what it wants to see?

And so with Iranian election. Behold this immortal headline on the editorial page of the International Herald Tribune: “The Velvet Revolution, ” followed by cheery prediction that “whatever its outcome, this (dramatic) expression of the popular will carries the promise of better times.”

“Hope Breeds Hype” would have been the better headline, followed by the warning to resist the “North Tehran” syndrome. In this fanciest section of the Iranian capital, they speak English, wear Chanel dresses under their chador and believe in the imminent demise of a despised regime. (In Tel Aviv, it is the “Sheinkin Street Syndrome,” where your basic foreign correspondent talks to artists, Meretz activists and assorted lefties before he files his story on “Change, Hope and the Peace Process” or on the evils of the Netanyahu regime.)

If these good folks had dug deeper and wider, if they had gone into the slums or countryside, they would not have confused a few cute girls who show lots of ankle and hair or a university rally with a “velvet revolution.” If they had read their Hanna Arendt, Franz Neumann or Lenin, they would have been still more skeptical about the incipient decrepitude of the Ahmadinejad regime. If they had studied the history of the Iranian revolution, they would not have called Mr. Mousavi a “reformer” instead of a “disgruntled conservative,” ditto Messrs. Karrubi and Rezai. Their battle against the past and future president was a very mild remake of what happens in any revolution: a falling out among chiefs.

The electoral outcome is no “velvet revolution” at all, though—give honor where honor is due—the “Iranian street” was more vocal and courageous than at any time since the crushed student revolt of 1999. But remember the election of 2005, when Ahmadinejad garnered a mere 19.5 percent in the first round, and then beat former president Rafsanjani with almost 62 percent. This time, Ahmadinejad won right away, and by one point more.

Of course, there was systematic (and brazen) fraud. Why else had the election authorities “counted” millions of ballots right after the polls had closed? On the other hand, Iran is not Enver Hoxa’s Albania (where he came in at 97.8 percent each time), and so Ahmadinejad’s massive majority could not have been completely rigged. As went North Tehran, the country did not. But the regime did not want to take any chances, and so added to vox pop without having to falsify it. Think Richard Daley the Elder, not Enver Hoxa.

The more interesting news is the opposition to Ahmadinejad in the “Holy City” of Qom, the spiritual headquarters of the 1979 revolution. The vocal protests of many clerics lead to a fascinating speculation: The old theocratic revolution is dead, power has passed to the—let’s call them—”secularists.” They are still bearded, but they wear suits or the battle dress of the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guards. They don’t trade in fatwas, but in economic privileges. Their weapon of choice is not the Quran, but the Kalashnikov, and their badge is the Iranian flag and not the green of the prophet (the battle insignia of Mr. Mousavi).

Let’s carry speculation on step farther. On Monday, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered an investigation into what Mousavi calls outright voting fraud. Whence we might conclude: The old clerical guard has understood the true import of the electoral verdict. It was a putsch at the ballot box, masterfully executed by Ahmadinejad and his henchmen, and it was directed not so much against the students and the wealthy denizens of Niavaran and Shemiran, but against Khamenei and his religious cohorts. It is Robbespierre vs. Danton, who had led the uprising against the King in 1792.

If this assessment is correct, we will see a lot more strife in the days to come. In the end, it might lead to a Persian Napoleon and his military dictatorship. And why not a “little war” to stabilize the new autocracy? These are dark thoughts, and like all historical analogies, they may be wildly off the mark. So over to Barack Obama, who has staked his first months in office on wooing the Islamic world in order to give a boost to moderates and liberals. Round one goes to the reactionaries.

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Mark N. Katz :: The prolonged protests in Tehran against the Iranian regime’s claim that Ahmadinejad was overwhelmingly re-elected president have raised the possibility that Iran might be on the verge of a democratic revolution. The widespread belief that election results were falsified has triggered successful democratic revolutions in several countries, including the Philippines, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Such protests, though, do not always succeed, as has been seen in Burma (Myanmar), Armenia, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere.

I have previously argued at MESH and elsewhere that a rapprochement between the United States and Iran’s authoritarian regime would be in American interests. The democratic transformation of Iran, though, would be far more beneficial for the United States (and, of course, for Iran). A democratic Iran might become an American ally or, if not that, friendlier to the United States than Tehran has been since 1979. A democratic Iran could also be expected to push Hamas and Hezbollah in a democratic direction, or perhaps even sever its ties with them. Further, while a democratic Iran could be expected to continue the atomic energy program that Tehran began under the Shah, it would presumably be more willing to accommodate the concerns of the international community than the Islamic Republic has been.

With all these possibilities at stake, the Obama administration’s restrained, “even-handed” reaction to the disputed Iranian election results may appear quite odd. This cool reaction, though, may be the best way for Washington to help the cause of Mir Hossein Mousavi—the presidential candidate who is charging electoral fraud. Greater public American support for him could be seized upon as an excuse by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to discredit him as an American agent. Expressing support for a transparent process instead of a specific politician may avoid this problem—especially since there may be little that the United States can actually do to help Mousavi right now.

As past occasions have shown, whether or not widespread popular protest against perceived electoral fraud results in democratic revolution or not depends on whether elements of the security services defect from the regime to the democratic opposition. The defection of even a few key personnel can quickly cascade into the defection of much of the security services and the immobilization of the rest. But without these initial key defections, the democratic opposition cannot hope to prevail, and its protests will sooner or later (and more probably sooner) be crushed.

It is virtually impossible, of course, for the United States to engineer the key security service personnel defections away from the regime and to the opposition during the brief window of opportunity that may be available before the democratic opposition is crushed, if security force defections don’t take place. What the United States can do, though, is quietly signal that it is prepared to work with those security service forces that do defect and to not seek their destruction. This is because organizational survival and personal advancement are often just as or even more important motives than the desire for democracy for officers considering defection to the democratic opposition in such situations.

Even if the regime succeeds in crushing the democratic opposition, its self-confidence is likely to decline and its internal divisions to remain and even grow. In similar circumstances elsewhere, some elements inside an authoritarian regime have made common cause with democratic forces outside of it. Helping them do so may be the sort of long term project that the United States could discreetly help with—whether or not Washington goes forward with attempting to achieve détente with the Islamic Republic.

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Martin Kramer :: There are days when I’m supremely grateful that I’m not paid to make policy decisions. Those who must make them on Iran have much more information than I have, but it probably still won’t be enough, so that in the end, analogies will play as large a role as analysis. Already much of the public in the West has embraced the analogy between Iran’s protests and the “color revolutions” of Europe. The potential for error there is great: Iran’s politics are sui generis even in the Middle East. But there’s a bit of room for such an error, because the regime doesn’t have nukes. If it had them, we’d be biting our nails instead of tweeting on Twitter.

Harvard’s Stephen Walt, on his blog, made an assertion that exposes the fundamental weakness of the realist claim that the outcome doesn’t matter, at least to us: “In the end, what really matters is the content of any subsequent U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, not the precise nature of the Iranian regime. If diplomatic engagement led to a good deal, then it wouldn’t matter much who was running Iran.” Walt is right when he goes on to say that Mousavi, specifically, may not be a vast improvement over the Khamenei-A’jad duo. But in keeping up Iran’s end of any “good deal,” does it really not much matter who runs the country? In our own lives, we prefer to do business with reputable dealers, as opposed to known scam artists, thieves, and forgers. The meaning of this past week is that the ruling mob has been exposed, and that alternatives aren’t entirely unimaginable. No one should get their hopes up, but the moment Khamenei, A’jad, and even Mousavi aren’t the entire universe of options, there’s every reason to put engagement on hold.

And since it’s always better to have options, perhaps the United States should act to promote them. “The Americans do not have the experience or the psychological insight to understand Persia.” That was Ann (Nancy) Lambton, the great British Iranologist, back in 1951. (She thought Mossadegh could be readily overthrown; the Americans at first thought otherwise. She was right.) So it’s a long shot. But there may be an opportunity here, and perhaps even awkward Americans—now with an additional sixty years of experience and a president with psychological insight—can find it.

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Walter Laqueur :: Has the legitimacy of the Iranian regime been seriously dented? The regime was no doubt surprised and even shocked by the intensity of feeling against Ahmedinajad by so many in the capital, but there seems to have been much less resistance outside it. The country is split ,but the levers of power (and the weapons) seem to be firmly in the hands of the regime, and this is all that matters at the present time. Mousavi, in any case, is part of the regime, not a true reformer, at best half-hearted; his fervent supporters are bound to be disappointed. A rotten compromise to solve the present crisis seems quite likely. The decomposition and eventual breakdown of the regime are bound to happen but they will take time.

Perhaps there was fraud in Iran, but most outside observers were apparently not aware how easily elections can be won in authoritarian regimes without even using the grosser forms of fraud such as stuffing the ballot boxes. If part of the population is illiterate, a desirable outcome of the elections becomes even easier to achieve. As far as now known, there was no outright forgery on a massive scale in the elections in the fascist and communist regimes in Europe.

The U.S. approach? What approach? I suspect Washington has accepted, knowingly or not, an Iranian regime in possession of nuclear weapons. No substantial help to slow the process can be expected from Europe, Russia and China. Military action will not be used, and its use by Israel will not be accepted.

No thought seems to have been given to what American policy should be once this stage has been reached. Should there be a grand bargain with Iran, accepting some or all of its “legitimate demands,” including its wish to extend its influence throughout the Middle East? Or should America support the anti-Iranian forces? I suspect there will be a little bit of appeasement and a little bit of resistance, some engagement and some disengagement, all the options will be tried in an attempt to muddle through until (or unless) something wholly unforeseen will happen.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: The principal goal of American policy toward Iran is to prevent that country from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Obama administration proposes to accomplish this through direct negotiations with the Iranian regime. Success is unlikely, but it is less unlikely if greater international pressure is brought to bear on that regime. The administration should therefore use the stolen election, and the outrage it should provoke in the democratic West, to try to persuade the Europeans to agree to tougher economic sanctions on Iran.

It would be helpful to have the Russians and the Chinese join in such an effort, but the events surrounding the election are not likely to prompt either to do so. The governments in Moscow and Beijing are no doubt just as appalled as the Europeans at what has happened, but for different reasons: the Russians because of the way the regime in Tehran has botched a rigged election, the Chinese at Tehran’s decision to hold an election at all.

Ultimately, Iran will cease to be a major strategic problem for the United States only if the current regime falls and is replaced by one less resolutely opposed to Western interests and values. Here the events of the last several days count as good news. Dictatorships fall when the governing elite loses the will to rule (as in Eastern Europe in 1989) or when it is sharply divided. The candidate from whom the election appears to have been stolen must represent a segment of the governing structure, otherwise he would not have been permitted to run in the first place. The unfolding conflict in Iran therefore pits not only the society against the rulers but also one part of the ruling clique against another. The United States can probably have little or no influence over internal Iranian politics, but anything American policy can do to widen this second division (the regime itself can be counted to do everything necessary to expand the first one) is worth doing and should be done.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: Watching the Iranian elections is like watching a Model United Nations or a Mock Supreme Court The issues are real and important. The passions are deeply felt. The divisions reflect divisions among the population. But the decisions have no effect whatsoever in the real world.

The elections, to change the metaphor, are like shadow plays or puppet shows: it is the manipulators behind the scenes who make the actors move, or negate the movements of the actors. In Iran, it is the Supreme Leader, the Council of Guardians, the Expediency Council, and increasingly the Revolutionary Guard who call the shots.

We have already seen this play, starring reformist President Khatami. Whatever the president and the reformist Majlis tried to do, the real rulers denied. Elected officials are mainly a façade, giving faux-democratic respectability to the regime. Yes, to an extent, elected officials provide a face to the regime, and do have some influence over internal matters, such as economic measures. But on the greatest matters of substance, they are entirely powerless.

Why should we pin any hopes on the Iranian elections? Does it matter all that much whether the face of the regime is sweet and smiling or angry and frowning? The regime will be the same.

What if, as many suspect, the current election, allegedly won by Ahmadinejad, was itself manipulated? The supporters for other candidates, like participants in a Mock UN, are incensed that, as they believe, the rules were violated and the results unfair. In this case, with electoral cover gone, the regime stands naked, its reality exposed. Naive Iranians will be disappointed and angry.

What about hopeful foreign leaders and diplomats? What has changed for them? Nothing. If they did not know what they were dealing with before, they were not only hopeful, but naive.

What approach to Iran would be most beneficial for the United States? Again, let’s look at past experience: When did Iran last do something agreeable to the United States? Iran stopped their nuclear program when the United States invaded Iraq, fearing that Iran might be next. When the threat appeared to recede, Iran reactivated their nuclear program. It thus seems that Iran responds to a serious threat by pulling in its horns. If the United States wants Iran to stop its nuclear bomb and missile program, reduce its terrorist support throughout the Middle East, and ease the pressure on its neighbors, then Iran must feel that the cost of pursuing its current path would be too high. President Obama must show the stick, and be ready to use it.

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Raymond Tanter :: The unfolding drama on the streets of Tehran raises key issues of whether Iranian instability will threaten survival of the ruling ayatollahs and if it is possible for a diplomatic breakthrough with them on Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons status in light of growing political instability.

Two schools of thought conflict in addressing these two issues.

One approach holds that although election fraud represents something of a setback for Iran’s “illiberal democracy,” efforts at engagement should be continued. Just as such analysts were wrong in presuming the regime would be constrained from cheating to maintain power, they falsely assume that representative institutions legitimize the rule of the ayatollahs in a less-than-liberal democracy.

A second school, of which the Iran Policy Committee is a contributor, finds that Iran does not have even a “limited” or “illiberal” democracy. Rather than deriving legitimacy from the people, the ayatollahs rule by assertion that clerics should rule because they are representatives of God on earth.

Regarding the issue of whether illegitimate elections in Iran are a point of departure for a breakthrough in Western diplomacy, such an assertion overlooks the role revolutionary ideology plays in motivating the Iranian regime to pursue its nuclear weapons program. Whether Iranian elections are legitimate is irrelevant to the regime’s pursuit of the bomb.

To motivate the Iranian regime to bargain in good faith requires leverage. An unused point of leverage against Tehran is for the West to reach out to its main opposition as it reaches out to the regime.

The Iran Policy Committee performed a content analysis of leadership statements regarding all major Iranian opposition groups. The study showed that the Iranian regime pays attention to the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the main Iranian opposition group, 350 percent more than all other opposition groups combined. In view of this surfeit of attention, it is reasonable to infer that Tehran fears the MEK as a threat to the survival of the regime.

Reaching out to the Iranian opposition, which is based in Iraq but has an extensive network in Iran, would be a common point of leverage for Washington and moderate Arab allies of President Obama to counter Iranian regime expansion in the region. Rather than a binary choice of pressure or engagement, an approach that incorporates the Iranian opposition would allow for a coherent policy of coercive diplomacy. Such a policy is likely to be more effective than either pressure or engagement alone.

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On June 4, U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a much-anticipated address to the world’s Muslims, from a podium at Cairo University. (If you cannot see the embedded video above, click here. The text is here.) The following MESH members responded to an invitation to comment on the speech: Alan Dowty, Michele Dunne, Chuck Freilich, Bernard Heykal, Bruce Jentelson, Josef Joffe, Mark N. Katz, Mark T. Kimmitt, Martin Kramer, Walter Laqueur, Michael Mandelbaum, Michael Reynolds, Michael Rubin, Harvey Sicherman, Philip Carl Salzman, Raymond Tanter, and Michael Young.

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Michele Dunne :: What President Obama had going for him in this speech was at least the appearance of frankness, laying on the table the areas of difference—terrorism (repackaged as “violent extremism”), Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear proliferation, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, economic development—and giving his view of each one. That approach, along with the requisite expressions of support for Islam as a religion and a civilization, will get him some points.

What the speech did not do was tell us anything much about how his administration will follow up on these issues. The list of deliverables was exceedingly short. The only firm promise was to a pursue a two-state solution to the Palestine issue—which will be extremely difficult to achieve. There were hints of a softer approach to Hamas (now it’s an organization with “support” and “responsibilities” instead of a terrorist group) and perhaps to Hezbollah (”we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments”), but it was unclear how serious that was and whether it would be sustainable in Washington.

If Obama considered “terrorism” a toxic word to be discarded, at least he did not do the same with “democracy.” He stayed on the plane of theory but addressed the issue squarely, not ducking its political aspects, and this was the part of the address that got the most positive reaction from the Egyptian audience. It was the only part of the speech where he actually lectured a bit, issuing a series of “you musts” when it came to what “government of the people and by the people” meant. Frankly it was more than I expected. It was a good start to articulate principles for which the United States stands, but then again, there was no promise of follow-up. What, if anything, will the Obama administration do when the Egyptian government excludes most of the opposition from the next parliamentary elections or when Syria throws a bunch of democracy activists in jail? Obama told us nothing about that. Privately, administration people are saying that Bush promised much on democracy and delivered little, and that Obama plans to do the reverse. Let’s see. We won’t have long to wait.

The women’s rights and economic development sections near the end had a cut-and-paste feel. These are Secretary Clinton’s pet issues, and apparently she is inclined to try to substitute them for democracy and human rights overall in policy and assistance programs. At least that didn’t happen in this speech. But the smallish economic and women’s rights initiatives mentioned created a sort of imbalance. It would have been better either to have Obama say what he was going to do in each of the major areas of the speech or none of them, perhaps saving the microloans for announcement in a fact sheet.

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Bernard Haykel :: I am writing from Riyadh where President Obama was cordially received but has left a bitter aftertaste among many here. His visit is seen as an attempt to get, not to say bully, the Saudi leadership to make concrete and positive gestures toward Israel, over and above the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. Saudis have little desire or willingness to do this because of a widely held view that Israel, especially under its present Likud leadership and after the brutal war in Gaza earlier this year, does not deserve this. A number of Saudis have asked the following question: Why should the Kingdom reward an Israeli leadership that is not even willing to acknowledge the Palestinians’ right to a state? Granting something additional now to Israel for nothing can only help make the Saudi leadership look weak-kneed.

As for Obama’s speech in Cairo, all the Saudis I have spoken to have acknowledged its rhetorical power, but they insist that only facts will make a difference to their assessment of the President’s true intentions.

My own view is that the speech was remarkable for its relative candor on a number of important issues (and for some notable omissions), but I am troubled by its framing which juxtaposes the United States and Islam as two equivalent entities, which they are not. In doing this, Obama has adopted unwittingly the framing of Al Qaeda’s ideology, and this in turn might grant a degree of legitimacy to discussing Islam as a political reality rather than a faith. Surely, it is certain forms of Islamism and not Islam that pose the problem.

The second notable point in the speech is Obama’s analogy between the plight of Palestinians and that of African-Americans under slavery and Jim Crow. The context here is Obama’s advice to Palestinians to adopt non-violent means in resisting Israeli occupation. As before, Obama has taken a page from Al Qaeda’s book, in which the alleged humiliation and oppression of Muslims are compared to the tribulations of African-Americans. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two leader, often invokes this same history by drawing on the examples of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers to argue that only violence and rejection can lead to political change, and to convince African-American soldiers to desert the U.S. armed forces.

In short, the framing of the United States’ relationship with the Muslim world as one based on friendship rather than enmity, while superficially and rhetorically laudable, is fraught with difficulties and pitfalls, not least because it can unwittingly give credence to the idea that there might in fact be a clash between the United States and Islam. I can imagine a long-bearded man now smiling in a cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

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Josef Joffe :: The problem laid out by President Obama in Cairo is an old one in America’s international relations. It is foreign policy as psychotherapy. The diplomatist/strategist deals with conflicts of interest and the “correlation of forces,” as our Soviet friends used to say. The therapist knows no such clashes, certainly no tragedies—only misunderstandings, fears, and neuroses. Obama-in-Cairo was Esalen-amidst-the-Pyramids. Or as he himself put it: “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.” It is an imaginary conflict, in other words.

There are several issues here. The first is that the therapist does not speak truth but reassurance. Obama recounts how Morocco was the first to recognize the United States in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1796. Unfortunately, the larger, though unmentioned, truth is less reassuring: that the first wars America fought after independence were with the “Barbary Pirates,” the potentates of the Maghreb. To break their nasty habit of selling American hostages for money, the young republic fought intermittently from 1801 to 1815. No misunderstandings here, just the naked clash of our interests against theirs.

A larger untruth is the (implicit) idea that America is at war with Islam, as uttered in the e contrario phrase: “America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.” Of course not. Who ever said so? Only Al Qaeda et al. did—copiously and tirelessly. These folks also keep saying as insistently that they are at war with the “Jews and crusaders,” with the West, and above all, America. Before the President reached Cairo, AQ’s No. 2, Aymal al-Zawahiri, let it be known that Obama’s speech would not at all change the “bloody messages” he was sending to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Therapists make no judgments on truth and falsehood; for them, the process is the purpose. But a process that does not correctly unearth the roots of conflict will invariably run afoul of the realities. Islamist terror will not go away because Obama softly, softly establishes a kind of moral equivalence between the Holocaust and what Palestinians call the Nakba, their loss and flight in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

Nor will the Arab world flock to America’s cause because of all the niceties Obama has bestowed on it. Let it be said, though, that the harsh rhetoric on Israel plus slaps like no-state-dinner for Mr. Netanyahu at the White House have been replaced by the balanced cadences of the Cairo speech: The Israelis have to do this, the Palestinians and Arabs have to do that.

But the chickens have already come home to roost. The hope, a perennial one, obviously is that the Arabs will be so overjoyed by the U.S. manhandling Israel that they will rally to Old Glory en masse, doing America’s bidding throughout the Greater Middle East. This is not how the Mideast works. To make the point, the spokesman of the Egyptian foreign ministry told the New York Times: “We will judge everything by the degree of Israeli commitments, and measures that are taken.”

In so many words: “Mr. President, now that you have pressured the Israelis, we want to see more of it. And more. And then, perhaps, we’ll do you a favor on other matters.” We are back at the oldest game of the Middle East. It is called “Let the U.S. Deliver Israel, Then We Might Start Acting in Our Own Interest.” Obviously, if it were in the Arab interest to push the Palestinians toward peace, and to engage in an alliance of containment and deterrence against Iran, they would have done so. But for lots of reasons, good and bad, the Arabs are not interested. And so the United States will keep weakening its only true ally in the Middle East without reaping any geopolitical fruit from its courtship of Araby.

Alas, a lot of damage will have been done before the United States learns that therapy is not grand strategy and changes course. But one bit of therapeutic advice remains apropos: Never treat your opponents and detractors better than your friends.

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Mark N. Katz :: President Obama gave a powerful speech in Cairo setting forth his vision of how the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world can be improved. In it, he called for change both in how the United States and its allies view and act toward the Muslim world. But he also called for change in how the Muslim world views and acts toward America and its allies.

Early on in the speech, he pledged “to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” In the very next sentence, though, he insisted that, “the same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America.”

His remarks about how the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq began and about Guantanamo were obviously critical of Bush administration policies. His saying that, “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements… It is time for these settlements to stop,” is an unmistakable call for change in Israeli policy. At the same time, however, Obama made clear that America’s bonds with Israel are “unbreakable.”

And in one of the most important passages of the speech, Obama called for a change in Palestinian behavior toward Israel. “Palestinians must abandon violence,” he stated bluntly. He noted that black people had suffered in America, but that, “it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.” He noted that non-violent resistance had overcome oppression elsewhere too. Non-violent resistance, he implied, would help the Palestinians achieve their goal of an independent state while violent resistance would not.

Later, Obama called for improved Iranian-American relations, but made clear that Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

Regarding the democratization of the Muslim world, Obama stated that this was not something that “can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” On the other hand, he made clear that America wants to see progress toward democracy in the Muslim world, and that this is in the interests of Muslim governments since “governments that protect…rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure.”

Those in the Muslim world who do not want to cooperate with the United States will find—indeed, have already found—reasons to dismiss Obama’s speech. Osama bin Laden dismissed it even before Obama gave it. However, those in the Muslim world who did not like American foreign policy in the past but would like to cooperate with America in the future can find in Obama’s speech an American president who acknowledges their concerns and is willing to work with them.

Obama’s Cairo speech represents a good faith effort to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world. If this does not occur, it will not be for lack of trying on Obama’s part.

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Mark T. Kimmitt :: OK. The long-anticipated “major speech to the Muslim world” is over, and it is being parsed for messages, inferences, policy directions and reactions. The “let me tell you what the President should say next week” crowd is reviewing the text to see if their recommendations were embraced, rejected or reversed. The analysts and pundits on Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and a thousand broadsheets in the region are assessing it to see how it aligns with editorial policy. The President is moving on, rhetorically and physically, to the next key administration challenge, be it North Korea, the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, General Motors, Afghanistan-Pakistan or a host of other high-priority national security issues.

As for the speech, all the right messages were sent out. America is not at war with Islam, we have common interests in fighting violent extremism, Palestine is a problem, a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat, and democracy is a form of human rights. So, let’s push the reset button. Good, practical sound bites that reaffirm U.S. policy and increase our appeal on the street, but there was little in the way of tangible new initiatives or promises of outcomes. Perhaps it was too much to expect, but the speech seemed more of a conversation rather than a commitment.

It’s fine to have a conversation. Perhaps it’s helpful to tell the Muslim world that we will get out of Afghanistan when the job is done, and get out of Iraq by 2012 regardless. Helpful to note that the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. Important to clarify that Iran should have nuclear power, but not nuclear weapons. But what is the administration going to do about this? The only tangible “we shalls” in the speech were easy and low-hanging fruit on education, science and technology, economic development and fighting violent extremists. No specific “we shalls” on Iran, on Palestine, on Gaza, on Syria. Only aspirations and “we seek.” Fine speech, but what’s next?

Was this a speech to guide U.S. policy or enhance U.S. popularity? Will the speech prove to be the catalyst for reform, for moderation, for diplomatic breakthrough or simply words to calm the street? If nothing else, the speech has built up expectations, and expectations are that the United States wants to reset the relationship—and that there will be tangible results from that new relationship. The Muslim world will be looking for outcomes, for a change to the status quo, for breakthroughs in long-standing grievances. The speech raised expectations and the street is looking for results.

Among the billion or so who listened carefully to a well-crafted speech, many are sitting in taxis, sipping coffee in cafes, praying in mosques and arguing in universities. Many if not all of them are applauding the speech and many (if not all) are asking the same question: what’s next?

So, congratulations on a great speech, well-written and well-delivered. It is certain to change more than a few minds about American intentions. But good words and good intentions have a rapidly depreciating value, and will make things worse if these words turn out to be false promises. Time will tell.

It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.

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Martin Kramer :: “Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that I respect more than the Mamluks God, His Prophet, and the Quran.” So spoke Bonaparte when he arrived in Egypt, in a proclamation of July 2, 1798. Substitute “Islam” for Egypt, “we Americans” for I, and “violent extremists” for the Mamluks, and you’ve got the core message of President Obama’s speech.

It’s a very old drill in the annals of “public diplomacy.” Supplementary gestures help. Obama was careful to pronounce the word Quran with the guttural qaf of the Arabic. (Too bad, though, he botched the word hijab.) Unless you’re converting, you can’t say Ich bin ein Muslim, so you come as close as you can. (Barack Hussein Obama—can we finally use his middle name now?—gets closer than most.) Some Muslims are wise to this, and so presumably they will discount it. But the great majority? Who doesn’t love pandering?

I leave it to others to parse the sparse policy pointers in the speech. (Rob Satloff does a nice job of it.) Some of the influences on Obama bubble to the surface. There is the Third Worldism: Muslims are victims of our colonialism (Obama has read Fanon) and the Cold War (has he been reading Khalidi again?) The primacy of the West is over: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” There is the implicit comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans during segregation, a familiar trope (Carter and Condi went for it too). Israel comes across as an anomaly. There is no appreciation of Israel as a strategic asset—its ties to the United States are “cultural and historical,” and thus not entirely rational. (That validates Obama’s other former Chicago colleague, Mearsheimer.) All of this has the ring of conviction—and of a Third Worldist sensibility.

Maybe the most disconcerting line is this one: “We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.” The pretense? This discrediting of liberalism and its universal humanism is the classic stance of the Third Worldist radical. And did you know that the job description of the nation’s leader now includes “my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear”? Perhaps it’s possible to disband CAIR. America now has a president who knows “what Islam is, [and] what it isn’t,” and who even has a mandate to insist on closing “the divisions between Sunni and Shia.” Perhaps an emissary should be sent from Washington to the pertinent muftis and mullahs: the mission would certainly be more congenial than closing divisions of General Motors.

Indeed, not since Bonaparte has a foreigner landed on Egyptian soil and delivered a message of such overbearing hubris. Were I a Muslim, this 6,000-word manifesto would have me worried stiff. This man wants to be my president as much as he is America’s.

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Walter Laqueur :: An excellent speech. Even before it was delivered, Wikipedia included it its list of the greatest speeches ever, a list beginning with the Pericles funeral oration. If a religion has 1.3 billion followers, it was only natural that the emphasis had to be on a new beginning, on mutual interest and mutual trust, on partnership, on peace, on not being prisoners of the past, on breaking the cycle of suspicion, on Muslims having enriched America, on doing away with crude stereotypes, on diplomacy and international consensus, on all of us sharing common aspirations, on listening and learning from each other, on Andalus, algebra and on the 1,200 mosques in America, on all of us being the children of Abraham, on “any world order that elevates one people over another will inevitably fail,” on education and innovation being the currency of the 21st century.

How much of this is genuinely believed? How candid can one (should one) be? I am sure that when the Prince of Wales said a few years ago that the Muslim critique of materialism helped him to rediscover sacred Islamic spirituality, he had never even heard about taqiya and kitman. I do not know the answer to the question; perhaps it was a mixture of the two.

Dissimulation may not be an admirable practice, but it could save lives. I recommend Macaulay’s 1850 essay on Machiavelli, a strong believer in Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare which, freely translated, means that he who does not know to dissimulate has no business to be in politics.

What of the impact of the speech? An unfair question: soft power, however desirable, has its limits. Pericles’ funeral oration did not lead to the resurrection of the dead and there is still much sin in the world despite the Sermon on the Mount.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: President Obama’s Cairo speech continues two venerable traditions of American public life. One arises from the electoral politics of foreign policy. It is customary for the presidential candidate of the out-party to promise more skillful conduct of the country’s relations with the rest of the world, either by adopting different positions—as with candidate Barack Obama’s promise to end American participation in the Iraq war—or by doing better in pursuit of a goal on which all agree.

During the Cold War the standard version of this second tactic was the charge that the incumbent had, through crass insensitivity, botched relations with America’s European allies, which the challenger promised to repair with more adept diplomacy. America’s relations with Muslims served this electoral purpose in the 2008 presidential election, with the challenger promising to improve them by dint not so much of his policies as of his identity. The purpose of the Cairo speech was presumably to deliver on that promise.

Unfortunately, it will not do so. Muslims’ attitudes to the United States will depend on Obama’s policies—that is, on what he does—not on who his father was. Whatever the uses of identity politics within the United States, there is no good reason to suppose that they have any significant effect beyond the country’s borders. As Anne Mandelbaum has observed, Dwight Eisenhower’s German background did not win him approval among Germans during the years, from 1942 to 1945, when he had extensive dealings with them. Nor is it clear why people in Muslim-majority countries should be favorably impressed with the fact that the United States has a president one of whose parents shared their faith. They live, after all, in countries governed, for the most part, by men who by that standard qualify as twice as Islamic as Obama, and whose performances in office have been, to put it generously, unimpressive.

The second political tradition that the speech continues is the perennial overconfidence of all presidents of the United States in the power of their own oratory. Such overconfidence is not surprising. In the United States an individual becomes the most powerful person in the world through his speeches. It is one of the glories of the American political system that a presidential election is, in part, a debating contest. Foreign policy, however, is not. Here again, what is relevant is the fact that what Obama does will shape Muslims’ (and others’) opinion of him and his country, while what he says will not. His impact on Muslims and the countries in which they live will therefore come from the policies affecting them that he devises after words fail him.

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Michael Rubin :: Obama is a gifted orator, one in a generation. By nature of Obama’s background—and the fact that he is not George W. Bush—he has a real chance to change the tone of discussion in the Middle East and among Islamic states. That said, rhetoric isn’t enough. Policy matters. Here, there is cause for concern. The Obama doctrine appears to rest on twin pillars: One is a decision to dispense with demands for accountability, and the second seems to be moral equivalency or cultural relativism.

Both Bush and Obama spoke of Palestine and their desire to see the creation of a state for Palestinian Arabs to live beside Israel. But Bush conditioned U.S. support for Palestine’s independence on a cessation of terrorism. Obama does not. And while he certainly condemned “violence” (perhaps terrorism is too loaded a term for Obama), he implied equivalence between this and the dislocation felt by some Palestinian Arabs.

Obama also cast aside demands for accountability when discussing elections, declaring “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.” This appears to be an allusion to the lack of U.S. support for the Hamas-led government in Gaza. The United States should be under no obligation, however, to befriend or assist governments which run counter to its interests. After all, U.S. foreign aid is not an entitlement. Hamas scrapped—and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt demands the scrapping of—agreements to which their entity and state have already obligated themselves. We should hold them accountable, not say we will embrace everyone.

As for cultural equivalency, I must object to his statement: “Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” Time and time again, however, it has been the superpower status of the United States which has prevented a far worse world order from taking root, be it in Europe, Asia, or even Latin America. The United States is not equal to Libya, nor should it ever be.

The cultural equivalency also permeated Obama’s discussion of democracy. Backtracking away from democratization as a pillar of policy, Obama said: “No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other. That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people.” But there are certain norms of good governance. On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, for example, we should not say, “Oh, well: That’s just the way Chinese democracy works.”

Let’s hope for the best but, absent a clear articulation of what the United States stands for and what our vision is, rhetoric will not be enough to make a better, more secure world or build a solid foundation for U.S. relations with Muslim-majority states.

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Harvey Sicherman :: President Obama’s Cairo speech was Wilsonian. The lofty moral tone, keen detachment (all claims treated equally), and leap-of-faith rhetoric are all there. So is the religious overlay. And as befits the shorter attention span of the 21st century, Obama proposes to remake the world in seven points instead of fourteen, in 55 minutes instead of Wilson’s 99-plus.

As president of a secular democracy, Obama’s choice of location (Mubarak’s Egypt) and audience (a “world” identified only by religion) offered minefields aplenty. He negotiated most of these with admirable dexterity but not always. One paragraph invoked “a partnership between America and Islam,” and then declared that “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” This was a bit much. Probably, as Theodore Roosevelt once said about a Wilsonian elocution, “as a matter of fact, the words mean nothing whatsoever.”

Some of the other words do mean something. Obama vigorously asserted the dignity of America’s civil religion, especially freedom of speech, religion, democracy, and women’s rights. He refuted dangerous nonsense about 9/11 and the Holocaust; explained policy in Iraq and Afghanistan; and justified the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coming from Saudi Arabia the day before, he instructed the Arab oil producers not to rely on “what comes out of the ground,” and instead educate their people. Good luck!

Obama’s “no sticks in sight” approach to Iran, including his apology on the Mossadegh affair (Madeleine Albright did this in 1998) was all open hand to which the Iranians thus far have responded with the middle finger. But the President’s framework ought to alarm the Israelis: will a U.S.-Iranian “dialogue” produce a demand that Israel yield its nuclear weapons in exchange for international guarantees that Iran, under international supervision, will not build one?

Obama, as he told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman before the speech, wanted to “speak directly” to the Arab street and persuade them of America’s “straightforward manner. Then at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.” But this is more than a margin call. Obama has straightforwardly distanced himself from Israel, the better to cultivate the Arab coalition, whose leaders are his real target. Can they deliver the Palestinians to a compromise acceptable to Israel? Can they do much to alter the Iranian course? Or is the Arab coalition’s influence, like that of the Arab street, or the world of Islam, only a shadow of its reputation? A historian might say of the Cairo speech that it was a triumph—of hope over experience.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: President Obama uses his bully pulpit in Cairo to urge his vision to the people of the Middle East. That vision is one of commonality based on common traditions and common humanity. The driving force that would motivate this commonality is teleological: a desire for progress. We all want the same things, he argues and urges: peace, prosperity, dignity, education, family, community. If we only look ahead, we shall get along with one another, and go along the path of progress. This is a remarkable post-postmodern rebirth of the 19th-century concept of progress.

But the President does not address the people of the Middle East, but instead addresses Muslims. In doing so, he validates the argument by Islamists that Islam should be the primary identity of the people of the Middle East, and implicitly validates the vision of a new Caliphate. And in focusing on Islam, he must over-communicate virtues and commonalities, and under-communicate problems and differences. Islam, he tells us, is a religion of “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” He goes on to say that “throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

This seems to me rather a whitewash of a dark history. Why, it’s déjà Bush, all over again: Islam is the religion of peace. Indeed, he argues that “one rule… lies at the heart of every religion—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” I suppose we should not be surprised that these formulations are geared to generate positive sentiments, rather than to summarize our knowledge of actual Islamic history, theology, or law.

Several times the President urges listeners to stop looking backward, to leave past grievances aside: “If we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward.” This is a difficult message for Muslims, given their understanding that the golden age of Islam was under Muhammad, who should for all eternity be the model for every believer. Islam under Muhammad is the life to be emulated. A good Muslim always looks back.

The specifics are mixed. The President is strong on “unbreakable” bonds with Israel, and that “Palestinians must abandon violence.” Definite on favoring two states. Strong on condemning Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, but in the abstract only. Strong on democracy generally speaking. Strong denouncing Iran’s bomb. Weak on Palestinians still in camps in Arab countries. Very mild on women’s rights. Ambiguous on Jerusalem. Wishes a nuclear-free world, but no special emphasis on a nuclear-free Middle East.

Shall the good intentions of the President pave the path to progress?

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Raymond Tanter :: President Obama’s Cairo speech was replete with soaring rhetoric designed to reach out to Muslims around the globe, and particularly those in the Arab world. The President remarked that now is “a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world,” but added:

We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek. A world where extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God’s children are respected.

The President can certainly talk the talk regarding outreach to Muslims, but will he walk the walk that the Muslim street wishes to see?

Doing so would require a number of U.S. policy changes to appease the Muslim street, such as pressuring Israel to make unilateral concessions, expanding engagement with Syria without preconditions, accepting an Iranian regime with a uranium enrichment capability, withdrawing forces more quickly from Iraq, halting drone attacks of Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan, and reversing U.S. escalation in Afghanistan.

President Obama was careful to signal that such unrealistic policies would not be forthcoming. He indicated an evenhanded policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute, reaffirmed his commitment to keep Iran from getting the bomb, held to his Iraq timetable, and justified escalation in Afghanistan.

The President’s indications that no major policy reversals would occur clashed with his eloquent rhetoric about a “new beginning” between Muslims and non-Muslims. Without any dramatic policy changes, President Obama’s speech is likely to unfairly raise expectations in the Muslim world, leading to inevitable disappointment.

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Michael Young :: President Obama’s homily in Cairo had much that was interesting in it and much that was vague. That’s the nature of these communications, but several things suggested that Obama wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

In referring to the war in Iraq, the President remarked:

Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.

Indeed. But if Iraqis are better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, what does that tell us about U.S. policy when it comes to supporting democracy and human rights in the Middle East? After all, neither diplomacy nor an international consensus would have ever freed Iraqis from under Saddam’s thumb. So did the United States do the right thing in getting rid of the Baath regime by force? Obama didn’t address this prickly question.

That fuzziness, however, permeated his later discussion of democracy in the region. Obama pointed out: “So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” But then he went on to say that this did not lessen his commitment to governments that reflect the will of the people. Except that “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.”

But hadn’t Obama just presumed to know that the Iraq war was ultimately beneficial for the Iraqi people, since he felt that they were better off without Saddam? And weren’t they better off without Saddam because the new system they are living under was imposed on them? And weren’t Obama’s bromides in favor of democracy and democratization not also statements implying that he presumed to know what was best for everyone?

If so, then why did he not just come out and state the obvious: that democracy, openness and pluralism are indeed better for all states, as is respect for human rights. Why did Obama prefer to avoid rocking the boat when it came to autocratic regimes in the region? Not a word was uttered on actual cases of human rights abuses, whether in Egypt, which was hosting him, or in any other part of the Middle East. Clearly, the realist aversion to involving the United States in the domestic policy of the region’s states was on display.

Finally, I was interested in what Obama had to say about the Maronites and the Copts, given my weakness for minorities in the region: “Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld—whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt.”

Yet this advice Obama placed under the rubric of “religious freedom.” Odd, because the problem of minorities in the Middle East is usually more political than religious. What the Copts would like more of is political power, not the freedom to exercise their religion. As for the Maronites, their sense of decline is attached not to the fact that they cannot practice their religion, which they can do without any objection from their Muslim compatriots, but that they feel political power is escaping them.

What do these issues have in common? They lead me to a disconcerting conclusion that Obama has no coherent view of political freedom in the Middle East. He tended to overemphasize religion, while underemphasizing how the United States might address political matters, such as what to do about dictatorial regimes, the major cause of the great trauma he described, namely 9/11; or how to reverse the absence of democracy in the Middle East, in illegitimate states that fail to fulfill the aspirations of their citizens; or what to do about minorities denied political power, Muslim and non-Muslim.

Obama submerged his speech in the holy water of religion, but it is freedom, the failure of the Arab state, and the lack of accountability of regional regimes that are far more central to the dilemmas the Middle East face today. In one word, it is mostly about politics, and on this Obama was too busy being polite to his listeners to raise the difficult questions he promised to raise.

Go to the comments for more from Alan Dowty, Chuck Freilich, Bruce Jentleson, and Michael Reynolds.

“Scholars on the Sidelines” is the headline of an op-ed by Harvard’s Joseph Nye in Monday’s Washington Post. There he notes that the Obama administration has appointed few political scientists to top positions, and predicts a widening of the divide between policymaking and academic theorizing. His Harvard colleague Stephen Walt has echoed the complaint, placing the blame upon scholars who follow what he calls “the cult of irrelevance.” Michael Desch, a Notre Dame political scientist, also has written in the same vein in a new piece entitled “Professor Smith Goes to Washington,” claiming that while Obama may be “depopulating the Ivy League and other leading universities with his appointments,” it’s unlikely the academics can match the influence of the think tanks or overcome the anti-intellectualism that pervades society and government.

The driver of this year’s rehashing of the issue is the promise of the Obama administration; just a few years ago it was the threat of Al Qaeda. Ask Bruce Jentleson now a MESH member, who wrote a similar and much-discussed lament about academic insularity—exactly seven years ago.

Of course, the debate is older than that. I addressed it myself, in an article entitled “Policy and the Academy: An Illicit Relationship?” originally delivered as a lecture in 2002. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the passing of Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), who taught politics at the London School of Economics and whose work has had an abiding influence upon many students of the Middle East, myself included. My subject was a short essay by Kedourie, dating from 1961, entitled “Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit.” I explored (and contested) Kedourie’s principled belief that policy and the academy should not meet, and that the divide benefited them both.

My piece is on the web and many have read it. But now that this debate has resumed, I think it useful to provide access to Kedourie’s own text—a trenchant 1,100 words—which I think speaks rather more forcefully than my synopsis of it. Read his piece first, and only then read my discussion of it. (By the way, the poet he quotes is Eliot; the poem, Gerontion. And yes, Kedourie usually did put “social scientists” in quotation marks.)

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Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit
by Elie Kedourie

Foreign policy, it is universally agreed, is a practical pursuit. It is an activity the end of which is the attainment of advantage or the prevention of mischief. Foreign policy, in short, is action, not speculation. Is the academic fitted by his bent, his training, his usual and wonted preoccupations, to take or recommend action of the kind which generals and statesman are daily compelled to recommend or take?

Someone might say, in reply, that academics are the best fitted for this activity. They have, after all, a highly trained intelligence, they are long familiar with the traffic of ideas, and long accustomed scrupulously to weigh evidence, to make subtle distinctions, and to render dispassionate verdicts. Plato, it might be urged, was not far out in his hopes of philosophers becoming kings.

The good academic is indeed as has just been described, but it is not really wise to invoke Plato’s shade, and exalt the scholar to such a high degree. For consider: if the academic is to recommend action here and now—and in foreign policy action must be here and now—should he not have exact and prompt knowledge of situations and their changes? Is it then proposed that foreign ministries should every morning circulate to historians and “social scientists” the reports of their agents and the despatches of their diplomats? Failing this knowledge, the academic advising or exhorting action will most likely appear the learned fool, babbling of he knows what.

It may be objected that this is not what is meant at all: we do not, it may be said, want the academic to concern himself with immediate issues or the minutiae of policies; we want his guidance on long-term trends and prospects; and here, surely, his knowledge of the past, his erudition, his reflectiveness will open to him vistas unknown to the active politician, or unregarded by him. And should not this larger view, this wider horizon be his special contribution to his country’s policies and to its welfare? But this appeal to patriotism, this subtle flattery, needs must be resisted. Here the man of action may be called on in support: it is related of the great Lord Salisbury that presented with a long, judicious, balanced memorandum written by one of his officials, and abounding in wise considerations on the one hand, and in equally sage considerations on the other hand, he impatiently exclaimed: “How well do I know these hands!”

The long view, the balanced view, the judicious view, then, can positively unfit a man for action, and for giving advice on action—which, as has been said, must be taken here and now. The famed academic, Dr. Toynbee, writing his Study of History in 1935 came to the conclusion, on the weightiest and most erudite of grounds, that there was no likelihood of Peking ever again in the future becoming the capital of China! Should he not have remembered the sad and moving confession of Ibn Khaldun—a writer he much admired—that his minute knowledge of prosody unfitted him for the writing of poetry?

What is true of poetry is as true of politics, and an academic’s patriotic duty is not to confuse rulers with long views and distant prospects, for the logic of events seems to take pleasure in mocking the neat and tidy logic of ideas:

Think now [it is a poet who warns us]
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear.

How difficult, therefore, to be wise, except after the event, and how every leap is a leap in the dark! To be wise only after the event is accounted a failing in men of action; but to be wise after the event is a virtue in historians. To leap in the dark requires strong muscles, steady nerves, a taste for adventure, and not too great a fear of the consequences. “I am not responsible for the consequences” Salisbury used to say, and he meant that having acted to the best of his knowledge and judgement, he could not but let the events take their course as the fates in their caprice decreed.

Shall academics then presume to instruct a man how he shall leap? Presumption is the pride of fools, and it ought to be the scholar’s pride not to presume. It is pursuit of knowledge and increase of learning which gives scholars renown and a good name. How then should they, clothed as they are in the mantle of scholarship, imitate this lobby or that pressure group, and recommend this action or that, all the time knowing full well that in politics one is always acting in a fog, that no action is wholly to the good, and that every action in benefiting one particular interest will most likely be to another’s detriment. Scholars, of course, are also citizens, and as such jealous for the welfare and honour of their country. Equally with other citizens they can recommend and exhort, but they should take care that a scholarly reputation does not illicitly given spurious authority to some civic or political stance.

Of what use then are academics? The impatient, mocking question seems to invite the short, derisive answer, which men of action and men of business have not seldom been disposed to give. But the scholar’s existence and activity does not have to be justified by his usefulness. Who, in the first place, shall be the judge of usefulness, who can tell whether the useful will not turn out to be useless and worse, and in the second, a world in which people shall live or die according as they are useful or not is one which men must feel to be totally estranged and hostile. The question therefore cannot be, of what use are academics, but rather what is it that they do. Unlike the earlier question, this one does not plunge the enquirer into the metaphysical depths, and the answer to it is very simple. Academics seek to transmit and to increase learning, one had almost said useless learning—but one does not wish to provoke. Foreign policy they leave to those who make bold to know how to leap in the dark.

First published in The Princetonian, January 4, 1961; republished in Elie Kedourie, The Crossman Confessions and other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion (London: Mansell, 1984).

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The appointment of Dennis Ross as “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia” (announcement here) has caused some puzzlement, in part because the geographic focus of his title seems fuzzy. This is especially so for “Southwest Asia.”

On the face of it, “Southwest Asia” looks like a geographic reference, and it has always had a few enthusiasts among geographers. It’s also been favored by those who deem it less Eurocentric than “Middle East” or “Near East.” (Maybe it is, but since Asia as a continent is a European idea, calling any region “Southwest Asia” hardly solves the problem.) Once there was even a maverick academic program, at SUNY Binghamton, called the Program in Southwest Asian and North African Studies (SWANA for short). But “Southwest Asia” got no traction in American academe, and even the SUNY program eventually swapped SWANA for MENA (Middle East and North Africa).

So when did “Southwest Asia” finally get its big break, and begin to turn up in high places as a near-synonym for the Middle East? “From the moment of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979,” wrote U.S. diplomat and strategist John C. Campbell, “Washington began to talk of ‘Southwest Asia’ instead of the Middle East as the area of crisis and of American concern.” Cold War strategists wished to emphasize that the region was crucial not because it was east of us, but because it was immediately southwest of the Soviet Union, which had a plan to push through to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The sooner Americans started thinking about the region as “Southwest Asia,” the sooner they would grasp the nature of the threat.

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski effected the shift in labeling. Two days after the Soviet invasion, he warned President Jimmy Carter that “the collapse of the balance of power in Southwest Asia… could produce Soviet presence right down on the edge of the Arabian and Oman Gulfs.” Carter, reeling from the combined effects of the invasion and the Iran hostage crisis, opened a dramatic television address to the nation some days later with these words: “I come to you this evening to discuss important and rapidly changing circumstances in Southwest Asia.” Carter proceeded to warn Americans of “a threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia.” A month later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee jumped on board, and held a series of landmark hearings later published as “U.S. Security Interests and Policies in Southwest Asia.”

“A new name has been devised to cover these counties on which attention has been concentrated during the past 12 months,” wrote the military historian Sir Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs a year later. “Southwest Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and the oil-bearing states bordering what now must tactfully be termed simply ‘the Gulf,’ all constituting a politically seismic zone of incalculable explosive potential.” Campbell later gave a similar definition: “‘Southwest Asia’ includes everything from the eastern fringes of the Arab world to the western limits of the Indian subcontinent.” (Campbell also added that “roughly, it is Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘arc of crisis.’” Brzezinski had coined that phrase a year before the Soviet invasion, and it figured prominently in a January 1979 story in TIME magazine, whose cover showed a Soviet bear looming over the Persian Gulf. TIME explained that Brzezinski’s “arc of crisis” consisted of “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.”)

This “Southwest Asia,” then, wasn’t a geographic reference at all, but a strategic one with a Cold War application. Not surprisingly, both the CIA and the Pentagon quickly picked up the term and ran with it. The CIA established a Southwest Asia Analytic Center, which produced papers like “The Soviets and the Tribes of Southwest Asia.” The Defense Department acted similarly, applying “Southwest Asia” (SWA) to a large area centered in the Gulf, but extending far beyond it. “Southwest Asia” is now the core of CENTCOM’s “Area of Responsibility” (AOR), which runs from Kazakhstan to Kenya.

Which brings us back to the Ross appointment at the State Department. “Southwest Asia” isn’t much used at State, which still prefers “Middle East” and hasn’t even given up entirely on “Near East.” (”Southwest Asia” is regularly used only in the Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, where it includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka.) After the Ross announcement, journalists wanted to know exactly what Ross’s own area of responsibility covered. In particular, did it include Afghanistan and Pakistan, the original entry point to “Southwest Asia” of the Cold War strategists? Hadn’t responsibllity for both countries already been given to Richard Holbrooke, named only a month earlier as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan?

At first, even the acting State Department spokesman, Robert Wood, didn’t know just what “Southwest Asia” included, which made for an embarrassing exchange at the Department’s daily press briefing. (Question: “You guys named an envoy for Southwest Asia. I presume that you know what countries that includes.” Wood: “Yes. Of course, we know. I just—I don’t have the list to run off—you know, right off the top of my head here.”

But the next day, Wood had an answer:

MR. WOOD: Let me give you my best—our best read of this. From our standpoint, the countries that make up areas of the Gulf and Southwest Asia include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, and those are the countries.

QUESTION: Not—not Afghanistan and Pakistan?

MR. WOOD: Look, Ambassador Ross will look at the entire region, should he be asked to, including Afghanistan. But this is something that would be worked out. You were—you asked the question yesterday about Ambassador Holbrooke and whether there was going to be some kind of, I don’t know, conflict over who is working in—on that particular issues in that country.

Look, Ambassador Ross and Ambassador Holbrooke will work together where necessary if they need to, if there’s some kind of overlap. But that’s, in essence, the State Department’s geographical breakdown of Southwest Asia.

QUESTION: Okay. So it does not—it is not the same breakdown as the military uses?

MR. WOOD: No, the military uses a different breakdown, but I’d have to refer you to them for their specific breakdown.

QUESTION: So it doesn’t include Jordan? It doesn’t include—

MR. WOOD: I just gave you the breakdown as I—as the State Department breaks it down.

QUESTION: So if Ambassador Ross is special envoy—special advisor for Gulf and Southwest Asia, what is the difference between Gulf and Southwest Asia?

MR. WOOD: Look—

QUESTION: For me, this is Gulf.

MR. WOOD: Well, it may be for you. For others, it may be different. I’d have to—I’ve given you what the Department’s position is with regard to the geographic makeup of the region.

Why did the State Department construe “Southwest Asia” so narrowly—so much so that it really is indistinguishable from “The Gulf”? That’s a matter for speculation. One report says Ross did have Afghanistan and Pakistan on the list of countries he thought belonged in the package. Holbrooke reportedly insisted they both be dropped, and got his way.

But it’s already clear that last week added yet another layer of confusion to the terminology the United States inflicts on the region to suit its own political, diplomatic, and strategic requirements. There is a “Near East” and a “Middle East” and a “Greater Middle East” (GME) and a “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) and a “Broader Middle East and North Africa” (BMENA). And now, alongside the Defense Department’s greater “Southwest Asia,” we have the lesser “Southwest Asia” of the State Department as scaled down for Ross. (This is not to be confused with the “Southwest Asia” of the State Department’s own Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Not a single country in that bureau’s “Southwest Asia” is identical to Ross’s.) Of course, labels tend to slip and slide across the map over time, depending on circumstance. It’s just remarkable to see them slip and slide at one time, in one building.

Meanwhile, in Iran, there is no confusion, only outrage that the appointment of Ross mentions “The Gulf,” as opposed to the Persian Gulf. Iran has waged a persistent campaign to keep the Persian adjective firmly fastened to the Gulf. But the Iranian government won’t take offense at Iran’s inclusion in “Southwest Asia”—to the contrary. Last year a leading Iranian journalist wrote a column entitled “There Is No Middle East.” The message:

The people of Southwest Asia and North Africa should not use the appellation Middle East to describe their home region because it was coined by European imperialists. The use of such non-indigenous terms only serves to reinforce mental slavery and subjugation…. The vocabulary that we use influences our thought patterns. If Muslims use Eurocentric vocabulary, even when speaking our own languages, it will undermine our sense of identity. A better substitute for the Middle East/North Africa would be Southwest Asia/North Africa, which could be abbreviated as SWANA.

Don’t Persians know that the naming of Asia is owed to… the Greeks?.

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Below: Jimmy Carter delivers his January 4, 1980 televised address concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (There is a brief preface on the Iran hostages.) His White House diary records this as an “Address to the Nation on the situation in Southwest Asia.” Notice the prop in the opening shot: a globe positioned so as to show the region. Toward the end of this segment, the camera pans across a map. (If you cannot see the embedded clip, or wish to view the entire address, click here.)

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With the fighting over in Gaza (at least for now), many see Hamas emerging as the victor in the same way that Hezbollah did in the war it fought with Israel in the summer of 2006. But did Hamas really win? Is it better off now than before the fighting began?

Just like Hezbollah in 2006, Hamas has survived its January 2009 conflict with Israel. Also like Hezbollah, Hamas has retained—and perhaps even increased—its control over its core constituency. In another similarity with Hezbollah in 2006, the 2009 conflict with Israel has increased Hamas’s status throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Also like before, criticism in the West and elsewhere has focused on the damage caused by Israel, and not the damage done to it.

Further, Hamas can probably still launch missile attacks on Israel just like Hezbollah can. Finally, Hamas has reportedly begun to rebuild the Israeli-damaged tunnels it uses to smuggle weapons from Egypt into Gaza.

But just how impressive are these achievements? Like Hezbollah, Hamas survived an Israeli onslaught. But also like Hezbollah, Hamas was unable to prevent or stop Israel from causing enormous damage to its supporters as well as the population it claims to protect. It is true that the conflict has increased the stature of Hamas in the West Bank. But this was something that was already occurring anyway through the incompetence and corruption of Fatah, which has made Hamas look better to many Palestinians.

Like Hezbollah in 2006, Hamas has won enormous sympathy and support in Arab and other Muslim countries. But if anything, Hamas has received even less support from their governments than Hezbollah did. America’s Muslim allies have not broken relations with Washington (as many did in 1967) or sent men and materiel to help their Palestinian brothers fight Israel. Even anti-American forces have kept their distance from Hamas. While expressing solidarity, Hezbollah has not launched a missile onslaught from Lebanon that might have forced Israel to divert its attention away from Gaza. Indeed, Hezbollah was quick to disclaim responsibility for the few missiles that were fired into Israel from Lebanon. As for Syria: while encouraging Hamas to resist, Damascus has done little to help it do so.

Tehran has actually become frightened over the genuine anger toward Israel that has welled up among Iranians. As Azadeh Moaveni’s Washington Post Outlook piece of January 25 noted, “Early this month, Khamenei appeared on national television to temper his previous declaration encouraging martyrdom on behalf of the Palestinians. He thanked the young people who had offered to go die in Gaza but said that ‘our hands are tied in this arena.’ Khamenei didn’t really want anyone’s hands to be untied, however; the whole Gaza incident was meant to distract Iranians, not to jeopardize Iran’s role in the region.”

However impressive the volume of outrage expressed in the Arab and Muslim world over Gaza, the Palestinians living there—and Hamas itself—may well have been more impressed by the fact that they received no meaningful support from these quarters in their struggle.

Also like Hezbollah, Hamas could not take much comfort from European criticism of Israel, as this did not result in effective action to halt Israeli military activity—much less any material support for the Arab side. Most importantly, whatever strains the 2006 and 2009 conflicts may have put on the Israeli-American relationship, U.S. support for Israel clearly remains strong. While criticism of Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians may be growing in the United States, this has not led to sympathy or support for Hamas. Nor is it likely to.

Finally, it should be pointed out that a large part of the reason why Hezbollah was perceived as victorious in 2006 is that it was the Israelis themselves who, in their disappointment at not having destroyed it, declared Hezbollah to have been the winner. Yet while Hezbollah’s political strength within Lebanon certainly increased as a result of the 2006 conflict, it is noteworthy that Hezbollah has been extremely careful not to provoke another Israeli attack since then.

It remains to be seen whether Hamas will follow Hezbollah’s example in refraining from firing missiles into Israel after such an intense conflict with the Jewish state. If it does, then Hamas’s behavior might more reasonably be described as prudent rather than victorious. If, instead, it resumes missile attacks, Hamas risks not only triggering another Israeli intervention in Gaza, but also being blamed by Gazans for having needlessly brought them more pain without any gain. And this would open the door for another Palestinian movement to displace Hamas through taking advantage of Hamas’s mistakes (just as Hamas did with Fatah). Hamas cannot afford a “victory” such as this.

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Jon Alterman :: For those who despair reading still more about the Middle East but who find it frivolous to read something that has nothing to do with Semites at all, Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament is the answer. Auslander’s book is a hilarious romp through his adolescence in an Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, New York. Shoplifting, sexual aids, and premarital sex all make unlikely appearances in this book. The battle running through the book is the way in which the author’s deep religiosity plays off against his rather lax observance. Auslander believes fervently in a God who is endlessly tormenting him and punishing him for his excesses, and he just as fervently feels he should tell God to stick it. Auslander’s eye for hypocrisy, his impatience with religious pieties, and his underlying outrageousness make this book laugh-out-loud funny, page after page. One can only hope the names in this book were changed to protect the innocent.

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Daniel Byman :: God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Levering Lewis, is a quirky and wide-ranging book, covering the period of Islam’s rise and spread. Unlike most histories of this period, Lewis is superb not only at detailing the struggles within the Arab world and Muslim community, but also at placing Islam’s rise in context: we learn about imperial politics and dynamics that weakened Byzantium and the Sassanid empires and allowed the new religion to flourish and about Islam’s competition with parts of Christian Europe (in particular the Franks). Much of the book focuses on Spain, where Islam flourished as Muslims and Christians traded with, taught, and warred against each other.

Lewis’ writing is colorful yet clear, and he is an excellent storyteller. Scholars may note that there are large parts of the story that he doesn’t cover or mentions only briefly (Byzantium, in my view, gets short shrift, particularly in the centuries after Islam’s birth), but such gaps are inevitable for a book that covers such a vast period and region.

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Mark T. Clark :: Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda is a good book for the holidays. Naylor, a war correspondent for the Army Times, narrates the U.S. military operation in March 2002 against the Taliban and remnants of Al Qaeda in the Shahikot Valley in Afghanistan. It was the largest military operation in Afghanistan after the action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda at Tora Bora.

The well-written book is riveting for many reasons. First, it helps the reader understand the kinds of challenges the United States faces in fighting in Afghanistan; second, it shows some of the problems the United States has encountered while trying to avoid the mistakes of the Soviet Union; third, it reveals some early problems with Rumsfeld’s transformation plans; fourth, Naylor’s account demonstrates the difficulties of coordinating such a large operation with conventional and special operations forces in conjunction with CIA operatives and indigenous fighters. And fifth, it promises to help the reader anticipate some of the concerns we may have when the Obama administration shifts U.S. focus away from Iraq and towards the renewed conflict in Afghanistan.

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Steven A. Cook :: I recommend Amin Maalouf’s wonderful book about his family, Origins. The first 75-125 pages are a bit of a slog, but once over that hump, Maalouf’s work hums along as he traces the arc of his family’s history from Lebanon to the United States to Cuba to France and back to Cuba. Largely because Maalouf is a writer of historical fiction, the book captures all the complexities of identity without the post-modernist jargon that often clouds the issue.

One of the most poignant moments early on in the book is Maalouf’s discovery of a trunk filled with, among other items, his grandfather’s correspondence. Maalouf’s meticulous, yet also vaguely frantic efforts to organize the contents of the trunk represent the ambivalence of the assimilated émigré. He is content in the Parisian world of letters, but there is an inextricable pull to the ancestral village in the mountains that hang over Beirut. The scene launches Maalouf on a journey to understand not only his grandfather’s life, but also to comprehend the powerful nature of that force that connects him and his relatives to this place. The device for this meditation on identity and one’s place in the globalizing world is the tension between the lives of Boutros, Maalouf’s grandfather, and his brother Gebrayel who ventured from Lebanon in the late 19th century bound for New York City and ultimately Havana.

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Mark N. Katz :: I love travel narratives, and since this is a recommendation for holiday reading, I’d like to call attention to one of my favorite Middle East travel narratives: Eric Hansen’s Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea. Yemen is frequently in the news, and the news from there never seems to be good. Yet as visitors to Yemen (including myself) have discovered, there is much that is friendly and attractive about this country that is little known not only to Westerners, but also to other Arabs.

In this book, Hansen conveys a strong sense of the country’s rugged beauty and individualism. Though many outside Yemen fear the rise of radical Islam there, Hansen’s descriptions of two widespread Yemeni customs—chewing qat (a mildly narcotic leaf) and carrying arms—suggest that this is not a country that Al Qaeda or other puritanical Islamist movements will find easy to dominate. Hansen, though, also discusses Yemen’s many problems—which have largely grown worse since his book was published. More than anything else, Motoring with Mohammed provides a clear, understandable introduction to a country whose politics so often appear to be neither clear nor understandable.

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Martin Kramer :: The Institut du monde arabe in Paris is hosting a splendid show on Bonaparte in Egypt through March 19. I saw it, and couldn’t resist the sumptuously illustrated catalogue, Bonaparte et l’Égypte: feu et lumières. It’s the next best thing to being there, and a perfect souvenir or gift if you do get there over the holidays. Not only are all the exhibits shown and explained, but there are background essays by leading experts, including Henry Laurens on Egypt and the French Enlightenment, André Raymond on Mamluk Egypt, Abdul-Karim Rafeq on Bonaparte’s Syrian expedition, and more. Despite its title, the exhibition covers Franco-Egyptian relations right up to the digging of the Suez Canal. There’s lots to captivate, from a panoramic painting of the Battle of the Pyramids to a special bookcase designed to hold the Description de l’Égypte, on loan from the National Assembly. Safe to predict that two hundred years hence, our descendants won’t be celebrating the cultural legacy of the invasion of Iraq. That’s what makes the French great—even (and all too often) in defeat.

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Walter Laqueur :: Read The Yacoubian Building, a fascinating, astonishingly outspoken bestseller about the life of the dwellers of a well known building in Central Cairo dealing with the radicalization of Egyptian youth, the fate of the old elite, homosexuality, corruption and a great many other topics. The novel, written by a Chicago-trained Egyptian dentist, inspired a movie by the same name, as well as a television series (I liked the movie even better than the book).

Also to be looked at (even if your Hebrew is a little rusty) is David Kroyanker’s new book about the (Jerusalem) German Colony. The author, architect and historian of architecture and Jerusalem, has dealt earlier on with half a dozen other sections of Jerusalem. This book, heavily illustrated and well researched, covers the history of this part of Jerusalem since the first Templars arrived from southwest Germany in mid-19th century. About every other house gets a write-up or illustration. Both a coffee table book and a serious study of wide interest.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: The Foreigner’s Gift by Fouad Ajami, the most insightful book on the American encounter with Iraq, has three cardinal virtues. First, it takes the measure of the people of Iraq as no other book has done, because unlike almost all other Iraq books, this one is written by a native speaker of Arabic with a deep familiarity with the history and culture of the Middle East, who visited the country frequently and traveled widely in it after 2003. Second, as the book’s subtitle—The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq—indicates, the book deals in depth with the third party to the post-2003 events, describing how the rest of the Arab world worked to thwart the plans and crush the hopes of the other two. Third, the book is elegantly, often lyrically written. Anyone interested in the Middle East will find The Foreigner’s Gift a pleasure to read even as he or she will come to understand better both the frustrations and tragedies since 2003 and the more recent hopes for better days in Iraq.

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Michael Reynolds :: The best books for the holidays are ones that are accessible to a general reader yet manage to inform and open new vistas. My recommendation, the Chechen doctor Khassan Baiev’s memoir of life and war in Chechnya, The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire is more than just accessible, informative, and stimulating. It is one of the most powerful stories I have read, and was written by one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met.

The book’s title refers to Baiev’s determination during the wars of Chechnya to fulfill his Hippocratic obligation to treat all wounded and sick, Chechen fighters and Russian servicemen alike. Baiev’s loyalty to his profession’s code led both sides eventually to identify him as a traitor and seek retribution, forcing Baiev to flee Chechnya in 2000. Fortunately, he was able to find asylum in the United States, where he put his story to paper.

Baiev’s description of the laceration of Chechen society by war, radical Islamism, and crime in the years between 1994 and 2000 is exceptional in its intimacy, but the book offers more than a recounting of conflict in Chechnya. Through the story of his childhood and life in the former Soviet Union, Baiev allows the reader to see the Chechens, who more commonly are either celebrated cartoonishly as die hard opponents of Russian imperialism or pilloried wholesale as terrorists and gangsters, as people. Baiev’s witness of human savagery unsettles at the core, yet his own example of courage inspires and offers hope.

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Tamara Cofman Wittes :: Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India, by Kristian Davies, is beautifully produced, with many full-color plates and wonderful details of some great Orientalist paintings. But more importantly, Davies helps us understand how and why Western artists became fascinated with these “exotic” parts of the world, through a narrative that is mercifully free of academic aridity and political jaundice. His fresh approach resonates with his pure aesthetic enjoyment of the subject, and his delight at peeking into the worlds (the real world, and the ones in the artists’ minds) that the paintings portray.

How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America’s leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:

Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.

I leave aside the identification of the Arabs with Princeton. Kerr was a Princetonian, but so am I, and I would have preferred to identify the Arabs with Columbia, for all sorts of reasons. But it is the way Kerr contrasts pre-1967 with post-1967 Arab politics that is striking—and misleading. Even in 1967, Arab politics hadn’t been “fun” in a very long time: as early as the 1940s, they had become a serious and deadly game of costly wars and bloody coups. True, Kerr was writing in the aftermath of Black September in Jordan, a time when Arab politics seemed to have come completely unhinged. But the idea that 1967 put an end to the “good old days” of Arabs “scrimmaging happily” was a pure piece of nostalgic romance in the grand Arabist tradition.

Unfortunately, such nostalgia is seductive. For years, it has been at the root of a notion that persists even today: if we could somehow undo the 1967 war—if we could undo the injury inflicted in those six days—we could put the Middle East back to where it was in the “good old days.” In this view, the Arabs and the world could have “fun” again if only we could erase the Arab memory of that war—by erasing its every consequence.

But the “good old days” analysis is entirely false, and not only in its distortion of Arab politics prior to 1967. It is false because it overlooks how the 1967 trauma trimmed the ideological excess of the pre-war period, and opened the way to pragmatic Arab acceptance of Israel.

That ideological excess, known as pan-Arabism or Nasserism, rested upon a prior sense of injury, in which 1948 played the major part. In that earlier war, Israel succeeded in defeating or holding off an array of Arab armies, and three quarters of a million Palestinian Arab refugees ended up in camps. The injury of 1948 was so deep that, over the following twenty years—Kerr’s “good old days”—there was no peace process. The Arabs nursed their wounds and dreamed only of another round.

1948 also had a profoundly destabilizing effect on Arab politics. Three coups took place in Syria in 1949, and often thereafter; Jordan’s King Abdullah was assassinated (by Palestinians) in 1951; Free Officers toppled the monarchy in Egypt in 1952. Everywhere, the 1948 regimes were faulted for their failure to strangle Israel at birth. Military strongmen seized power in the name of revolution, and promised to do better in the next round. Those “good old days” were in fact very bad days, during which Arab politics became militarized in the certainty and even desirability of another war with Israel.

In 1967, the other war came, and these regimes suffered a far more devastating defeat, delivered in a mere six days. Unlike 1948, when they had lost much of Palestine, in 1967 they lost their own sovereign territory. The shock wave, it is generally assumed, was even greater.

Yet what is telling is that the regimes didn’t fall. Nasser offered his resignation, but the crowds filled the streets and demanded that he stay on—and he did. The defense minister and air force commander of Syria, Hafez Asad, held on and ousted his rival two years later, establishing himself as sole ruler. King Hussein of Jordan, who had lost half his kingdom, also survived, as did the Jordanian monarchy. The only regime that failed to withstand the shock waves of 1967 was Lebanon’s, and Lebanon hadn’t even joined the war. Kerr wrote that 1967 had left the Arab players “crippled for life.” In the three Arab states that lost the war, the regimes survived, the leaders ruled for life, and they are now being succeeded by their sons.

What explains the fact that 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab system as 1948 did? It is true that even before 1967, these regimes had started to harden themselves. The evolution of the Arab state as a “republic of fear” dates from the decade before 1967, and this probably helped regimes weather the storm. Unlike in 1948, there weren’t many refugees either—the Arab states lost territory, but the war was quick, and most of the inhabitants of the lost territory stayed in their homes.

But I believe the reason 1967 didn’t destabilize the Arab order is this: Arab regimes and peoples drew together in the fear that Israel could repeat 1967 if it had to, and that it might show up one day on the outskirts of Cairo or Damascus (as it threatened to do in 1973), or come right into an Arab capital (as it did in Beirut in 1982).

The memory of 1967 thus became the basis of an implicit understanding between the regimes and the peoples: the regimes will avert war, and in return the people will stay loyal, even docile. The regimes have upheld their end, by gradually coming to terms with Israel, and by leaving the Palestinians to fight their own fight. Pan-Arabism—which largely meant sacrificing for the Palestinians—faded away because no Arabs were prepared to risk losing a war for them. The skill of rulers in averting war has helped to secure and entrench them.

I call this understanding implicit—it doesn’t have an ideological underpinning. Pragmatism rarely does. But the evidence for it is that no Arab state has entered or stumbled into war with Israel in over thirty years. The memory of the 1967 trauma has been translated into a deep-seated aversion to war, which underpins such peace and stability as the region has enjoyed. 1967 thus marks the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict—the conflict between Israel and Arabs states, which had produced a major war every decade. 1973 marks the end of the end, in which two Arab states stole back some honor and territory, precisely so they could lean back and leave Israelis and Palestinians to thrash out their own differences. This narrower Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a sore, but its costs have been limited compared to a state-to-state war.

It is important to note that pan-Arabism did survive elsewhere in the Arab world, where its illusions continued to exact a very high cost. I refer to Baathist Iraq, which wasn’t defeated in 1967, and where pan-Arabism continued to constitute one of the ideological pillars of the regime, vis-à-vis Iran and the West. There it also led to miscalculation, war, and defeat, on a truly massive scale. The Iraq wars—there have been three in the last three decades—provide a striking contrast to the relative stability in Israel’s corner of the Middle East—a stability which rests, I suggest, on the Arab memory of 1967, which restructured Arab thinking in the states surrounding Israel, away from eager anticipation of war, and toward anxiously averting it.

So in regard to Arab politics, I have offered a possible revision of the usual view of 1967: perhaps its memory, far from making the Arabs angry and volatile, underpins the stability of the Arab order and regional peace. If so, then perhaps we should recall it as a year of net benefit all around—as compared, say, to 1979, the year of Iran’s revolution, or 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The impact of 1967 was to create a new balance, and push ideology to the margins of politics. The impact of 1979 and 2003 has been to unbalance the region and strengthen radical ideologies. 1967 ultimately produced a process that led to the finalizing of borders between states. The combined impact of 1979 and 2003 threatens to erase borders from the map.

The risk today, over forty years later, is not that the consequences of 1967 are still with us. It is that memory of 1967 is starting to fade, and its legacy is being eroded. I am struck by the subtitles of the two leading books on 1967. Michael Oren’s is June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Tom Segev’s goes even further: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. If only it were so. The problem is that the Middle East continues to be remade and transformed by subsequent events, whose legacy is much more damaging than the legacy of 1967.

What then happens when the Arab world is dominated by generations that no longer remember 1967 or, more importantly, no longer think Israel capable of reenacting it? What memories are replacing the memory of 1967? The 2006 summer war in Lebanon? (To rework Kerr’s analogy, that was like Columbia playing Notre Dame to a draw.) Without the memory of that defeat of forty years ago, the ranks of the Islamists could swell with people who imagine victory. Without the fear of war, peoples could turn away from those rulers who have made peace—away from the implicit understanding that underpins order. Will it be possible to build stability and peace on other memories, or other promises?

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There are two opposing coalitions in the Middle East today. On the one hand, there is a revisionist coalition comprised of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah—a coalition dissatisfied with the distribution of power in the region, and dissatisfied with the current agenda-setters and frameworks for state action. These revisionists include states and non-state actors. Like other such coalitions in the region’s past century of history, they are using their ability to play spoiler on regional issues and within the domestic politics of certain Arab states, in order to force status-quo states to give them a greater share of attention and power.

Hezbollah’s dynamic leader, Hasan Nasrallah, and Iran’s populist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, envision a region defined by unending “resistance” against Israel, the United States and status-quo Arab governments. Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad argue for the redemptive value of violence and offer the promise of justice and dignity for Arabs humiliated by decades of defeat at the hands of the West and Israel, and decades of humiliation and neglect at the hands of their own governments.

Against this group of revisionist actors is a looser coalition of status-quo actors who are trying to preserve the regional balance of power, including the role played by the United States. It is notable that today’s status-quo coalition, unlike any in the Middle East’s past since 1948, includes all the major Arab states alongside Israel and the United States.

Even on the streets of their own cities, moderate Sunni Arab leaders such as Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah (all associates of the United States) are less popular than Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad. The radicals’ message of resistance is always combined with denunciations of Sunni Arab leaders for cowering under an American security umbrella and making humiliating deals with Israel, and for ignoring the plight of their own people. The revisionists’ critiques of Arab governments’ performance both regionally and domestically are echoed and reinforced by the narrative of the domestic Islamist opposition inside Egypt, Jordan, and the other Arab status-quo states.

This balance of forces in the region had its coming-out party in the 2006 Lebanon War, and the diplomacy and developments since that conflict all represent the efforts by regional revisionists to capitalize on the openings that conflict created for them, and by the status-quo states to recover and contain the revisionists’ influence.

Because of this regional face-off, and the imperative of containing this revisionist coalition of actors, America and her major Arab partners need one another more than ever. But Arab states are cooperating with America in the face of unprecedentedly high levels of public anti-American resentment and anger. America and the status-quo Arab states must attempt to cooperate in containing these regional threats at a time when each of them individually, and their partnership itself, are subject to widespread public resentment and opprobrium. And the regional revisionists are proving themselves very effective at wielding this public sentiment against both the Arab regimes and against Washington. That puts them in a real dilemma. Over time, in the absence of some kind of regional progress, this U.S.-Arab strategic cooperation on big regional issues like Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel will only survive if Arab governments are willing to repress that domestic resentment and anti-Americanism.

That is not a stable foundation for long-term relations, and it’s a situation that plays right into the arguments of regional radicals like Hasan Nasrallah as to why these regimes have to be overthrown: they sell out to the Americans, they make humiliating deals with Israel, and they don’t care about the people.

Washington and the Arab capitals are like two donkeys tied together on a cart: neither can stand without the other’s help, and neither can escape unless the other is also freed. The Arab regimes are implicated by our failed foreign policies in the region, and we are implicated by their failed domestic governance. If we don’t help each other, we are both in trouble, and we know it.

Escaping from the bind that the United States and its Arab friends are in in the Middle East today requires several things that seem in short supply in 2008: a commitment to sustaining our investments when many weary Americans would prefer to walk away from the table; new investments in issues like Arab-Israeli diplomacy even though the returns are likely to be meager at best; and a commitment to the long term, despite the urgency many feel for quick results.

Here are my thoughts on what such a policy must comprise:

• A renewed effort at Arab-Israeli peacemaking—not because the situation is ripe for resolution, but because a peace process is part of containing the regional revisionists and especially the efforts of Iran to plant both feet firmly in the heart of the Levant. A peace process will not solve all the problems of the Middle East. But a peace process is important because it creates tensions and disagreements among members of the revisionist coalition, weakening their impact on the region and on our regional allies.
• A continued U.S. commitment to security in the Persian Gulf. Despite Russia and China’s more energetic commercial efforts in the region, neither of these countries is eager to take over this job. The United States must continue to keep the Gulf open for all, and I am fairly confident it can be done peacefully. But it does require concerted multilateral diplomacy to deal with the Iranian nuclear program, to deal with Iraqi stabilization, and to help the GCC states build the capacity and will to play a greater role in Gulf security.
• Initiatives that will present a compelling narrative of progress, peace and prosperity to counter the narrative of rejection and resistance put forward by the revisionists. As I said, that suggests the value of efforts at Arab-Israeli peace, but it also suggests the need to present the vast majority of Arabs who live outside Palestine with the opportunity to shape their own future. This promise can only be fulfilled through far-reaching political, economic and social reforms that create a new relationship between Arab governments and their citizens.

Arab leaders keenly feel the threats from radical Islam within their own societies. They know that Islamists have capitalized on state failures and weaknesses, and that the critique put forward by local Islamists is magnified by the rising popularity of Iran and its allies. In this insecure environment, U.S. efforts to persuade at least some Arab leaders of the need to reform should resonate—if it is part of a broader regional agenda, and if it is accompanied by the right kind of incentives.

For now, most Arab regimes believe that the best way to manage the threat from domestic Islamist opposition is to focus on resolving regional conflicts like Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, relieving them of the burden of addressing domestic grievances. While the United States should work with them to resolve regional conflicts, the next president needs to help them understand that the best insulation against the destabilizing effects of regional revisionists and rising domestic Islamism is to repair the frayed social contract between citizens and the state.

Tamara Cofman Wittes made these remarks at a symposium on “After Bush: America’s Agenda in the Middle East,” convened by MESH at Harvard University on September 23.

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I’ve already prepared my briefing for the next president. No point in waiting until he calls me at 3 a.m., which he certainly will. Of course, I could leak it then, but Bob Woodward is already working on his next book, so I might as well leak it now. Here we go.

Thank you for the White House invitation, Mr. President. You don’t know how much I appreciate this appointment as your advisor—my talents were wasting away in that think tank. You’ve asked me to give you a ten-minute briefing on our interests in the Middle East, in a way even a community organizer or small-town mayor or U.S. senator can understand. You’ve asked for an unvarnished telling—no lipstick. No problem. Here’s what you need to know.

The primary U.S. interest in the Middle East is the free flow of energy from beneath its soil to the United States and to our partners elsewhere. The United States is the largest consumer of oil in the world—it consumes a quarter of all world production. We consume twice as much per capita as the other industrialized countries, twelve times as much as the rest of the world. We’re the biggest consumers of energy in the history of humankind. The Middle East is home to 60 percent of the world’s remaining oil; the United States has less than 2 percent. Transferring energy from there to here—and elsewhere to people who depend on us—is our primary interest in the Middle East.

And within the Middle East, Mr. President, the epicenter of our interest is the Persian Gulf. The name “Persian Gulf” is a very old one, you’ll find it on every map. But it might as well be called Lake Michigan, so integral is it to the lubrication of American life. This means that the U.S. must secure the Gulf, and can’t allow any part of it to be dominated by any other power, global or regional.

But in the Middle East there are people as well as oil, and they have more than the usual share of pathologies. A prime U.S. objective, then, has been to isolate the energy flow from those pathologies, by deflecting or combatting or alleviating them.

The preferred way—the American way—had been to find allies among the rulers, and to work with them discreetly, from off-shore and over the horizon. This technique worked for many of your predecessors. The American oil companies ran the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, American advisors assisted the Shah of Iran, arms sales kept clients happy, and there was no need to place an American boot on the ground. Almost every shore of the Gulf was friendly.

But beginning thirty years ago, the Gulf began to heat up. Vast oil wealth began to feed delusions of grandeur and hatred of America, in three forms. Let’s call them, for short, Khomeinism in Iran, Saddamism in Iraq, and Bin Ladenism in Saudi Arabia. Iran’s revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and 9/11, were all Gulf-generated push-back against our primacy. Sometimes they cancelled each other out—as in the Iran-Iraq war—but by 2003, our grip on the Gulf was loosening. We had two of the three big states, Iran and Iraq, under a weak “dual containment,” and the third, Saudi Arabia, was being pressured by jihadists to get us out. When the United States finally invaded Iraq in 2003, we were in search of a foothold. Instead, we almost sank into quicksand. But we’ve pulled ourselves out, and you should be careful not to fritter away our advantage in Iraq. There aren’t many alternative platforms.

Mr. President, our problem in the Gulf remains acute. Oil is a finite resource, demand for it is growing, and we’ll continue to have to expend energy to get energy. Unfortunately, our Gulf allies are really dependencies, and can’t do the fighting for us. In Iraq, we’ve destroyed Saddamism and dealt a blow to Bin Ladenism. But Khomeinism lives, and all those who resent us in the region are rallying to Iran, which promises to succeed where others have failed, by acquiring a nuclear weapon.

The thing to remember about Iran, Mr. President, is that it was once an empire. The classical authors and early European mapmakers called it the “Persian Gulf” for a reason. What we face now is an Iran that’s determined to erode our position in the Gulf, so that we’ll disappear, just as Britain did before us. This is the most formidable of the three challenges we’ve faced in the Gulf. If Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, the Gulf waters will become almost impossible to chart, the oil states (and Israel) will be unnerved, and our primary interest will be at risk. History may not forgive you, so keep all your options on the table.

Mr. President, you ask how much attention should be devoted to Israel and the Palestinians. Once upon a time, it was thought that Israel versus Arabs was the source of all instability in the Middle East. Israel fought against Arab states in every decade, and in 1973, one of those wars actually harmed our primary interest: the Arabs imposed an oil embargo. The United States since then has worked hard, and successfully, to meliorate that conflict. We did it by upping our support for Israel, thus dissuading Arab states from more war, and bringing Egypt and Jordan to make peace with Israel. For the last thirty-five years, there have been no state-to-state wars involving Israel.

True, there have been a couple of Palestinian “uprisings,” and Israel has chased the PLO and Hezbollah across Lebanon. But these skirmishes never rose to a level that would disrupt our primary interest, the energy flow. Fostering an Israeli-Palestinian deal would be a good deed, but its contribution to our overall interests would be marginal, and an attempt to negotiate one would be all-consuming. It could overload your bandwidth, pushing everything else out. In present circumstances, any problem that can be managed without our troops isn’t that urgent. Show interest, but don’t waste time.

Afghanistan is another perpetual crisis that’s resistant to all attempts at resolution. The country itself is of little intrinsic importance, but it does export misery, from drugs to jihadists. Amelioration and containment are probably the best strategies—isolating its pathologies from spreading to Arab countries or Pakistan. But be careful not to portray this as the “good war,” because we won’t ever deploy enough troops to win it decisively, and we can achieve our limited goals short of that anyway.

One last warning, Mr. President. On the edges of the Middle East, we’ve relied heavily on two regimes which have been our most consistent partners in hunting jihadists: Musharraf’s Pakistan and Mubarak’s Egypt. Musharraf is gone, and Mubarak is quite likely to be gone before you leave this office. Pakistan and Egypt aren’t as central to our core interests as the Persian Gulf. But if extremists succeed in taking either, temperatures at the core of the Middle East will rise dramatically. (This will be so even if we disarm Pakistan’s nukes before the country goes under.) It’s difficult to judge the likelihood of such a debacle. But to hedge against the consequences, be prepared to upgrade security ties with Israel and India, which we’ll need to absorb and deflect the shock.

Again, Mr. President, it’s an honor. I know we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. At 3 a.m. Goodnight, sir. Shall I tuck you in?

Martin Kramer made these remarks at a symposium on “After Bush: America’s Agenda in the Middle East,” convened by MESH at Harvard University on September 23.

This wire service article from the New York Times of April 27, 1952 is evidence of how the National Geographic Society once unsuccessfully tried to define the Near, Middle, and Far Easts “in terms of logical geographical divisions.” It is amusing now to read the rationale for the Society’s insistence on centering the Middle East in… India. (Read the article for details.)

The motive was a desire to save the term Near East from oblivion. Middle East, which the British had embraced after the First World War, had pushed Near East aside in discussions of contemporary politics. In 1946, the term Middle East struck a deep root in America, with the founding of the Middle East Institute in Washington. The new institute began to publish the Middle East Journal the following year. Likewise, the New York Times regularly referred to the region as the Middle East. This caused some consternation in official circles, since Near East remained the preferred term of the U.S. State Department. (Even today, the region comes under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.) The article does indeed suggest that the National Geographic Society was following the State Department’s lead.

Needless to say, the “logical” division proposed by the Society, which would have pushed the Middle East thousands of miles eastwards, failed to reverse the tide of popular usage. In August 1958, the State Department finally gave up, as announced by the New York Times in an article headlined “‘Near East’ is Mideast, Washington Explains.” The National Geographic Society took a bit longer. Its January 1959 map of the region skirted any admission of defeat, by employing this evasive title: “Lands of the Eastern Mediterranean (Called the Near East or the Middle East).” But ultimately the Society too gave up the fight. (Follow the evolution of its maps of the region here.)

And so we are not called NESH.

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