Walter Laqueur contributes a new paper to MESH’s Middle East Papers series, on Russia’s Muslim strategy. That strategy, barely coherent, is riddled with contradictions, as Russia vacillates between resentment of the American-led world order and fear of an ascendant Islam. For now, it’s the resentment against the West that dominates the Russian outlook, resulting in a makeshift approach to Islam at home and abroad that may prove inadequate as Russia’s own Muslim minorities and neighboring Muslim states grow stronger. Download here.

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The other week over at ForeignPolicy.com, in a post titled “The ’safe haven’ myth,” Stephen M. Walt offered six reasons to be skeptical of the argument that a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would pose a significant threat to the United States. On the same website, Peter Bergen rebutted Walt. Running through Walt’s six reasons one by one, Bergen argues that the historical record severely undercuts Walt’s assumptions about how a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan would have little impact on US security.

Bergen is unsparing in his criticism. Yet although he calls Walt’s sixth reason “one of his flimsiest arguments,” he misses just how flimsy it is.

Walt writes, “Sixth, one might also take comfort from the Soviet experience. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujaheddin didn’t ‘follow them home.’” Bergen rightly responds that even before the U.S. invasion, Al Qaeda was carrying out attacks on American targets while based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

But what he might have stated is that self-described mujaheddin in fact did follow the Soviets home, and did so quite deliberately. Afghanistan served to support violent Islamism in former Soviet Central Asia and inside Russia in the Caucasus.

Islamist militants in former Soviet Central Asia—most famously in Uzbekistan, but also in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—used Afghanistan as a base of training and support and cooperated with the Taliban. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 knocked back these movements for a time. For the past several years their members have been preoccupied with defending themselves inside Afghanistan, and little was heard from them.

The resurgence of the Taliban, however, may have already made it possible for some of these militants to again take up arms in Kyrgyzstan. At the least, others inside Afghanistan are again openly talking of carrying their jihad deeper into Central Asia. For two recent reports, see this one by New York Times correspondent David Lloyd Stern, and this one by The Guardian’s Ghaith Abul-Ahad.

Stern is a long-time friend whom I have known since our days studying Russian as undergraduates, and he has extensive experience reporting from throughout the former Soviet Union. Writing from Kyrgyzstan, he correctly notes that in the past, Central Asian governments have been quite happy to hype the threat of Islamist militants to suppress dissent and justify crackdowns. But as Abul-Ahad reports from within Afghanistan, there exist militants all too willing again to take up arms in the name of Islam against the governments in Tashkent, Bishkek, and Dushanbe as well as Kabul.

Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors have unsophisticated armies made up of poorly trained and motivated conscripts, and had a difficult time countering these movements in the late 1990s. It is likely that this time around, their insurgent opponents will prove more capable in combat. U.S. military personnel fighting in Afghanistan have observed a steady and marked improvement in the Taliban’s tactical and combat skills. This is not unusual; practice makes perfect. But it does not bode well for the Central Asians.

Were the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan, there is good reason to believe that the surrounding countries will again face violent insurgencies. This is not to predict a domino effect of toppled governments. States waging counter-insurgency campaigns can compensate for the lack of professionalism of their security forces by applying coercion and repression more widely. Uzbekistan’s security forces in particular are known for their mercilessness, and it is possible that Uzbekistan and the other states could contain their insurgencies by continuing to employ draconian measures. But it is, however, to predict that the misery index in countries bordering Afghanistan will go up. True, some might argue, the United States would not be paying that cost directly, Central Asians would be, and therefore it is not a U.S. national interest. But in that case we should at least be honest about it, and not ignore it in an effort to salve our collective conscience.

The fallout from Taliban-led Afghanistan was not restricted to Central Asia, however, but extended into Russia. Boris Yeltsin’s ill-advised, even criminal, attempt to crush the defiant Mafioso-state of Johar Dudaev by invasion in 1994 ignited a popular insurgency in Chechnya. Joining the Muslim Chechens who rallied to defend their homeland were self-styled mujaheddin who had trained in Afghanistan. Their ranks included Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem, a Saudi citizen known more famously as Amir Khattab.

Khattab was a dedicated jihadist. Before coming to Chechnya, he had trained in Afghanistan and fought in Tajikistan. Although the depth of his tactical prowess has been debated, his charisma was exceptional. By 1996 he emerged not merely as the leading foreign jihadi in Chechnya, but as one of the principal power brokers inside Chechnya.

After the end of the first Chechen war and Russia’s withdrawal from Chechnya in 1996, Khattab teamed up with the most famous of the Chechen warlords, Shamil Basaev. Basaev himself has stated that he had trained in Khost, Afghanistan in the spring of 1994, prior to the beginning of the first Chechen war. Together, Basaev and Khattab established their own camps inside Chechnya where they trained volunteers from throughout Russia’s North Caucasus in guerrilla warfare. Their activities, which extended to involvement in hundreds of kidnappings inside Chechnya and neighboring regions, undermined the elected government of Aslan Maskhadov and created hellish conditions for inhabitants in Chechnya and surrounding areas.

Whether by design or accident, Chechnya and its environs were coming to resemble Afghanistan. Residents were being reduced to having to choose between unbridled criminality or a rudimentary order based on a harsh interpretation of sharia. It is worth noting that during this period in 1997 Ayman al-Zawahiri, described often as the mastermind of Al Qaeda, was arrested and detained in Dagestan for five months. Zawahiri was searching for a safe haven, and had been trying to make his way to Chechnya. Upon being released from Dagestan he then made his way to Afghanistan.

The aim of Basaev and Khattab was to drive Russia out of the whole North Caucasus and unite the region in an Islamic state. To assist their cause they recruited Adallo Aliyev, a famous Dagestani poet, as their figurehead leader. (I met with Adallo on several occasions while he was on the lam in Turkey. Adallo was later amnestied by Dagestani authorities due to his age and stature as a cultural icon. He was the subject of a good overview of the turbulent North Caucasus in Der Spiegel this past July.)

Basaev and Khattab attempted to execute their plan in 1999 and invaded Dagestan, triggering the second Chechen war. Shortly after, the Taliban “recognized” Chechnya to underscore its solidarity. It was, of course, an almost wholly symbolic act, but one that did encourage still more Chechen fighters to identify still more closely with the radical Islam of the Taliban. According to the U.S. State Department, Basaev returned to Afghanistan in 2001, and allegedly also sent Chechens to fight in Aghanistan, returning the favor, as it were.

The second Chcchen war proved to be much more difficult for the jihadists. Khattab was poisoned in 2002, and Basaev was killed in 2006. But from 1995 until about 2001, Chechnya was of immense importance to the jihadi propaganda and fundraising. The example of Chechnya seemingly illustrated the underlying promise of jihad: that a small group of Muslims could defeat a major power so long as they trusted in God and their arms.

After U.S. forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, news accounts were filled with implausible claims of “Chechens” fighting in the ranks of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, to the point that the uninitiated would have thought that the Chechens were a major ethnic group inside Afghanistan, and not a nation of barely a million in the Caucasus. Clearly, these are exaggerations. The best explanation I have seen for this phenomenon is that the word “Chechen” became shorthand among Afghans for any Russian-speaking Muslim. The glory associated with Chechnya’s struggle against Russia up until Chechnya’s pacification popularized the Chechens and endowed them with a mythic reputation vastly larger than their numbers. Nonetheless, a multitide of sources leave no doubt that the ties between the Taliban and jihadists in Chechnya were considerable.

The presence of jihadi training camps inside Afghanistan and the Taliban’s support for foreign jihadists were not the sole or even primary cause of Islamist insurgencies in Central Asia or the Caucasus, but they did contribute to the development of those insurgencies. The only consoling thought one can take from the Russian or post-Soviet experience is the suggestion that even states with limited capabilities can contain jihadist insurgencies, albeit at a high price of repression.

In short, when contemplating the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Soviet experience should give us no comfort. To the contrary, that experience would tell us to expect that the return of a Taliban-led Afghanistan will invigorate jihadists and again facilitate the spread of militant Islam inside Central Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere.

In his response to Bergen, Walt makes no attempt to dispute Bergen’s critique. Instead, he writes that his original post really was directed toward the omission of any cost-benefit analysis in the debate over Afghan policy. The need to weigh objectives and resources and define clear priorities in policymaking is axiomatic. Given the consistent tendency of policy wonks only to insist that their pet issue deserves a higher priority and greater resources without deigning to explain what issues deserve fewer resources, perhaps this point, however basic, bears repeating.

I actually share some of Walt’s pessimism about the U.S. course in Afghanistan and I can agree that that question of whether our policies might be making things worse rather than better is an urgent one. But what I cannot agree with is the refashioning of history to make us feel better about our preferred policy choices. If Afghanistan is all about bad choices, and I think it is, we owe it ourselves to be honest about how bad those choices are when we debate them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two schools of thought conflict in addressing these two issues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israeli public discourse over Iran’s nuclear weapons program is dominated by two analogies: the Holocaust and the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

The prominence of the Holocaust—the most horrific genocide in human history—should be no surprise. Jewish history seen through the Zionist lens is a chronicle of powerlessness and tragedy, embodying a “gevalt syndrome”: if things can get worse, they will. Gloomy premonitions are extracted from even the most propitious turn of events—and recent developments in Iran are far from propitious.

This tragic history culminates in the Holocaust, which continues to be ever-present in Israeli public life. It was a central element in Israel’s critical decisions on its own nuclear weapons program, in the 1950s and 1960s. As recounted in Avner Cohen’s authoritative Israel and the Bomb, David Ben-Gurion’s private communications on this issue returned to the Holocaust, then only a few years in the past, again and again. In the current debate, the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier serves to strengthen the hold of the analogy.

To take a sampling of the most recent statements:

• Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: “We will not allow Holocaust deniers to carry out another Jewish Holocaust. This is… my supreme commitment as Prime Minister of Israel.”
• Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin: “This time [Hitler] has a beard and speaks Persian…. But the words are the same words and the aspirations are the same aspirations and the determination to find the weapons to achieve those aspirations is the same menacing determination.”
• President Shimon Peres: “As Jews, after being subjected to the Holocaust, we cannot close our eyes in light of the grave danger emerging from Iran…. If Europe had dealt seriously with Hitler at that time, the terrible Holocaust and the loss of millions of people could have been avoided. We can’t help but make the comparison.”

In this light, a nuclearized Iran is regarded by both policymakers and the public as an existential threat to Israel, as an ideologically-driven state capable of irrationality and suicidal behavior—an image strengthened by the incidence of suicide bombings. Poll data show that Israelis believe, by overwhelming majorities ranging from 66 to 82 percent, that Iran would use the bomb to try to destroy Israel. Frequent reference is made to the 2001 statement by former Iranian President Ali Rafsanjani that “if one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

The second major analogy in the debate, the 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear plant, seems obvious since it involves a neighboring state, with a similar threat, similar conditions, and (so far) a similar failure of the international community to stop the program. It is also noted that while the 1981 attack was almost universally condemned by other governments, no effective sanctions against Israel resulted, and it was clear that many states privately welcomed the action. The analogy also lowers expectations, in that the Iraqi nuclear weapons program was not ended but only delayed for several years (which turned out to be adequate).

At the same time, some participants in the debate underline differences: an attack on Iranian facilities would be much more difficult militarily, and the Iranians, unlike Iraq, would be ready and able to retaliate on a number of fronts. But some differences, others point out, would work in the other direction: offensive capabilities have also improved considerably over the last three decades, and there is considerably more international attention and support directed toward blocking an Iranian bomb than was the case with Iraq.

It is also important to note some analogies that are not featured in this debate, but are either ignored or downplayed by Israeli policymakers and analysts. For example, little mention is made of the fact that Saddam Hussein did not use the weapons of mass destruction (chemicals) at his disposal in 1991, during the SCUD attacks on Israel, despite his earlier use of such weapons against Iran. Likewise, the Cold War model of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear balance is not a major focus, and when discussed it is often with the focus on the differences that would obtain in a Middle East context: the lack of invulnerable second-strike capability, shortcomings in command and control, and above all the lack of any clear “rules of the game.”

Some of the analysts in academia—particularly from the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, including Ephraim Kam and Yair Evron—have, along these lines, examined the consequences of an Iranian bomb in terms of deterrent theory and the requirements of a stable balance. But even in these analyses, the emphasis remains on preventing the Iranian program from coming to fruition. And elsewhere, in the public debate and in the utterances of policymakers, attention is focused almost entirely on prevention.

Israeli policymakers obviously have a strong incentive to make an Israeli attack appear inevitable if sanctions fail to stop Iran, since it strengthens the chance for these sanctions to succeed. But a close reading of policymakers and press in Israel today leads clearly to the conclusion that Israel will in fact act if the sanctions fail.

Alan Dowty delivered these remarks at a symposium on “Iran: Threat, Challenge, or Opportunity?” convened by MESH at Harvard University on April 30.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

President Obama in his charm offensive in Europe and Turkey said all the right things—about a new peaceful world order, about a world without nuclear weapons, about Turkey’s greatness, about America’s responsibility to take a lead solving the global financial crisis because it began in the United States, about America not being at war with Islam, about the Czech velvet revolution helping to bring down an empire without a shot been fired and so on. Public relations are of considerable importance in international affairs as in other fields of human endeavor. It would be churlish to complain about the lack of specifics—public appearances were not the occasion to deal with them.

But it is not too early to ask what will follow next, to what extent will the charm offensive make it easier for America to cope with the major international crises ahead. As this is the subject of a book rather than of short comment, I would like to single out one issue: Afghanistan/Pakistan.

The establishment of stable conditions in these countries is of critical importance. They should not become failed states, safe havens for the preparation of terrorist attacks in various places. Nor do I believe that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, and that the war against Taliban cannot be won. It can be won on two conditions: that the border with Pakistan will be effectively sealed and that several hundred thousand NATO soldiers will be stationed in Afghanistan.

Closing borders is of decisive importance as historical precedents have shown time and again. The Greek communist guerrillas had the upper hand in the years after World War Two. They collapsed almost overnight the moment Tito defected from the Soviet bloc and closed the border between Yugoslavia and Greece.

But America is not in a position to dispatch substantial forces to Afghanistan and NATO Europe even less so, and the border will not be closed. The 3,000 soldiers promised in Strasbourg, most of them for non-combatant service, are a symbolic gesture. In the circumstances, present U.S. policy of trying to win the war with insufficient means does not make sense—unless it is part of a wider exit strategy.

Afghanistan and Pakistan will remain sources of major danger, but not only to the West. They will be a threat for India, China, Russia (with its interests in Central Asia) and even Iran. They will have to deal with this problem once the United States and NATO will have left.

But what about further proliferation and possibly, even likely, attacks with weapons of mass destruction? There is no answer as long as the concern about this danger is limited to the West, manifesting itself in little more than hand wringing. It will probably take a military conflict (or even two) fought with such weapons until the major powers (perhaps even the United Nations) will understand that there are certain common interests and a need for common action in this respect.

In the meantime, following the successful trip to Europe and Turkey there should be a moratorium on press conferences and speeches. Too frequent appearances are bound to lead to repetition, wear and tear, even disenchantment. I do not suggest President Obama should follow the example of General de Gaulle (one press conference a year with questions submitted three weeks before). But it ought to be possible to find a compromise between the two extremes.

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

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

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

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

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Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit
by Elie Kedourie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From Ami Pedahzur

One of the first steps taken by President Barack Obama after his inauguration was to start the process of shutting down the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Supporters of the step praised the president for adhering to moral principles and international law while skeptics have argued that this would undermine the effectiveness of the war on terror. Only time will tell whether this step was successful or not, but in the meantime it should turn our attention to the reasons for creating this detention camp in the first place.

The detention center at Guantánamo Bay has raised questions of why leaders tend to choose offensive measures to combat terrorism and why these measures aren’t more successful. In my book, I address this question through the analysis of the Israeli counterterrorism endeavor over the last sixty years—an endeavor dominated by what I call the “war model.” Since the raids on Palestinian population centers in the early 1950s by the Unit 101—Israel’s first commando unit—this model had yielded very limited results. Emotion, pressures from the security establishment and domestic political considerations have shaped Israeli counterterrorism policy more than any overarching strategy to cope with the threat of terrorism.

My conclusions have implications for policymaking beyond the Israeli case. Most policymakers might be surprised to learn that the demise of terrorist groups and the end of terrorist campaigns in the past have had little to do with offensive counterterrorist measures applied against them. The only approach that has dramatically reduced the number of terrorist attacks and their lethality is the “defensive” one. Sending military forces after the terrorists is much less effective than enhancing security in public areas and relying on domestic intelligence organizations and police forces. And most democracies, despite their declared policies, end up negotiating with terrorists on a frequent basis and cut deals with them.

Terrorism is one tactic which sub-state actors of various types apply for attaining their goals. This tactic is mostly chosen in asymmetrical conflicts, when such groups suffer from inherent military inferiority. Terrorism is employed as a symbolic act of violence aimed at non-combatants with the intent of creating an atmosphere of fear and anger amongst the citizens of the target state. Media coverage of these events only enhances this sense of fear and panic.

However, it is not only civilians who are subjected to the fear inflicted by terrorism. Policymakers suffer from the same effect. A terrorist attack, especially on a large scale or of a highly symbolic magnitude, is likely to frustrate, upset, and lead to emotional turmoil. Thus, leaders are influenced by their own emotions well before they reach a decision-making point. In most cases, elected policymakers in democracies are eager to prove to their terrorized constituents that they are strong, and would like nothing more than to boost public morale as well as their own approval ratings. Consequently, and without knowing it, they limit their cognitive scope of possible decisions to a small number of offensive responses. Unfortunately, this is exactly the outcome that terrorists are interested in.

This process is reinforced by the fact that the angry leaders naturally seek the advice of the security establishment. Most military and intelligence officers are trained to see any challenge from a narrow offensive perspective, and do not have a full grasp of the political and social causes and implications of terrorism and counterterrorism. Thus, they are likely to provide policymakers with a relatively limited set of aggressive options for response.

In past wars, the enemy was identifiable, the rules of engagement were clear, and victory was easy to measure. The struggle against terrorism presents intelligence and military officers with unprecedented challenges. The heads of the security establishment are first faced with the challenge of identifying an elusive enemy. In many cases, the same sub-state actors that perpetrate terrorism, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the IRA, and ETA, are also involved in local politics and even social activities. They rarely wear uniforms and they operate from civilian population centers. Thus, the reliance on signal and visual intelligence, which is highly effective in the struggle against ordered armies, becomes secondary to human intelligence. In other words, technology is at best only a supplement in solving the intelligence puzzle.

After identifying the terrorists, comes the challenge of understanding their motivations and goals. What state actors, especially in the West, perceive as rational does not necessarily reflect the preferences of sub-state actors in other cultures. Therefore, it is very hard to make assumptions regarding the true motivations of the terrorists, identify their vulnerabilities and predict their future steps. This requires intelligence analysts who speak the relevant languages, have a deep understanding of other cultures and are capable of transforming their knowledge into policy alternatives.

But even a clear intelligence picture and a good policy are not enough. Modern militaries are not structured or trained to respond to 21st-century terrorism. They are trained to fight wars with other armies. Even elite counterterrorism units and SWAT teams are more suitable for coping with past scenarios such as hostage-taking crises than with suicide bombers. Thus, the expectations that the armed forces can carry out successful counterterrorism operations are not entirely realistic.

The reliance on the armed forces also takes a high toll in other national security areas. The resources which are needed for countering terrorism are diverted from other military units and projects, which often are more vital from strategic and national security points of view.

In the Israeli case, the best example is the misuse of Sayeret Matkal, a highly trained intelligence recon unit, the main goal of which is to supply detailed intelligence for operations like the one against the Syrian nuclear facility in 2007. This unit also has been deployed for rescue, kidnapping and assassination missions since the late 1960s. After a series of failures, especially in rescue missions, Israel formed an elite police counterterrorism unit (Yamam), with the sole purpose of carrying out counterterrorism related operations. Yet, Sayeret Matkal’s commanders know that successful counterterrorism operations, unlike clandestine recon operations, are much more visible and likely to sustain the unit’s reputation and flow of resources. So they use their political ties in policymaking circles to keep on being assigned such operations. This leaves the Yamam counterterrorism experts, who have far less political clout, frustrated and marginalized.

As I indicated earlier, terrorism is merely one tactic that is employed by groups which simultaneously use other strategies, most commonly guerrilla warfare. The LTTE (”Tamil Tigers”) in Sri Lanka, the PLO in the 1970s and Hezbollah today are the best examples of highly versatile groups in terms of strategies, tactics and weapons. It is very hard to declare a war on a tactic, and thus the majority of wars against terrorism turn quickly into extended counterinsurgency operations.

While the state enjoys superiority in technology and firepower, the insurgents usually fight within a well-known territory and easily assimilate among non-combatants. This leads the states to use air strikes and artillery attacks and thus to cause collateral damage amongst civilians. This vicious cycle eventually enhances popular support for the insurgents, as was reflected in Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon and 2009 war in Gaza. In most cases, after a long war of attrition, the state, which launched the attack and refused to negotiate with the terrorists, will cut a deal with them either through direct or indirect negotiations. In terms of winning or losing, such a scenario actually strengthens those who initiated the campaign of terror in the first place.

Clearly, these failures raise the question of whether the resources now being spent on counterterrorism operations shouldn’t be allocated to other national security needs, while thinking “outside the box” on creative ways to cope with terrorism.

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It was high time that anti-Semitism would find something hipper than those dusty Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski and then used by the pro-Tsarists to discredit reforms in Russia as a Jewish plot. Egyptian and Syrian state media have turned the Protocols into television series, trying to modernize the plot and bringing it forward into the 20th century.

Iranian TV has beaten them hands down with “Harry Potter and the Ziono-Hollywoodist Conspiracy.” (If you cannot view the clip embedded above, click here.) J.K. Rowling, that English (and no doubt, fully Aryan) rose, as avatar of the globe-encircling Jewish kraken? Yes, though the evidence is a bit disjointed as the clip unfolds on YouTube. The basic visual argument is hardly as compelling as the original Protocols which, after all, have real-life Jews who have real faces and names, working out complicated plans to conquer the world and pollute the race. You only get Harry and his buddies and professors flitting in and out of the picture while the voice-over proclaims a story line that actually has nothing to do with Messrs. Voldemort and Dumbledore.

It is “Witchcraft and Brainwashing” that spreads the “evil essence of Zionism.” This is how the logic apparently works: Since Harry Potter movies are all about W ‘n’ B, they are a Zionist tool. Along with “devil worship,” W ‘n’ B will corrupt “innocent children and youth” around the world. Why is this a Zionist tool? Because witchcraft was invented by the “rabbis of ancient Egypt.” Now we get a few seconds from the Order of the Phoenix even though it does not contain witchcraft-mongering rabbis. But wait. Aren’t those longbearded faculty at Hogwarts kind of Jewish-looking? Didn’t we see Jewish symbols in every Harry Potter movie? I swear, the kids were playing with dreidels in The Philosopher’s Stone. And when they assembled for a meal in The Order of the Phoenix, they were actually celebrating Passover. You thought the matzohs were crackers, eh? Whenever the kids joust and fight, they are actually preparing for the Last Battle that will do in or enslave all the Muslims.

As we hop along this warped path of Iranian TV logic, we also learn that the world faces a “cultural crusaders’ war” that is more powerful than any military assault the West has engineered in, say, Afghanistan and Iraq. How will the Jews attain world domination? By hastening Armageddon, the “End of Days,” which will deliver a kind of Jewish endsieg, the Nazi term for “final victory.”

What does this have to do with Harry Potter? Well, because in the next volume, Iranian TV intones, he finally wants to face down Voldemort. That will be the mother of all battles, to coin a phrase—a secret metaphor (and call to arms) for Armageddon.

Personally, I find this insulting to the Jews. Previously, the Iranian propaganda line painted the “Little Satan” as mighty regional superpower. Now, this TV clip puts down Israel/Jewry as a bunch of losers who no longer have the will and wherewithal to subjugate the Muslims directly and by force of arms. Now, they have to rely on a bunch of kids—on Harry and Hermione—to execute their evil designs.

What has the Jewish Conspiracy come to? This member in good standing feels so dissed that I will enroll in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the fall to learn how to turn Mr. Ahmadinejad into a toad.

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