How do we know whether our models, or, to be more modest, our characterizations of countries are correct? We try to show that the case studies and other information that we adduce support our vision. But our interpretations are seldom challenged by immediate events, and their validity is most easily assessed in the long term, by which time our views have been forgotten or are deemed irrelevant.

At a recent conference on Iran, three speakers with strong credentials made a case that the Islamic Republic government was basically rational, that it responded reasonably to variations in its political environment, and that its goals were based on realpolitik and realistic. I had two doubts about that. First, its fundamental raison d’etre was religious, and religious objectives, very aggressive ones, appear to be its long-term goals. Second, its extreme position on Israel appears to be fueled by a religious absolutism and triumphalism.

In recent days, I have become convinced about a third basis for doubt about the rationality of the Islamic Republic government. The Iranian national election for president was, by established procedure, already fixed. Four acceptable candidates were chosen out of the hundred-plus by the “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei. All four were outstanding supporters of the Islamic Republic and had held high positions.

But this was not sufficient for the “Supreme Guide” and his extremist supporters. Instead of letting the populace vote for their preferred candidate among this small coterie of loyalists, the “Supreme Guide” decided to fix the election again, in favor of the most extreme candidate, Ahmadinejad. (In Persian, the name is Ahmadi-nejad, rather than the incorrect Ama-din-ejad that one hears on the media.) So, for the benefit of choosing among the small differences in outlook of the candidates, the “Supreme Guide” decided to insure that Ahmadinejad would win, whatever electoral fraud, and preemptive announcement was required.

Was it rational for the “Supreme Guide” to jettison all pretense of electoral probity, and of a “Republic” supported by the people, for such a small gain? Was the loss of legitimacy both at home and abroad worth it? Was driving the populace, seeking small measures of personal freedom and economic stability, to a new understanding that the Islamic Republic regime was their enemy, a reasonable price for the small gain of choosing one among the selected candidates? I would suggest that it was not rational, but rather an expression of fanatical religious motivation. And that would make the Islamic Republic regime a non-rational player.

The events of the fixed election and it s popular aftermath has inadvertently provided a test for a model of the Islamic Republic proposed by Amir Taheri in The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution, published last March, before the recent election. Taheri (p. 358) says that “Iran today… is… like a heaving volcano, ready to explode.”

Taheri’s thesis is based on the multiple contradictions and fractures in Iranian society: revolutionary institutions versus conventional state institutions; the revolutionary armed forces versus the state armed forces; the radical mullahs who wish to control the government versus more traditional mullahs who do not wish religion to be tainted by governance; religious foundations and Revolutionary Guard enterprises versus the workers demanding trade unions; revolutionary religious surveillance of education versus teachers; the revolutionary generation versus the post-revolutionary youth; and Shi’a Persians supported by the revolutionary government versus ethnic and religious minorities.

Taheri cites as further reasons for popular discontent the oppression of the revolutionary institutions, from attacks and arrests over “improper” dress and comportment, to mass arrests of allegedly dissident populations, to the continuing closing of newspapers and magazines deemed insufficiently sympathetic to the regime, to the ever increasing blocking of the electronic media, to the blacklisting of authors and books, to “disappearances” of trade union leaders, journalists, student activists, ethnic activists, and opposition mullahs, to the ongoing wave of executions of minorities—especially Kurds, Arabs, and Baluch—and other perceived opponents of the regime. Taheri (p. 361) says that “faced with popular discontent, the Khomeinist clique is vulnerable and worried—extremely worried…. Iran today… is about a growing popular movement that may help bring the nation out of the dangerous impasse created by the mullahs.”

Taheri wrote this before the recent election and the extraordinary popular demonstrations against the fixed results, and then against the regime. I think that a case can be made that Taheri’s account of Iran has been validated by subsequent events. If he were correct in his assessment, the result should have been exactly what did happen. Taheri’s model has been tested by events and shown to be sound.

What is Taheri’s policy advice? He says (p. 361) that “the outside world would do well to monitor carefully and, whenever possible, support the Iranian people’s fight against the fascist regime in Tehran.” How would he do that? “With a clear compass, the litmus test for any particular policy towards Iran will likewise be clear: does this activity, program or initiative help or hinder regime change?” (p. 362). What would not help is for foreign countries to treat with the regime in any way that would validate it and give it legitimacy. President Obama and European Union, please take note.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Summer is upon us, and MESH has asked its members to recommend books for summer reading. (For more information on a book, or to place an order with Amazon through the MESH bookstore, click on the book title or cover.) And now that you have other reading, MESH takes our first vacation since we launched back in December 2007. Action will resume on August 10.

Daniel Byman :: Kill Khalid by Australian journalist Paul McGeough (New Press, 2009) offers a riveting account of the bungled Israeli assassination attempt against Khalid Mishal in Amman in 1997. McGeough also explores the rise of Hamas and the emergence of Mishal as one of its leaders. Kill Khalid is extremely readable and draws heavily on interviews of many of the key figures. McGeough also provides an interesting account of Hamas after its victory over Fatah in elections in 2006. I would have liked more on Hamas’ rise inside the West Bank and Gaza before 2006, and the focus on Mishal means that several other key players do not receive enough attention. But these criticisms are simply a desire to have an already long book be even longer. McGeough’s occasional sympathy for Hamas will annoy some readers, but it would be a shame if this turns them off the book completely, as he offers plenty of interesting stories and provocative thoughts about a group that is not well understood in the United States.

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Mark T. Clark :: Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez propose a provocative thesis in their book, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (Yale University Press, 2007). They propose that, contrary to conventional historiography, the Soviets provoked the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt in order to destroy Israel’s nascent nuclear program. The conventional wisdom holds that while the Soviets may have carelessly provoked the war (by baselessly charging the Israelis with preparing for war against Syria and Egypt), they nonetheless acted to constrain their Arab clients once war began. Ginor and Remez demonstrate conclusively that this interpretation has more to do with holding to certain assumptions than in attending to all the details that have become available through careful research, interviews, some archival work, and unintended admissions by Soviet officials and participants in the war. The authors are continuing their research beyond the book and will present their latest findings at ASMEA’s annual conference in October 2009. But you will have to read this book first.

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Michael Doran :: My favorite recent book on the Middle East is not on the Middle East at all: Peter Rodman, Presidential Command (Knopf, 2009). Although it is a study of U.S. national security policy making, it is highly relevant to students of the Middle East, not least because it presents an original interpretation of Bush 43’s Middle East policies—one that is considerably at odds with the reigning narrative. Let me revise that last sentence: “an original and critical interpretation….” Rodman was no cheerleader. The entire book is rewarding, but, if nothing else, read the Bush 43 chapter—personally, I found it riveting. Fair warning: the book does have a dispassionate, academic quality that makes it less than ideal as fun, beach entertainment. It is, however, essential reading. Rodman, who was a member of MESH, died unexpectedly last year. He was a special man. In his honor, be sure to read the eulogy by Kissinger at the beginning.

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Adam Garfinkle :: Lawrence Rosen, a Princeton anthropologist (also a lawyer and an early MacArthur “genius” awardee), has a “big idea” in his newest book, Varieties of Muslim Experience (University of Chicago Press, 2008). The idea concerns the intensely personal, relational nature of what he calls Islamo-Arab society. The metaphor that holds it all together is that of the arabesque. Rosen tries to illustrate the workings of this big idea with regard to politics, law, science, terrorism, portraiture, how we understand Ibn Khaldun, and more.

Some of these applications have appeared in Rosen’s earlier work, and some of his attempts at interpreting the big idea are more persuasive (to me, anyway) than others. Still, despite the occasional repetition and the density of the some of the writing, this is worth a look. If you take a social anthropological approach to the Middle East as the beginning of wisdom, as I have done now for several decades, you will have more patience for Rosen’s kind of writing and way of thinking than if you have limited yourself to IR/poli-sci-fi kinds of writing. So this book is not for everyone, but it is stimulating. It provides new ways to support arguments some of us make on related but different grounds (about the fit between Arab political culture and political pluralism, for example). Above all, perhaps, it really does traffic in a big idea, which, for anthropologists these days, if not for other social scientists, is depressingly rare.

Ah, but will it hold your attention at the beach or at poolside? If you’re worried it might not, maybe bring along Tom Robbins’ new one, B is for Beer, just in case.

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Michael Horowitz :: Assaf Moghadam’s book, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), is an excellent read. Moghadam is a leading expert in the study of Al Qaeda and suicide attacks and his expertise shines through. He discusses the rise and spread of suicide terrorism, and specifically looks at how the Salafi Jihad movement has spearheaded the spread of suicide terror tactics. Well-researched and argued, this book deserves a close read by all scholars interested in questions of terrorism, Al Qaeda, and the way globalization is influencing the trajectory of terrorist groups.

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Josef Joffe :: “Two states” between the Jordan and the Mediterranean are back en vogue, what with Obama demanding it, and Netanyahu grudgingly conceding it. Dividing up a beach towel, which this slice of 50 miles essentially amounts to, would be hard enough for two friends. It is, unless the Lord intervenes, impossible between two foes. There is only one alternative that is worse: a “one-state solution.” Benny Morris, in his book One State, Two States (Yale University Press, 2009), tells us why, in all the gloomy and bloody details—quotes, facts, and all.

The Israelis, who made the horrible mistake of settling “Judea” and “Samaria” post-1967, have finally come around to “two states” in principle. The Arabs have not, or as Morris puts it: The “Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, from inception and ever since, has consistently regarded Palestine as innately, completely, inalienably and legitimately ‘Arab’ and Muslim and has aspired to establish in it a sovereign state under its rule covering all of the country’s territory.” So, it’s not just Tulkarm, but Tel Aviv, too. There is no place here for the Jews, and that, as Morris adds, Arabs believe “in the deepest fibers of their being.” Could this ever change? It has—but that happened in another country which was once fiercely irredentist. Germans have yielded Alsace-Lorraine and those lands that are now Polish, Russian and Czech not just in writing, but also in their hearts. But then look at all the “intervening variables:” Cold War, nuclear weapons, European integration, population transfers numbering 9 million, and, above all, a liberal-democratic polity where Hitler once ruled. This is how you change a zero-sum into a non-zero sum game. Morris makes for melancholy summer reading, but he cuts skillfully through layers of wishful thinking and sloppy analysis to lay bare the core of the Hundred Years War. Germans and French have fought over Alsace-Lorraine a lot longer—since Louis XIV.

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Mark N. Katz :: Former CIA analyst Emile Nakhleh lays out a strong case for how the United States not only should, but could improve relations with the Muslim world in A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World (Princeton University Press, 2008). In 162 pages, he points out that radical Islamism is a minority phenomenon within the Muslim world, and argues that the U.S. must recognize this in order to isolate it. The most interesting—and controversial—part of the book are his ten recommendations for guiding future American foreign policy toward the Muslim world. I assigned this book as a text for my “War on Terror” seminar earlier this summer, and it proved highly successful in engaging the interest of my students as well as provoking discussion and debate over his policy recommendations in particular. As my students showed, not everyone will agree with these. But Nakhleh’s book is an excellent starting point for how to reorient American foreign policy away from a narrow focus of how to defeat radical Islam to a more effective approach that seeks to discredit it.

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Walter Laqueur :: Christopher Caldwell is a columnist of the Financial Times. There have been several dozen books in various languages about the political, cultural, and social changes taking place in Europe (and about to occur in the years to come), but Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (Doubleday, 2009) is still useful, based on wide reading and shrewd observation. This levelheaded book has its weaknesses, it is far better informed about European reactions to Muslim immigration than on European Islam and the differences within Muslim communities and between various countries. But it still deserves to be read in view of the great resistance in Europe to accept the fact that important changes have taken place, and confusion over what to do about it.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: The subtitle of Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007)—a compelling, smoothly written history based on prodigious research—announces one of its themes: the connection between the world’s strongest country and the world’s most turbulent region is an old one. It dates back, in fact, to the earliest years of the republic: the war with the Barbary pirates in the latter part of the 18th century and the outset of the 19th counts as the first war waged by the independent United States. (The war was won, but only after years of setbacks—perhaps a portent for our own time.) For their chronic naivete about the Middle East, therefore, Americans have no good excuse.

The book’s title expresses another of its principal themes. The American encounter with the region has had three distinct although overlapping sources. Power, of course, is the principal moving force of international affairs, and as the United States has grown stronger over the decades its entanglement in the Middle East, as in other parts of the world, has deepened. Because Americans have always been religiously inclined people, the Holy Land has held a special attraction for them. The commitment of American Protestants to the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland goes back, for example, to the 18th century. And Americans have consistently held beliefs about the region based on their own wishes and hopes rather than on the realities of the societies there. If one of the bases of recent American policy in the Middle East—the belief in Arab democracy—turns out to be a fantasy, it will have a long pedigree.

One other theme from this rich account deserves mention. For religious, self-interested, and altruistic reasons Americans have tried, for more than two hundred years, to do good in the land of the Bible, the pyramids, and the mosque. More often than is commonly realized, as Oren documents, they have succeeded. The low public standing of the United States among most Middle Easterners (Israelis conspicuously excepted) for the last six decades therefore provides powerful supporting evidence for the proposition that no good deed goes unpunished.

For those interested in these three themes, and in putting the occupation of Iraq, the confrontation with Iran, and the sputtering but apparently immortal Arab-Israeli peace process in their proper historical context, Power, Faith, and Fantasy is the book to read.

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Joshua Muravchik :: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Free Press, 2007) is simply a great work of literature. How she does it, I cannot imagine since, as we learn in the book, English is apparently her sixth language, and they are disparate ones. Move over, Joseph Conrad. The prose is beautiful. The recounting of her childhood and coming of age in Somalia and other Third World venues is gripping. No less so, her flight to the West and her encounter with, and gradual assimilation of, its culture. Hirsi Ali is a significant political figure, but never mind the politics. This is a magnificent tale of human growth and triumph.

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Michael Reynolds :: Summer reading and Tolstoy are mutually exclusive, but I urge readers to make an exception for Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat (Dodo Press edition, 2009), and not because Tolstoy was an Orientalist (he studied Oriental languages at Kazan University). Hadji Murat is a short and fast-paced novel set in the Great Caucasus War which Russia waged against the Avars, Chechens, Lezgis, Circassians and other mountain peoples of the North Caucasus in the 19th century. Drawing on his own experiences fighting in the Caucasus, Tolstoy illustrates an empire at war with tribal peoples.

The novel’s namesake and central character is an Avar notable trapped between an Imperial Russian Army seeking to subdue the mountaineers and an Islamic resistance movement led by Imam Shamil, who grimly seeks to upend traditional mountaineer society in the name of religion. As a classic work of literature, Hadji Murat explores universal themes, including the dynamics that drive men to fight and sacrifice their lives. It reveals, among other things, the complexity of modern insurgencies, where bureaucracies clash with clan structures, trust is impossible, and religious, ethnic, and family ties all compete for the loyalties of individuals, with often fatal consequences.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: Amir Taheri, executive editor-in-chief of Iran’s Kayhan newspaper prior to the “Islamic revolution,” and now living in the West, is an unalloyed opponent of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution (Encounter Books, 2009), written for a popular audience in clear prose, doesn’t mince words in its rejection of the current regime. The Islamic Republic’s claims to Islamic purity are debunked; its insistence on world conquest exposed; and its brutality to its own people denounced. Taheri cites widespread internal clerical opposition to the regime, including quotes from ayatollahs that the Islamic Republic is “a conspiracy against God and believers,” and “the rule of the corrupt, by the corrupt, for the corrupt.” The entire sordid history of the Islamic Republic is recounted in detail and assessed. Taheri makes a strong case that the Iranian people deserve better. In sum, a lively read by a knowledgeable partisan.

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Raymond Tanter :: Alireza Jafarzadeh’s The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) charts a unique path among commentary on Iran by directly linking the Iranian regime’s ideology with its quest for nuclear weapons. Jafarzadeh’s knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program is expansive: In August 2002, as spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, he revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, where the Iranian regime had clandestinely built cavernous centrifuge enrichment halls. In The Iran Threat, Jafarzadeh examines the rise of President Ahmadinejad and the corresponding Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) control of Iran’s nuclear program. As the IRGC and its clerical ally Ayatollah Khamenei consolidate power following the fraudulent re-election of Ahmadinejad in June, it is worth revisiting Jafarzadeh’s incisive work on the Iranian president’s background and the ideology that underpins his domestic and international policies.

“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.

MESH members’ answers are appearing in installments throughout the week. Today’s responses come from Michael Mandelbaum, Mark N. Katz, and Michael Horowitz. (Click here for yesterday’s opening installment.)

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Michael Mandelbaum :: Asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is supposed to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” Similarly, it is too soon to render a verdict on the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, the attempted political transformation of Iraq. To be sure, the American public has already decided that the effort has gone on too long and has cost too much in blood and treasure. Historians may, however, be kinder, if Iraq eventually becomes a stable country with a reasonably representative government and a free press in which Shia, Sunni and Kurds coexist more or less peacefully.

The administration was correct in believing that democracy—which includes liberty and the rule of law as well as free elections—would be a potent antidote to many of the Middle East’s pathologies and correct, as well, to believe that a democratic Iraq could serve as a positive example for the rest of the region. It erred insofar as it believed that democracy could take root there quickly or easily, or that the United States could do much to hasten this generations-long process.

What is most important for American interests in the region, however, is not a democratic Iraq, welcome though that would be, but rather a non-nuclear Iran. Here the administration has not done well. The mullahs are surely closer to having the bomb now than they were in January 2001. Just what could have been but was not done to slow or stop them will inevitably be a matter of controversy: perhaps, short of the use of force, nothing would have worked. My own view is that the foolish and pointless American alienation of Russia, beginning in the mid-1990s with the eastward expansion of NATO, cost us Russian support for maximal pressure on Iran, which might at least have helped to restrain the Islamic Republic.

Whatever its failings concerning Iran, the Bush administration is not guilty of the frequently-made charge that it missed the opportunity to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If, as Samuel Johnson observed, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then the Middle East peace process is both the last refuge of the exhausted administration and the first recourse of those who aspire to replace it. The next administration, if it plunges immediately into negotiations, will not do better; it will simply fail sooner, absent fundamental changes in the attitudes toward Israel of the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, changes that are not within the power of the United States to bring about.

In the Bush Middle East policy, finally, and indeed for the outgoing administration’s foreign policy in general, one grand failure does stand out: in energy. The global pattern of the production and consumption of oil, leading to massive transfers of wealth to oil-exporting countries, has created or aggravated virtually every problem American foreign policy confronts. It funds terrorism and the global spread of the Wahhabist form of Islam. It props up the anti-American regime in Iran, as well as the rule of Vladmir Putin in Russia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It worsens the American current account deficit and global warming.

The key to alleviating all these problems is to lower the world’s consumption of oil. That in turn requires higher prices for gasoline, which would promote both conservation and substitution. The Europeans and the Japanese have done their part by imposing high taxes on gasoline. The United States has not. Here the Bush administration has done badly, but its would-be successors offer no improvement. Both candidates have promised the American public lower gasoline prices, which is the opposite of what is needed.

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Mark N. Katz :: Perhaps the best way to assess President George W. Bush’s legacy in the Middle East is by measuring it against the standard that he himself set in his November 6, 2003 speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.

On that occasion, President Bush stated:

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

Nearly five years later when he is about to leave office, it is easy to point out where President Bush’s Middle East policy has fallen short. The United States has fostered democracy in Iraq, but it is extremely fragile. There is reason to doubt whether it could survive the withdrawal—or even the reduction—of American armed forces. Afghanistan appears to be a democracy in name only despite the continued presence of American and NATO troops. The Bush administration’s hopes for progress toward democratization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere in the Arab world have not been fulfilled. Pakistan may have become more democratic, but it certainly does not appear to have become more peaceful or willing to cooperate with the United States vis-à-vis the Taliban.

Many will conclude, then, that President Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East has failed. Such a conclusion, however, might be premature. President Bush himself has frequently claimed that despite those who assess his Middle East policy as a failure now, history will vindicate him. He may be right.

President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a peaceful, democratic Europe appeared overly optimistic and naïve not just in the immediate aftermath of World War I, but for decades afterward. Yet ninety years after the November 11, 1918 armistice, his vision has largely been fulfilled in Europe.

Why did this happen? Two key components were 1) the spread of democratic values first in Western and later in Eastern Europe, and 2) America’s commitment to supporting West European democracies after World War II (though not after World War I) and East European democracies after the Cold War.

The main problem with Bush’s support for democratization in the greater Middle East was that demand for it in the region has been weak. But the demand for democratization was also weak in much of Europe after World War I—especially after the onset of the Great Depression. This, however, did not prevent the demand for democratization from growing in Europe later. And American support was crucial for transforming this demand into actual democracy first in Western and later in Eastern Europe.

The demand for democratization may be weak in the greater Middle East now, but Europe’s experience suggests that this need not prevent it from developing later. If and when the demand for democratization does grow in the Middle East, American support will also be crucial for transforming it into actual democracy. But for this to happen, a future American president must first be willing to acknowledge that it can happen, as President Bush was.

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Michael Horowitz :: Is the United States better off in the Middle East now than it was eight years ago? We probably will not know the real answer for quite a while. Though the short-term implications of policy choices often reveal themselves fairly quickly, the long-term implications often escape easy analysis. It is through the actions of the next administration that we will find out about the Bush legacy in the Middle East from an American policy perspective; once in power and away from the rhetoric of the campaign trail, what they choose to continue, what they choose to discard, and how things turn out. The United States, along with other states, has set in motion a series of events in the Middle East that could end with vast improvements in regional security and the welfare of the people of the Middle East. However, that same series of events could easily lead to a set of outcomes that destabilize the region and fail to improve the welfare of the people of the Middle East.

Evaluating the short term, the answer is decidedly mixed. On the plus side, the Bush administration helped the Iraqi people rid themselves of a brutal despot: Saddam Hussein. For that they should always get credit. However, it does not take a trained strategist or brilliant military mind to recognize that things in Iraq did not go as planned.

On Iran, eight years ago the Iranian regime was pursuing nuclear weapons and the United States had to choose between dealing with the regime, pursuing a containment strategy, or taking more aggressive action. It seemed like some progress had been made in the later few years of the Clinton administration in improving U.S.-Iranian relations and that the people of Iran might be ready for a thaw. Back-channel communication apparently continued in the early days of the Bush administration, but then halted. Eight years later, the United States faces the same choices it did in 2001, while in the interim Iran has made more progress towards a nuclear bomb.

(I will leave it to people far more expert than me to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.)

What about the status of the region as a whole? Data from the Polity IV dataset, a popular political science dataset measuring the characteristics of individual regimes, suggests that the Middle East remains one of the most fragile regions in the world. Many states in the region have fragility “scores” at the medium or high levels, indicating significant regime instability. Yet this was also true before the Bush administration ever took office. At the end of the day, perhaps the greatest feeling is that of a missed opportunity. It seemed like great progress in the region was possible, yet great progress was not made. Perhaps that merely indicates the short attention span of Americans, but it also suggests that we will be debating the legacy of the Bush administration in the Middle East for years to come.

Lindsey O’Rourke’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, “Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb,” is an interesting attempt to describe some of the issues surrounding the use of female suicide bombers in Iraq and elsewhere. As she points out, many of the groups that have utilized suicide terrorism have employed female suicide bombers. As such, her attempt to study the issue seriously is welcome and could significantly contribute to scholarship in this area.

Unfortunately, her piece contains a few misconceptions about suicide terrorism and the existing literature that deserve clarification. As someone also interested in questions surrounding suicide terrorism, I offer these comments in the spirit of helping build our knowledge in that area.

First, she states that “we are told” female suicide bombers are driven by “despair, mental illness, religiously mandated subordination to men, frustration with sexual inequality and a host of other factors related specifically to their gender.” At least in the literature on suicide terrorism, this does not seem to be the case. Robert Pape’s work on suicide terrorism, which she approvingly cites, does not come from this perspective. Neither does work by Mia Bloom, Bruce Hoffman, Assaf Moghadam, Ami Pedahzur, Marc Sageman, and others. So, while I agree with her argument that “feminine” motivations do not seem to be driving female suicide bombers and female suicide bombers have similar motivations to men, most other scholars of suicide terrorism agree as well.

Second, it is unclear whether her goal is to de-emphasize the “female” element of female suicide bombers or to argue they do deserve independent consideration. As many argue, she states that “there is simply no one demographic profile for female attackers,” something true for male attackers as well. If there is no demographic profile and the motivations of female suicide bombers are similar to male suicide bombers, why do they deserve study as a separate category? Her answer is that female suicide bombers are used more frequently for a specific type of missions—assassinations—because they have an easier time getting close to hard targets due to cultural and societal norms about treating and handling women. This is a very interesting and an important finding, if true, for it points out a shortcoming in security screening procedures around the globe. However, that means we should not necessarily study female suicide bombers as an independent category, but as part of the larger category of suicide bombings designed to assassinate leaders.

Third, her focus on occupation as the cause of suicide terrorism is misplaced. Whether the feeling of occupation is accurate or not in the eyes of the West, perceptions of occupation likely play a powerful role in influencing the propensity for groups to engage in violent resistance. However, occupation is less likely to impact the choice of a particular tactic within the decision to engage in violent resistance. While Pape has shown that many of the groups that adopt suicide terrorism perceive themselves as occupied, many other groups that perceive themselves as occupied have not chosen to adopt suicide terrorism.

In fact, it makes more sense to think about suicide terrorism as a special case of a military innovation, one strongly influenced by diffusion dynamics. The extensive direct and indirect linkages between groups that have adopted suicide terrorism suggest that the probability of suicide terrorism is not an entirely independent choice, but one influenced by the knowledge and skills that groups gain from direct and vicarious learning. Moreover, we have to study both those groups and people that adopt suicide tactics and those that do not in order to gain the full picture. As Scott Ashworth et al. recently pointed out in the American Political Science Review, studying just the universe of suicide terror groups or female suicide attackers selects on the dependent variable, making it hard to draw causal inferences from whatever correlations might exist. Things that are similar within the universe of suicide terror groups or the universe of female attackers might also be true of non-adopters as well, meaning those similarities do not actually predict behavior.

A more fruitful way to study the issue is to compare the groups that have adopted suicide terrorism and group members that have become suicide bombers with those that have not. Comparing adopters like Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Tamil Tigers with non-adopters like the Provisional IRA and ETA, the Basque terrorist group, reveals the critical importance of organizational dynamics in driving adoption or non-adoption. Since, as O’Rourke points out, demographic profiling of potential suicide attackers does not seem promising, it makes more sense to evaluate group characteristics and focus on what makes adoption more or less likely.

Regardless of potential issues with her academic analysis, however, her policy prescription to improve screening of women at “key security checkpoints” is sensible. While I disagree that “occupation” is a primary cause of suicide attacks—as described above, it influences the probability that a group will adopt terrorism, not the choice of suicide tactics—hopefully ideas like the “Daughters of Iraq” can be more than a stopgap in the effort to decrease the number of suicide attacks against American and Iraqi forces, as well as ordinary Iraqis. I applaud O’Rourke’s attention to this important topic, and hope to see more analysis of this kind in the future.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

With August fast approaching, MESH has asked its members to recommend a book for summer reading. (For more information on a book, or to place an order with Amazon through the MESH bookstore, click on the book title or cover.)

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Daniel Byman :: Yaroslav Trofimov’s The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda (Doubleday, 2007), is a fast-paced, informative, and tight book about how Saudi zealots took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Trofimov appears to have excellent access to some sources that others have not tapped, and he sheds light on an event that has long been known but not well understood in the West. We learn a tremendous amount not only about the bloody combat in the holy shrine itself, but also about Saudi ineptitude and the motivations of the zealots. The only annoying thing about the book is that the author repeatedly stretches to make links to Al Qaeda that are at best weak and at times rather fanciful. My guess is an editor pushed him to have a “9/11 link” even though the rest of the text is gripping and illuminating without tying it to Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: Summer reading should be stimulating, informative, and, most crucially, fun. Robin Wright’s new book, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, while flawed, fits the bill. Wright whisks the reader from Morocco to Iran introducing us to the men and women engaged in the contest for the soul of the region, the dreams and shadows of her title. For a region associated with autocrats and suicide bombers, the reformers she introduces are like a breath of mountain air. Their dreams are our own. But like haze on a hot summer day, those dreams are threatened by men of dark vision such as Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Hamas’ Mishal and Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, all of whom Wright lets speak for themselves. She’s an optimist in the end, but be fair-warned, she is also partisan and ambiguous about U.S. power to shape the region (the chapter on Iraq is best avoided). Still, there’s more right than wrong here. (Penguin, 2008.)

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Mark T. Clark :: Antonio Giustozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2007) traces the emergence of the neo-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001. He notes how the Taliban have become more flexible in interpreting Sharia, using innovative guerrilla and terrorist strategies as well as technology in their quest for power. He shows that neo-Taliban successes have stemmed from three things. First, the Taliban have exploited the political weaknesses of Afghanistan’s new government, especially between central and local arms. Second, they have adopted new strategies and tactics in fighting the Afghan army, its militias and its “foreign” supporters. And third, the insurgents have confronted an inconsistent and ineffective counter-insurgency strategy against them. When Giustozzi pieces together the recent history, he is at his strongest; when he interprets elements of strategy, he is at his weakest. The work is worth reading, if only to understand some of the recent “successes” the insurgency has scored and anticipate some counters we may soon employ.

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Steven A. Cook :: When I saw Aaron David Miller at the Council on Foreign Relations shortly after his book was published, he told me that it would make me “laugh and cry.” The author knows his work, as I found myself cackling in between moments of great despair while making my way through Miller’s terrific account of his time working the Arab-Israeli account. I can pile the number of Arab-Israeli conflict books ceiling-high in my office, but what makes The Much Too Promised Land different is its sobering and thus refreshing examination of American policy. Miller, it seems, has lost patience with Arabs, Israelis, and the follies of American policymakers who have been led down the garden path of the peace process by visions of the Nobel prize. I hope the next team that takes on the unforgiving task of managing the Arab-Israeli conflict learns the lessons that Miller has taught us. (Random House, 2008.)
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Adam Garfinkle :: About 28 years ago, a Chicago publisher called Nelson-Hall put out The Last Crusade: A Negotiator’s Middle East Handbook, by William R. Brown. The book is an analysis of Henry Kissinger’s step-by-step diplomatic odyssey from Kilometer 101 to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, written by a U.S. official who was along for much of the ride. As far as I can tell, the book was not widely reviewed (perhaps because of its unfortunate title; who knows?). Foreign Affairs just squibbed it, with the then doyen of the Middle East section, John C. Campbell, devoting two whole sentences to Brown’s effort. But the second sentence was this: “Brown’s background in public service is largely in the Arab field, and his analysis of Arab perceptions is particularly apt.”

Damn right it was. Before political correctness made it uncomfortable for State Department Arabists even to believe what they saw with their own eyes, let alone to write about it, Brown evinced a knack for keen insight, honest analysis and crisp prose. Consider, for just one out of dozens of examples, this remark: “The Arab perceives a single community of faith and language that contrasts sharply with our emphasis on competing but mutually adjusting political factions. In the West, politics has a flavor of controlled conflict that the Arab regards as destructive to community…. In the Middle East the purpose of political institutions is to facilitate the constant unfolding or revelation of a popular consensus. According to the liberal democratic norms of the West, political institutions are dedicated to enacting the wishes of a tolerant majority.”

The Last Crusade is not in print—hasn’t been for decades—but copies are available through Amazon. It’s fun to locate Brown’s more general conclusions, distilled out of the dense diplomatic interactions of the Kissingerian era, and throw them into the headwinds of today’s Middle Eastern storms to see how they fly. On the whole, they fly pretty well.

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Michael Horowitz :: While it is a bit older, I would like to encourage people that have not already done so to go out and purchase a copy of The Age of Sacred Terror by Dan Benjamin and Steve Simon (Random House, 2002). The book remains one of the best descriptions of Al Qaeda in the period up until 9/11. The rich historical detail, supplemented by the insights Benjamin and Simon gained from working on terrorism and Al Qaeda-related issues as National Security Staff members during the Clinton administration, provides a great deal of important information. They describe both the inner workings of Al Qaeda from its genesis through 9/11 and the efforts by the United States government to respond. Whether as an introductory text for advanced undergraduates interested in terrorism issues or a handy reference tool for more advanced scholars, The Age of Sacred Terror significantly contributes to our understanding of Al Qaeda.

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Raymond Ibrahim :: One of the most informative books I’ve read on Sunni Islam’s notions of international affairs—the whens, whys, whats, and hows, of warfare and peace—is appropriately titled War and Peace in the Law of Islam (reprint, The Lawbook Exchange, 2006), by the late Johns Hopkins professor, Majid Khadduri, himself a former Baghdadi jurist. What especially makes this book valuable is that the earliest edition was originally written in 1941—that is, some decades before the reign of political correctness infiltrated academia, stifling the sort of conclusions that Khadduri makes (e.g., that jihad is an eternal obligation). Indeed, though Khadduri was a well-respected scholar and never accused of having any “anti-Arab/Islam” agendas (he was, after all, an Arab and a Muslim), the straightforward assertions he makes in this book, if made today by another scholar, are liable to classify the latter as an “Islamophobe.”

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Josef Joffe :: Weighing in at about 3 pounds, and numbering almost 800 pages, Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007) is not exactly beach-time reading. But the book should be on the shelf of anybody who takes a serious interest in the history of America’s involvement in the Arab/Muslim world. Even before the Constitution was written in 1787, the fledgling republic was already embroiled in conflict—when, in 1784, a Boston ship was seized by Moroccan pirates. In fact, that conflict was one reason for the constitutional convention in Philadelphia: how to create national institutions (like a navy) that would deal with the brigands of North Africa. Remember Ronald Reagan’s airstrike against Qadhafi in 1986, in retaliation against a terror attack against U.S. soldiers in Berlin? A haunting precedent is Tripoli’s declaration of war on the United States in 1801. So America’s entanglement in the Middle East is as old as the republic itself, and this is why Oren’s book makes for such important and instructive reading in these breathless, indeed, a-historical times. As a side-benefit, this book will dispense once and for all with the myth of isolationism. As Oren shows, the United States was embroiled in world politics from day one.

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Martin Kramer :: It being summer, I finally found time to read Mohsin Hamid’s novella, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt, 2007). What leads (or drives) young Muslim men to terrorism, and “why do they hate us”? Hamid has given us a thesis in the guise of a thriller that takes the reader on an odyssey from Princeton’s campus to a high-powered valuation firm in midtown Manhattan to the alleys of Lahore. A young Pakistani comes to America, rises rapidly, finds a semblance of love, ignores contradictions—and then tumbles into the great divide. All of this he narrates to a mysterious American in an unforgettable voice, and anticipation of the climax will keep you hanging to the end. The thesis: America has its own unique way of inspiring self-loathing in others, even those it embraces—and it comes back to haunt us. (Think Sayyid Qutb and Edward Said.) There is a very different way to tell this story, but Hamid tells his version grippingly.

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Walter Laqueur :: I have been reading Iu. N. Golubchikov and R.A. Mnatsakanian, Islamizatsiia Rossii: Trevozhnye stsenarii budushchego (Islamization of Russia: Alarming Future Scenarios) (Veche, 2005). This book deals with problems widely ignored in the West (and also by the Russian leadership, overwhelmed and preoccupied by the good fortune of oil and gas royalties). The difficulties facing Russia differ in some ways from those confronting Western Europe, but in the longer run are even more formidable. Like some Russian experts, I believe it doubtful that Russia will be able to hold on for very long to the Northern Caucasus—to mention only one problem.
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Bernard Lewis :: The Ottoman Empire was the longest-lived regional regime in the Middle East since antiquity; it was also the most recent, and left enduring traces. Şükrü Hanioğlu’s A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2008) is a major contribution to the better understanding of the region. His account is based on intimate knowledge of the Ottoman archives, as well as of many other sources, both internal and external. Concerned with trends more than events, this book illuminates the ideas and movements that shaped the course of history.

Two processes of change are of particular relevance. One is that of identity and loyalty, variously determined by faith, place, and blood; another is the theory and practice of government, evolving from authoritarian to democratic and/or dictatorial. Some of the words in later use, notably “constitution” and “revolution,” acquire special resonance against the late Ottoman background. All this is of obvious relevance to the better understanding of the present-day Middle East.

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Walter Reich :: What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism, by Alan B. Krueger (Princeton University Press, 2007) is a necessary and superb book. It demolishes the myth that poverty breeds terrorism, especially Islamist terrorism. To be sure, this myth was demolished many times before Krueger’s book appeared. But probably because it’s such a simple and widely-embraced explanation in the realm of ordinary crime—one that, moreover, suggests a simple solution (in this case, some kind of anti-poverty program in the Muslim world)—it was a myth that refused to die. World leaders such as Bill Clinton and Shimon Peres, as well as a panoply of other high government officials, theologians, journalists, intellectuals and Middle East specialists, all of whom should have known better, repeatedly resurrected this myth. Krueger’s demolition of the myth is probably the most effective and sustained one to date. I’m sure, though, that, like so many characters in contemporary action movies and video games, “poverty breeds terrorism” will prove impervious to Krueger’s on-target bullets and will rise again and yet again. The argument that the gang member in West Side Story sarcastically cites to explain his criminal behavior—that he became depraved because he’d been deprived—will, quite seriously and foolishly, continue to be applied to the depravities of terrorism. As it happens, I discovered the book only when asked to review it; my full review is here.

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Michael Reynolds :: Although for much of the 20th century most people regarded the Caucasus as an exotic borderland of Russia, it has been an essential part of the Middle East from the dawn of history. Its peoples are bound to those of the Middle East by language, culture, religion and civilization. Today the Caucasus is again an inextricable part of the politics of the Middle East. It is also a fiendishly complicated region. It boasts a truly mind-boggling variety of ethnicities and linguistic groups (fascination with that diversity is not a modern preoccupation: astonished Arab invaders in the seventh century dubbed the Caucasus jabal al-lusun, “the mountain of languages”). It is the site of not only some of the oldest lands of Islam, but also the most ancient living Christian civilizations in the world, the Georgian and Armenian. In more recent centuries, Persian, Turkish, and Russian civilization have all indelibly stamped the Caucasus (and each in turn has been stamped by the Caucasus) as they jockeyed and struggled for dominance. The contemporary Caucasus remains in important ways unchanged: polyglot, culturally rich, and riven by often bitter internal and external rivalries.

However intimidating the complexity of the Caucasus may be, greenhorn and old hand alike will benefit from Charles King’s The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford University Press, 2008). In a single volume, King manages to pull off the seemingly impossible task of presenting a portrait of the region as a whole, and one that is wonderfully written as it simultaneously informs, entertains, challenges, and stimulates.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: An academic colleague said to me that, before Israel, Muslims and Jews rubbed along well enough. Enmity toward Jews, he felt, stemmed from Jewish (colonial) immigration to Palestine. Some specialists have recently made a case that Muslim anti-Semitism flowered under the ideological ministrations of the Nazis. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew Bostom (Prometheus Books, 2008), a compendium largely of original texts from the Quran forward, makes a different case: The most extreme prejudicial animus against Jews is integral to Islamic thought and deed from Muhammad, and is honored by his many successors through the centuries with determination and energy. Introduced by Bostom’s 174-page overview, this collection of documents, of Muslims speaking for themselves, and observers reporting historical events, is extensive and convincing, illuminating and distressing, and will break through the many pious obfuscations that often pass for Western commentary on Islam.

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Robert Satloff :: Arab principals rarely write their memoirs, and such books are even rarer in English. Americans and Israelis live in a tell-all culture; theirs is a world largely without secrets anymore. By contrast, Arab leaders, ministers, courtiers, and hangers-on may speak in whispers but they rarely put their tales in print. The exceptions—like memoirs by Sadat and King Hussein—are mainly stylized versions of history written to burnish images, not to explain politics or policy. In this light, The Arab Center, Marwan Muasher’s memoir of his public service, is wonderfully refreshing—even beyond its often fascinating content and its courageous call for moderation in a region that knows too little of it. The “center” of the title refers to a political center, neither Islamist right nor Nasserist left, but it is a subtle reference to the fact that Muasher—Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel, an ambassador to Washington, a foreign minister and a deputy prime minister—had a center-aisle seat throughout a turbulent period in Jordanian and wider Middle East politics. That inside look iinto a largely closed world is reason enough to commend this thoughtful book. (Yale University Press, 2008.)

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Tamara Cofman Wittes :: Every year, my students, my cousins, and random strangers ask me to recommend a single book that provides a good introduction to the contemporary Middle East. Very few of those asking are willing wade through something as edifying as Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples. Let me recommend, as an alternative for the general reader, a delightful memoir by the scholar R. Stephen Humphreys entitled Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age (2d ed., University of California Press, 2005). Personal, readable, and thoughtful, Humphreys’s essays hit all the key issues (Islamism, demographics, oil curse, etc.) while weaving in history and personal narrative.

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Michael Young :: I highly recommend Bernard Rougier’s Everyday Jihad (Harvard University Press, 2007) about the development of militant Islam in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp next to the Lebanese city of Sidon. Rougier’s thesis is that trans-national militant Islam is now so dominant in the camp that “a considerable part of the population has freed itself from the national Palestinian framework and is no longer governed by a nationalist universe.” The thesis is debatable, and I happen to disagree. But Rougier was one of the first to document the rise of Salafist groups in the camp—groups that have indeed come to play a central role in the politics of Ain al-Hilweh. My quibble is whether Palestinians have psychologically freed themselves from the preeminence of a nationalist universe—whether Peshawar can ever count for more than Jerusalem or Haifa.

Rougier’s merit is to constantly come back to Lebanon and investigate on the ground. Indeed he did research for his book inside Ain al-Hilweh. He knows the Salafists well, understands the value of reportage, and speaks and reads Arabic fluently. Everyday Jihad is a fine example of a type of research on Lebanon sorely lacking, with so many scholars manacled to a desk, or a prepaid ideology. The country is much more interesting when the scholar is also a sociologist and a journalist. Rougier shows why.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

At the recent inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), presenter LTC Joseph Myers made an interesting point that deserves further elaboration: that, though military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine—such as Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, even the exploits of Alexander the Great as recorded in Arrian and Plutarch—Islamic war doctrine, which is just as if not more textually grounded, is totally ignored.

As recent as 2006, former top Pentagon official William Gawthrop lamented that “the senior Service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered.”

This is more ironic when one considers that, while classical military theories (Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, et al.) are still studied, the argument can be made that they have little practical value for today’s much changed landscape of warfare and diplomacy. Whatever validity this argument may have, it certainly cannot be applied to Islam’s doctrines of war; by having a “theological” quality, that is, by being grounded in a religion whose “divine” precepts transcend time and space, and are thus believed to be immutable, Islam’s war doctrines are considered applicable today no less than yesterday. So while one can argue that learning how Alexander maneuvered his cavalry at the Battle of Guagamela in 331 BC is both academic and anachronistic, the same cannot be said of Islam, particularly the exploits and stratagems of its prophet Muhammad—his “war sunna”—which still serve as an example to modern day jihadists.

For instance, based on the words and deeds of Muhammad, most schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that the following are all legitimate during war against the infidel: the indiscriminate use of missile weaponry, even if women and children are present (catapults in Muhammad’s 7th century, hijacked planes or WMD by analogy today); the need to always deceive the enemy and even break formal treaties whenever possible (see Sahih Muslim 15: 4057); and that the only function of the peace treaty, or hudna, is to give the Islamic armies time to regroup for a renewed offensive, and should, in theory, last no more than ten years.

Quranic verses 3:28 and 16:106, as well as Muhammad’s famous assertion, “War is deceit,” have all led to the formulation of a number of doctrines of dissimulation—the most notorious among them being the doctrine of taqiyya, which permits Muslims to lie and dissemble whenever they are under the authority of the infidel. Deception has such a prominent role that renowned Muslim scholar Ibn al-Arabi declares: “[I]n the Hadith, practicing deceit in war is well demonstrated. Indeed, its need is more stressed than [the need for] courage” (The Al Qaeda Reader, 142).

Aside from ignoring these well documented Islamist strategies, more troubling is the fact that the Defense Department does not seem to appreciate Islam’s more “eternal” doctrines—such as the Abode of War versus the Abode of Islam dichotomy, which in essence maintains that Islam must always be in a state of animosity vis-à-vis the infidel world and, whenever possible, must wage wars until all infidel territory has been brought under Islamic rule. In fact, this dichotomy of hostility is unambiguously codified under Islam’s worldview and is deemed a fard kifaya—that is, an obligation on the entire Muslim body that can only be fulfilled as long as some Muslims, say, “jihadists,” actively uphold it.

Yet despite all these problematic—but revealing—doctrines, despite the fact that a quick perusal of Islamist websites and books demonstrate time and time again that current and would-be jihadists constantly quote, and thus take seriously, these doctrinal aspects of war, apparently the senior governmental leaders charged with defending America do not.

Why? Because the “Whisperers”—Walid Phares’ all too apt epithet for many Middle East/Islamic scholars, or, more appropriately, apologists—have made anathema anyone who dares imply that there may be some sort of connection between Islamic doctrine and modern-day Islamist terrorism, such as in the recent Steven Coughlin debacle. This is a long and all too well known tale for those in the field (see Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: the Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America).

But consider for a moment: though there are today many Middle East studies departments, one will be sorely pressed to find any courses dealing with the most pivotal and relevant topics of today—such as Islamic jurisprudence and what it has to say about jihad or the concept of Abode of Islam versus the Abode of War—no doubt due to the fact that these topics possess troubling international implications and are best buried. Instead, the would-be student will be inundated with courses dealing with the evils of “Orientalism” and colonialism, gender studies, and civil society.

The greater irony—when one talks about Islam and the West, ironies often abound—is that, on the very same day of the ASMEA conference, which also contained a forthright address by premiere Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis (“It seems to me a dangerous situation in which any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam is, to say the least, dangerous”), the State Department announced that it had adopted the recommendations of a memo stating that the government should not call Al Qaeda-type radicals “jihadis,” “mujahidin,” or to incorporate any other Arabic word of Islamic connotation (“caliphate,” “Islamo-fascism,” “Salafi,” “Wahhabi,” and “Ummah” are also out).

Alas, far from taking the most basic and simple advice regarding warfare—Sun Tzu’s ancient dictum, “Know thy enemy”—the U.S. government is having difficulties even acknowledging its enemy.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

On Monday, March 3, the Security Council adopted its third resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to cease enriching uranium. The Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, in a classic understatement of the problem, announced in part that:

Our task in Iran is to make sure that the Iranian nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes. We are at it for the last five years. In the last four months, in particular, we have made quite good progress in clarifying the outstanding issues that had to do with Iran´s past nuclear activities, with the exception of one issue, and that is the alleged weaponization studies that supposedly Iran has conducted in the past.

Several reports (here and here) indicate that Iran continued its nuclear weapons program beyond 2003 when it was “estimated” to have stopped, according to the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

The reports mention that the U.S. and undisclosed allies presented several documents, including videos, to the Security Council in late February. Some of the evidence presented to the Security Council, which Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazee, declared as “baseless,” included:

• An Iranian report on nuclear activities that could be related to its weapon program past 2003;
• An Iranian video depicting mock-ups of a missile re-entry vehicle configured in such a way so as to carry a nuclear warhead, according to the IAEA Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen;
• Other documents showing the Iranians experimenting with warheads and missile trajectories where the altitude of the explosion made no sense for conventional weapons;
• A “fairly detailed set of illustrations and descriptions of how you would build a nuclear warhead, how you would fit it into a delivery vehicle, how you would expect it to perform”; and
• Material showing details of warhead design and how it would fit in a Shahab-3 missile.

The Shahab-3 is based on the North Korean No-dong missile and has a range of about 1300 km, which would encompass Israel, Turkey, and Afghanistan. The evidence presented to the Security Council contradicts repeated statements by Iranian officials that the Shahab-3 was only for peaceful purposes, not weapons, according to numerous reports found here.

This third round of sanctions was weakened in order to get consensus, according to these reports, because the December 2007 NIE made it far more difficult for the Bush administration to make a compelling case to other Council members. As one analyst put it, “The NIE put a stake through the heart of diplomacy on Iran.” The saga of Iran’s nuclear program and the U.S. “estimate” continues.

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In recent years, a growing number of analysts and policymakers, have referred to the doctrines guiding Al Qaeda and its associates as an ideology, and appear to have influenced the Bush administration into adopting the term as well. President Bush, for example, has characterized the 9/11 suicide hijackers as men who “kill in the name of a clear and focused ideology.” Although descriptions of the precepts and beliefs guiding Al Qaeda and its associates as ideological in nature certainly hit the mark, few serious attempts have been made to justify the use of the term ‘ideology’ in connection with the Salafi Jihad—the guiding doctrine of Al Qaeda, its affiliates, associates, and progeny. A closer look at what makes the Salafi Jihad an ideology reveals that a more proper term to describe the Salafi Jihad would be as a religious ideology.

The Salafi Jihad is an ideology because its functions are essentially congruent with those of other ideologies.

• First, ideologies have an explanatory function, whereby they attempt to raise awareness among a certain group that a certain problem deserves their attention. Salafi-Jihadists attempt to raise awareness among Muslims that their religion has been on the wane.
• Second, and analogous with the diagnostic function of modern ideologies, the Salafi Jihad identifies the alleged source of the Muslims’ conundrum in the persistent attacks and humiliation of Muslims on the part of an anti-Islamic alliance of what it terms ‘Crusaders,’ ‘Zionists,’ and ‘apostates.’
• The third function of the Salafi Jihad also parallels that of other ideologies, namely its attempt at creating a new identity for its adherents. Several scholars, including Olivier Roy, have argued that Muslims and Western converts adopting Salafi-Jihadist tenets suffer from a crisis of identity. To those who are disoriented by modernity, the Salafi Jihad provides a new sense of self-definition and belonging in the form of a membership to a supranational entity. Salafi-Jihadists attempt to instill into Muslims the notion that the only identity that truly matters is that of membership in the umma, the global community of Muslims that bestows comfort, dignity, security, and honor upon the downtrodden Muslims.
• Finally, like all ideologies, Salafi-Jihadists present a program of action, namely jihad, which is understood in military terms. They assert that jihad will reverse the tide of history and redeem adherents and potential adherents of Salafi-Jihadist ideology from their misery. Martyrdom is extolled as the ultimate way in which jihad can be waged—hence the proliferation of suicide attacks among Salafi-Jihadist groups.

What, however, is the Salafi Jihad’s relationship to religion? Religions differ from ideologies in two important respects.

First, the primary focus of ideologies is the group, whereas that of religions is the individual. Precisely because of its preoccupation with the group as a whole, ideology demands great loyalty and commitment on the part of the individual member. Ideologies, like religions, demand verbal assent from their members. But more than religions, ideologies also demand complete control over the thoughts, words, and deeds of their adherents. This characteristic also applies to Al Qaeda and like-minded groups.

Second, religions tend to support existing orders, while ideologies tend to confront them. “Ideologies are not merely world-reflecting but world-constituting,” writes Bruce Lawrence. “They tend to have a ‘missionary’ zeal to show others what they need to do, to correct and help them to that end.” Thus, unlike religious leaders, bin Laden goes beyond merely disagreeing with those who do not share his beliefs—he battles them.

Yet, while the Salafi Jihad is distinct from Islam due to the former’s ideological nature, it also differs from ordinary ideologies in an important respect. It tends to use religious words, symbols, and values to sustain itself and grow—a tendency that defines it as a religious ideology. Ideologies are usually devoid of religious symbols. Ian Adams, for instance, writes that “what separates [religion from ideology] is that while the central feature of a religious understanding is its concept of the divine, the central feature of an ideological understanding is its conception of human nature.”

Unlike secular ideologies, however, the Salafi Jihad invokes religion in three ways.

• First, it describes itself and its enemies in religious terms, such as the ‘Army of Muhammad,’ the ‘lions of Islam,’ and of course ‘jihadist.’ Their enemies are labeled as Crusaders, apostates, or infidels.
• Second, Salafi-Jihadists describe their strategy and mission as a religious one. Their struggle is a jihad, which they themselves define in military terms, as opposed to the ‘internal war’ against human temptations. Their main tactic, they claim, is not suicide attacks, but ‘martyrdom operations.’
• Finally, they justify acts of violence with references drawn selectively from the Quran. Most Muslims, including non-violent Salafis, cite a number of sources from the Quran and hadith against the killing of civilians. Salafi-Jihadists, on the other hand, cite a number of Quranic verses and Hanbali rulings in support of their actions.

Accurately labeling the nature of Salafi-Jihadist doctrine as a religious ideology is not merely an exercise in academic theorizing, but has important policy implications. Confronting Salafi-Jihadists on religious grounds is highly problematic because Salafi-Jihadists draw from the same religious sources—albeit selectively and stubbornly—that inform the lives and practices of over a billion other Muslims. It is for that reason that ordinary Muslims—not to speak of non-Muslims—find it difficult to challenge Salafi-Jihadists without running the risk of being accused of targeting Islam as a whole.

A counter-terrorism approach that highlights the corruption of Salafi-Jihadists ideology not on religious, but on secular grounds is more likely to have the desired effect of weakening the appeal of the Salafi Jihad. Rather than highlighting the doctrinal and theological inconsistencies within Salafi-Jihadists, the United States and its allies would be wise to grasp every opportunity they have to highlight the disastrous consequences that Salafi-Jihadist violence has wrought on the everyday lives not only of Westerners, but first and foremost on Muslims themselves.

It is a simple, though not sufficiently emphasized fact that the primary victims of Salafi-Jihadists are Muslims, who are killed and maimed in far greater numbers than non-Muslims. Salafi-Jihadists openly justify the killing of civilians, including Muslims, under a logic of the ends justifying the means. It is equally a fact that leaders of Salafi-Jihadist organizations hypocritically preach about the benefits of martyrdom, but rarely, if ever, conduct suicidal operations themselves, or send their loved ones on such missions. It is a fact that Al Qaeda and associated groups offer no vision for Muslims other than perennial jihad—hardly an appealing prospect.

Waging a battle against a religious ideology such as the Salafi Jihad is a challenging task that requires commitment and ingenuity. Yet, highlighting a few simple, but damaging facts about the actual results of Salafi-Jihadists can also go a long way.

This post is an excerpt from a longer article to appear in the forthcoming issue of the CTC Sentinel, the new monthly publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. —MESH

Update: The longer article has appeared here. —MESH

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