Egypt’s National Democratic Party (NDP) conference is fast approaching, but the meeting—which will formally set the stage for political succession—isn’t making headlines these days. On October 6, the Los Angeles Times reported on how the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is reacting to sales of an Artificial Virginity Hymen Kit; still other news outlets have focused on the important decision at Al-Azhar to ban the niqab (the full-body veil) in the classroom.

Less covered in the Western media, but perhaps equally consequential, is the ongoing controversy surrounding Hala Mustafa (pictured). On October 10, Dr. Mustafa will appear at hearings before the Journalist Syndicate disciplinary committee, where she faces sanctions for meeting with Israeli ambassador to Egypt Shalom Cohen in early September.

Dr. Mustafa is a member of the NDP’s elite policy committee, and a scholar at the government-sponsored Al-Ahram Center. Last month, she found herself the target of a Journalist Syndicate investigation for meeting with the Israeli ambassador to Egypt. By meeting with Cohen, she violated draconian union bylaws, which enforce the strict policy of no contact with Israelis underpinning the “anti-normalization” campaign.

In recent decades, the Egyptian professional boycott against Israel—led by Islamist-controlled syndicates—has been an effective tool in preventing a normalization of bilateral relations between the states. While the government of Egypt has made little effort to reverse the trend, it has not seemingly endorsed the boycott—until recently.

The Journalist Syndicate appears to be looking to make an example out of Dr. Mustafa. And she’s not getting any help from the government’s Al-Ahram Center. Indeed, not only has the Center established its own board of inquiry to investigate Dr. Mustafa, just weeks ago the Center announced it too would “boycott Israelis of all levels.”

Perhaps this turn of events shouldn’t be surprising given that the center was founded in 1968 as the Center for Zionist and Palestine studies. Nevertheless, it seems odd that Egypt’s leading research institution—a state-funded institute closely tied to the regime—would adhere to extra-legal anti-normalization prescriptions advocated by Islamist-led unions. Indeed, the 1978 Camp David (peace) Accords stipulated that after the Israelis withdrew from Sinai, the states would establish “normal relations” including “cultural relations.”

While there is little doubt that the Egyptian government is committed to the absence of war with its Israeli neighbor, there remains a staunch opposition to moving toward a peace between the peoples at both the popular and the official levels. In Egypt, this incongruity is rationalized by the Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, but even when the peace process is making progress—during the heyday of the Oslo Accords (1994-98), for example—Cairo demonstrates little inclination to change the dynamic.

The resistance to normalizing relations with Israel reaches the highest levels in Cairo. To date Hosni Mubarak—who has served as Egypt’s president since 1981—has visited Israel only once, and that was to attend the funeral of former Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin. Still, in 1995, following his return from Israel, he told the Government daily Al Ahram that “I don’t consider this a visit.”

It remains to be seen what will transpire with Hala Mustafa’s case. Syndicate insiders say that the group’s board of directors is inclined to freeze her membership for a year, resulting in her removal as editor and chief of Al-Demokratiya. Sadly, based on developments to date, it appears unlikely that Mubarak regime will oppose a Journalist Syndicate dictate or intervene on her behalf.

For the Obama administration—which is trying to convince states like Saudi Arabia to normalize with Israel in hopes of encouraging the Jewish state to take “risks for peace” with the Palestinians—Cairo’s disposition is problematic. After all, if even peace partners are unwilling to normalize, convincing states like Saudi Arabia to do so stands little chance of success. In the search for Arab normalization with Israel, Washington would be best advised to take a more modest approach. Egypt, at peace with Israel for nearly 30 years, would seem a reasonable place to start.

MESH Admin: There is an Arabic translation of this post.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Mubarak is on his way back to Egypt. Well done, folks. It’s amazing how much mileage we can… all… squeeze… out… of a meeting that is notable for its general lack of newsworthiness. If I had to score this one, I hate to say it, but I would give the edge to the Egyptians. I think the Obama people got snookered by the Middle East. President Hosni Mubarak came to the White House, demonstrating he is back and bilateral relations are on track without returning the favor to his host. It is true that everything—nuclear proliferation, terrorism, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, democracy (or lack thereof), and the Arab-Israeli conflict—was on the table, but it seems President Obama did not get what he needed/wanted most: A commitment from Mubarak for an Arab gesture toward Israel.

The prevailing discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the nation’s capital suggests that some sort of positive signal from the Arab world to Israel will make a settlement freeze more tenable to average Israelis and encourage them to take the hard steps that lie ahead. Mubarak wasn’t buying it and there is little reason to believe that he would. Egyptians argue that Cairo has a peace agreement with Israel, there is security cooperation between the two countries, and the Egyptian head of Intelligence spends a great deal of time on issues important to Israel. Why is an additional gesture necessary? More broadly, the Arab world points to the Arab Peace Initiative that then-Crown Prince Abdallah tabled in 2002, which promised Israel normalization of relations once there is a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as the most important gesture to the Israelis. If that is not incentive enough for the Israelis to negotiate in good faith, what is? So we are left with platitudes about progress and the need for all parties to do more to create an environment for peace. I sincerely hope no one left the Vineyard for this snoozer.

In all seriousness, the result of the meeting ups the ante for Obama’s planned big statement on Middle East peace. Perhaps if he throws down the gauntlet in a big forum, his international prestige will compel the parties to take the necessary steps toward peace. It is hard not believe, however, that Obama just learned a very important lesson about the limits of American power to get friendly governments to do things Washington wants.

The other items on the agenda seemed secondary, but I was not there so I don’t know for sure. If Abdel Monem Said’s Washington Post piece is any guide, the Egyptian delegation was, among other things, seeking to enlighten its American counterpart on problems in Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. That’s all well and good. Thanks for putting it on our radar screen. Yet, what are the Egyptians bringing to the table to help Washington deal with these very difficult problems? If Egypt’s response to the problem of piracy, which directly affects Egypt where it counts—in Suez Canal tolls—is any guide, Cairo does not plan on offering very much. Rather than deploy its navy to ensure safe passage in the Gulf of Aden, which leads to the Red Sea and the Canal, Egypt suggested the establishment of a regional information center on piracy, and Mubarak proposed that merchant ships arm themselves with heavy artillery to deal with the problem.

Both President Obama and the Secretary of State Clinton confirmed that they raised human rights and reform issues, which is a good thing, but I am skeptical that the United States is going to get very far with Mubarak. It seems to me that given the nature of the regime, it’s going to be awfully hard for opposition groups to dislodge Mubarak or any of his likely successors even with Washington’s help. I am channeling Gramsci here. It’s a fantasy to believe that civil society groups can disarm the Egyptian gendarme state. It’s true that Mubarak relies on coercion, the least efficient means of political control, which suggests that he is vulnerable to counter-narratives. Still, those alternative accounts of Egypt exist, whether they are liberal, Islamist, leftist, neo-Nasserist, and yet Mubarak seems secure. Yes, I know this is a generational issue. That’s why I think it was good thing that President Obama and his Secretary of State raised the issue of reform even if they are intent on treating the relationship more broadly than their predecessors.

In the end, I guess the Obama administration is more Rumsfeldian than it may like to admit. You deal with the Egypt you have, not the one you want.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting yesterday with a group of young Egyptian activists at the State Department was a welcome and long-overdue development. These young people somehow managed to elicit the words “democracy” and “human rights” in the same sentence from the Secretary, something that until yesterday she had managed only once before, on Wednesday in a response to a question from reporters when she was meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit.

Of course, in both instances the words were uttered in a rather casual way. She said yesterday, for instance: “Well, we always raise democracy and human rights. It is a core pillar of American foreign policy.” Not exactly a ringing policy defense.

In fact, over the course of the past few months there have been a number of occasions that have caused democracy and human rights activists to wince. First, there was Clinton’s confirmation testimony in which she made clear that U.S. foreign policy under an Obama administration would center on the so-called three “Ds”: diplomacy, development, defense. For many there was a fourth obvious D missing: democracy. Next, there was the conscious downplaying of human rights by the Secretary during her travels to China, Egypt and elsewhere. Then there was the State Department’s decision to move the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor out of the main State Department headquarters after 32 years. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the administration has failed, until now, to find anyone willing to head that bureau.

So, why is this? The first reason is obvious and understandable. The Obama administration wanted to distance itself from the tone and perceived baggage of the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda.” The rhetoric did need to be toned down perhaps, but it did not need to be thrown out altogether. A well-placed source at the State Department recently told me that in his bureau, they were no longer to use the words “freedom and democracy” in speeches. “Those are Bush words,” he was told. No. They are not. They are American words as Secretary Clinton herself makes clear.

The second and more important reason seems to be that this administration believes democracy and development are two entirely different things. When asked at her press availability yesterday about the democratic progress Egypt has made, Secretary Clinton avoided the question by talking instead about what the United States was doing and would do with development assistance in Egypt. Specifically she said: “We are very committed to doing what we can to promote economic opportunity inside Egypt. We consider that a key part of our providing assistance to Egypt.” She then added the following breathtaking sentence: “We’ve spent, as you know, many billions of dollars over the last years promoting NGOs, promoting democracy, good governance, rule of law. And I want to stress economic opportunity because out of economic opportunity comes confidence, comes a recognition that people can chart their own future.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, a variation of this line of argument was first advanced in print yesterday by Steven Cook for the June 1 issue of Newsweek. In his article, he argues for eliminating all democracy promotion programs in Egypt (and by extension all authoritarian regimes) and reprogramming them into agriculture, pre- and post-natal health and disease prevention programs. Doing so, he writes, would better win hearts and minds and, more importantly, “reduce tensions between Washington and Cairo.” (And Beijing, Minsk, Rangoon, Harare, etc., I suppose.) This is pretty disappointing stuff from the drafter of the Council of Foreign Relations task force report, “In Support of Arab Democracy: Why and How.”

What Secretary Clinton—and Steven—seem to be saying is, “Look, the Bush administration spent a boatload on promoting democracy and look where that got us; let’s spend more on economic development. At least we can make some folks happy.” The trouble with this is that it is both factually incorrect and kowtows to the regime-inspired idea that first you help us develop economically and then, if it suits us, we can think about developing institutions of accountability (aka democratic institutions) later.

The fact is the United States has spent many billions of dollars in Egypt on arms, commodities, and Egypt-defined “development” but not on democracy and NGOs. During my time at the State Department we had to wrestle the Egyptian government (and our own!) to the mat to squeeze out a few million dollars to support international organizations like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House, among others. The direct grants to local non-governmental organizations were even smaller. Most were below $100,000. Although I don’t have the time now to sum up all that was spent by the Bush administration on non-Egyptian-government approved democracy programs in Egypt, I’d make an educated guess that the entire sum wouldn’t amount to more than $100 million over the seven fiscal years from 2002 to 2008. The entire budget for the Middle East Partnership Initiative during those years averaged only $70 million per year—and that was for the entire region from Morocco to Iran.

But the statement is wrong in another way as well. One of the key innovations of the Bush administration—which created a lot of friction, I can assure you—was to stop working with the Egyptian government on their self-described development programs and instead do something that would really impact the economy: the reform of the financial sector. Working with a talented group of new ministers—not a true democrat among them—we found innovative ways of using “development assistance” to incentivize reforms in the financial sector. In a negotiated Memorandum of Understanding with Egypt, the government committed to, among other things, strong and independent central bank management, developing a functioning government securities market, and implementing a comprehensive program to reform the Egyptian banking sector that included privatization. Against benchmarks in the MOU, the Bush administration committed close to $700 million with an additional $2.3 billion in loan guarantees, also tied to performance benchmarks. The results, as the IMF tells us, have been remarkable. Egypt has been growing at an average annual rate of between 5 and 7 percent per year. This is real “development.”

The main point to make here is that actually doing something important required changing the way things were done. The United States had to risk changing the way it spoke about our economic support funds to Egypt. Egypt treated these funds as theirs; they earned them. They made peace with Israel, the argument went, and deserved this annuity in perpetuity for their amazing sacrifice to the United States. The Bush administration looked at what the funds were producing for the Egyptians and for us, and concluded that they needed to be reviewed and reshaped, whatever the original intent of the funding some 30 years ago. Moving economic and political reform together at the same time was crucial in this.

To take a step backwards now is a mistake, but the Obama administration is taking it. Already they have reversed the hard-fought agreement not to allow Egypt to veto democracy programs and have agreed that from now on all programs will be negotiated with the Egyptian government as part of the bilateral agreement. This sends exactly the wrong signal, and soon other governments in the region will be demanding the same sort of agreement. Moreover, the Egypt desk officer at State calmly explains that this administration is only correcting what the Bush administration screwed up. This is Egyptian money, the explanation goes, and we have to eliminate the cause of the friction in the relationship. Some people at USAID tell me that it is all part and parcel of a broader effort to separate democracy assistance more broadly from what USAID does.

Ironically—and sadly—the program that brought in the activists to meet Secretary Clinton yesterday is an early casualty of this leap backwards. Freedom House’s “New Generation” program has seen its project de-funded since the agreement went into force. They had had a three-year agreement with USAID that was terminated only one year into the agreement after the Egyptian government objected to it. It was good the Secretary met with the young people now; she won’t be able to do so next year.

Perhaps we’ll win more hearts and minds with pre- and post-natal care—if anyone knows we’re providing it—but returning to the status quo ante, eliminating core democracy programs, toning down rhetoric to the point that it is seen as a green light to regimes to repress their people, all guarantee we’ll lose some as well. A recent publication by the Project on Middle East Democracy, “Looking Forward: An Integrated Strategy for Supporting Democracy and Human Rights in Egypt,” proposes a much more thoughtful way forward. The Obama administration would be wise to consider many of its sensible recommendations. In the meantime, as these young Egyptian men and women, bloggers, journalists and activists head for home tomorrow, they leave confused about what the United States stands for. This shouldn’t be. Let’s hope that their meeting with Secretary Clinton was for more than just show. Their young lives will depend on it.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The events in Gaza over this weekend present a number of internal and external challenges for the Egyptian government, again raising questions about Cairo’s capacity to deal effectively with regional crises. Needless to say, the Israeli Air Force’s offensive against Hamas coming soon after Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni rebuffed Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s pleas for restraint in Gaza, reminds Egyptians of their manifest weakness. It also plays right into the hands of the Egyptian opposition, whether it is the Muslim Brotherhood, neo-Nasserists, or the nationalist left, who all believe that Cairo’s alliance with Washington has brought Egypt to its knees, unable to oppose effectively Israeli policies in the region no matter how predatory. Israel’s attacks in Gaza will inevitably radicalize Egypt’s political discourse in much the same way they did after the July 2006 war in Lebanon, which placed Mubarak on the defensive.

In an effort to insulate itself from the domestic criticism sure to come and the inevitable calls to take some sort of punitive action against Israel, the Egyptians almost immediately summoned Shalom Cohen, Jerusalem’s ambassador in Cairo, for a dressing down with Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit. In addition, in order to avoid the public relations disaster they experienced when Hamas breached Egypt’s border with Gaza last January, the Egyptians swung open the Rafah crossing to facilitate evacuation of the wounded. Still, these actions are unlikely to mollify Mubarak’s many domestic critics, especially since Aboul Gheit—at the same time he was seething about Israeli murder in Gaza—was implicitly laying a good deal of the blame for the outbreak of hostilities on Hamas, who resisted Egyptian entreaties to resume a dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.

Beyond the domestic difficulties that are likely to result from Israel’s airstrikes, a weakened Hamas is likely going to be more difficult for Egypt’s General Intelligence chief, General Omar Suleiman, to corral. The June 18 ceasefire was predicated in part on Hamas’ ability to prevent other militant factions like Islamic Jihad and the Fatah-affiliated Al Aqsa Martyrs brigade from launching rockets on Israel. When the dust settles in Gaza, however, Suleiman and his emissaries are likely to find a significantly altered political environment in which Hamas is unable to impose its will on others or is even amenable to any efforts to reestablish the ceasefire. In other words, the Egyptians are going to be confronted with turmoil, lawlessness, and the increased possibility of factional violence Gaza.

Although the Egyptians generally distrust and dislike Hamas, Israel’s airstrikes present absolutely zero upside for Cairo. Even if Mubarak had the creative capacity to turn crises into opportunities, it is hard to imagine what the opportunity might look like. Cairo worries that chaos in Gaza threatens the stability of Sinai where Palestinian and Egyptian militants could link up and, in turn, could threaten the cold, yet peaceful relations with Israel. What would happen should an attack on Israel occur from Sinai? How would the Israelis respond? Of more immediate concern, however, is Israel’s less than implicit desire to dump Gaza onto Egypt. The last thing that the Egyptians want is responsibility for the 1.5 million Palestinians and the myriad problems of the Strip. Yet, if the Israelis choose to wash their hands of Gaza, the Egyptians actually have few resources to resist. They could, of course, threaten to abrogate the peace treaty, but returning to a state of war with Israel is hardly in Egypt’s interest.

The broader regional implications for Egypt are clear. Israel’s airstrikes have produced widespread outrage in the Arab world and provide opportunity for actors like Iran to play Arab politics. It is only a matter of time before Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad will use Israel’s attacks on Gaza to advance his own popularity (second only to Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah) and Tehran’s influence in the region. To the extent that Ahmedinejad can weave a narrative that those at peace with Israel and/or allied with the United States are harming the interests of the Palestinians and thus the Islamic world, Egypt’s regional influence is likely to continue to recede.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MESH members’ answers have appeared in installments throughout the week (Tuesday, Wednesday, and yesterday). Today’s responses, the last in the series, come from Steven A. Cook, Mark T. Clark, and Jon Alterman.

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Steven A. Cook:: George Bush’s Middle East report card:

Effort: B
Willingness to Listen: F
Cognitive Issues: F
Grasp of Abstract Issues: F
Recognition of Complex Problems: F
Group Interaction: D

Overall Grade: D-

Comments:

George and his friends have demonstrated strong views about the Middle East, but precious little grasp of the region’s history, politics, and culture. While the President et al. have made a strong effort, their unwillingness to listen and insistence that their views were superior to all others accentuated their knowledge deficit. As a result, not only have they not achieved their goals in the region (democracy in Iraq, a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel, OBL “dead or alive,” the end of the Asad regime in Syria, Egypt leading the region in freedom, ending the U.S. addiction to oil, draining the swamp of extremists, getting Hezbollah to “stop this s***,” and disarming Iran), but in most cases Washington’s approach has produced precisely the opposite of the desired effect.

Many of George’s friends argue that things are better in Iraq these days. This is certainly true, but nobody is quite sure what will happen in Iraq. There are still a variety of issues that can undermine the progress of the last year. In addition, George’s grade suffered because he was unable to think through the consequences of his actions. The invasion of Iraq did get rid of an awful regime that was a menace to the region, but created an opportunity for another awful regime to be even more of a menace to the region.

I have to give some credit to the President for speaking out forcefully about democracy and freedom in the Arab world. A lot of people there did not like it (at least publicly), but it did have a salutary effect on the dominant discourse in the region. Arab leaders have had a very hard time changing the subject from reform and political transformation since the “forward strategy of freedom” was articulated in November 2003.

Still, the rest of this effort to promote change was either poorly conceived (see Al-Hurra), or old ideas wrapped up with a new bow (see MEPI). The administration’s diplomatic tin ear did not help (see Rice, Condoleezza “birth pangs of the new Middle East” or Hughes, Karen “Saudi women should drive, Middle East tour 2006″). Once again, deficits in grasping abstract issues, in group interaction, and in willingness to listen forced the administration to virtually abandon the freedom agenda once the situation in Iraq deteriorated and Islamists scored electoral gains in Egypt and Lebanon as well as a victory in Palestine. This resulted in a return of the state throughout the region, but particularly in Egypt. It turns out Cairo did not lead the region in freedom but rather repression, as the Mubarak regime used almost every coercive instrument at its disposal to undermine, intimidate, and destroy its opponents.

George does not generally avoid conflict, but he exhibited a demonstrable unwillingness to deal with the Arab-Israeli problem. He did get involved from time to time, but only reluctantly and for reasons that often had little to do with finding a resolution to the conflict. Moreover, when the President did get involved, he failed to grasp the complexities of the issue, resulting in cavalier commitments about the establishment of a Palestinian state by the end of his term. Indeed, while actively discouraging Israel from exploring peace talks with Syria, the administration’s problem with abstract issues resulted in the belief that negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—two weak and wounded leaders—held “special promise.”

I am afraid that despite a lot of effort, exorbitant resources, and a not insignificant amount of blood, Middle East policy over the last seven and one-half years is a D-.

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Mark T. Clark :: On the broadest level, I agree with John Lewis Gaddis’s assessment of what may become George W. Bush’s legacy in an article found here. Comparing previous presidential legacies, he points out that many of the arguments that now rage over Bush’s policies will, as with the majority of policies of previous presidents, fade into the background.

Importantly, though, Gaddis believes that in Bush’s “Second inaugural” the president laid out a vision—a transformation, if you will—of the U.S. approach to international politics regarding the promotion of democracy in the world, including the Middle East. He proposed promoting democracy with the “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Gaddis adds:

If the Bush Doctrine was meant in that sense—if ending tyranny is now to be the objective of the United States in world affairs—then this would amount to a course correction away from the 20th-century idea of promoting democracy as a solution for all the world’s problems, and back toward an older concept of seeking to liberate people so they can solve their own problems. It could be a navigational beacon for the future that reflects more accurately where we started and who we’ve been.

I believe Bush will have a second, narrower legacy as well, one that will serve U.S. interests in the future. In the proving grounds of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Bush has restored the belief that the United States can fight and win an insurgency. We could win a conventional conflict, as in Iraq in 1991, but after Vietnam, it became conventional wisdom that insurgencies were virtually impossible to win. Lebanon in 1983 and Somali in 1993 only confirmed that view. The rapid defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11 began to change that perspective. That war, of course, is not yet finished, but there are signs that it may settle soon.

Iraq, however, may come to cement this view. The initial success of rapidly defeating Saddam’s ragged army was overtaken by the unexpected insurgency, fueled by sectarian strife and outside support. Despite mounting problems, Bush insisted on pursuing the “surge” against opposition by many of his generals and members of Congress. The surge restored the fundamentally important element in a new, stable government: security for its citizens.

In other areas of the Middle East, he will have a mixed legacy. It will be unaffected by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If it was difficult to get resolution with the Palestinian Authority, it became impossible with a government split between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The one stain on his legacy in the Middle East may be the Iranian nuclear program. Giving Europe the lead to negotiate with Iran failed to net any gains. And, as the Europeans are learning, the Iranians are not serious about a diplomatic solution. They want a nuclear weapons program. Anything short of military intervention may never have worked. But given the administration’s preoccupation with Afghanistan and Iraq, it had no serious cards to play against the Iranians.

Excepting the last point, we are better off than we were eight years ago.

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Jon Alterman :: The United States is far worse off in the Middle East than it was eight years ago. There is an easy way to tell this is so: those whom the Bush administration has most avidly sought to weaken and isolate are stronger than they were, while the United States and the secular liberals that the Bush administration sought to nurture are weaker.

While the world does not miss Saddam Hussein, the governments of Iran and Syria did not cower after his fall. To the contrary, by acts of omission and commission they helped deepen Iraq’s agony despite the presence of more than 100,000 U.S. troops intended in part to intimidate them. Their allies, Hezbollah and Hamas, have also seen their fortunes rise, despite U.S. insistence on their isolation. Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon has increased, and it now has veto power over the government. Hamas not only won an election that the Bush administration pressed forward, but it now controls territory of its own.

Although the Bush administration denied it vehemently at the time, the invasion of Iraq was always a roll of the dice, and a trillion dollars in, it remains unclear how those dice will land. Given the intelligence information available in 2002-2003, one could make a plausible argument for going in, but it is impossible to either justify or excuse the rank incompetence that characterized the first years of the occupation (which, in the best-case-scenario reasoning that underlay the military planning, was only supposed to last 90 days). Driven by hubris and a belief that with the events of September 11, “everything had changed,” officials were selected for loyalty over experience, with predictable results. Saddam’s fetish of loyalty had destroyed Iraq the first time; the Bush administration’s fetish of loyalty helped destroy it a second.

Bloodied in Iraq, the United States has far less pull in the region than it had a decade ago. In the Gulf, friendly governments actively undermine the Bush administration’s policy and engage in energetic diplomacy among Palestinians and Lebanese to make up for the administration’s shortfall. While these governments remain reliant on U.S. arms, they actively seek to balance U.S. influence with that of other outside powers such as France and China, and they seek to assuage the Iranians out of fear that the United States cannot protect them.

The bright spot is that there has been a good deal of progress on counterterrorism, especially in the last several years. A series of attacks within the Arab world persuaded governments that the problem is not merely a Western one, and their security services are both better prepared and better informed than a decade ago. Their newfound skills have helped decrease the number of attacks against civilian targets around the globe, and deeper intelligence cooperation has helped protect U.S. civilian lives.

Yet, much of the progress in counterterrorism has come at a cost. In 2003, the Bush administration appeared convinced that the brutality and ineptitude of Middle Eastern governments were principal drivers of terrorism; by 2007, it was clear that regional governments were the U.S. government’s chief allies. The U.S. government went suddenly from seeking to reform the status quo to zealously supporting it, and abruptly abandoned a wide range of opposition figures who had taken risks out of confidence in U.S. backing.

While there have been a series of U.S. missteps in the region, what has not happened is as important as what has. After the death of Yasser Arafat, the United States had an unprecedented opportunity to move forward on Arab-Israeli peace issues. A new Palestinian president came into office with broad support and legitimacy, and a record of speaking hard truths to Palestinians in Arabic. Yet, the opportunity to build up Mahmoud Abbas as a credible peacemaker was lost, in part out of an ambition ceaselessly to wring yet one more concession out of him.

The setbacks that the United States has suffered in the Middle East are reversible, but it will take years of effort to bring the United States back to the same level of regional influence enjoyed in 2000. The Bush administration has little of which to be proud.

Politicians, journalists, academics, and other observers of foreign relations are hardly rigorous when it comes to defining “national interests.” Definitions tend to range from the tautological to something akin to Justice Potter Stuart’s, “I know it when I see it.” Too often scholars invoke interests to explain state or individual behavior without ever explaining how their claims were derived. Given how often the concept of national interest is invoked, it should not be too much to ask analysts to take some care explaining precisely what they mean.

Historical precedent is a good place to start, but it is not just a matter of declaring, “Washington has historically pursued Y policies to achieve X, therefore X must be in the interest of the United States.” Maybe; maybe not. A better, albeit not perfect, way of getting to that interest is to examine critically the relative costs Washington has been willing to bear to achieve some goal. When you apply this kind of analysis to the Middle East, it is obvious that Washington’s interests in the region are:

1. Securing the free flow of oil.
2. Ensuring Israel’s security.
3. Countering terrorism and rogue states.
4. Preventing other powers from dominating the region.

Numbers three and four could be rolled into the first two interests. After all, countering terrorism, confronting rogue states, and preventing others from dominating the region are all derivative of Washington’s core interests—oil and Israel.

It’s important to note that democracy promotion is not and never was an interest of the United States. That’s not to say that I do not support the aspirations of millions of Middle Easterners who want to live in more open and democratic societies. Rather, like the policy of supporting “authoritarian stability,” promoting democratic change in the Middle East was the means by which the Bush administration sought to secure America’s regional interests. Rather than rely on authoritarian leaders who, it is believed, contribute to an environment that breeds terrorism, the United States hoped to promote democratic politics so that angry (mostly) young men could process their grievances through democratic institutions rather than through violence.

The problem with the policy was that no one ever was able to answer how Washington could protects its interests in the short and medium terms—when transitions are fraught politically and states are unstable—until the long term when, it is believed, more appropriate democratic partners would emerge. I tried answering the question (see my 2006 essay, “The Promise of Pacts”), but no one listened.

The threats to U.S. interests in the Middle East are not terribly surprising. First, in a “Back to the Future” moment it will likely be Moscow, not Beijing, that will be a competitor for influence in the region. The semi-authoritarian or authoritarian nature of the Russian regime and its crony capitalist system fit quite well with the Middle East. Recently, Moscow sent an aircraft carrier into the Eastern Mediterranean and has begun outspending the United States on cultural and public diplomacy in important countries like Egypt. It is unlikely that Russia will supplant the United States as the preeminent power in the region, but the Arab world may soon have an alternative to play off of Washington. The best evidence of this was the prevailing positive sentiment about Moscow in the Arab press after Russia invaded Georgia last August.

Obviously, Iran’s drive for nuclear technology is a threat to a regional order that has generally been hospitable to the exercise of American power. As scary as this seems, Washington should start thinking about the day after the Iranians realize their nuclear goal and how to deter Tehran. There is very little evidence that either incentives or coercion is going to stop Iran’s efforts. Deterring Iran is a tough sell politically, especially after President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s odious remarks at the UN General Assembly, but deterrence is precisely what the Israelis are trying to achieve. We should do the same and extend our nuclear umbrella to our allies in the Middle East.

The other threat to Washington’s interests in the Middle East is Israel’s self-destructive behavior in the West Bank. The United States cannot help ensure the longevity of the Zionist project if the Israelis keep doing things that will ultimately undermine the Jewish and democratic character of Israel. It is time for the settlements to go. There is no reversing the demographic trends that will result in more Arabs between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea than Jews. As long as Israel holds on to the West Bank, it will face the existential threat of too many Palestinian babies relative to the number of Israeli Jewish babies.

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

As if it were not enough that an Egyptian criminal court sentenced civil society activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim in absentia to two years in prison plus a fine for “harming the reputation of Egypt abroad,” now the Egyptian media reports that the courts have agreed to hear another suit seeking to strip Saad of his nationality. There are so many things wrong with these decisions that it is difficult to know where to start.

Topping the list, of course, is the rich irony that it is these very decisions that harm Egypt’s image far more than Saad has ever done. Then there is the fact that these are among the ridiculous third-party cases allowed by Egyptian law, in which the charges are brought not by an injured party or even by government prosecutors but by sleazy lawyers loosely affiliated with the ruling party. Such third-party cases often become truly ludicrous, for example when a third party sues—sometimes successfully—to force a divorce between two happily married Egyptians because one of them has done some unorthodox writing and so is considered an apostate who is not allowed to be married to a Muslim. In Saad’s case, the court agreed that Saad hurt the interests of all Egyptians by calling for U.S. military assistance to the Egyptian government to be cut or conditioned unless the country makes progress toward democratization and greater respect for human rights. A strange idea, indeed, about who has Egyptians’ best interests at heart.

There is a silver lining to the judgment against Saad: at least he was convicted of an explicitly political crime, unlike opposition politician Ayman Nour, languishing in prison for nearly three years now on trumped-up forgery charges. While neither Nour nor Ibrahim are causes célèbres in Egypt’s essentially conservative and conformist society, each has enjoyed a mini-resurgence of support recently among young liberal Egyptians, who are finding new ways to express themselves, whether joining Facebook groups, posting comments on the website of al-Masry al-Youm, or singing patriotic songs on the beach at Alexandria. This is no revolution, but it is heartening to see younger Egyptians identifying the regime’s dirty tricks for what they are.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Much of today’s backlash against democracy promotion in the Middle East can be traced to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, and its effect of reinforcing the “Algerian nightmare” complex among nervous Washington policy makers about the prospect for political takeovers of Arab countries by illiberal and anti-American Islamist movements.

While many would see Hamas and the Moroccan Justice and Development Party, for example, as occupying two points on a spectrum, I reject this view and reject the notion that Hamas’s victory has much to tell us about the prospects for Islamist behavior in (hypothetical) democratic elections elsewhere in the Arab world. In a recent piece for the Journal of Democracy, I argue for the importance of seeing that there are differences in kind, not just degree, among Islamist movements in today’s Middle East. I describe three distinct categories of Islamists, and focus on the last of the three as the only one from which a potentially democratic Islamist politics might emerge. In evaluating this final category, I argue that the democratic credibility or capacity of a given Islamist movement can only really be tested and assessed in a more open political environment, and that ultimately the quality of Islamist political discourse will hinge on the quality of the political system in which it resides.

Others, however, would argue that these distinctions are not meaningful, on either philosophical or pragmatic grounds. The philosophers might argue, like my friends Hillel Fradkin and Hussein Haqqani, that the common ideological roots of today’s Islamist parties present them all with a rather high bar to clear before they could act as “normal” political factions. This is because their founding ideology doesn’t draw a basic distinction between the Muslim umma and the political state, and thus sets up all kinds of bars to basic principles of democratic politics. Pragmatists, for their part, might say that all Islamist political groups evident in the region today are really some form of hybrid, exhibiting elements of violence and of “normal politics,” and aspects of religious movements alongside of political parties. Even those that don’t engage in violence themselves, they note, either have violent pasts or condone/celebrate the violence of others.

Below I lay out the three categories I describe in the Journal of Democracy.

The first category—and the easiest to dismiss for the purposes of this discussion— comprises the relatively small but important group of radical, ideologically driven movements that we can call takfiri, for their readiness to label other Muslims heretics, apostates, and therefore justifiable targets of violence. Such groups include Al Qaeda, of course, along with its affiliates and allies in Algeria, Iraq, and elsewhere. These groups take no interest in formal politics save for the strict pan-Islamic state that they envision setting up once they have toppled their region’s existing governments. They glorify violence as a religious duty and reject democracy as a violation of God’s sovereignty. Such violently irreconcilable groups are irrelevant to the question of whether Islamist movements can be successfully integrated into a democratic Arab future. The takfiris will endanger that future, just as they endanger the present.

A second category includes what we might call “local” or “nationalist” militant Islamist movements, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, or the Shiite militias of Iraq. Two characteristics set this type of Islamist movement apart. First, they combine their Islamist ideology with a specific set of local political demands that are the focus of their activity and the core concern of their supporters—unlike the takfiris, they seek and benefit from the vocal support of a given local community. Second, they all exist in weak or failing states (or non-states, in the case of Hamas), where the central government has proved incapable of providing basic security for all its citizens or where the state itself is an arena of contention between competing groups in society. The lack of state capacity enables these movements to wield their weapons with a good deal of support from their local communities. Their armed activities serve not only to advance the ideological cause, but also to protect local constituents from depredation at the hands of the state or communal rivals.

Thinking of Hamas and Hezbollah primarily as Islamist groups rather than as nationalist militants obscures the search for solutions to the problems these groups pose for democratic politics. The fundamental challenge that these groups pose to Arab democratization is their use of violence, not their Islamist character or ideology (although the latter is used to justify the former). Such movements could not have emerged into this dual role of militant political party in a strong state like Egypt; indeed, whenever the Muslim Brotherhood or its offshoots in Egypt developed violent capabilities, the government crushed them mercilessly. Only regimes with insufficient capacity to enforce their monopoly on violence and with weakened capacity in their political institutions are compelled to allow such compromised groups to participate in politics with their weapons in hand. Hamas is a perfect example. According to the formal rules of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas was not qualified to participate in the parliamentary elections because it did not accept the signed agreements with Israel. But the PA could not enforce this rule.

That groups like this choose to run in elections is itself evidence of the extent to which electoral legitimacy is becoming a norm among Arab citizens. A role in formal politics helps the Islamist-nationalists to hedge their bets should they ever need to put away the gun. But they do not view political processes and institutions as authoritative, and have often shown themselves ready to threaten or even use force when it suits them—witness Hezbollah’s takeover of Beirut in May. As long as the region’s Lebanons remain too weak to control its Hezbollahs, there is little hope that full democracy or meaningful equality under law can blossom. States that can barely function or make their writs run throughout their own lands will never be robust candidates for democratic consolidation.

In the strong states that one more often finds in the Middle East, however, the forces of political Islam are a different breed from Hamas and Hezbollah. This third and largest category of Islamist movements—the category most relevant to discussions of democratic change in the Arab world—comprises groups that eschew violence (at least locally) and aspire to a political role in their respective countries, without voicing any revolutionary goals. Such groups may operate as legal parties, such as the Islamic Action Front in Jordan and the Party of Justice and Development in Morocco, or they may be excluded from formal political recognition but still engage in the political process, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) or Kuwait’s Islamist “societies.” They all want to transform society and government into something more “Islamic,” but aim to do so “from below”—that is, by persuading citizens to adopt Islamist ideas, demand Islamist policies from government, and behave as more closely observant Muslims.

There are, of course, a lot of questions to be raised and discussed about how to assess the democratic “credentials” or relevance of Islamist groups in this third category. But my point in this post is simply that Hamas and Hezbollah are not the same animal as the Egyptian MB, and we should not generalize from one to the other. The 2006 Palestinian elections indeed set back both peace and democracy for Palestinians and Israelis—but those elections have little to tell us about the prospects for Islamist politics elsewhere in the Middle East.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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