From Mark Moyar

I started writing A Question of Command in the middle of 2007, near the nadir of the Iraq war, in large part because I was distraught at the daily slaughter in Iraqi cities. Having recently completed a book on the first half of the Vietnam War, I had started on the sequel but decided to put it on hold in order to write something of more immediate value to the Americans serving abroad. The United States, I was convinced, was not providing its military officers with the proper instruction before sending them into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. I believed, in addition, that America’s strategic and policy decisions had suffered badly from a lack of understanding of counterinsurgency that stemmed, in considerable measure, from the scarcity of good books on the subject.

For the preceding three years, I had been teaching mid-career officers at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. During that period, a new colonel took charge of the college and re-oriented the curriculum towards counterinsurgency, as a result of his experiences commanding a Marine regiment in Fallujah. I had responsibility for identifying new instructional material for one of the core courses taken by all of the students, so I rapidly gained familiarity with historical and theoretical works on counterinsurgency that lay outside my lane of the Vietnam War.

As I waded into new sources, I reached the same conclusion I had reached in the course of writing two books on Vietnam—that most of the scholarship did not delve adequately into the actual business of how to defeat insurgents. Too much of it focused on high-level strategy and policy and on theoretical questions. There were only a few noteworthy exceptions, and they were historical works rather than theoretical treatises, like Brian Linn’s The Philippine War and Andrew Birtle’s U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine. Teaching experienced military officers, many of whom had already served in Iraq or Afghanistan, allowed me to see better the lack of practical usefulness of so much counterinsurgency research.

My broadening awareness of the counterinsurgency literature also revealed that Vietnam specialists were not the only people who accepted too readily the “hearts and minds” theory of counterinsurgency, which claims that counterinsurgencies should be defeated primarily with social, economic, and political reforms, not with military force. Through many years of research on Vietnam, I had concluded that the hearts and mind theory did not work in the case of the Vietnam War, and I came to the same conclusion for many other counterinsurgencies. In A Question of Command, I argue that security and good governance, rather than sweeping reforms, are the key activities in counterinsurgency, and that success in those two activities is principally a function of leadership. Rather than focusing on finding the right methods, as the “hearts-and-minds” school recommends, counterinsurgents should concentrate on finding the right leaders.

With the publication of A Question of Command, I hope to influence three specific audiences, in addition to the general public. The first is the U.S. military’s officer corps. Through its historical analysis and theoretical analysis, the book illustrates the leadership attributes and methods that have produced success in the past and are likely to do so in the future. It explains how to develop leaders, put them in the right positions, delegate authority efficiently, co-opt new groups of leaders, and influence an ally’s leadership. These subjects have been ignored almost entirely by previous scholars, in favor of topics of considerably less value to practitioners.

The second audience is policymakers, who are apt to make bad decisions in counterinsurgency situations if they do not understand the dynamics of counterinsurgency leadership. For example, American policymakers would not have barred Iraq’s traditional ruling class from the new Iraqi security forces had it known that building security force programs on a crash basis without experienced officers is a recipe for disaster.

The third audience is the scholarly community, particularly in the areas of history and political science. I am hoping to convince them that they have given insufficient attention to the role of leadership in counterinsurgency, and will therefore redirect attention in such a way as to promote greater learning in this area.

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On Saturday, October 17, at The Washington Institute’s annual Weinberg Founders Conference at Lansdowne, I was privileged to serve as master of ceremonies for the announcement of our second annual Book Prize for outstanding books on the Middle East published in the previous year. This is a major literary award, one of the most lucrative for non-fiction works in the world. And this year’s winners—chosen by a three-person panel of jurors that included Washington Post/Newsweek columnist Lally Weymouth; former State Department counselor (and SAIS professor) Eliot Cohen; and Emory University Middle East professor Ken Stein—merited every dollar in prize money… and more.

The first prize, worth $30,000, went to Ronald and Allis Radosh’s A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel; the second ($15,000) went to Ali A. Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilization; and the third ($5,000) went to Martin Indyk’s Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East. What a broad, fascinating and provocative array of books! They include a history of what was perhaps the most contrary decision an American president has ever taken on Middle East policy (Harry Truman’s decision to buck the Foggy Bottom establishment and recognize the new Jewish state of Israel); a bold and courageous account by an Iraqi intellectual cum public servant about what ails Muslim societies and how to fix it; and a wonderfully introspective retrospective on a scholar-diplomat’s time on the front lines in the Middle East (and the no-less-violent battles about the Middle East back in Washington). I have no role in these decisions—we are scrupulous about having an independent, omnipotent jury whose members don’t even know the identities of their fellow jurors—but I was thrilled with how their deliberations came out.

For more information on our Book Prize winners, click here.

From Meir Litvak and Esther Webman

From Empathy to Denial explores patterns of continuity and change in the representation of the Holocaust in the Arab world since the end of the Second World War up to the early 21st century. It is the first scholarly, comprehensive attempt to examine and analyze the evolvement and characteristics of the Arab intellectual and public discourses on the Holocaust, and to explain the background and causes of their development.

We employ a wide array of primary Arabic-language sources such as memoirs, historical texts, newspapers and internet websites, and pursue an historical approach, combined with interdisciplinary methods of discourse analysis, social psychology and Holocaust studies. However, in view of the vast scope of sources, we focus on the leading cultural and political centers that produce the discourse: Egypt, Lebanon and the Palestinian-Jordanian arena, with occasional references to other countries.

The book was born when both of us, after working separately for several years on the spread of Western anti-Semitic ideas in the Muslim world, felt that the Holocaust had become a prominent issue in Arab political and intellectual discourse. Surprisingly, no serious scholarly research, aside from few casual references, had been done on this topic, so we decided to join forces. As we proceeded, we realized just how wide the subject was. References to the Holocaust are incorporated in different contexts and a wide array of publications of all Arab political and ideological trends. In addition to newspapers articles and books dealing directly with Holocaust-related issues, such as the German reparations to Israel, we often had to peruse whole books and dozens of magazine issues to find one significant relevant passage.

Originally, we intended to build the book thematically, ranging from denial to justification through equation of Zionism with Nazism, the charge of Zionist-Nazi collaboration in the extermination of the Jews, and Arab perceptions of Nazi Germany. But we soon realized the need to further contextualize the thematic analysis by including studies of major cases which were instrumental in the evolution of Arab Holocaust discourse.

The first one deals with the formative years of 1945-48, which presaged all the themes that have typified the discourse ever since. The second concerns the responses to the 1952 German-Israeli reparation agreement; the third analyzes the Eichmann affair in the early 1960s; the fourth deals with the Arab reactions to changing Catholic attitudes toward the Jews, prompted by the Vatican II Council. The two final chapters deal with the effect of Holocaust terminology and discourse on the Palestinian narrative of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, and with the emergence of a new approach towards the Holocaust in the wake of the peace process in the early 1990s—an approach favoring revision of the traditional Arab perception and unequivocal acknowledgment of the suffering of the Jews.

From the vast number of scattered references to the Holocaust, we had to select the most important and recurring ones, relying on our personal judgment. There is a subjective dimension in every historical study; no methodology can guarantee an entirely neutral, objective or transparent account of events. We are keenly aware of the pitfalls, as Jews and Israelis re-presenting the representation of the Holocaust in the Arab world. We have tried to maintain a dispassionate approach, enabling our sources to speak for themselves. Only in a few cases, where we thought that the lay reader might be misled by the distortion of historical evidence, have we supplemented those sources with scholarly studies that present a more accurate account of history.

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From David Makovsky

Dennis Ross and I wrote our book because we thought there is a need to base policy toward the Middle East on the complex realities that America confronts there. For too long, ideological blinders or theoretical views of the region have guided those who shaped and made U.S. policy. It is time that changed. And that is why we decided to write a book that explores the myths and the illusions that too often have driven American approaches to the region. We are not content only with exposing why certain key assumptions have been wrong and have produced mistaken policies. We want to outline and explain the key assumptions that ought to be driving what America does and how it does it in the region.

If the Middle East did not matter, we could be more cavalier in looking at wrongheaded assumptions about it. But with American interests and well-being increasingly riveted on what happens in the Middle East, we no longer have that luxury. With 9/11, we learned the hard way that the Las Vegas rule doesn’t apply to the Middle East: what happens there does not stay there. Pathologies in the Middle East will not remain isolated. They can and will affect us and our security. Whether we are dealing with an ascendant Iran determined to pursue nuclear weapons, or Islamists who seek greater leverage in the region and beyond, or trying to see whether peace between Arabs and Israelis remains in the cards, we had better understand what is possible and which choices and options provide us the best possible leverage to change the behaviors of those whose behaviors must be changed.

And that, ultimately, is what we set out to do in this book. We are not just seeking to debunk mythologies. We are trying to explain the path we ought to be taking in the Middle East, while also illuminating the core set of principles and assumptions that should underpin that path. Dennis is a renowned practitioner of diplomacy and is now the head of the Obama administration’s National Security Council’s “Center Region” that includes the Middle East and Iran. I served as a journalist for American and Israeli publications. As a journalist, I tried not just to cover stories in the region, and not just interview leaders and those in and outside political circles. My goal was to observe the Middle East from the ground up and see the interplay of the different forces—social, economic, and political—that shape the dynamics of the region.

While Dennis and I may both look for larger trends, we understand that U.S. policy toward the Middle East cannot be shaped by abstractions such as neoconservatism or realism. Those who seek to impose grand theories on this part of the world—whether of the right or the left—miss the context from which policy must emerge. We offer what amounts to a centrist view of what to do in the Middle East. Unlike the Bush administration, we favor active diplomatic engagement. We understand the importance of power in an area characterized by conflict and coercion. But just as the military option should never be taken off the table, neither should diplomacy ever be dismissed. Nevertheless, unlike many of the Bush administration’s critics—those who portray themselves as realists but who seem to reflect little understanding of Middle East reality—we don’t favor indiscriminate engagement with any and all actors, including nonstate actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Is it “realistic” to engage diplomatically with groups like Hamas if it means we undercut Palestinians who believe in coexistence and a secular future for their people?

Our mantra is engagement without illusion. We must pursue peace without illusion while understanding the difficulty of achieving it, but recognizing the consequences of not making the effort. We must compete with the radical Islamists by using force where necessary, while realizing that only other Muslims will discredit the radicals and that any strategy for competition must rely on social, economic, political, and diplomatic tools. Engagement cannot be a panacea for peace or for preventing Iran from going nuclear, but it creates possibilities for success and produces a context for tougher policies should it fail. Developments in Iran are fluid. Yet, they point to a theme that we try to hammer in the book. Create a context whereby it is the regime in Iran and not the United States that is the issue. If international sanctions against the regime are required, it is because the world understands that it is Tehran’s behavior that is problematic. Whether engagement is a successful American strategy or a failed tactic will depend upon Iran’s response.

In the end, we offer a guide for a new realism—one shaped by understanding the factors that actually govern behavior in the region; one guided by always understanding the context in which our policy must proceed; and one inspired by the need to preserve hope and possibility in a region too often characterized by neither.

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From Peter J. Munson

While deployed to Afghanistan in 2004, I applied and was accepted to the Marine Corps’ foreign area officer program, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2005, I began studying in Monterey, Califonia, first at the Naval Postgraduate School, then Defense Language Institute. As Iraq was the most immediately important place to the military at the time, I set about trying to learn as much as I could about the country and its history.

I quickly found that the available material was inadequate for my purposes. While numerous studies and histories had been published on Iraq pre-2003, and several high profile books detailing the military and policy aspects of events in 2003 and after were beginning to show up, none explicitly linked Iraq’s history and legacies to what was going on in the country post-invasion. What is more, the quickly growing literature on post-invasion Iraq focused on either policy and strategy critique or individual observations of soldiers or journalists. There was a significant gap for someone trying to learn about Iraqi society, culture, and politics in the new era.

Using democratic transition literature as my guide, I wrote several papers and a thesis on aspects of the Sunni insurgency. The transition literature pointed out key phenomena that had presented problems for previous transitions and helped me to put the Iraqi case in perspective. When I got some very positive feedback on my initial work, I decided to push ahead and attempt to expand my work into a book, incorporating the other groups in Iraq and paying close attention to the political process.

My intent was to produce a book that, instead of focusing on U.S. military actions or the popular policy debate, would explain the Iraqi side of the attempt at transition. I set out to review Iraq’s recent history and the effects of that history on culture, society, and politics, and to demonstrate how those legacies were affecting events in post-Saddam Iraq. The goal was to produce a work that would be of interest to general readers, but would be documented and researched sufficiently to be of special use to service members, officials, and academics considering the problems in Iraq.

Over the next year and a half, I worked on the book while studying Arabic at Defense Language Institute. By the end of my studies there, I was able to read Arabic and incorporate a good number of Arabic sources into my research. In summer of 2007, I moved to Muscat, Oman, working at the U.S. Embassy there and traveling extensively in the Middle East. I was able to incorporate some insights gained from working with militaries in the region and from talking to a wide variety of Arabs, including some Iraqi expatriates, to hone some of my conclusions in the book. By this point, however, interest in Iraq was waning and I was unable to find a publisher until spring 2008, when two houses finally offered to give the book a chance and Potomac Books vowed to put the book out for a general audience.

The publishing timeline allowed me to incorporate a number of important updates, including the results of the provincial elections in 2009. The most important phase of Iraqi transition is yet to come, however, with American influence waning and national elections forthcoming. The manner in which the government ultimately deals with issues such as Kirkuk, reconciliation, and constitutional amendments will also be telling. Hopefully, if interest in Iraq in Transition is strong, I will be able to incorporate these important events in a second edition.

I think it is incredibly important for Americans, and especially the professionals involved in the formulation, execution, and analysis of policy, to understand the complexities and challenges that confront political reform and democratization. At first glance, democracy promotion seems intuitive and “right,” yet the reality of its implementation in other societies is not so simple. I hope that this book adds to the body of literature on democratic transition, which shows that foreign policy cannot be based on rosy assumptions and glib hopes of miraculous transformations. At the same time, just because Iraq was such a mess does not mean we should not attempt to draw insight from it. Many lessons can be learned from Iraq and used to help other states facing more gradual transformation away from authoritarian rule toward some sort of socially acceptable hybrid, if not outright democracy.

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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.

From Steven R. Ward

Immortal grew out of my nearly quarter-century of covering Middle East military issues as a CIA intelligence analyst. I had looked for years without success for a book covering the broad sweep of Iran’s military history, and had occasionally thought that perhaps I should try to fill that gap. There were three factors, however, that pushed me from thinking about writing to actually doing it: ongoing U.S.-Iran tensions, my experiences with the Afghan and Iraq wars, and the utility of having such a history available for analysts joining the intelligence community since September 2001.

When I started working on Immortal in late 2005, the potential for hostilities between the United States and Iran was a concern for Washington because of Iran’s role in post-Saddam Iraq and its provision of weapons and training to armed groups opposing Coalition forces there and in Afghanistan. Given Iran’s history of supporting provocative lethal activities against U.S. interests I was concerned that, totally distinct from the U.S. policy debate, the Islamic Republic was capable of triggering a conflict.

Admittedly, the improved situation in Iraq lowered tension as I moved my manuscript into the publication process in late 2007 and early 2008. More recently, President Obama’s offer of an open hand to Tehran may have further decreased the likelihood of hostilities. I still think, however, that Iran remains a potential military opponent for the United States as it seeks to elevate its influence and change the regional status quo at America’s expense. Should events take us back toward more hostile relations, Immortal can help show how Iran has been shaped by its history and, in turn, improve our understanding of Tehran’s security outlook and strategies. And, not to be too negative, I think that knowing Iran’s military history, which covers a lot of the grievances the Iranian regime has asked the U.S. government to address, can be useful in any efforts to improve relations between our countries.

Back-to-back assignments working on the intelligence side of Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban and Operation Iraqi Freedom against Saddam Hussein were the events that made me think seriously about writing Immortal in preparation for potential military encounters with Iran. In both cases, as intelligence community analysts were shifted from their primary country accounts to support these U.S. military operations, I saw the great need others had for help in understanding Afghanistan and Iraq and in putting current events into their larger historical context. Analysts with more time on these accounts, I noted, were able to do some of the best work because they were familiar, not only with the Soviet experience in Afghanistan or the Iran-Iraq war, but with the role of Afghanistan’s ethnic and tribal traditions in combating the British in the 19th century or with the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s. So, it was not much of a leap to decide that a book on Iran’s military history would be very useful to have on hand in the event of a conflict.

The traumatic events of the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the emotions that surrounded the run up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, also reminded me that a stronger grasp of the history shaping these foreign cultures was one of the best protections against analysis distorted by our own heightened nationalism and ethnocentric views. I wrote Immortal, in part, in the hope that a better understanding of Iran’s history would prevent preconceptions, misconceptions, and ethnocentric bias from clouding our view of Iran’s true capabilities and likely intentions. As an intelligence analyst, I was aware that, at least since the days of Sherman Kent and start of the U.S. intelligence community, one of the primary objectives of strategic intelligence has been an empathetic understanding of foreign countries. My history aims to contribute to such an empathetic understanding of Iran, helping us to avoid problems (as discussed in Kenneth Booth’s Strategy and Ethnocentrism) that deprive an adversary of intentions other than hostility, but also deprive our policy of constructive possibilities on which to build a more stable relationship.

Finally, I am a strong believer that history matters, and this is something I wanted to share with the new analysts joining the intelligence community to work on Iran and other critical national security issues. As historians and strategists have noted over the years, our experience with the past provides the only real empirical data we have about how people conduct war and behave in crisis. New analysts and others dealing with Iran also can benefit from Immortal’s presentation of the role of Iran’s military history and ethnic, tribal, and religious heritages in shaping contemporary issues such as civil-military relations, military professionalism, and innovation. Its military history also helps distinguish Iran’s war-fighting style from that of neighboring Arab militaries, and can add nuance to analysis of regional power balances.

Knowing Iran’s history, of course, does not provide easy answers for such a complex country. But my fondest hope is that Immortal will help intelligence analysts, military personnel, policymakers, and other interested Americans isolate the important questions about Iran that affect peace and stability in the region.

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All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.

From Joshua Muravchik

When I would tell people that I was writing a book about Middle Eastern democrats, the reaction was invariably the same: “That will be a short book.” This jibe expressed the common knowledge that the region remains stubbornly autocratic.

The fact that there is precious little democracy in the Middle East does not mean, however, that there are no democrats. Surveys show that the vast majority say they want democracy, although it is uncertain what they mean. Perhaps more important, there are also individuals whose lives revolve around making their countries more free and democratic, and who have proven they understand these ideas well. We know little about them because their work is peaceful and incremental and overshadowed by the shocking deeds and pronouncements of tyrants, terrorists, and religious fanatics.

I have profiled seven of them, six Arabs and an Iranian. In addition to illuminating their goals and activities, I have attempted to sketch a full biography in the hope of understanding how they came to be who they are.

Each of them was raised under an authoritarian regime in a society hidebound in its customs. Each belonged to a religious tradition that prized memorization over debate; each attended schools that stressed obedience and rote recitation. They learned that personal desires may have little effect on one’s choices in life; that family connections may determine how much justice can be expected; that that dissent can consist of as little as a complaint and be punishable by as much as death; and that power is seized or retained through brutality. In such societies, acquiescence is the key to longevity.

How did they free their minds and become different from most around them? For some the answer lay in exposure to the West. For others the personal became political. Both women in the group saw their mother’s life blighted by polygamy. Some experienced religious or class persecution or watched their parents persecuted. Some witnessed raw brutality and were revolted. One might have been content to be a poet if the authorities had tolerated that.

Each of these seven has paid a heavy price. Four have been imprisoned, and four have received death threats. Three have had loved ones menaced or penalized. Two have been forced into exile. One has seen his children murdered. All have sacrificed material well-being. In addition to physical bravery, each has displayed moral courage to march to their own drummer in societies that prize loyalty, not individualism. Their stories are inspiring and absorbing.

These are the seven:

• Wajeha al-Huwaider, briefly a columnist for the leading Saudi newspaper al-Watan, was banned for her searing polemics against male supremacy. She is the leader of the movement for the right of women to drive in Saudi Arabia and a group that puts Saudi women (faces concealed) on YouTube recounting their mistreatment.
• Mithal al-Alusi, once a leader of the youth movement of the Iraqi Baath Party, split with the party over its brutality and lived two decades in exile. In 2004, after returning to liberated Iraq, he became the first prominent Iraqi to visit Israel, provoking several attempts on his life. In one, his two sons perished. In 2008, Alusi’s fourth trip to Israel led to the lifting of his parliamentary immunity and an indictment for a capital crime, but in a landmark ruling the Iraqi court overturned these actions.
• Mohsen Sazegara was a press attaché to Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris and accompanied Khomeini back to Tehran in 1978 for the revolution’s final triumph. While serving in several high positions in the clerical regime, Sazegara grew increasingly disillusioned by it, becoming one of its most effective opponents, enduring four arrests before being forced into exile in 2004.
• Hisham Kassem pushed back the limits of press freedom in Egypt by publishing the Cairo Times, a small but widely-noted English weekly in the 1990s. Then he became the founding publisher of al-Masry al-Youm, the first fully independent Arabic daily in Egypt since Nasser took power, which has transformed the press scene in Egypt. He is also chairman of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.
• Bassem Eid was the principal investigator for B’Tselem, an Israeli organization combating mistreatment of Palestinians. When Yasser Arafat returned to the occupied territories in1994 and established the Palestinian Authority, Eid grew alarmed at mounting abuses of Palestinian citizens by Arafat’s regime, so he left B’Tselem and founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.
• Rola Dashti was the leader of the campaign that in 2005 won women the right of women to vote and hold office in Kuwait. In 2009 she and three other women won election to parliament.
• Ammar Abdulhamid is a human rights activist and blogger who was Syria’s most outspoken dissident until a face-to-face death threat from Bashar Asad’s security chief impelled him to flee the country.

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From Oren Barak

The puzzle that my book grapples with might be familiar to those who have seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a movie that came out in 1975, the same year that Lebanon’s civil war broke out:

Cart Master: Bring out yer dead.
[A customer puts a body on the cart]
Customer: Here’s one.
Cart Master: That’ll be ninepence.
Dead Person: I’m not dead.
Cart Master: What?
Customer: Nothing. There’s your ninepence.
Dead Person: I’m not dead.
Cart Master: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.
Customer: Yes he is.
Dead Person: I’m not.
Cart Master: He isn’t.
Customer: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.
Dead Person: I’m getting better.
Customer: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment…

The “Dead Person” is Lebanon and the puzzle is how did this state, which so many observers had referred to as a “non-state state” (or a “failed state,” to use a more up-to-date term), manage to endure despite the long and devastating conflict (1975-90) and be resuscitated in its aftermath. The book suggests that the Lebanese Army has played a significant role in Lebanon’s survival.

Initially, I planned to write a more general account of Lebanon’s process of state formation, the causes for its “failure” in the 1970s and 1980s, and its reconstruction in the 1990s. But after some deliberation, I decided to focus on the Lebanese Army, which encapsulates these dramatic developments. After all, this was a military that was weak before the conflict, which had become paralyzed and nearly disintegrated along the lines of ethnicity, clan, and region in the initial stages of the war, but which managed to stay intact throughout this period and be successfully reconstructed in the postwar era. Indeed, today the Lebanese Army enjoys an unparalleled position in Lebanon, demonstrated not only by the widespread public support for its activities, such as the military operation that it launched against Fatah al-Islam, the radical Islamic faction in Tripoli, in 2007, but also in the election of the army commander, General Michel Suleiman, as Lebanon’s president in 2008.

It is important to note that this trajectory is markedly different from that of other military institutions in divided societies that witnessed intrastate conflict. In Yugoslavia, for example, the Yugoslav People’s Army disintegrated along with the state, and some of its men joined the various ethnic militias. Some of them, including high-ranking officers, soon perpetrated war crimes against their former compatriots. Although some Lebanese soldiers, too, joined various militias during the civil war, the bulk of the army’s personnel did not.

In order to solve the puzzle of the Lebanese Army’s endurance during the conflict, I decided to trace its origins from the creation of the first Lebanese military units by the French Army during the First World War until the attempts made by the Lebanese Army to restore Lebanon’s authority in the postwar era. Yet, when going through the vast resources that I gathered—the army’s bulletins, the Lebanese official gazette, memoirs and biographies of numerous Lebanese soldiers, Western archival material, the Lebanese and Arab press, and secondary works on Lebanon—I realized that any discussion of the history of the Lebanese Army (and of any military institution for that matter) must not limit itself to “objective” facts, but also relate to the ways that the army and its leaders—always conscious of the critical importance of history in the process of state formation—wished this past to be remembered.

Writing about a military institution in the Middle East, a region where security matters are still paramount, is no easy task. Yet, in the Lebanese case, I was struck by the wealth of resources on the army, most of which were previously untapped. Among others, this enabled me to collect biographical material on 4,453 officers who served in the Lebanese Army from its inception to the present in order to identify change and continuity in patterns of recruitment and military service. In this way, I was able to show that the Lebanese Army has gradually become more representative of the various sectors of Lebanese society—ethnic groups (or communities), large families (or clans), and regions—and this transformation preceded the political reforms that facilitated the ending of the conflict. Military institutions in divided societies, in other words, can be, and perhaps ought to be, representative institutions! I believe that this finding is relevant to other divided societies, including present-day Iraq.

In The Lebanese Army, I hope to achieve three main goals. The first is to call attention to the significant developments that have taken place in Lebanon in recent decades, and especially to the strengthening of the state’s institutions not only in the coercive sense but also in terms of their legitimacy. In my view, this process has considerable implications for Lebanon’s close neighbors, and especially for Israel, where many still treat Lebanon as a “non-state state.” A second goal is to encourage additional studies on military institutions—and on the realm of security generally—in divided societies, including most Middle Eastern countries. Finally, the book challenges scholars to rethink existing explanations for the “weakness” and “strength” of states in our times, as well as these concepts themselves. Lebanon, for one, is certainly not “dead” and there are many lessons to be learned from its experience.

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From David L. Phillips

U.S. officials must be steely-eyed in confronting terrorist threats. However, we simply cannot kill all our adversaries. An effective counterterrorism strategy must go beyond confrontation and coercion. It must also be based on a deeper understanding of the disenfranchisement that gives rise to despair and the conditions that delude individuals into believing that sensational violence serves their cause.

My book is a post-mortem of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policy. It is also intended as a guide for the Obama administration. Part of it consists of case studies of groups that are at various stages of abandoning violence and seeking their goals through political means: the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, Free Aceh Movement, and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. Some of these groups are making progress; others are back-tracking; while some groups are dividing into various factions. These case studies are considered within the context of world affairs since Bush declared his “Global War on Terror,” of which the book is deeply critical.

The United States missed a golden opportunity after 9/11. The headline of Le Monde read: “Nous sommes tous Americains.” But instead of building on international sympathy, Bush squandered the world’s goodwill through a series of foreign policy blunders.

The UN Security Council supported U.S. military action to topple the Taliban. It also welcomed our pledge to democratize and rebuild Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s failure to expend the required resources stirred doubt about the sincerity of its commitment.

The debacle in Iraq fueled further speculation. Using democracy to justify the U.S. occupation convinced detractors that democracy promotion was a Trojan horse for toppling governments averse to U.S. interests. Conspiracy-prone Iraqis were astonished by the post-war reconstruction fiasco. They wondered how the United States could vanquish Saddam’s Republican Guard, but fail to keep the electricity and water flowing.

Nothing eroded America’s credibility more than neglecting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Waiting until the final year of his administration to announce a major push for peace in the Middle East compounded concerns arising from the Bush administration’s support for corrupt, tyrannical, and (in the eyes of devout Muslims) impious regimes in the Muslim world.

I wrote From Bullets to Ballots in order to encourage the Obama administration to develop a deeper appreciation and different balance between confrontation, coercion, and co-optation of extremists.

The book is far from soft on terrorists. To be sure, every U.S. president has had the option—indeed the responsibility—to preempt an attack against the United States. I make the case, however, that Bush discredited this approach by conflating preemption and prevention. Preemption is justifiable when attack is imminent, whereas preventive war involves military action when there is no urgent threat.

The book insists that the United States can never condone torture, rendition, extra-judicial execution, or political assassinations. However, it acknowledges that targeted killings of armed combatants may be necessary under dire circumstances to prevent the killing of civilians.

When it comes to coercion, I advocate smart sanctions, which are more effective by targeting individuals with travel bans, freezing their overseas assets, and curtailing commercial operations in countries that sponsor terror. Financial intelligence can be used to choke off financial flows, and partnerships with local law enforcement can help disrupt hawala banking used by terror groups to move money. It is possible to interdict financing at its source by screening alms to radical clerics who misuse contributions as payments to “martyrs” or to support militant operations.

While observing the principle of free speech, the United States cannot stand idly by while the Internet is used to incite hatred, raise funds, recruit killers, and facilitate the command and control of terror operations. Unleashing viruses and computer worms can help address security risks. So can bombarding servers, redirecting traffic, and using a password assault to disrupt communications and penetrate websites used for nefarious purposes.

These confrontational and coercive measures are necessary options, but in the book I maintain that democracy and development assistance are also vital to the realization of US national security and global interests. All options explored in the book are explained in the context of case studies and the discussion of actual country conditions.

Democracy assistance has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. To be effective, however, the United States should avoid arrogance and tread softly. In the book, I insist that leaving a heavy footprint alienates allies, risks undermining local initiative, and fomenting further violence.

Moreover, I underscore that democracy assistance is not about empowering leaders of whom the United States approves. One of Bush’s failings was to equate democracy with elections. Democratization is a process, not an event—one that must go beyond elections by including assistance to promote the rule of law, minority rights, and security sector reform, and enhance independent media and civil society thereby ensuring transparent and accountable governance.

Development assistance must also take into account national security considerations. The book points out that strengthening the formal education sector and increasing educational access for young girls undermines radical madrassas. I also advocate greater access to information and science education to help cultivate analytic thinking as a bulwark against extremism.

The most vulnerable persons must not be allowed to slip through the cracks and become victims of manipulation. To this end, hardship and resulting radicalization can be mitigated via a social safety net focusing on health services, as well as steps to develop community and national health systems. Additionally, viewing humanitarian assistance through a conflict-prevention lens both addresses basic needs and enhances stability, which is necessary to break the cycle of violence and counter extremism. Aid, trade, and debt forgiveness stimulate economic development and the emergence of a moderate middle class, thus helping to eradicate poverty, which is a potential breeding ground for extremism.

Eliminating the conditions that cause instability and give rise to extremism requires both U.S. leadership and international cooperation. Terrorism will continue to be the defining issue of our times. From Bullets to Ballots is grounded in the conviction that America will not be safe unless it finds the right balance between security, development and democratization. Moreover, foreign aid must be based on more than altruism. In light of today’s financial crisis, expenditures on democracy and development assistance are even more valuable when they also enhance U.S. national security.

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