Ghajar Off the Table Until Lebanese Elections?

Israel is reportedly postponing further talks about withdrawing from the divided Lebanese/Golan Heights village of Ghajar (earlier articles here and here); the rationale is said to be that it wants to wait until after the June 7 elections to guarantee that Hizbullah does not take over the Lebanese half of the town.

My first reaction is that Hizbullah just got a big electoral boost. An Israeli withdrawal would have been a win for the current Lebanese government, but now it looks as if Israel is holding Ghajar hostage to make sure southern Lebanese vote right. That is unlikely to work very well. And as I've said before, talk of Hizbullah "winning" the elections ignores the coalition building that is a normal part of any Lebanese Parliament.

UPDATED: My second reaction was to say to myself, hey, I don't imagine Hizbullah is going to let this one go by without a comment, and sure enough, here's Al-Manar, citing the Haaretz report:

The "gift" the Zionist entity wanted to provide to the Lebanese Prime Minister ahead of the parliamentary elections is no longer under discussion… and the reason is too simply that the Zionist entity is scared of a possible Hezbollah victory in the elections!

Indeed. They recognize it as a boost to their own prestige.

Postpone Hajj Due to Swine Flu?

This is getting stranger and stranger. The Grand Mufti of Egypt is suggesting Muslim scholars issue a collective fatwa to postpone the hajj due to swine flu. Arabic version is here. Keep in mind — I know I keep repeating it — there have been no cases in Egypt. In fact, according to WHO's rundown as of yesterday, the only cases confirmed in the entire Middle East are in Israel (seven cases). And WHO says, "WHO is not recommending travel restrictions related to the outbreak of the influenza A(H1N1) virus." Oh, yes, and another thing: the hajj isn't until November. Am I missing something here? Has the hajj ever been postponed for health reasons, in all of Islamic history? I don't know, but I expect you'd need at least one infected person to justify it. (Not only are there no cases in the Middle East, except Israel, but none in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan — well, anywhere Muslim.)

And a group of Egyptian Sufi sheikhs have declined to go to a Sufi conference in the US because of fear of swine flu. (I don't know about other parts of the country, but if there are carts in the streets and someone shouting "Bring out your dead!" it's not around here.)

Elsewhere it's reported that 44 suspected cases in Egypt have all tested negative, while the pig kill goes on.

For a country with no cases, the level of hysteria seems high, fanned by the press and irresponsible public statements. I know I've spent a lot of time on Egypt's swine flu overreaction, but I'm mirroring the local media.

Baghdadi Says He Wasn't Captured

I noted previously, to a comment about why I hadn't posted about the capture of the head of Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq, Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi, that there were a lot of questions about whether he had really been captured. Now The Islamic State in Iraq, as it is officially known, has not only denied he's been captured but says the photo being circulated is not of him, and an audio tape has been released as well. So my hesitancy about calling attention to an unproven claim seems to have been prudent.

The COIN Lobby Takes Afghanistan: More Thoughts on McChrystal and McKiernan

I can't resist, when blogging about Afghanistan and asymmetric warfare, posting Lady Butler's once-famous Victorian era painting of Dr. William Brydon riding alone into Jalalabad, entitled Remnants of an Army. It is a reminder that we aren't the first to try to solve the puzzle of winning a war in Afghanistan. (That was during the First Afghan War in 1842. If you don't know the story, a column of some 16,000 people — mostly camp followers, but about 4,500 military, mostly Indian Army but also British Army — left Kabul for Jalalabad. Doctor Brydon arrived alone. Here's Wikipedia on the First Afghan War. It's happened other times as well: you could ask the Soviet Union, if it still existed.) And, while I know I've quoted Kipling already this month and will start to look like some sort of nostalgic imperialist if I'm not careful, his lines from The Young British Soldier are hard not to quote:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

I certainly don't mean to imply that this (or Doctor Brydon's) will be our fate in Afghanistan, but it's increasingly clear that yesterday's virtual firing of General McKiernan amounts to an attempt to innovate and avoid conventional warfare.

Instead of updating the two previous posts (yesterday afternoon and last night) I'm going to offer a new one. As the military blogging community and other analysts have weighed in, it seems I'm not the only one to see this virtual firing of General McKiernan as highly unusual and also as a sign that General Petraeus is going to put his mark on Afghanistan through General McChrystal. My two earlier postings introduce the basic biographies of McKiernan and McChrystal. On the assumption that not everyone in the Middle East analysis community follows the military debates on counterinsurgency, let me share some links and some opinions.

First off, the blog Abu Muqawama is always a good resource for the COIN (counterinsurgency) field; among other comments they link to is this one on McChrystal's "dark side;" this one on his "scary smart" side (though I note that unlike Petraeus, who has a PhD. from Princeton, McChrystal has two masters' degrees in different fields). They also link to the post by Fred Kaplan at Slate, also worth a read.

I've been wracking my brain for the last time that a general was essentially fired in the middle of a war. Lincoln did it constantly in the Civil War, but has it happened since Truman fired MacArthur? Not that McKiernan was fired so summarily or that he was so senior, but I can't recall any major replacements of a theater commander in the midst of a campaign. Ricardo Sanchez stepped aside at the height of the Abu Ghraib controversy in Iraq, but continued as Commander of V Corps in Germany. George Casey succeeded him in Iraq, but served a full tour, and then was made Army Chief of Staff. (Which was also William Westmoreland's reward after Vietnam.)

Gen. David Rodriguez will be the new Deputy Commander in Afghanistan. He and McChrystal both are apparently West Point Class of '76 (Petraeus is Class of '74). Do those dates ring any bells among those of us who are old enough to remember those days? Those are the West Point classes that just missed Vietnam and witnessed, as junior officers or underclassmen, the lost war. The young officers who actually fought in Vietnam — Colin Powell, Norman Schwartzkopf — took one lesson to heart: don't go to war unless you have popular support, and then commit overwhelming force (the so-called Powell Doctrine). The generation that missed Vietnam took counterinsurgency theory more seriously.

The more I look at this the more I see a real coup on the part of the counterinsurgency wing of the Army. McChrystal is a Special Operator, who as head of Joint Special Operations Command went after Saddam Hussein and Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi. Petraeus is cashing in the political and military capital he gained in the surge, and applying it to Afghanistan. General McKiernan, by all accounts a solid conventional warrior — tanker, Seventh Army commander in Europe, ground forces commander in Iraq in the initial invasion — is the loser; the COIN community is in the ascendant for now. Whether that is a harbinger of success or disaster will, of course, be proven on the battlefield, not on blogs. If it works, Petraeus will be Chief of Staff of the Army and maybe Chairman of the JCS. It's a big if, however. Afghanistan is not Iraq.

There are aspects of Afghanistan — a history of weak central governments and fierce warrior cultures typical of mountain redoubts like the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Kurdistan; the Pushtun code of hospitality in which tribal loyalties transcend much else, of isolated mountain valleys which are ideal for defense and hard to subdue, and so on — that may prove hard to reconcile with classic COIN theory. But it is an alternative to Dr. Brydon riding alone into Jalalabad.

One of the oddities of Vietnam was that the Kennedy Administration started out as a very pro-counterinsurgency-theory adminstration: Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of JCS was, of course, an old paratrooper; the Green Berets were a favorite project of JFK, and so on. But when Vietnam came along, despite some intriguing initial counterinsurgency efforts on the part of the Green Berets and Marines, ultimately the old conventional warriors (of whom William Westmoreland was the classic model) took over and fought a conventional war, mostly. And, of course, lost it.

Of course, we have always had a counterinsurgency lobby in the US military: it's just that it was called the Marine Corps. They wrote the book (the Small Wars Manual of 1940) that was pretty much the book on counterinsurgency until General Petraeus' Army Field Manual of 2006. But there were always prophets among the Marine Corps. At the very end of last year, at the age of 95, retired Marine Corps General Victor H. Krulak died. Would that he had lived to see this day when the COIN folks seem triumphant. Krulak argued for a counterinsurgency approach in Vietnam, and lost. As a result, he never became Commandant of the Corps despite being one of the most innovative Marines of his generation. He did, however, live to see his son, Gen. Charles Krulak, become Commandant. Now the Army is preaching the Marine Corps doctrines of small wars and counterinsurgency (Petraeus co-wrote the Counterinsurgency Field Manual with a Marine general; it's a joint field manual, and the Bible of the COIN folks in the Army today. But it's something new in the Army, old hat to the Marines.)

I have no idea how things will play out in Afghanistan, or the increasingly linked issue of Pakistan. But I am certain that Gates — and President Obama, who clearly signed on to this — just changed the game in Afghanistan by changing the doctrine. I'm not the first person to say it, but Afghanistan just became Obama's war, since he's now committed to a dramatically changed strategy, and fired a general to do it.

What Does Roxana Saberi's Freeing Mean?

I didn't post yesterday about the release of Roxana Saberi mostly because I didn't have an immediate reaction other than, of course, relief that a journalist had been freed by a repressive regime. The New York Times has asked a number of experts for their opinions and since they seem to cover the spectrum pretty well, I'm going to refer you to them instead of simply parroting something others are saying. I do recognize, of course, that in the midst of an Iranian electoral campaign, every move means something. What precisely it means, and which factions were responsible for what (remember, Ahmadinejad signaled a while back that he thought she should be freed, so stereotyping who's behind what isn't wise) may take some time to discern.

More on the Change of Command

I've been thinking a bit more about the replacement of General McKiernan with General McChrystal (see immediately prior post). I'm struck by the fact that this comes within days of the visit of Presidents Karzai and Zardari to Washington, and that Karzai has often complained about Afghan civilian casualties. (The US seems to have bombed a surprisingly large number of weddings, for example.) I'm wondering if Karzai had complaints about the command of ISAF.

On the other hand, I think it's clear that David Petraeus, since arriving at CENTCOM, has begun spreading the counterinsurgency gospel to Afghanistan as well. Since McChrystal has a Special Forces background, while McKiernan spent a lot of time in armored units and commanded ground forces in the invasion of Iraq, a more conventional-warfare oriented career track, this could really be Petraeus putting his own stamp on things.

Still, it's unusual to change commanders with this suddenness in wartime; strictly speaking McKiernan wasn't relieved of command so much as asked to step aside; he will retain command until McChrystal is ready to assume command. It still carries the appearance of a professional rebuke.

Changing Horses in Midstream

The announcement by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal will replace Gen. David McKiernan as Commander in Afghanistan cited the need for "fresh leadership" in that conflict.

I'll probably have more to say later or tomorrow, but this seems like the sort of professional slap in the face that is rather rare in modern US wars: relieving the commander of a major war zone in the midst of the war. McChrystal's background may be more appropriate to the conflict — he former headed Joint Special Operations Command — but McKiernan has only commanded ISAF (NATO's International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan since last year. It clearly seems to be a rebuke.

Egypt as Venue for Obama's Speech: Two Modest Proposals

Since it was announced on Friday that President Obama would make his long-promised address to the Muslim world from Egypt, there has been a fair amount of commentary on the wisdom of the choice of venue. Marc Lynch's piece yesterday is probably a good condensation of the arguments. It seems to me that the real question is not just speaking in Egypt, but where he chooses to give the speech.

I suspect, with Lynch and other analysts, that the White House wanted a friendly Arab country: his previous speech in Turkey received much attention in some quarters, but in the Arab world a non-Arab Muslim country is not as impressive as an Arab one, and I'm sure an Arab country was desired. Thus Obama's former home of Indonesia is out. Iraq doesn't work since it reminds everyone of the US occupation; Jordan's too small; Saudi Arabia would bring up the controversy over the "bowing" again, and so on. Egypt is friendly and can provide intense security.

The downside is it seems to be an endorsement of the Mubarak regime and its human rights record. And there will be those in the Arab world who dismiss a speech in Egypt as simply using a reliable, bought-and-paid-for ally to make the gesture. I think this perception could be alleviated somewhat, however, if a suitable venue were chosen, with symbolic force that transcends the prestige of the regime in power. Speaking in an auditorium, a soccer stadium, or Parliament would be predictable venues, and that may be what they have in mind, but something more creative might make a greater impact.

I have two thoughts to throw out here. First, the White House announcement said that Obama would speak in Egypt: it did not specifically say that he would speak in Cairo. That could leave open the option of the new Library of Alexandria, a symbol of learning and literature in the Muslim world and an evocation of the great tradition of ancient Egypt. It would serve to emphasize that learning retains a prominent role in the Islamic world and emphasize the humane letters and their preservation in a world beset by fanaticism and rage.

The Library of Alexandria might not be specifically Muslim enough as a venue for a speech addressed to the entire Islamic world, of course. In that case, how about this: Obama speaks at Al-Azhar.

The ancient mosque/University of Al-Azhar, founded over 1000 years ago, is perhaps the most prestigious center of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world. It is also a powerful symbol of traditional, but non-radical, Islamic doctrine. Yet Al-Azhar is also a modern university, a reminder that education plays an important role in the region and in Islam as a whole.

I'm sure there would be those who would seize upon a few of the rulings of Azhari sheikhs on controversial issues to argue that it is a hotbed of extremism, but that is not really the case. And those crazies who believe Obama is a secret Muslim would no doubt find their heads exploding at the very thought of a speech at Al-Azhar. But they aren't going to vote for him anyway, and they aren't his intended audience. Muslims are.

So those would be my suggestions: don't ask for an address to Parliament or a speech in a soccer stadium or (worse) a military parade ground, or some tourist isolation booth like Sharm al-Sheikh, where too many summits are held; speak at either the Library of Alexandria or Al-Azhar.

Sanctions on Syria Extended

I really do intend to take the weekend off, but wanted to make sure you saw Josh Landis on Obama's renewal of sanctions on Syria; yesterday Landis explained why he was against it. I actually think with the Lebanese elections, new leadership in Israel, and so much else, US-Syrian relations may be the canary in the coal mine: let's watch and see what's happening there, as a clue to what may be happening elsewhere in the near term.

The Pope in the Holy Land

Pope Benedict XVI has arrived in Jordan on the first leg of his visit to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Here's the Vatican's website on the trip for those who want to follow it over the weekend, and here's the official itinerary. Here's a prelude from Haaretz, a report on how he will visit both the Al-Aqsa Mosque* and Yad Vashem (many Israeli newspapers noting the irony of a German Pope at Yad Vashem), a Jordan Times report on his first event, and much more to come, I'm sure. *The papal itinerary lists the Dome of the Rock rather than al-Aqsa; possibly the Israeli report got it wrong.

I've noted previously the quandary of Middle Eastern Christians: in Iraq, their status is genuinely in peril, but in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the population is declining due to emigration. The Pope will doubtless address this on his trip, hopefully without the awkwardness displayed in his remarks about Islam a few years ago (in which his quoting a Byzantine ruler was interpreted by many Muslims as if it were his own viewpoint). This Pope is a German systematic theologian by background, and that is not necessarily the best background for subtle and nuanced pastoral outreach. This could be an interesting trip.

More Weekend Reading

I've been signing off on Fridays by offering a selection of online stories to hold you over the weekend, so I'll do so yet again, and do bear in mind that I offer a variety of opinions of all political and ideological leanings, and that my linking to an article does not mean I endorse all its arguments:

• Yemen has banned eight newspapers, apparently in an effort to crack down on recent separatist protests in the former South Yemen. More on growing dissidence here. Yemen, with a marginal economy in the best of times, has been hit hard by the global economic downturn, and the strains are starting to show.
  

• Egypt is dismissing reports that the IAEA has detected traces of enriched uranium in Egypt as "erroneous and old"; more on the subject here. And still more dismissal here.
  

• The folks at MERIP have a new Middle East Report Online piece up on the Shi‘a of Saudi Arabia. I haven't posted, to date, about the recent stirrings among the Shi‘a of the Saudi Eastern Province, including sinister references to secession, because I can't comment on everything that's happening everywhere, and it seemed to be mostly polemical. But if you're looking for a backgrounder (from the usual MERIP point of view), this is worth reading. (And "usual MERIP point of view" is not meant as some sort of snide dismissal: from their earliest days back when I was in grad school and dinosaurs roamed the earth, they've provided a consistent and scholarly leftist critique: I don't always agree with them, but I do usually read them and learn.)
  

• A piece in Haaretz about how Israel's "Anglo" community — American immigrants for the most part, and other English speakers — are reacting to one of their own becoming Ambassador in the person of Michael Oren. It's kind of a throwaway in the lead sentences, of course, that they acknowledge Netanyahu belongs in the same category.

• Gideon Levy in Haaretz about Israeli President Shimon Peres as the "propaganda minister" of the new Israeli government. Excerpt:

"We've had better and worse presidents, but we've never had a president who served as government propagandist. Now we do: Shimon Peres has appointed himself to the unworthy task. Since the new government formed - the most right-wing government in Israel's history - the (seemingly) left-wing (former) peace man has become its public relations agent."

• President Obama plans to address the Muslim world during a forthcoming visit to Egypt, possibly in June.
  

• A commentor recently asked why I hadn't mentioned the (reported) capture of the head of Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq, Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi. One reason is the sheer confusion about who he is, if he is in fact in custody. For some background see this posting at Jihadica, and this one at Long War Journal. The guys who do nothing but watch al-Qa‘ida full time aren't sure who's been captured or even if Baghdadi is a real person, so I have refrained from speculation. But I refer you to those better informed, who still aren't sure either. Confused? So am I. Here's more if you want to be more confused.
  

Ghajar Withdrawal Appears Likely Soon

Israeli withdrawal from the Lebanese half of the town of Ghajar seems likely in the near future, (also see here), amid reports that it is working with the United Nations to assure the security on the Lebanese side of the border once it pulls back to the internatonal frontier. I posted on the background of the Ghajar issue here, and refer you to the details there, but essentially Ghajar is one of the easiest territorial issues to address since Israel has no desire to stay on the Lebanese side of the border (which it reoccupied during the 2006 war with Hizbullah); it's awkward because the town straddles the old Lebanese-Syrian border and the Syrian side is part of the Israeli occupied Golan.

Ghajar is an anomaly, a town divided by an international border that, during the period between 1982 and 2000 when Israel occupied its security zone in south Lebanon, grew into a larger and united entity. (It's also an anomaly because the population is ‘Alawite, and most Syrian and Lebanese ‘Alawites live much farther north).

Israel says the only reason it is still in Ghajar is because the Lebanese Army failed to come up with a plan to assure the security of the border against Hizbullah infiltration, and now the UN seems to be working hard to bring about a withdrawal. It's the one withdrawal Netanyahu can safely carry out without offending any major Israeli constituency, and there have been reports it is a priority for the US to get Israel to withdraw before the Lebanese elections June 7. (One of George Mitchell's aides, Fred Hof, is both an old friend of mine and one of the acknowledged experts on Lebanese border issues; his hand may be in here somewhere.)

Of all the various territorial issues in play, Ghajar seems like the one most likely to be solved in the near term.

Blogroll Debuts at Last

Rather belatedly, I'm starting a blogroll down on the lower right, and will probably add a links list to major Middle Eastern news sites as well. If your blog isn't on it yet, please don't be upset; I'll be adding almost daily, I suspect, for some time to come.

I'm starting with the political blogs, dealing with current events and policy, since I suspect that's where my heaviest readership comes from, but I'll be adding blogs on culture, language, etc. as we go along: perhaps in separate blogrolls. News links and other resources will be added in due time. I may start a separate list for country-specific sites if the list gets too long.

UPDATE: I note that blogs beginning with "The" are alphabetized under "T", and that my first blog in a non-Roman alphabet alphabetized after everything else. At the moment I think that will have to be the default order as the blogroll gets longer.

Afghanistan's Pig is Named "Pig" and Other News from the Swine Flu Front, Including a Pop Song

The Reuters news story I linked to in yesterday's post about how Afghanistan has quarantined the (reputedly) only pig in the country left out one bit that the BBC has added: the pig is named "Khanzir," which is just Arabic for pig. (Of course Arabic isn't spoken in Afghanistan, and I think Persian uses a different word (Afghan Dari is basically Persian) and I have no idea how you say it in Pushtu. So the pig is named pig.

Meanwhile, Egypt has still had no cases of H1N1 (swine flu), despite a scare with an Austrian tourist in the Red Sea resort town of Hurghada. Hurghada is on the Red Sea coast and would be a pretty easy place to isolate from the Nile Valley if there were an outbreak, but it was apparently a false alarm.

The last time I saw press numbers on the great pig massacre the numbers killed so far were nothing like the 300,000 originally reported as targeted. I'm not sure if the Egyptians have backed off a bit following international protests and ridicule, or if they're just not publicizing it. The story linked above says they're proceeding with the cull. Then, from the same article, there's this to consider:

On Tuesday, a few hundred pigs were found in one of Giza’s main roads, reportedly left there at midnight. It turned out to be a failed attempt to smuggle the pigs.

And here are some numbers:

Meanwhile, the General Authority for Veterinary Services finished slaughtering 1,320 pigs and culling 5,138 out of 168,000 pigs in Egypt, according to Major General Abdel Salam Mahgoub, Minister for Local Development.

So the 300,000 to 350,000 seem to have become 168,000? Or were the original numbers wildly inflated?

And, continuing the overreaction, from the same article:

Meanwhile, pupils in some schools started wearing medical masks during their lessons as a preventive measure.

An official source at the Ministry of Education, though, said this was not ordered by the ministry, adding there was actually no need for such a measure at this time.

Education Minister Yousry El-Gamal said instruction had been given that doctors and female health experts be deployed in schools during the exams. He stressed the place and timing of the exams would not be changed, ruling off the possibility of holding them in open spaces.

Reading this, one has to keep reminding oneself that Egypt has not had a single case of swine flu. Neither has Afghanistan. Egypt has had serious outbreaks of bird flu in recent years, and I can understand a certain amount of overcaution, combined with the taboo on pork.

And finally, thanks to The Arabist for linking to a MEMRI TV posting of a new pop song in Egypt about the swine flu, including the immortal lines:

In every port and airport, we need to write in large letters:
You’re not allowed to enter Egypt and bring a pig with you.

Always good advice. And I had not realized until now just how easy it is, in Arabic, to find rhymes with khanazir (pigs, swine). The fact that there are not more Arab songs about pigs isn't for lack of rhymes, I guess. I like the interview with the singer, as well, in which he says that someone (his agent?) called him and said, "you have to immediately write a song about influenza." Ah, show biz. It adds to the surreal nature of the entire swine flu panic, which has seemingly disrupted countries without a single case in evidence.

For the video, I don't immediately see any imbedding codes and am not tech-savvy enough to post the video here without them, but you can watch it at The Arabist. He's thoughtfully provided an MP3 download in case you just have to have it for your Ipod.

AND AN UPDATE: I belatedly should mention for those unfamiliar with Egyptian popular music in recent decades that Sha‘aban ‘Abd al-Rahim, or "Sha‘abula" as he is popularly known, made his name with a song called "I hate Israel" and went on to make a reputation for political songs denouncing the US, the war in Iraq, and other stuff. He's a political singer, in other words.

New Arab Reform Bulletin Up

The Carnegie Endowment has a new issue of the Arab Reform Bulletin up. It's always a good survey of issues regarding elections, democratization and human rights issues.

Of particular note is a good backgrounder on the upcoming elections in Mauritania, in which the leader of the latest coup is running for President. It's a country many of us know little about so it's useful to have this for reference.

Algerian Arabic and French

Synchronicity: Just the other day I was discussing Arabic dialects and the issue of diglossia, and in the comments to that post The Moor Next Door commented at some length on the situation in Algeria today. Algeria is a country that interests me greatly, but which I've never visited, so I was glad to have his input. Now, apparently totally unrelated to that conversation, here's a blog post by an Algerian linguist studying at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London, which deals with exactly the question of the roles of Arabic and French in Algeria today. (This is also a linguistics blog — the title, Jabal al-Lughat, means "The Mountain of Languages") that periodically deals with Berber/Tamazight languages as well as Arabic and some African language families. It's usually too specialized for me to link to, but this seemed right in line with something we'd been discussing.)

But by all means read his comments section too, which adds interesting perspective. And reflect for a moment that these Algerians (I take it most of them are Algerians, though some Moroccans chime in as well) are discussing French vs. Standard Arabic vs. colloquial Arabic and all of them are doing it in what appears to be excellent grammatical English.

Israel's Nukes and the Iranian Issue

This article in the conservative Washington Times, and this sidebar accompanying it, are provoking some commentary today because they imply that the Obama Administration's efforts to stem nuclear proliferation could lead to exposing Israel's nuclear arsenal and making it part of the debate about Iranian nuclear ambitions. The implication seems to be that the US might expect Israel to be willing to trade off its own strategic deterrent, but the idea that somehow the US has been "shielding" Israel's nuclear arsenal for 40 years seems a bit far-fetched.

Israel's nuclear arsenal is not a secret in the usual sense. In the defense literature through the years there have been fairly detailed descriptions of delivery systems and how and where they are deployed. There are muliple books on the subject, some credible (just about anything by Avner Cohen), some a bit credulous (Seymour Hersh's The Samson Option). I've always suspected the Israelis wanted details to leak out — a deterrent doesn't deter if the other side doesn't know you have it — and that the abduction and jailing of Mordechai Vanunu (instead of dismissing him as a crank and ignoring him) was meant in a way to let the world know that Vanunu's information was genuine. Israel's policy of strategic ambiguity over its nuclear arsenal does not deceive anyone, and its neighbors recognize its nuclear arsenal for what it is. Its ballistic missiles are in at least their third generation, and that it has nuclear weapons capable of delivery from aircraft and by ballistic missile is hardly debatable, while there are allegations of a submarine-launched capability (a potential second-strike capability) as well. Here's globalsecurity.org's pages on Israeli nuclear deployments. Click on individual bases for the (alleged) details. Oh, that secret.

To insist on sanctioning Iran's development of nuclear weapons without recognizing that weaponization has already occurred in the region (not to mention Pakistan), it seems to me, undercuts our credibility as advocates of non-proliferation. But to suggest that the Obama Administration is in danger of "revealing" Israel's nuclear arsenal seems naive. Iran already knows about Israel's arsenal and mentions it frequently. It's only the US Administration that has consistently looked the other way. I don't really see much new in today's story.

If Hizbullah Wins . . .

Elias Muhanna, the blogger who blogs as Qifa Nabki, has a piece in his own name at Foreign Policy entitled "What if Hizbollah Wins?" As I noted in my post on Eric Davis' comments about binary thinking, Lebanese politics has traditionally sought consensus rather than a zero-sum I-win-you-lose formula, but since 2005 the polarization between "government" and "opposition" (even though the "opposition" is represented in the current government) has deepened.

If the "opposition" wins a majority in the forthcoming elections, it will probably be because of gains made by Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, though Hizbullah may also improve its representation. Aoun is a controversial figure, but hardly an anti-Western demagogue. If an opposition victory is interpreted by the US as a simplistic triumph for Hizbullah, and by extension Iran and Syria, it could lead to cuts in US aid to Lebanon (especially military aid, which has been growing) or other retaliation. That would hardly lend credibility to US claims to be promoting the spread of democracy. (Funny thing about spreading democracy: sometimes the voters choose someone you don't like.)

As with Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah's support base comes not from its ideology (though that may attract some) but from its social programs. It has a real constituency, and a real claim to play a role in Lebanese politics. That it, alone among the various factions, still maintains its armaments, is a serious problem, but it will not be solved by rhetoric or cuts in aid. There is a genuine possibility that the "opposition" will win a majority in the Lebanese Parliament, and that majority will include Hizbullah. It isn't certain, but I hope the outside world is prepared for such a result if it comes.

More Overreaction to Swine Flu?

Egypt's Health Minister is urging citizens to avoid movie theaters and restaurants, pray outdoors instead of in mosques and churches, and avoid the ‘umra or lesser Meccan pilgrimage for several weeks, even though there have still been no cases of swine flu in Egypt. Virtually everywhere else (with the exception of US Vice President Biden), the advice is only to stay home if you have symptoms. As Mexico starts reopening schools and restaurants and the initial US alarmism eases, it seems that Egypt is still up in arms. First the pig kill, now draconian warnings about not mingling in public. Don't you usually need at least one case of the disease before you start to panic?

Well, then, how about this:

Afghanistan's Only Pig Quarantined in Flu Fear. Their only pig is in the Kabul zoo.

Gates and Mubarak: Advice on Hair Coloring?

US Secretary of Defense Bob Gates was in Cairo today. He's in his mid-60s. Yesterday was Husni Mubarak's 81st birthday. Which one has white hair?

Does anyone remember the old Clairol commercials, "Does she or doesn't she? (Only her hairdresser knows for sure.)" Or the jokes about Kiwi shoe polish? (And yes, I know the hairpiece theory.)

Sorry, Mr. President, no offense, but one does have to wonder. As I've noted before, Qadhafi's hair is still jet black, too, but he's a decade and a half younger than Mubarak. Maybe it's just sour grapes on my part, as one of those people who was graying at 40 and white in my 50s.

(Photo: US Department of Defense)

What Signal is Hamas Sending?

Hamas' newly-re-elected Politburo chief Khaled Mesh‘al has sat down for an interview with The New York Times, summarized here. Mesh‘al says that Hamas has stopped firing Qassam rockets at Israel and is seeking a two-state solution and offering a 10-year truce with Israel.

None of this is new: Mesh‘al has said it before, as have other Hamas figures, but repeating it to The New York Times has the effect of drawing the attention of the US to the position.

Israel has always rejected the idea of a temporary truce, a hudna, and American readers will no doubt be struck by the ten-year limitation. That limitation derives from Hamas' own identity as an Islamist organization: since Hamas holds that Palestine is an Islamic waqf and no Muslim can sign away title to the holy land permanently, they hold that dealings with Israel cannot entail permanent recognition. However, the Prophet Muhammad's Treaty of Hudaybiyya, with the Quraysh of Mecca, constitutes a precedent for establishing a long-term hudna or truce. The original duration of the Treaty of Hudaybiyya was 10 years, and there is a tradition in Muslim jurisprudence that a hudna with a non-Muslim state can be made for up to 10 years. (In practice, Hudaybiyya collapsed much sooner; in practice also, a hudna could theoretically be extended when the first 10 years had run.) Even if Hamas wanted to grant full recognition to Israel (and while some Hamas figures might consider it, it is certainly not a majority opinion), they seem to be caught by their own legal tradition, as interpreted by strict Islamists.

Graybeards like myself may recall some of the debates within the Palestine Liberation Organizaion in the 1970s over what kind of peace might be negotiated: salam or sulh. The question of a hudna is somewhat different, however, since the PLO was primarily a secular body and saw peace in terms of achieving Palestinian statehood, while Hamas has a religious raison d'être that limits its options.

It is, however, worth noting that Mesh‘al does respond to a question about the Hamas Charter by noting that it is 20 years old and suggesting Hamas may have evolved from the positions of those days.

Hamas has been sending similar signals to Israel without any positive response; the NYT interview seems to be an attempt to appeal to US opinion. It does suggest Hamas is trying to find some way forward, to keep itself in the negotiations despite Israeli refusal (and US refusal as well) to talk to Hamas. I suspect the cautious hints and the 10-year limitation will incur the same rejection they have in the past, though it might be useful to explore, through backchannels, just what Hamas is hinting at.

A Few Items Worthy of Attention

I'm working on some posts of my own but thought I'd offer a couple of links in the meantime:

• An interesting collection of observations on Pakistan over at National Journal. I tend not to post on Pakisitan because a) I don't know much about it and b) we have two real Pakistan experts here at MEI, former Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin and Marvin Weinbaum. But given the current campaign and all the alarm about the Taliban being close to Islamabad, I think the observations collected by National Journal are a good offsetting balance. I particularly think Paul Pillar's are worthy of note. There's cause for concern but let's not write the obituary for Pakistan yet.
• Why did Muqtada al-Sadr go to Turkey? Marc Lynch reflected on it yesterday without reaching a firm conclusion, but it's obviously a sign that Sadr's extended absence from the Iraqi scene may be coming to an end as the US presence starts to wind down.

More to come in a little while.

Michael Oren as Israeli Ambassador: Some Thoughts

As I'd noted previously, rumors have been circulating for some time that historian Michael Oren would be Binyamin Netanyahu's choice for Ambassador to the US, and that has now been confirmed.

Oren has been here in town for a while, teaching at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service (my own alma mater as it happens), and also is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He's probably best known for his book Six Days of War, on the 1967 war, but his more recent book Power, Faith and Fantasy is an overview of the whole American experience of the Middle East from the early days of the republic to the present. (I recommend both books, though I've only read certain chapters of Power, Faith and Fantasy.) This website for the book has his biography and summaries of both books. You'll note that he was raised in New Jersey and moved to Israel in the 1970s. Here's a Jerusalem Post profile.

Oren served as spokesman for the IDF during the 2006 Lebanon War, and he has no diplomatic experience as such, but he clearly knows the US and his second book shows he is thoroughly steeped in the history of the US in the Middle East.

This recent article of his in Commentary on Israel's "Seven Existential Threats" suggests a fairly sophisticated understanding of Israeli society as well, and while some of the threats (Iran, terrorism) are predictable, others (the growth of the haredi population; failure to enforce Israeli law on the settlers) are not conventional Likud positions. And this column in Haaretz portrays him as favoring unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank.

Ambassadors are still important in many ways, especially given the fact that the Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is not going to be all that popular in foreign capitals. Still, Israeli Prime Ministers have normally conducted their own relations with American Presidents directly rather than depend on their Ambassadors for insight. But Oren could prove to be an interesting one. And if, as the Israeli press keeps saying, he was Netanyahu's first choice rather than Lieberman's, it may suggest more flexibility than most of us give Netanyahu credit for. As I noted last week, Binyamin Bin-Eliezer has said he's changed.

One More Take on Eric Davis' "Ten Sins": Sin #6

I've already posted several times in order to give my own riffs on Eric Davis' "'Ten Conceptual Sins' in Analyzing Middle East Politics": an introductory comment here, and longer comments on Sin # 1 and Sin # 7: all my posts on the subject are aggregated here. I don't plan to post on all of them, but I definitely want to deal with one more at least: Sin #6: Seeing the Middle East politics through binary thinking. Davis comments:

Western analyses of the Middle East is to view political events in either “black” or “white” terms. While we can be very critical of many actions of the so-called Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi) between 2003 and 2007, when it lost much of its power, it was, and still is, one of the largest social service providers in Iraq. The fact that it, not the central government, provides a wide variety of social services, such as jobs, health care, education, and security, should make us realize the need to distinguish between its armed elements, who often engaged in despicable behavior, such as ethnic cleansing and criminality, and its social service providers, who have tried to help a population in need.

I agree with the point, but I think there's something else at work here. Americans, and our British forebears and allies, have a tendency — born of our heritage of Parliamentary democracy and relatively stable government — to expect normal governance to function within an essentially two-party system. Although Britain may technically be a three-party system the Liberal Democrats have never governed by themselves, and we essentially are used to a "Government" and "Loyal Opposition" model. This is hardly universal: it isn't even that common on the European continent, where multiple party systems and shifting coalitions are the norm.

Middle Eastern politics is obviously not functioning on a two-party model. Israel is almost a definition of multiple party coalition maneuvering. The other two countries that at least arguably have a genuinely pluralistic politics — let's agree on Turkey and Lebanon and argue about others later — have rather different traditions. They don't fit either the Anglo-American binary or continental coalition models.

Insofar as participatory politics has a history in the Arab world (a major issue in its own right) it has usually emerged not from the national level but at the local level. In the Nasser era in Egypt the regime and the security services ran the country with an iron hand, but local villages chose their own headmen. (That is no longer generally the case, so in a way things have been retrograde since Nasser, despite his strong security state.) Unions and professional syndicates had greater independence 30 years ago than they do today, and the judiciary still has an independent streak. That's one reason Egypt is not and has never come close to being Saddam Hussein's centralized and totalitarian Iraq.

There is another tradition, the old tribal concept of shura: consultation., The sheikh of a tribe might rule, but he ruled with the advice and consent of the elders and clan leaders, of his own family and other leaders. It was not by majority vote, but it also was not by dictatorial whim. It was done by consensus. Not everyone was a part of that consensus of course, not the women and children nor the uninfluential males, but it was not one-man-rule either.

There is still, I think, in much of the Arab world a preference for rule by consensus. Even in the Gulf monarchies there is still the tradition of the royal majlis, in which the ruler meets with his subjects, hears their complaints, and seeks to offer them remedies. It is a sort of benevolent despotism, a monarchy tempered by listening to one's subjects' complaints.

When Lebanon has worked best, it has worked through Shura: consultation and compromise among the various confessional, sectarian, and quasi-feudal allegiances that make up the country's varied communities. When it has worked least well (1958, 1975-1991, arguably since 2005) is when it has been drawn, either by its own internal stresses or external rivalries (the "Arab Cold War", as Malcolm Kerr called it, in 1958, the regional Arab-Israeli dynamics during the civil war, and the Western crusade for democratization since the Hariri assassination in 2005), into a binary, zero-sum, if they win we lose sort of equation. The Lebanese instinct is to be inclusive and non-zero-sum; the Western tradition is to interpret everything in a government-opposition model. Westerners have trouble figuring out how Walid Jumblatt, whose father was killed by Syria, spent years supporting Syria (though he's now against it again), or how Michel Aoun, rightwing Maronite general driven out of power by Syrian force of arms, is now an ally of both Syria and Hizbullah. But the key is it is not a zero sum game, since that leads to something like the civil war of 1975-1991. One bargains, one deals, one balances interests and finds a consensus. When Lebanon does that, it works. I have sometimes argued that not only does the Lebanese term za‘im come pretty close to the concept of "godfather" in the Mafia sense, but that the concept of the five families dividing up territory is not a bad analogy either. That may be a patronizing oversimplification, but it is not, in my personal opinion, unhelpful. (Bottom line: if the "opposition" wins in the June 7 elections, don't expect the apocalypse. If the "government" wins, don't expect it either. Left to themselves, the Lebanese will work it out. Their problem has always been that no one — regional neighbors or superpowers — leaves them to themselves.)

A binary view — one which encourages a zero-sum assessment — is not likely to work well in the Middle East, but it is the default paradigm for analysts from an Anglo-American background. I hope these thoughts add a bit to Eric Davis' wise assessment.

Roundup on the Mass Hamicide

To my dismay — and as a lover of Egypt it really is to my dismay though I'll post on it anyway — the whole pig cull is becoming a real awkward situation. Over the weekend The Arabist posted a good links post (called "Pig Fever") that links to multiple commentaries on the subject. I won't repeat his links. Here's an update on the progress of the mass hamicide, but of greater concern are reports of clashes between the government and the zabbalin. The zabbalin, the garbage collectors of Egypt, are mostly Copts; they received a great deal of international publicity due to Sister Emmanuelle, a Belgian nun who worked among them for decades until her death at nearly 100. Being primarily Christian, they raised pigs among the garbage dumps in the Muqattam area and elsewhere. The government has now said that its crackdown on pigs is not aimed at the swine flu (since the world has been denouncing the pig cull), but at cleaning up the urban garbage dumps where swine were raised.

Once in the late 70s, while living alone in a Cairo apartment, my local zabbal, who had previously collected at Christmas and Easter, showed up for a tip on the Prophet's Birthday. I said, but you're a Christian, you asked for gifts on Easter and Christmas. He said, no, I'm a Muslim, and we celebrate Prophet Jesus as well, and pulled out a government ID card that showed his religion as Muslim. Maybe he was the rare Muslim zabbal, but most are Copts; maybe he had a fake ID.

Sister Emmanuelle has passed on now after nearly a century, and it sounds as if the zabbalin are facing a real challenge to their livelihood. It's hard to be sure, from outside. I hope they do well.

The Syrian Ambassador at MEI

I had to miss Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha's presentation at MEI yesterday, but Marc Lynch has headlined it and analyzed it, and you can listen to the podcast at MEI's website.

Because I work from home on Fridays I'll admit I sometimes miss Friday events. And on this one, I thought it would be the same old boilerplate, and Marc Lynch seems to say that quite a bit of it was, but there do seem to have been some interesting signals there. I really think that there is a potential for a breakthrough on the Syrian track: but one I find it hard to picture Netanyahu taking. Anyway, I refer you to both Lynch's report and the original presentation.

Weekend Reading

As I've done on other Fridays, a collection of recent articles to tide you over for the weekend:

• Jihadists Studying Western Scholars Studying Jihad: It gives Thomas Hegghammer at Jihadica a chance to use the word "omphaloskeptic," which is almost worth the time reading it in itself (contemplating your navel, for the Greek-challenged), but it's an intriguing subject in its own right. As we study them, are they studying us studying them? Another take on the same subject from Arab Media Shack.

• Israel's 61st independence day had only one survivor who had been present at the signing of the declaration of independence in 1948, a 94-year old.

• Resisting the mass hamicide: Egypt's pig farmers setting up roadblocks as Egypt tries to kill 300,000 pigs.

• And, now that the UN has criticized Egypt for the pig kill despite the lack of any cases of swine flu or any proof pigs wre involved, Egypt now says it was a general health measure to end "disorderly pig rearing," especially those raised in garbage dumps by the zabbalin, mostly Christian garbage collectors.

• Ehud Barak on Avigdor Lieberman: "I think that the positions [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman is articulating behind closed doors are far more balanced and, I would say, more responsible than what some of his [public] declarations suggest." A rather diplomatic way of saying, "he's not as crazy as he sounds."? But this is your country's chief diplomat we're talking about, here, and its Defense Minister is saying it.
  

The Spring Issue of the Middle East Journal

Okay, it's time for the commercial break. The Spring 2009 issue of The Middle East Journal reached readers a week or two ago, but for technical reasons the electronic edition is only now up, and I had waited until it appeared to link to it. If you're a subscriber and haven't used the electronic edition before, you'll need your subscriber number from your mailing label. If you don't subscribe they're available for purchase. (As of this moment the current issue articles seem to be priced in pounds sterling, which I think is a glitch to be fixed. Later: I'm told it's only pricing in sterling on my home laptop. The MEI computers are showing dollars.)

The individual articles are:

• Lawrence Pintak, "Border Guards of the 'Imagined' Watan: Arab Journalists and the New Arab Consciousness." Former CBS correspondent Larry Pintak, now Director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo, analyzes a survey of Arab journalists and argues they are the vanguard of a new Arab nationalism.
• Jean-Pierre Filiu, "The Local and Global Jihad of al-Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghrib." A study by a scholar from Sciences-Po in Paris of the radical Islamist Algerian group formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.
• Pinar Ipek, "Azerbaijan's Foreign Policy and Challenges for Energy Security." Ipek, a professor at Bilkent University in Turkey, analyzes Azerbaijani foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union.
• Alisa Rubin Peled, Shari‘a Under CHallenge: The Political History of Islamic Legal Institutions in Israel, A study, including newly declassified material, of the history of Islamic law in Israel, and the emergenced of an "agreement on how to disagree" between the government and the shari‘ court system.
• Victor Nemchenok, "'That So Fair a Thing Could Be So Frail': The Ford Foundation and the Failure of Rural Development in Iran, 1953-1964." A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia, Nemchenok uses Ford Foundation archives to examine the failure of the foundations rural development efforts under the Shah, concluding that Cold War motivations in US policy predominated over development efforts.
• Book Review Article: Steven A. Cook, "The Big Chill: Democracy Promotion in the Arab Middle East." Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, reviews several recent books dealing with US efforts to promote democracy. If you download it you will get the whole book review session.
  

More Thoughts on Eric Davis' "10 Sins": Sin No. 7

Sin #7: Failure to learn the history, language and cultures of the region.

I'm not going to comment on all ten of Eric Davis' "10 Sins Conceptual Sins in Analyzing Middle East Politics" since I don't want to seem like this blog is becoming parasitic and repeating someone else's insights. But as I did in my post on "Sin Number 1" I want to expand my own ideas on a few of his points which are also hobbyhorses of my own. So in a way I am shamelessing ripping off Prof. Davis' ideas and spinning my own stories from them, but I hope I'm adding to the conversation while recognizing who raised the key issues in the first place.

I already dealt with his "Presentism" sin, so it's worth talking a bit more about one that is particularly linked to the "Presentism" problem: "Failure to learn the history, language and cultures of the region." It's his sin number 7, and while I also plan to post on sin number six, let me vent on this one first. Once again, if you haven't read the original article, please do so before reading me.

Number one already dealt with history, so let's talk about language.

His point on reporters (in particular) not knowing the language is, I think, a valid one. I particularly liked his comments here:

While I am not trying to suggest that those who do not know a country’s language should avoiding [sic]reporting on its political affairs, we can think of Eric Rouleau, who was for 30 years a special correspondent in many countries of the Middle East for Le Monde and who spe aks fluent Arabic. Would we take seriously a correspondent who was bureau chief in Washington, DC, for a major daily newspaper in Iran, the Arab countries, Turkey, or Israel if s/he did not speak English? A question to ask is why major American newspapers do not make more of an effort to recruit reporters who know at least one of the languages of the region, such as New York Times reporters John Burns and Neil Macfarquhar, and Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid, just to give a few examples.

One of my past incarnations involved being a jounalist for small specialized publications, but one who did speak and read Arabic. A great many years ago, probably sometime in the 1970s, even before I was working as a journalist, I was at a round table discussion of media coverage of the Middle East, and I raised the same question that Eric Davis raises here, right down to the citation of Eric Rouleau (who eventually served as France's Ambassador to Tunisia and Turkey). (I think I also mentioned Peter Mansfield and one or two other Brits with decent Arabic.) The answer I got from one of the panelists (right now I'm guessing it was Bob Simon, then of CBS, but I wouldn't testify under oath to it), was that US newspapers and networks thought that someone who had spent so much time in the region as to learn Arabic would show bias towards the Arab side in Arab-Israeli issues, and that therefore we tended to move foreign correspondents around a lot so they wouldn't fall victim to "clientitis."

I had no opportunity to rebut at that time, now over 30 years ago and maybe more, but the rebuttal is obvious: does your correspondent in Mexico city speak Spanish? Does the head of the Paris Bureau speak French? If so, how is that not posing the same threat you allege for the Arab world? And if they don't speak the local language, how do they cover the news?

The situation has changed since the 1970s; the correspondents Davis mentions know Arabic (and Anthony Shadid is Arab-American); and a lot more US diplomats have decent Arabic today, though only a handful of diplomats and retired diplomats are comfortable enough to be interviewed in Arabic on Al Jazeera, but there are a handful, of whom former Ambassador Christopher Ross is a notable example. But it's still true that most of the journalists covering the region have, at best, "kitchen Arabic," and that no one would think that normal if they were based in Latin America. Yes, Arabic is harder than Spanish.

I'm sure not that many US journalists posted to Israel speak Hebrew, either, and the same with Persian, Turkish, Pushtu, Urdu, whatever. This is also integrally linked to Davis' Sin Number Four: the Excessive Focus on Elites. But of course. If you can't speak the language, the only people you can directly speak to are those who speak a Western language or who can provide an interpreter if you don't have your own.

He also includes cultures, but I think I'll leave that aside for now, since if you know the language and history, you're likelier to absorb the culture, anyway.

More Thoughts on Eric Davis' "10 Sins": Sin No. 1: "Presentism"

Yesterday I noted the important essay by Professor Eric Davis of Rutgers, "'10 Conceptual Sins in Analyzing Middle East Politics." I think it's a seminal article, well-thought-through and a major contribution. If you haven't read it yet, please go do so now before you read my riffs on it, either in the original, or if it's easier for you, in the Arabic translation.

I wanted to second the motion and cheer on a few of the points in particular. In this post I want to discuss his:

1. "Sin Number One: Presentism." If you've been paying attention to this blog (and there will be pop quizzes), you'll know that my training is as a historian. I am often puzzled by the lack of historical perspective of many political scientists (and yes, I know Eric Davis is a political scientist, but he's obviously an exception) is so short of historical depth. This is a favorite hobbyhorse of mine, and you've probably noticed if you read this blog regularly that I will start reciting the historical background of some issue. One doesn't want to overemphasize historical consciousness, but one also doesn't want to ignore the memories of a people, as remembered by the elderly and transmitted to the young through the educational system.

A prime example: Iraq. Many of the debates about whether or not to invade Iraq and how to handle the occupation drew on a variety of models: the 1991 war, the occupation of Germany and Japan (Iraqis are not Germans, and as for Japan, for a MacArthur-style regency you need both a MacArthur and an Emperor Hirohito, whose cooperation and Japanese veneration of the Emperor guaranteed its success), but I almost never heard parallels to previous instances of Iraqi history.

I do not claim to be an Iraq expert, since it's one Middle Eastern country where I can tell you precisely how long I've spent there — five days in 1989 — and I realize even the rawest journalist covering the war has spent more time there. But I've known quite a few historians of modern Iraq, read their works, studied the military histories of the revolt (Iraqis call it the thawra or Revolution) of 1920-21, and the history of the 1941 British intervention, and I've also known plenty of Iraqis through the years. The British Mandate period is an open sore, the brutal British response to the thawra is well-remembered: it was the first use of mass aerial bombing of civilian populations, using punitive bombings of whole villages, and Iraqis know it. Everyone no doubt remembers the pictures of Saddam Hussein, in the runup to the war, standing on a balcony firing a rifle into the air. Did you know that the rifle he was firing was a British Enfield captured during the thawra of 1920-21? Iraqis did.

True story: at a Middle East Institute Annual Conference early in the war (I'm going to guess the fall of 2003 but wouldn't swear to it) I was talking with an old friend and one of the key historians of modern Iraq, Phebe Marr, and she introduced me to, I believe, a military man (maybe a civilian) who worked for J-5, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Plans Division (he gave me his card: it was definitely J-5). He and I continued to talk by ourselves for a while and I said something like, "I just hope it isn't going to be 1921 all over again." The man from the Joint Chiefs' Plans Division, several months into our invasion of Iraq, said to me, "what happened in 1921?" I noted yesterday the British "last post" in Basra, but did we really enter Iraq with no understanding of the Iraqi experience of military occupation and the British aerial campaigns? I fear that we did.

I could come up with plenty of other stories along these lines. The Middle East has more history than the rest of the world — and as the old joke line goes, produces more history than it can consume locally — and is fully aware of its history. I remember my first trip to Lebanon, back in the early 1970s, before the civil war. The friends traveling with me and I went to lots of historic sites (most of us were history grad students at the time) and at many of them the tour guide's spiel (in Arabic: we went with the cheap guides) would start with, "this is Turkish, and then the next level is Ayyubid; the next is Crusader, those rocks under the Crusader rampart are Arab, the lower stones are Roman, and the foundation is Phoenician." I have no idea if this was an accurate archaeological description, but we heard something similar so many times that we began using "wa'l-assas Feniki," (and the foundation is Phoenician) as a tagline for a while. And I don't even want to start about Egyptians and Israelis, especially the latter, where every cab driver seems to be a BronzeAge archaeologist (and some Cabinet officials really have been), not to mention a Biblical exegete. History is there to Middle Easterners, even those with little education. Tabsir's choice of an illustration for Prof. Davis' article, Saddam receiving a palm tree from (or giving one to) some Babylonian or Assyrian King (I'm guessing this illustration is at Saddam's rebuilt and re-imagined Babylon, but I'm not certain) is just right, I think. And Anwar Sadat, in his last, most self-absorbed years, took to holding a marshal's baton that was shaped like the ancient lotus/papyrus symbol of Egyptian royalty. (At least he never used the Pharaoh's crook.)

So I'm fully on board with the "Presentism" complaint. I could multiply the examples: Iranians of all political stripes still think about 1953 a lot, and held a lot of conferences on Operation Ajax back in 2003, but Americans often analyze Iran without acknowledging our interventions there. Suez 1956 is still a sore point for many Egyptians who weren't even born then, and as we learned in Kossovo, in the Balkans 1389 was pretty much a week ago. I'll be posting on some of Eric Davis' other "sins" later today or when I have the time, but I thought his first sin was one that is a particular hobbyhorse for me as well.

Americans never had an empire in the Middle East, and we therefore think that we come to the region with pure intentions. But we first ventured into the region as missionaries: and in recent years our old evangelism has shifted from religion to democracy, and we still think we will be seen as bringing blessings to the ignorant. Middle Easterners are aware of and proud of their history, and well aware of the paternalism they suffered from in the period of European colonialism (short as it was in the Middle East compared to, say, India). Americans are "Europeans" to most Middle Easterners, not through geographical confusion but because most of us look, and recently have been acting, like their old colonial masters. (Having Barack Obama as President may slowly dissipate that sense.) A common word for foreigner down to modern times has been Faranji or Farangi, which is an old Arabic word for "Frank," in the sense of Crusader. We don't usually think about the Crusades very much, but they aren't forgotten in the Middle East.

That's enough for now, I think. I'll post on some of Eric Davis' other "10 Sins" soon.