Inspector Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

The situation in Iraq appears much the same: suspiciously quiet. The recent attacks against the foreign and finance ministries attracted little more than a one-day story in the press. Yet, these attacks could be a precursor to more violence, and should give pause to those that believe the job in Iraq is done. Despite progress, there remains a significant number of unresolved grievances such as the status of Kirkuk, distribution of oil revenues, inadequate incorporation of the Sons of Iraq into the security services and, in general, a “winner-take-all” attitude by the Maliki government. Any of these could lead to a reversal on the ground and a renewal of widespread violence.

Others would suggest the opposite. They point to noteworthy reductions in attacks against, and casualties among American forces, the easing of widespread tensions between the Sunni and Shi’a communities, and a general war-weariness which often precedes a long-term reduction in violence.

So which side is right? Is Iraq on the verge of backsliding, or is it moving towards a normal, albeit rocky, political situation which militates for the final departure of U.S. troops in 2011? Will 2010 be the year when it all falls apart or finally comes together? Will Iraq transform itself into a relatively pluralistic nation at peace with itself and its neighbors, and remain an ally of the United States?

On this, the United States cannot sit idly by and allow the situation to determine its own path. U.S. involvement in shaping and achieving an outcome positive to our interests is critical. However, one wonders if this can happen, given the comparatively laissez-faire policy embraced since the elections. I believe the current situation argues for more administration effort, and a return to direct administration involvement in order to ensure a “soft landing” in Iraq. If the goal remains the drawdown of all combat brigades by June 2010 and the complete withdrawal of all troops by the end of 2011, the administration must devote more time and effort to the problem.

The administration in general and President Obama in particular must reinforce a message and reinforce a policy which demonstrates that success in Iraq remains a national priority. The current message seems to be, “we’ve won in Iraq, so let’s move on to Afghanistan” or, dangerously, “we never should have been there, so let’s get out as quickly as possible.” Those who criticized the “forgotten and unresourced war” in Afghanistan and now devote full attention to that effort risk making the same mistake in reverse. Too rapid a shift of focus, resources and priorities from Iraq to Afghanistan, and failure to devote the required time and high-level effort to working through the unfinished business, put the hard-won gains in Iraq in peril. Despite the 2008 election rhetoric, this administration inherited the responsibility for success in Iraq. Pretending it doesn’t exist, bleeding it of needed resources or failing to rally public support for the remaining hard work abrogate the responsibilities that came with the election victory.

While Afghanistan remains an important priority, it cannot be at the expense of Iraq. For a reminder of this, I often turn to an editorial published by Professor Eliot Cohen in 2003. In talking about leaving Iraq prematurely, he noted:

Cut-and-run cannot be disguised, and the price to be paid for it would be appalling. No one else would take on the burdens of Iraq; talk of handing it over to the United Nations or NATO is wishfulness, not strategy. Whatever one’s view of the war’s rationale, conception, planning or conduct, our war it remains, and we had best figure out how to win it.

While there has been tremendous progress since Eliot Cohen wrote this in 2003, there is still work to be done. And we had best figure out how to do it.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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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.

This interview with Timur Goksel (click here if you don’t see the embedded clip below), a former political advisor to the United Nations Interim Force in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL), is interesting in two regards. Goksel is someone intimately familiar with Lebanon’s Shi’ite community, and his observations (many of which I happen to agree with) are worth listening to. But he is also someone who, to me, often appears so taken up by the domestic narrative of the Hezbollah-Shi’ite relationship, one that he has witnessed from up close, that he underplays broader, equally significant, aspects of Hezbollah’s behavior.

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As I said, much of what Goksel says here is accurate. Don’t expect the Shi’ites to push Hezbollah to disarm, because the party’s weapons are tied into the community’s sense of strength and revival. Hezbollah has also, for the moment, indeed taken a more pragmatic approach to the idea of an Islamic state. This no longer seems to be a priority, as the party has opted for a much more effective strategy, one it developed after it successfully participated in Lebanon’s first postwar parliamentary elections in 1992: namely, integrating its supporters into the state and using this as a means of preserving its political, military, and geographic autonomy—in other words, and paradoxically, joining the state to better keep the state at arm’s length away from Hezbollah’s vital interests.

I also agree with Goksel that to truly understand Hezbollah, one must understand the sociology of the Shi’ite community. However, where I think he comes up short is in the larger picture (at least in this video), particularly with regard to the party’s regional links, interests, and calculations. Only once, I believe, does Goksel mention Iran, in the context of the Amal-Hezbollah deal negotiated in Damascus in 1990 under Syrian and Iranian auspices. Otherwise, his tendency is to talk about Hezbollah as a largely Lebanese Shi’ite phenomenon.

Is there any real doubt, however, that Hezbollah, as a military and political organization, is an extension of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus and, more broadly, serves Iranian regional interests? Iran’s achievement was certainly to anchor Hezbollah in the Lebanese Shi’ite reality, but it is not that reality that explains why Hezbollah is arming Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and elsewhere; why it possesses a military capacity, including long-range missiles, that cannot conceivably be justified in a Lebanese context; why it is helping train the Mehdi Army in Iraq; why its youths are being sent to Iran for military instruction and political and religious indoctrination; and why Iran can rely on sympathetic Shi’ite networks in South America and West Africa.

Yes, Shi’ites fear that Hezbollah’s disarmament will again lead to their marginalization, even if Hezbollah has been instrumental in heightening this utterly unrealistic existential fear. But let’s reverse that. Would the community agree to surrender Hezbollah’s weapons in exchange for greater political power in Lebanon? In fact, I believe Hezbollah would consider this excellent idea the kiss of death, which is why it has so strenuously sought in the past three years, after the 2006 summer war, to maintain the community in a state of near permanent hostility towards its political foes in the country—including a vast majority of Sunnis, the Druze, and a sizable portion of the Christian community. Hezbollah best retains authority over the community in times of polarization, allowing it to set the communal agenda and block out dissenting voices.

Repeatedly, Hezbollah has expressed its refusal to hand its weapons over to a sovereign Lebanese state. Those who criticize the state, particularly its past shortcomings with respect to the Shi’ites, may be justified in doing so. But this is really just a vicious circle, so you can turn back that question against the critics by asking: What kind of state does Hezbollah desire when it has spent years politically, geographically, and ideologically separating Shi’ites from Lebanese society, even using their hold over certain state institutions to reinforce this? There is an overriding explanation: If Shi’ites embrace the Lebanese state, Hezbollah would lose much of its power, its justification for retaining its weapons, and its regional usefulness to Iran, which defines the party’s strategy.

That’s the other side of Goksel’s comments, and one that somebody with his knowledge surely can tell us much more about. Perhaps he did; he just didn’t happen to do so in this particular segment, which requires some necessary counterpoint to make the whole more intelligible.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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On April 6, U.S. President Barack Obama gave an address to the Turkish parliament in Ankara, on the occasion of his first visit to a Middle Eastern country as president. (If you cannot see the embedded video above, click here. The text is here.) In his speech, the President touched on a range of issues related to U.S.-Turkish and U.S.-Muslim relations. The following MESH members responded to an invitation to comment on the speech: J. Scott Carpenter, Michele Dunne, Hillel Fradkin, Adam Garfinkle, Bruce Jentleson, Josef Joffe, Mark N. Katz, Michael Reynolds, Michael Rubin, Philip Carl Salzman, Harvey Sicherman, Raymond Tanter, and Michael Young. Soner Cagaptay’s assessment is added in the comments.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: There were many, including me, who were worried that President Obama’s speech before the Turkish parliament would send the wrong signal to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development (AKP) government, by embracing Erdoğan’s conceit that Turkey is somehow a leader of the “Muslim World” and a major player in the Middle East. Our worry, it turns out, was unjustified—for the most part.

In the speech, the President struck mostly high notes. Symbolically he linked Turkey strongly to Europe by traveling there as part of his European trip. He spoke of Turkey as the secular, democratic nation-state that it is, even as he challenged it to move forward on religious freedom and minority rights. His formulation that Turkey is a country where the Muslim faith is practiced was merely… accurate. When the President mentioned Turkey’s desire to play a role in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, he did so only after referencing the more proximate conflicts of Nagorno-Karabakh and still-divided Cyprus. Importantly, in a thinly-veiled reference to Hamas, the President called on the Turkish government to “reject the use of terror, and recognize that Israel’s security concerns are legitimate.”

There were a couple sour notes, however. When the President delivered the requisite reminder that the United States is not, I repeat, not at war with Islam, he once again invoked the tired bromide of the so-called “Muslim World.” When will senior U.S. policy makers stop reinforcing Al Qaeda’s narrative about a mythical Muslim world? The President also continued to avoid the “D” word (democracy). Prosperity, instead, is the word of the day. Finding ways to improve education expand healthcare, boost trade and investment without improved transparency and accountability will be a neat trick which I look forward to hearing more about. The President promised more detail in “coming months.”

Whatever the Turkish people might have thought about the speech, Erdoğan’s body language suggested he did not like it. At all. The fact that Obama tracked substantively with President Bush on Iran and the Palestinian issue was clearly painful for him to hear. More painful still probably was the President’s wise decision to skip the Khatami-inspired Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Istanbul. The AKP were desperately hoping to rope the President into this muddleheaded effort to divide “civilizations” into religious camps. Actions always speak louder than words.

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Michele Dunne :: In President Obama’s address to the Turkish parliament, he made a few basic statements—inter alia, “The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” “The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security,” and “The United States strongly supports Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European union”—that were, if not revolutionary, at least useful in their clarity. I will leave the evaluation of what Obama said on internal Turkish affairs to those who specialize in that, but what he said about specific reforms inside Turkey seemed to reach a satisfying level of detail, and he made several general statements—e.g., “freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state,” and “an enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people”—that encouraged further movement on these issues.

What was peculiar about Obama’s speech, however, was his strong emphasis on democracy (mentioned at least eight times) as the tie that binds the United States and Turkey in friendship, and yet his unwillingness to apply the same principle in the latter part of the speech to U.S. relations with the Muslim world. There, the “D” word was banned. Aside from the usual platitudes about “mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama promised to promote the welfare of people in the Muslim world only in socioeconomic terms: education, health care, trade and investment. No objections to that, Mr. President, but what’s the plan for working with countries where the state stands squarely in the way of citizens getting those things? And that would apply to quite a few states in the Muslim world.

The President and Secretary Clinton can only go around the world apologizing for the Bush administration for so long. The Obama administration needs its own foreign policy—one that is neither Clinton-warmed-over nor anything-but-Bush—and one that takes account of current conditions. Those conditions include much more political ferment and stronger demands for civil and human rights than existed in the Middle East a decade ago. So promoting democracy and human rights will need to be part of that foreign policy, including in the Muslim world. It’s getting to be about time to face that, and Turkey would have been an excellent place to start.

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Hillel Fradkin :: Towards the close of his speech to the Turkish parliament, President Obama declared “as clearly as I can” that the “United States is not at war with Islam.” He sought to reinforce that message by implying that our military actions within the Muslim world, in past and future, have only the object of “rolling back a fringe ideology” and the terrorism represented most prominently by Al Qaeda—an effort he regards as shared by Muslims themselves.

Much attention has and will be paid to this declaration—it is already being referred to as an “olive branch”—even if it stated the obvious. The United States is not in fact at war with Islam and never has been, as President Bush made clear by declaring Islam to be a religion of peace but a few hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001. For after all, why would we Americans be at war with a peaceful religion? Moreover, although our soldiers are presently engaged in fighting some Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, we are fighting side by side with other Muslims. A statement of these facts would have enhanced Obama’s declaration.

But perhaps the obvious must sometimes be stated, and Obama is perhaps in a better position to make it clear by virtue of a fact he mentioned in his speech: he is among those Americans “who have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country.” Perhaps this will put this issue to rest so long as such misunderstanding as exists is not willful. At all events, and as Obama implied, the future of peaceful and fruitful relations between the United States and the Muslim world may depend less on the United States than on the approach that the Muslim world takes to terrorism of all varieties—including anti-Israeli terrorism—and the ideologies which inform them.

But Obama’s speech was not primarily addressed to the Muslim world, but to the Turkish people and its government. In the long run, it is the substance of his remarks to them which is likely to be more important than his declaration—and not only for U.S.-Turkish relations but for the wider Muslim world. Here he placed less stress on Turkey’s Muslim heritage than its republican heritage as the first and so far the most successful Muslim-majority republic.

As Obama almost indicated directly, this emphasis comes against the background of recent concerns that Turkey under the present leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) might be weakening in its fidelity to that heritage, turning away from its long-standing alliances with Western countries—including the United States—and even moving closer to radical Islamic actors such as Sudan and Hamas. Obama’s remarks, although gently stated, essentially urged Turkey to renew its historic commitment to republican democracy and reaffirm its role as the place where East and West “come together.”

Obama referred explicitly to the heroic statesmanship of Atatürk, George Washington and perhaps above all of Abraham Lincoln. In light of his appeal to Lincoln, one might say that Obama invited Americans, Turks and Europeans to listen to the “better angels of our nature,” and urged Turks in particular to rededicate themselves to the propositions upon which modern Turkish history and success have been built. This was an important message to deliver, and it can only be hoped that it will be well received. That hope may however embrace not only Turkey but the wider Muslim world, which might profit from the example of Turkish republican success both now and hopefully in the future. In the long run, the reception of that message will be more important to American-Muslim relations than the declaration that the United States is not at war with Islam.

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Adam Garfinkle :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday was, to my way of thinking, an anti-climactic event. For months now we have been tantalized by the promise that Obama would go to a majority-Muslim country and tell it like it is. And this is what we get? This was a box-checking speech, full of duck-billed platitudes and not a single deliverable. The only things noteworthy about it were that: a) it happened; b) there was no quid pro quo protocol equilibration to Greece; and c) the speech abjured the old language that Turkey is a “moderate Muslim nation.” Turkey, we learn, is a secular democracy, just as Atatürk and his secular fundamentalist followers have insisted ever since 1924. This comes at a time when Turkey has a government, and a fairly popular one, that makes that description less resonant politically than ever. Why go talk to a Muslim-majority society only to pretend, sort of, that you’re not?

As for the “key” line—that we are not at war with Islam—well, Obama buried his lead four-fifths the way down the text, and of course that statement is nothing Bush administration principals, including the President, did not say dozens of times. If it suits your interests not to believe that statement, it’s not going to matter much which U.S. president says it. If it suits your interests now to stop saying you don’t believe it, then any president who is not George W. will do. If some Muslims now have heard this statement for the first time, just because it was delivered in Turkey by Barack Obama, fine: better eventually than not at all. But no, that statement in and of itself is not a game-changer, not with more U.S. soldiers headed to Afghanistan, more missiles fired into Pakistan’s border areas, more violence inevitable in Iraq over the next two years. Those of the conspiratorial persuasion seeking evidence that Obama is a liar will be able to find it just as easily as those who were sure George W. was a liar.

As for the speech itself as a form of the “black arts” (as Peggy Noonan once put it about speechwriting), it’s the worst major presentation the President has given (or delivered) so far. Judging from the official transcript pulled off the White House website, I counted at least two dozen mild infelicities, bona fide clunkers and grammatical errors that never should have made it past a second draft. One of these days people will stop comparing Obama to the hopeless George W. Marblemouth and recognize how mediocre this stuff really is.

Am I saying I could have written a better speech for this occasion? Yes, I actually believe that. There were oh-so-many missed opportunities in that speech—so many ways to have better concretized U.S.-Turkish friendship, and so many ways to have recognized that tolerance, hospitality, rule of law and other virtues (not to exclude democracy) which apply to Turkey, historically and at present, do not have to be expressed in an American idiom to be real and worthy of sincere admiration.

Maybe the lack of a unifying theme and anything remotely resembling a deliverable is the good news here. Some people had been hoping that Obama would use this occasion to launch a Presidential initiative on Israel/Palestine, stating U.S. parameters for a settlement, inviting the world to sign up to them, and implying muscular suasion on all engaged sides to make it happen. That we did not hear. Though I am skeptical that such a policy is wise, I’m almost sad it didn’t happen: that, at least, would have made the speech memorable.

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Bruce Jentleson :: Good speech. Got both the music and the words right. Doesn’t solve all problems in U.S.-Turkish relations, or all issues on the U.S. agenda of which Turkey is part, but does amount to a good start on both separating from the most counterproductive parts of the Bush policy and defining the key elements of an Obama policy.

Obama struck two key notes in getting the music right. One was his emphasis on mutual respect. This is the same phrasing he used in his inaugural address and in his video message to Iran. True, the respect mantra often gets invoked in the Muslim world as cover for less defensible positions. But its genuine resonance is even truer. Meeting people where they are, rather than where one may think they should be, is more likely to lead to being able “to build on our mutual interests, and rise above our differences,” as Obama put it, than lecturing and hectoring. Those self-styled hard-headed powerites who like to deride this sense of mutuality would do well to remember how the strength of anti-Bush sentiment in the Turkish parliament blocked Turkish military cooperation with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The other was the line about not being at war with Islam. This needed to be said. Sure, Bush made any number of disclaimers of his own. But they didn’t stick. In saying that trust was strained “in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced,” Obama was recognizing reality. That’s strategic, not self-flagellatory as some neo-cons would have it.

On the substance he also got much right. He spoke to Turkey’s multi-faceted role as an ally, not just on terrorism or any one particular issue but more broadly on a range of global, regional and bilateral issues. He gave Turkey credit for its diplomacy in the Israel-Syria talks, while stressing active U.S. re-engagement in the Arab-Israeli peace process. He supported Turkey’s accession to the European Union. He also pushed a bit on internal democratic reform and rule of law. He approached the Armenia issue with more of an eye to what the two countries need to do together than what the lobby back home expects of him.

Much remains to be done. Music and words are fine, but action must follow. But not bad for a start.

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Josef Joffe :: “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” This is one of those sentences which are so right that nobody could disagree—like “I love jamocca ice cream” or “The sun sets in the west.” Of course the United States is not at war with Islam, and never will be. If you want to push it, you might say: a part of Islam is at war with America, and for that there is plenty of evidence—from 9/11 to an endless slew of statements made by Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri or a bunch of lesser imams and mullahs or by various leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, not to speak of those representatives of the “Arab street” we get to see on Al-Jazeera.

Why would the president affirm what was undeniable in the first place? To make a gesture, of course. As he did with this sentence: “I also want to be clear that America’s relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

Again, this is as “surprising” (or if you want to be catty: vacuous) as the “we are not at war” sentence. Whoever based America’s relationship with the umma on “opposition to terrorism?” Not Bush ‘43—not, he, the coddler of Saudi Arabia, the financier of Egypt, the ally of Jordan’s Abdullah, the guarantor of the Gulfies. How patient, to the point of self-effacement, was W. with Turkey, after Ankara betrayed him in the run-up to the Iraq war? And who saved the Muslim Bosnians from the rage of the Serbs? The U.S. Air Force in the days of Clinton.

“We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground.” Does this mean we did not listen carefully to our Arab allies, paying over-sensitive respect to their fence-sitting and their mumbly caveats? Here Obama resorts not to belaboring the obvious, but to the oldest (liberal) tradition of American foreign policy. There are no clashes, no interests, no conflicts—just “misunderstandings.” And if we listen hard and patiently enough, these “conflicts” will just go poof.

Of course, these are not the ways of international politics, where collisions and conflicts are real, where the measure is not goodness or careful listening, but the power and the will that—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—backs up diplomacy.

Especially in the Hobbesian universe that is the Islamic Middle East—say, from the Levant to the Hindu Kush—homily will get you nowhere. Let’s hope the 44th president of the United States is not like Jimmy Carter who took four years to learn about the nasty ways of the world—who preached in the beginning that we should lose our “inordinate fear of communism” only to be rewarded by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and who let Khomeini come to power only to be repaid with the 444-day humiliation of the embassy hostage crisis.

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Mark N. Katz :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament was designed to appeal not just to the Turkish public, but also to the broader Muslim world. In it, Obama certainly struck many positive notes. His administration is for improved Turkish-American and Muslim-American relations. His administration also seeks peace or improved relations between Turkey and Armenia, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and Syria, among others. His administration supports Turkey’s admission to the European Union.

Indeed, Obama signaled that America is willing to work with all parties in the Muslim world except the terrorists. He called for the United States to work with Muslims and non-Muslims alike against them. The only two terrorist movements that he mentioned by name, though, were the PKK and Al Qaeda. He made no mention of the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah, among others. By not describing them as terrorist, Obama has certainly opened the door—and perhaps even raised the expectation—that he is willing to work with them.

The audience applauded when Obama said, “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” His next sentence—”In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical not just in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject, but also to strengthen opportunity for all its people”—appears to be more an expression of hope than a statement of fact. For unfortunately, there is widespread support in the Muslim world for non-democratic movements that engage in terrorism. Many Muslims instead see groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Taliban as legitimate “national liberation” movements.

What Obama may soon find is that it is going to be extremely difficult for the United States to appeal to the broader Muslim world and to fight terrorist groups within it simultaneously. The Bush administration at least recognized that this was a dilemma and attempted to resolve it by recognizing the need for democratization (even if it did not push very hard for this in many Muslim countries). But Obama’s statement that “Turkey’s democracy is your own achievement. It was not forced upon you by any outside power,” appears to be a strong signal that his administration does not share even the Bush administration’s recognition that the United States can and should do something to promote democratization in the Middle East.

Obama’s hopes for improved relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world are laudable. But unless public opinion in the Muslim world stops supporting non-democratic political movements, or these movements undergo a democratic transformation, it is doubtful that the improved relations he hopes for can be achieved.

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Michael Reynolds :: President Obama demonstrated in Turkey the talent that has distinguished him at least since his tenure as head of Harvard’s Law Review: namely, the ability to play the role of reconciler between otherwise seemingly irreconcilable sides. The best example of this was his ability to touch on the question of the Armenian genocide in his speech to the Turkish parliament in such a way as to win applause from the parliamentarians as well as praise from one of the leading advocates of Turkish recognition of genocide.

Obama’s charisma extended beyond the parliament. Even the thousands of leftist protesters who declared Obama to be merely a new face for an old American imperialism felt compelled in interviews to concede that, yes, Obama himself comes across as intelligent, affable, and appealing. Posters showing a cartoon Uncle Sam with Obama’s face superimposed recalled the famous New Yorker magazine’s spoof of Obama dressed in a turban, albeit with precisely the opposite point: far from being a secret Al Qaeda sympathizer, Obama represents merely a new face for an old American imperialism.

Obama’s message of humility, patience, and charity thus left a generally positive impression in Turkey. Needless to say, however, articulating a vision wherein conflicts are resolved through mutual and sincere compromise is easier said than achieving that vision. Obama has not yet indicated publicly to what extent he is willing to use American power, positive as well as negative, to push the resolution of the Middle East’s multiple conflicts.

Another thing that that struck me was this statement made by Obama in support of Turkey’s EU candidacy: “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith—it is not diminished by it.” It is a quintessentially American assertion. The sentiment behind it is, indisputably, appealing on the most obvious level. But one has to wonder what citizens of the European Union, regardless of their stance on Turkey’s EU candidacy, think when the President of the United States of America makes declarations about what constitutes Europe’s fundamental interests.

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Michael Rubin :: There are certain points every U.S. official should make upon visiting Turkey. President Obama did his homework and delivered them. He is correct when he declares, “Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And Turkey and the United States must stand together—and work together.” Obama is right to highlight Turkey’s EU accession ambitions as well as the reforms accomplished over the past several years. And he successfully tiptoed through the political minefield of the Armenian genocide debate.

However, Obama also broke new ground, not all of it positive. For example, Obama stated, “The United States will continue to support your central role as an East-West corridor for oil and natural gas.” But how can Obama expect to pressure Iran to accede to its international obligations when Turkey’s State Minister Kürşad Tüzman seeks to raise bilateral trade with the Islamic Republic to $20 billion? (It was just $1.3 billion when the AKP took power.)

And while diplomatic nicety is the bread-and-butter of speechwriters, in the case of Obama’s reference to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it can have cost. Here his comments were infused with moral equivalency which is especially dangerous given Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s embrace and, indeed, endorsement of Hamas. Obama could have sent a positive message, especially in a country like Turkey which has suffered so much terrorism, had he reinforced that idea explicitly that democracies must stand against terrorism and that no political agendas can legitimize terrorism. Obama drew equivalence between Al Qaeda and the PKK; he should have added Hamas to the mix. Let us hope that, before Obama embraces Erdoğan as a true partner, he becomes aware of the Turkish Prime Minister’s endorsement of Al Qaeda financier Yasin al-Qadi.

Rhetoric is easy, but can be ephemeral. It is easy to say “We will be respectful, even when we do not agree,” but the President of the United States should never sacrifice the values of free speech or expression in order to protect the sensitivity of anyone who might take insult. To compromise fundamental values is a slippery slope; we should not go down the path of Europe. Nor should Obama speak of the Islamic world. He should recognize the true diversity of Muslim peoples, and not seek to impose a unitary identity upon them.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: Will President Obama, even with his Muslim middle name, have any greater luck than President George W. Bush reassuring the Muslim world of the good will and good intentions of the United States? He goes farther, saying that “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better.” Along the same line, addressing Turkey’s application to the EU, he argues that “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith.” In fact, the benefits of Islam, both in history and prospectively in the EU, are highly contested, but the Turks and Muslims more broadly probably welcomed these sentiments.

The President says that the United States is not and can never be at war against Islam, that “our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.” Here the President asserts a division between the moderate majority of Muslims and the minority “fringe” of jihadis—oops, I mean “terrorists”—not to be specified further. This may be a distinction without as much of a difference as we, and the President, might hope. If the President says it enough, maybe his Muslim audience will come to believe it.

The President’s approbation of Turkey and its recent legal measures was clear, while he urged its leaders to continue along the line of diversity and pluralism, particularly in regard to the Kurds (but not the PKK), and the Orthodox Christians, as well as to resolve differences and improve relations with Armenians. At the same time, he stressed the secular nature of the Turkish constitution, and made no mention of the Islamist—I mean Islamic—party in government.

President Obama took a hard line on Iran, focusing not on cooperation in regard to Iraq and Af/Pak, but on Iran’s movement toward nuclear weapons. He offers a stark choice to Islamic Republic: “Iran’s leaders must choose whether they will try to build a weapon or build a better future for their people.” No hints about what may follow the manufacture of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

They say that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it, first as campaign promises, then as foreign policy. So it is with Palestine. In spite of much good advice from MESH prior to the President’s ascension, he is determined to achieve what so many, with so much effort, have failed to achieve: “In the Middle East, we share the goal of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. That is a goal shared by Palestinians, Israelis, and people of good will around the world.” (Emphasis added.) I do not know which Palestinians the President has been speaking to, but neither Hamas nor Fatah will recognize Israel, and the preferred goal of most Palestinians appears to be a different two-state solution: Palestine and Jordan.

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Harvey Sicherman :: President Obama’s speech at the Turkish parliament gave ample evidence of his gift for allowing his audience to see themselves in him. Thus, he spoke winning words to those advocating the democratic Kemalist Turkey of the West. But those who wanted to “reorient” (literally) Turkey toward the East could also find comfort in references to Ankara’s mediation of regional conflicts and imperial Muslim past. Kemalism, of course, burns the bridge to the East. And the current Turkish government is suspected by its opponents of seeking to burn the bridge to the West. Nevermind; Obama levitated above this contradiction with the crowd-pleasing conclusion that “Turkey’s greatness lies in your ability to be at the center of things.” Gifted rhetoric to be sure.

In the wake of Presidential parades, a clean-up crew (usually the unfortunate Secretary of State) must collect the policy. Three specifics:

1. RESET: To use the blackberry-proficient President’s favorite phrase, he wants a renewal of U.S.-Turkish cooperation. On the most neuralgic item—the Kurds—Obama pledged “our support” against the PKK while restating that the new Iraq should not be a danger to its neighbors (i.e. no independent Kurdistan). He advocated Turkish entry to Europe (a poke at France and Germany) and swallowed whole in public his previous view of the Armenian genocide, which he consigned to the historians.
2. I’m coming your way: Obama notified Israel’s new government not to quarrel over the two-state solution, “the road map and Annapolis… a goal that I will actively pursue as President of the United States.”
3. I feel your pain: Ankara was another installment in a campaign to change the American image, this time for Muslims. Obama declared (as had Mr. Bush) that the United States was not “at war with Islam.” He tried manfully to lift the American-”Muslim World” relationship out of the terrorist focus through two devices: a respectful search for common ground and his personal experience of Muslims in the family. This, too, was cunningly designed to sway his audience: I am not one of you but I am close enough to know you, a near relative as it were. And, of course, “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith…” Although variations on the theme were also uttered by his predecessor, the President can count on amnesia, and his own striking example, to change the image. But does this really matter? And is Obama not raising expectations of impossible comity with a “Muslim World” at war with itself and gripped by the grievance culture besides?

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Raymond Tanter :: In tennis, when confronting a choice between hitting the ball cross-court or down the line, “Solve the riddle by going up the middle!” Like the tennis analogy, the visit of President Obama to Turkey is a search for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

One school of thought: Turkey’s harsh response to Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should prompt the NATO alliance to reconsider Turkey’s commitment to the global struggle against radical Islam. Because such “Islamism” is priority number-one for NATO, and because Ankara holds an incompatible view of the threat, consider removing Turkey from the alliance.

When Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen rose as consensus candidate for NATO Secretary General, Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan raised objections. Rasmussen had been prime minister when the cartoons were published and refused to censor the newspapers in which they ran. Rasmussen was cleared for the NATO post after negotiating with Turkish President Abdullah Gül and stating: “I consider Turkey a very important ally and strategic partner, and I will cooperate with them in our endeavors to ensure the best cooperation with Muslim world.” Obama’s apt intervention to help devise language acceptable to the parties allowed for the appointment of Rasmussen and typifies the President’s approach of searching for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

A second school: Turkey’s strategic position—the second-largest NATO-member army; borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran; a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan; and Europe’s sixth-largest economy—requires greater outreach and integration of Turkey into Europe.

Accordingly, Washington should take a lead role in promoting Turkish accession to the European Union to overcome French objections. Enhanced bilateral relations would include expanding the economic component of U.S.-Turkey relations and promoting more collaboration between mid-level military officers. To overcome religious tension, the United States would no longer treat Turkey as a “Muslim country” and more as a European country.

The most prudent course for the Obama administration is the middle path between these two extremes, a road the President is beginning to take. Indeed, Turkey is too important an ally to alienate with even the suggestion that the country might be removed from NATO. But enthusiastic engagement should depend on the degree to which Turkey is on the same page as the rest of NATO regarding the threat of radical Islam.

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Michael Young :: As I read President Obama’s comments to the Turkish parliament on Monday, I couldn’t help but think of Egypt.

Under the conditions prevailing during much of the past 25 to 30 years, his speech would have been one that, in its references to the Arab-Israeli conflict but also at the highly symbolic moment of Obama’s first contact with the Middle East, would have been made before the Egyptian parliament. Instead, the U.S. president chose a non-Arab state as the venue for his first major address to the region and the Islamic world.

One wonders how Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak reacted when he heard Obama say: “The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security. And like the United States, you seek a future of opportunity and statehood for the Palestinians. So now, working together, we must not give into pessimism and mistrust.”

Surely, he felt that someone had gently bumped him back into the line. Wasn’t Egypt the traditional mediator between Israelis and Palestinians? If your hunch is that this gives us a sense of the thorough marginalization of the Arab countries compared to their non-Arab periphery, particularly states like Turkey and Iran, but also Israel, then your hunch comes very late. Whether it was in his passages on Iran, Iraq, or terrorism, and even in his appeal to the Muslim world, Obama not once mentioned Egypt or Saudi Arabia, though he did mention their rival, Syria, just once.

Remember, in 1990 it was Egypt and Saudi Arabia that were the cornerstones (if you could call them that) of the Arab mobilization against Iraq when Saddam Hussein ordered his soldiers into Kuwait. When the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was extended in 1995, it was Egypt that led the Arab effort to create a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East (and failed). Throughout the 1990s, Egypt was the go-to place to talk about Palestinian-Israeli issues, and when Egyptians were the victims of Islamist violence during the 1990s, it was the go-to place to hold anti-terrorism summits, for example the one at Sharm al-Sheikh in 1996.

That Obama mentioned these topics, and others, in Ankara did not mean that it is time to write Egypt’s obituary. But with Mubarak now an old man, still sitting atop a political system seemingly incapable of renewing itself in pluralistically invigorating ways, and with no end in sight to the Saudi gerontocracy, it is not surprising that Obama should have struck his highest notes in a country that is of the region but not quite in it—and therefore untainted by its irrepressible decline. The United States will continue to ally itself with Arab states to contain Iran, but as Obama made clear in his speech, and in his diplomatic initiatives in recent weeks, he relies much more on countries like Turkey and Russia to act as hooks on which to hang any international effort to deal with Iran’s nuclear program.

Obama sent a kind word to the world’s Muslims, and surely many in the Arab world applauded his lines. But what he was really telling them, intentionally or not, is that their region is changing, and it’s changing in ways that may soon turn the Arabs into secondary characters in their own narrative, because their regimes simply seem unable to change.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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Is Iran trying to create a “Shiite crescent,” as its Arab critics insist, or is it a country merely interested in helping the oppressed in the Middle East, Sunnis and Shiites alike? That’s the question indirectly posed in this news report from Al-Jazeera in English (here, if you cannot view it above), and in many respects it’s a red herring. The truth is simpler. Iran will use all the instruments it can muster to advance its nationalist agenda in the region—Shiite solidarity in some countries, resistance to Israel or the United States in others, and popular displeasure with Arab regimes in yet others, with overlap possible in each.

Two things are interesting here. First, that Iran’s Arab rivals, realists to the bone, should tend to define Iranian behavior mainly in terms of ideology and sectarian affiliation. But that too is a red herring, because the Arab states realize that in competing with Iran, their principal comparative advantage remains Sunni sectarian mobilization. Iran, they know well, is as realist a state as any other, but one effective way of containing its power in the Middle East is to appeal to the ambient Sunni fear of a regional “Shiite threat,” no matter how vague and remote that concept may be.

A second thing interesting here is what Iran’s multi-layered ability to advance its regional interests means to the United States. There has been much talk of “engaging” Iran of late in Washington, and in and of itself that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Already, for example, this promise may have influenced the speech today of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he declared that Iran was prepared for a dialogue with America, provided it took place in “a fair atmosphere in which there is mutual respect.” But before we get any ideas that Ahmadinejad has truly warmed to such an opening, we might want to consider that the president felt a need to sound conciliatory because he couldn’t abandon that valuable card to his future rival in the presidential election, Muhammad Khatami.

The real question, however, is how does the United States engage Iran successfully when the Islamic Republic has proven so adept at advancing its national interests in intricate ways, and seems so much more clearheaded than the United States about the endgame? The Arabs have usually fought back by appealing to sectarian paranoia; but what can the United States do against an Iran that by all accounts is building a nuclear weapon in order to become a regional hegemon? An Iran that is indeed able to appeal to Shiites in Arab societies, perhaps most importantly in Lebanon? That can play on Arab sympathy for the Palestinians, while also influencing its allies in Iraq? And that can on occasion raise the domestic heat on American friends such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, because their societies question their legitimacy?

The simple answer is that, until now, we’re not quite sure. Amid all the talk of… well, talking to Iran, the Obama administration has yet to formulate a new and comprehensive policy toward the Islamic Republic. To talk is not a strategy; it’s just a verb. That doesn’t mean a brilliant scheme will not soon emerge from the catacombs of the National Security Council and the State Department. It doesn’t mean that Washington will inevitably be taken for a ride by the mullahs. But since we have an administration in Washington that has expressed its desire to break away from the allegedly “ideological” Bush years and return to the cooler pursuit of the national self-interest (”smart power.” as Hillary Clinton calls it), then we can probably assume that Tehran will test that ability to the limit.

The Al-Jazeera report is interesting because it limits itself to a conceptual template that the Iranians are glad to work within. For every Arab attack on the predominance of Shiite sectarian calculations in Iranian foreign policy, the Iranians can find a good refutation. The real issue is that Iran is as nationalist as any other state, and as flexible in balancing its ideological weapons with its political, financial, and military ones regionally. That will be an important lesson for the Obama administration to remember when or if it moves ahead in an exchange with Tehran. It should also provide a blueprint for how the U.S. should respond when trying to put Iran on the defensive. If Iran can play on several regional and international game boards, then Washington needs to match that. Now is Barack Obama’s opportunity to show that he has the subtlety that George W. Bush lacked.

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?

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

MESH members’ answers will appear in installments throughout the week. We begin with responses from Michael Young, Raymond Tanter, and Philip Carl Salzman.

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Michael Young :: The question posed—What did the Bush administration do right and do wrong in the Middle East?—seems almost provocative in light of the conventional wisdom in recent years stating that the administration has done nothing right. The view is both politically tendentious and ahistorical. The administration has done both right and wrong, and in that way has pretty much replicated the behavior of its predecessors.

Iraq, of course, may seem to disprove that contention of continuity, but it also ended up being the exception confirming the rule that the administration subsequently very much behaved in the context of the international consensus on affairs of the region. In fact, almost immediately after the war ended the United States went to the Security Council to get sanction for the invasion from the United Nations.

Was Iraq a bad idea? To this day I think the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein was both necessary and meritorious. Nor do I believe it required any other justification than the fact that removing mass murderers from power is necessary and meritorious. That is why I am especially bitter over the aftermath of the war—the shoddy planning, the insufferable hubris, the indecision, and all the other American errors helping to ensure that in the future the United States will shy away from similar actions—not to say from more effective and aggressive support for those in the Arab world who continue to suffer at the hands of the region’s despots.

Lebanon was a verifiable success for the Bush administration. Never a high priority for the United States, ending the Syrian presence in the country was nonetheless something George W. Bush alone successfully pushed for, along with the French President Jacques Chirac, when all other American presidents since 1976 were willing to partly or completely subcontract Lebanon to Syria. Bush received help from the Lebanese in 2005, when they took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands to demand a Syrian pullout, but he stuck with them afterward. That alone, from my perspective, makes him worthy of a more generous legacy than he will get.

Otherwise, the administration has been all multilateral compromise. It has worked in the context of the Quartet on the Palestinian-Israeli track, and through the 5 + 1 Group and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the nuclear dispute with Iran; has backed international law and the Hariri tribunal in Lebanon, through the Security Council; and has stood by in allowing Turkey to sponsor indirect Syrian-Israeli negotiations. In Afghanistan it has worked through NATO, under UN authority.

Alas, despite the rhetoric in favor of democratization in the Middle East, the administration has largely abandoned that message, in large part because it needs the collaboration of Arab dictatorships against Iran. This makes the Bush administration today so little different from the Clinton administration when it comes to the basics of regional behavior and thinking, that what comes next in Washington (most probably an Obama administration) will seem very little different than what Bush administration turned into once the Iraq war ended.

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Raymond Tanter :: The legacy of George W. Bush rides on Iraq in the short term and Iran in the mid-term. As Iraq slid into chaos during 2006, the Bush legacy suffered as well. During 2007, Iraq was resuscitated by a U.S. surge, counterinsurgency strategy, and political reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis led by the Iranian opposition in Iraq. The surge provided more U.S. forces in Iraq to execute a counterinsurgency strategy that provided security for Iraqi civilians who, in turn, provided intelligence about Shiite militia and Sunni insurgent groups. Interviews in Iraq confirm that political reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis, as well as between former Sunni insurgents and the U.S. military, was fostered by the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group in Diyala province. This reconciliation reinforced the surge and counterinsurgency strategy.

Although the Iraqi story is still unfolding, deterioration of 2006 has yielded to significant security gains and a political bounce in Iraq. Not so for Iran. Washington’s efforts to deter and coerce the Iranian regime fall short due to infighting within the Bush administration, not much different from bureaucratic warfare about Iraq. The State Department’s approach ranges from hints to open an interest section in Tehran, to subcontracting Europeans to negotiate with Tehran, to fostering multilateral sanctions by the UN Security Council. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense reportedly draws up war plans for dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons program. There are, in addition, American military plans for destroying the terrorist infrastructure that Tehran maintains in Iraq and for engaging in raids across the Iraqi border to eliminate the supply of sophisticated roadside-bomb technology manufactured in Iran.

Developing an approach that does not embolden the regime in Tehran or rely on problematic military strikes would require the same strong presidential leadership President Bush showed in changing course in Iraq. President Bush demonstrated rhetorical leadership on Iran when he spoke directly to the Iranian people in his 2005 State of the Union address, saying, “As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.” In 2006 he added, “We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.” Before President Bush leaves office, he should match his strong words with deeds that would reinforce the diplomatic option yet keep the military alternative on the table.

One way of closing the gap between rhetoric and action is to develop a third option regarding Iran, between failing diplomacy and challenging military strikes. Empowering democratic forces both inside and outside of Iran would be a step toward creating such a third option that puts pressure on the Iranian regime to rethink its pursuit of nuclear weapons and sponsorship of terrorism, before resorting to military action. Reaching out to the same Iranian oppositionists who fostered political reconciliation in Iraq is such an option.

The Mujahedeen-e Khalq is feared by Tehran. Delisting the group from the U.S. list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations would pressure Tehran on the nuclear issue, terrorism, and Iraq. Knowing the potency of this democratic opposition group, Tehran is pressuring Baghdad to extradite the leadership to Iran and disperse the rank and file. If President Bush allows Iraqi Security Forces to take control of the MEK pursuant to a Status of Forces Agreement and the MEK is destroyed, the United States will lose a valuable source of intelligence, political reconciliation gains in Iraq, and leverage against Tehran, permanently tarnishing the Bush legacy.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: It is too early, substantially too early, to judge the Middle East legacy of President George W. Bush.

Before assessing the Bush legacy in the region, we must have some idea how his initiatives and policies turn out, and how the region develops and changes over the next years. Above all, will Iraq hold together, develop democratically, and prove to be an American ally? Secondarily, will the Taliban and Al Qaeda be held off in Afghanistan, will the Afghan government gain strength, and will Afghan society evolve into a civil society? Finally, will Lebanon remain independent from Syria and avoid further civil war, and will Libya continue to regularize its behavior to international norms or return to its earlier radical and disruptive activities? At the moment, it is too early to say.

What we can say, is that the bar is very low in assessing U.S. presidential legacies in the Middle East. From 1945 until 1990, U.S. presidents were concerned above all with the Communist threat, in Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, while the Middle East was regarded as a secondary theater. American presidents acted with purpose and effect in Greece, Italy, and Europe generally, and in Korea and Latin America, and with purpose and less good effect in southeast Asia. But U.S. presidential performance in the Middle East was for the most part indecisive and weak. While Truman recognized Israel, Eisenhower undermined British, French, and Israeli efforts to counter Nasser. Carter undermined the Shah of Iran, and flinched at checking the Islamic revolutionaries, while Reagan cooperated with the Iranians in aid of conflicts in Latin America. The first Bush did stop Saddam in Kuwait, but let slip the opportunity to remove him. Clinton fiddled while American assets were repeatedly attacked by Islamists. All relied for stability upon Middle Eastern dictators. So the Middle Eastern legacies of American presidents are largely of neglect and weakness.

There are some things that can be said about the G. W. Bush legacy in the Middle East. First, he responded with decisive force against American enemies. Does anyone remember the world of experts who said that the Afghans and Iraqis could never be beaten? Yet a handful of American special forces with air power were enough to bring the Taliban down in record time. And the American military did not suffer serious threat from the Iraqi military. American military performance was extremely impressive; that legacy is clear. The civil war in Iraq has tended to obscure that, but clarity returned somewhat with the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Second, America has suffered no terrorist attacks since 2001. This is a stunning record. And yet, little credit is given for events that have not taken place.

There are also clear negatives. First, the rationale for invading Iraq was imprudently simplified for public consumption, and, although all intelligence agencies around the world were confident that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the absence of such weapons undermined public support. “Bush lied” is a dishonest distortion, but widely accepted. Second, the defense against terrorist attacks tended to set aside, or be seen as a threat to civil liberties and constitutional rights. Perhaps this was inevitable, but striking a balance, and appearing to strike a balance, were not sufficiently achieved.

At the same time, neither the American public nor the Democratic opposition covered themselves with glory. The public appears to have a sit-com length attention span and tolerance of effort, while the Democrats flinch from defending the country and often appear to be tempted to side with the enemy. The Europeans have gone well beyond being tempted.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: The new administration does not have the luxury of a blank slate. American policies, resources, and commitments have already filled up most of the space. Therefore…

Accept the fact that America’s main investment and hope is Iraq, a country of central importance to the Middle East. Stability and example in Iraq would not only be the fulfillment of past American efforts, but the best hope for future political and economic progress in the Middle East. A strong Iraq, friendly to the United States, would be a powerful influence and counter to Iran and Syria.

Avoid trying to be the hero who finally solves what no one else has been able to solve in the sixty years of ongoing efforts: the Palestinian problem. All previous attempts have seen the situation go from bad to worse. Minimizing the worse possibilities is the most realistic course. In any case, the Palestinian problem, central to ideological discourse in the Middle East, is in fact a minor problem of a minor population.

Afghanistan is a frontier fight, not critical to the Middle East—however important it may be to the prestige of America and the West, now that they have committed to making it into a real state and civil society. The project must be pursued, and pursued vigorously, but not at the expense of the more important commitment to the central Middle East.

Look to hitherto peripheral players, Russia and India, who may increasingly contribute to future developments in the Middle East, Russia in a negative way, and India potentially in a constructive way. Both are giants on the borders of the Middle East, and both are feeling their oats and itching to benefit from their weight. The new administration must find ways of discouraging Russia and encouraging India.

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Michael Young :: A priority of any new administration will be to take a pill against a rampant disease afflicting the Middle East policy community: engagement-itis. Everybody today advocates engagement: of Iran; of Syria; of Hamas; of whatever the Bush administration failed to engage. But no one seems to have clearly defined how engagement should happen and what it must bring about—neither the wonks of the campaigns nor the think tank mavens dying to be offered a policy position.

Depending on who the United States engages, the calculations will differ. Talking to Iran offers different gains than talking to Syria, for example. An American opening to Tehran may be inevitable in the coming months, because the United States wants to avoid a military confrontation in the region over Iran’s nuclear program—whether Washington or Israel does the bombing. The next administration will also need Iranian cooperation in Afghanistan, which will emerge as a battleground in the coming years.

However, for the United States to successfully engage Iran, Washington will need leverage. That means consolidating its gains in Iraq while downgrading its military presence and getting the Europeans and Russia on board in imposing further sanctions on Tehran. A rather tall order. Whether the United States wants to attack Iranian nuclear facilities or not, not having leverage over Iran elsewhere may make more likely the administration’s resorting to the military threat to compensate—belying the claim that engagement will necessarily calm tensions in the region.

One source of leverage over Iran is to weaken its ally Syria. There has been an argument making the rounds that it is time to talk to the regime of Bashar Asad. But talk to Asad about what? The engagers first suggested the United States should try this to break Syria off from Iran, and by extension from Hezbollah and Hamas. But then Asad made clear he wouldn’t break with anybody. Why should he? His dubious relationships are what bring everyone to his doorstep, hat in hand.

So the engagers backtracked and suggested it was a good idea to engage Syria because this might advance Syrian-Israeli peace. But Asad again made plain that his priority in talking to Israel was to normalize relations with the United States and break Syria out of its isolation. And if Asad does that, why should he split with Iran if this was never an American precondition?

Iran will be at the heart of the administration’s problems in the coming year, but Syria will be the Iranian Achilles’ heel that everyone ignores. If the screws are tightened on Syria, Iran could be denied a useful ally in the Levant. But is that going to happen? No. So don’t be surprised if Iran, Syria, and Israel, but also Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as they find themselves having to deal with a United States eager to engage but with little leverage or lucid ideas on how to do so, begin manipulating the dynamics of the one place that serves as everyone’s default game board in the region: Lebanon.

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.

This report of the return of Samir Quntar to his home village of Abay on Thursday is how you would expect a news story like this one to play in a foreign media outlet. (If you do not see an embedded clip, click here.)

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No imagination. No real sense of what’s going on. Just an examination of the superficial paradoxes of the scene, particularly Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s welcoming of Quntar as a resistance fighter when only two months ago Jumblatt’s followers were fighting Hezbollah. Oh Lebanon! Land of contradiction, of fickleness!

What is really going on is far more interesting. Roughly speaking, the Druze have a dual political leadership structure in their community, with Jumblatt heading one faction and Talal Arslan heading the other, in the latest reflection of the traditional Jumblatti-Yazbaki dichotomy. Arslan’s power happens to be vastly more limited than Jumblatt’s, even as Jumblatt has a vested interest in puffing Arslan up to protect the dual structure of power tilted to his own advantage, to maintain Druze unity, and to prevent the emergence of Druze upstarts.

Even before Quntar, a Druze, was released from prison in Israel, both Jumblatt and Arslan realized he might be co-opted by Hezbollah and used against them. Indeed, the first thing the party did to the released prisoners was dress them up in military fatigues and send them out on a round of welcoming ceremonies. That’s why Quntar arrives in Abay in a Hezbollah uniform. Jumblatt’s and Arslan’s rally for Quntar was motivated by the need to avoid Druze ill feeling by ignoring their coreligionist; but more importantly by a desire to defend their leadership over the Druze by containing Quntar, which they did by embracing him to better defuse him. Although Quntar presents no threat to their power base, he could emerge as a small headache. For example, he could conceivably be brought into parliament in next year’s elections in the Baabda constituency, where Hezbollah and the Aounists, if they decide to bother Jumblatt, have considerable electoral sway.

What is interesting in this context is that the Syrian intelligence services have set up a similar such figure in the Druze community. His name is Wiam Wahhab, and while his Druze support is negligible, he has retained public attention because he is one of Damascus’ megaphones in Lebanon. Wahhab’s rise had threatened Arslan much more than it did Jumblatt, though Arslan and Wahhab are both close to Syria. In a new reversal, Quntar’s release threatens Wahhab, while Arslan, thanks to his collaboration with Jumblatt, has re-entered the Druze political scene in relative force after a period of relative quiet. This was made possible because last May the Jumblattis and the Arslanists united in fighting Hezbollah.

A sign of Quntar’s limitations among the Druze was not recorded in this video. When the Hezbollah representative, Muhammad Fnaysh, made a speech, he was booed on several occasions; and when Quntar praised Syria in his statements, he was booed as well. The Abay gathering had little to do with Samir Quntar. It was about the traditional Druze leadership affirming itself against Hezbollah, against an interloper, by neutralizing what Jumblatt and Arslan fear may be a Hezbollah creation in their midst.