Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Tamara Cofman Wittes

This will be my last post on MESH for the foreseeable future. On Monday I will take up new responsibilities that will take me away from the wonderful discussion that unfolds on this page. I’ll be serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, with specific policy responsibilities that include democracy and human rights (and, yes, the Middle East Partnership Initiative) along with public diplomacy.

MESH has done what some thought impossible: built a successful and well-read group blog on Middle East affairs, one that produces a sustained, relatively unpoliticized, thoughtful, and empirically grounded discussion among academics and policy analysts on the politics of the contemporary Middle East. I’ll admit that, at the start, I was skeptical about the project Stephen Peter Rosen and Martin Kramer proposed—but they convinced me to give it a try, and they, along with my excellent colleagues on this blog, have built a rich conversation that brings together multiple perspectives and disciplines in a way that is always fresh, and very often truly enlightening, even for experts in many regional policy topics. I have learned a lot here, and for that I am grateful to Stephen, Martin, and all my smart and dedicated fellow MESH members.

The associated paper series, conferences, and other activities have built on the value of this unique forum and demonstrated the payoff from continued dialogue between the ivory tower and those inside the Beltway over Middle East policy. That’s a lesson I’ll certainly bring with me into the State Department, and I look forward to reading and learning from my MESH colleagues in the months and years to come.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

From Philip Carl Salzman

“It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.”

—President Barack Obama, statement on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, November 4, 2009

The assumption represented by the fresh statement by President Obama on Iran is that all people and peoples are the same: at heart, all people and peoples basically want the same things, basically understand the world in the same way, basically are prepared to come to terms in the same way as everyone else. This is particularly clear in the assertion that what the people of Iran seek is “universal rights.” Such a culture-free world as envisioned in this statement would make communication and agreement a lot easier. The reality, however, is that cultures do differ, and that people and peoples do not see life and existence the same way, and may disagree on goals. Iranian regime goals of Islamic and Shia domination are not secret; these are the explicit raison d’etre of the regime, not to be negotiated away to build “confidence” and a “more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.”

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From Adam Garfinkle

As President Obama decides how to proceed in the Afghan war, he needs to add one more variable that is rarely mentioned: Iranian determination to acquire nuclear weapons. An ongoing Afghanistan campaign means that resort to force against Iran would be tantamount to starting a second war. The politics being what they are, that will knock the military option against Iran off the table, with negative implications for an empowered diplomacy toward Iran.

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From Alan Dowty

As the Goldstone report on the Gaza war wends it way up the UN food chain, casting further opprobrium on Israel at each level, it is legitimate to question Israel’s handling of this challenge. Did the Israeli response lessen or aggravate the damage?

There are serious critiques that could have been levied against Goldstone’s mandate even before a single accusation was heard. UN investigations of wars, including this one, typically focus on jus in bello, on the laws of war on the battlefield, and ignore jus ad bellum, the justification for going to war in the first place. It can be argued with great cogency that it is unreasonable to judge the conduct of a war with little or no reference to its causes; echoes of this can be heard in Israeli complaints about the lack of attention to claims of self-defense.

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From Raymond Tanter

The role of Iran in fueling insurgency in Iraq, particularly attacks against U.S. forces, has been well-documented and forms one front in Iran’s proxy war against the United States. Receiving much less attention than Iraq, is the role Iran has played in supporting anti-NATO insurgents in Afghanistan as a second front against U.S. and NATO forces.

At first blush, such support seems bizarre given the intense antagonism between radical Shiites in Tehran and the fringe Sunni Taliban movement, each of which sees the other as lying outside the bounds of true Islam. Indeed, the two were at odds throughout the 1990s, at times approaching what some considered a full-blow regional crisis. Late 1998 saw the Taliban murder of hundreds of Shiites in Mazar-e-Sharif and an Iranian buildup of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps troops along the border with Afghanistan.

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From MESH Admin

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.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

From Mark T. Clark

On October 22-24, 2009, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) held its second annual conference, entitled “The Middle East and Africa: Historic Connections and Strategic Bridges.” At the welcoming reception on the first night, Vice President Peter Pham announced the creation of the new, refereed journal, The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, to be released early in 2010. The subjects for the journal—as a reflection of the unique approach of the association—will fall within a broad range of geography, encourage multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives, and will not shy away from offering scholarship that will have policy-relevance as well as academic merit. As much as we value high quality scholarship at ASMEA, we also believe it is imperative to share such scholarship with elements of the government—and anyone else for that matter—who seek a deeper understanding of the issues in our regions.

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