Center for a New American Security

Today's news from Egypt, where the offices of the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute were raided along with several other civil society organizations*, should prompt swift action from the U.S. Congress when it returns from the holidays.

Unlike many other regional analysts, I am not terribly upset by U.S. military aid to regimes in the Middle East: this aid, in theory, gives the United States influence over the behavior of regimes and institutions in the region -- and also professionalizes Arab military organizations. But the United States has an opportunity to support the promotion of democracy in the region by linking military aid to the development of civil society. Egypt receives approximately $1.3 billion in annual military aid from the United States. The Congress should include a clause to the effect that regimes will not be eligible for U.S. military aid if organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (such as the NDI and the IRI) cannot operate free from host government harassment. The Egyptian military claims organizations like the NDI and the IRI "meddle" in the affairs of Egypt. Well, $1.3 billion in military aid also "meddles" in the affairs of Egypt. If you want the latter, you should be prepared to accept the former as well.**

I have written about the sources of U.S. leverage in the Middle East. I do not think the problem is that the United States does not have leverage but that it has been incompetent in using it. The United States now has an opportunity to use it in Egypt. And even if the Egyptian military declines U.S. military aid (unlikely), the United States will have sent a strong signal that democracy promotion is a strategic goal of the United States in the region and that allied regimes should adjust their behavior. I might not have recommended such a gambit in 2010, but I think the events of 2011 mean the United States has to play by new rules in the region.

*Reports from Cairo indicate the other organizations were the Arab Center for Independence of Justice and Legal Professions (ACIJP), The Budgetary and Human Rights Observatory, Freedom House and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

**Military aid comes from a different pool of money than does other aid. One of the problems the United States has using its leverage is that the right hand often does not know what the left hand is doing. So the Dept. of Defense might be doing one thing while U.S. AID is doing another. Foreign governments know all about the fault lines and divisions in the U.S. government and exploit them. They bet (correctly) the U.S. government will not be able to come up with a whole-of-government approach. The U.S. Congress, though, can step in here and tie one set of activities to another by federal law.

For the past several months, I've been working on a big project related to U.S. policy toward the Middle East at the Center for a New American Security. (My research partner is Duke's Bruce Jentleson, whose research I have long admired.) During that time, I've had the opportunity to interact with a wide array of former and current U.S. policy makers as well as the kinds of na'er-do-well academic specialists on the region whose work I have always found to be thought-provoking. One thing virtually everyone can agree on is the dilemma in which U.S. policy makers find themselves: in a region that is rapidly democratizing, the United States is over-invested in the least democratic institutions and regimes in the region.

Where things get tricky is when one tries to decide what to do about that. The principle problem is one that has been in my head watching more violent crackdowns in Bahrain and Egypt: the very source of U.S. leverage against the regimes in Bahrain and Egypt is that which links the United States to the abuses of the regime in the first place. So if you want to take a "moral" stand against the abuses of the regime in Bahrain and remove the Fifth Fleet, congratulations! You can feel good about yourself for about 24 hours -- or until the time you realize that you have just lost the ability to schedule a same-day meeting with the Crown Prince to press him on the behavior of Bahrain's security forces. Your leverage, such as it was, has just evaporated. The same is true in Egypt. It would feel good, amidst these violent clashes between the Army and protesters, to cut aid to the Egyptian Army. But in doing so, you also reduce your own leverage over the behavior of the Army itself.

At some point, of course, the United States has no choice to cut all ties to a regime or institution. We are not, I feel strongly, quite there in either Egypt or Bahrain. But as I hear of more and more of my friends in the region beaten with crowbars and pelted with rubber bullets by the forces charged with protecting the citizenry, it's fair to wonder whether or not the United States is using the leverage it has to its greatest effect.

From a Washington Post staff editorial:

An incident in which five Egyptian guards were killed when Israeli forces pursued terrorists crossing the border helped to trigger the upsurge in tensions with Cairo.

Were killed? Who or what killed them? Did they fall into a pit of vipers? Did God smite the Egyptian guards? Were they, perhaps, swallowed up by the Red Sea? Because, hey, these kinds of things have happened before, right?

Media reporting on the incident informs us that the IDF in fact killed these five Egyptian guards. Israelis and Israeli allies can all surely agree this was a bit of an own goal on the part of the IDF, since Israel and Egypt are in the process of renegotiating the terms of their relationship after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and -- keep your fingers crossed -- the return of democratic politics in Egypt.

The recent events in which Egyptian protesters stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo were shocking. The Egyptian government's failure to protect the embassy of a government with whom it has full diplomatic relations was unforgivable. And, as the editorial points out, the way in which Arab regimes deflect attention away from their own problems toward Israel is both pathetic and habitual. But does it actually serve any useful purpose to pretend our Israeli friends are just passive by-standers to what is taking place in the Middle East? Sometimes, in their efforts to counter terrorism, Israel is its own worst enemy.

The tactical and operational decisions of Israeli commanders often have negative strategic effects or are taken in a strategic vacuum. Surely we can and should just admit this, right, and help our Israeli friends to realize this as well? 

Update: Here is the original Washington Post report on the incident, which followed an attack that killed eight Israelis. Note how, in the original report, the murder of Israelis is described in the active voice, whereas the killing of Egyptians is, again, described in the passive voice.

The Egyptian government had demanded an Israeli apology for and joint investigation into the border skirmish, in which an Egyptian military officer and two policemen were killed. It had also criticized statements by Israeli officials about Egypt after the attack in southern Israel, which killed eight people.

When Arabs kill Israelis, the reader can understand their frustration and anger because agency is established. By contrast, since Arabs are killed by ... Magic? The Hand of God? Too many bad Egyptian cigarettes? ... the reader is left to wonder why these irrational Arabs are so angry and frustrated. I don't mean to go all Orwell on you kids, but language matters. The Washington Post can dismiss Egyptian popular anger toward Israel as something ginned up by cynical Arab leaders in part because it never honestly describes an Israeli action that killed five Egyptians. 

Each year, around this time in the (lunar) calendar, Western newspapers are usually filled with stories about the latest exciting Ramadan soap opera everyone is watching. Nothing happens during Ramadan, the story goes, so most reporting on the Arabic-speaking world is of the human interest variety.

It's worth pausing to consider, then, how remarkable this year has been and continues to be. I woke up this morning to images of Hosni Mubarak in a cage, on trial in Egypt. This is a stunning image for me to see, so I can only imagine the effect it has on 83m Egyptians and about 250m other people in the region.

Elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking world, meanwhile, violent civil wars and upheavals continue to press for the fall of the Qadhdhafi regime in Libya, the al-Asad regime in Syria, and the Saleh regime in Yemen. If I had to place my bets, I would bet all will ultimately and bloodily be successful.

Remarkable. Ramadan mubarak indeed.

1. Jane Mayer's lengthy article in the New Yorker on the National Security Agency should be required reading within defense policy circles because it raises so many good questions about domestic spying, classification, and how we prosecute leakers. I like Mayer's reporting a lot, as I've made clear in the past, so I'll only pause to take issue with one thing in her article: I have a tough time having any degree of sympathy for those who leak classified information -- even when that information exposes a problem in or abuses of the system. And I think Mayer intends for us to pity her protagonist, who is being prosecuted for feeding information to a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. (The protagonist claims none of the information he leaked was classified, though it was cut-and-pasted from SECRET documents.) I found myself nodding along with the guy who told Mayer, "To his credit, he tried to raise these issues, and, to an extent, they were dealt with. But who died and left him in charge?" Exactly right: the system breaks down when every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jane gets to decide what gets released to the media and what does not. Unsurprisingly, journalists have a more sympathetic view toward those people who feed them scoops than do those whose jobs and lives are made harder by their colleagues leaking information.

2. Egypt: Why Are the Churches Burning? by Yasmine El-Rashidi in the New York Review of Books.

3. Kim Dozier on the Osama bin Laden raid. Kim is much admired within the special operations community, and her excellent sources and contacts inform this great article, which incorporates inside information (and leaks) without compromising OPSEC ...

4. ... but John Kenney gets the real scoop on the raid, interviewing several SEALs and printing their testimonies.

5. Confessions of a Vulcan: Dov Zakheim explains how the Bush Administration screwed up Afghanistan.

6. Finally, the Modern Library has re-issued Shelby Foote's Civil War Trilogy with a series of introductory essays. The first essay, by Jon Meacham, correctly places Foote within a very specific social and literary context in central Mississippi in the early 20th Century and notes the influence of the salon of William Alexander Percy. My scarily erudite paternal grandfather, actually, grew up in the exact same time and place, and it was a crazy one: on the one hand, it was in some ways a Third World country, yet on the other hand, it managed to produce a ridiculously disproportionate number of the Twentieth Century's men of letters. (And women, of course, because you can't forget Eudora!) Having only read the section on the Gettysburg Campaign previously, I started the first volume of the series last night and had trouble putting it down.

From Ryan Lizza's article on the foreign policy of the Obama Administration:

The activists [Sec. Clinton] did meet with were not as organized as she had hoped. “As incredibly emotional and moving and inspiring as it was,” she said, speaking of the demonstrations, “I looked at these twenty young people around the table, and they were complaining about how the elections are going to be held, and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists are so well organized, and the remnants of the old National Democratic Party are so well organized. I said, ‘So, well, are you organizing? Do you have an umbrella group that is going to represent the youth of Egypt? Do you have a political agenda?’ And they all looked up and said no. It made my heart sink.”

A few things need to be said about Michael Doran's essay in Foreign Affairs:

1. The idea that the Bush Administration was entirely populated with people who knew nothing about the Arabic-speaking world is false and ugly. Doran was teaching at Princeton and had published widely on the Arabic-speaking world before joining the administration. He is a first-rate scholar of the peoples and history of the Middle East.

2. I was emailing with Parag Khanna this morning and told him I think it's too early for him or anyone else to be making broad claims about what these events mean for the Arabic-speaking world as a whole. As Doran correctly notes here (and Lisa Anderson notes elsewhere in the same issue of Foreign Affairs), this is hardly the first time the Arabic-speaking world has been swept up in revolutionary fervor in the past century. And as Anderson notes, the challenges of a state like Libya and a state like Egypt going forward are completely different.

3. Doran is correct, in my estimation, to be worried about current and future violent non-state actors in the Arabic-speaking world and the ways in which Iran might support them. This is something that would have worried a responsible policy maker as much in December 2010 as today -- and I don't just say that as a guy who wrote his dissertation on Hizballah.

4. Let us not be so blinded by what Iran may or may not do that we fail to take the opinions and preferences of Arabs seriously. Doran writes:

Faced with the accountability of the democratic process, Egypt's new rulers will not feel nearly as free as Mubarak did to side with Washington and Jerusalem when the next round of conflicts involving Israel erupts. In the post-Mubarak era, the resistance bloc has a new weapon: the Egyptian crowd, which is now freer than before to organize on its own. Renewed violence will undoubtedly spark massive street demonstrations, not only in Egypt but also in Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But it is in Egypt where the bloc will concentrate its energies, providing the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups with a pretext for organizing the mob and casting themselves as the conscience of the Egyptian people. They will demand that the military sever all ties with Israel and the United States -- and it is far from certain whether Egypt's insecure army officers will have the mettle to withstand the campaign.

I have no big problem with much of what Doran writes here. I do have a problem, though, with his emphasis on what he calls "the resistance bloc" -- Iran and Syria together with violent non-state actors like Hamas and Hizballah. Iran and its allies aside, Egyptians do not very much like Israeli policy toward the Palestinian people. Iran, Syria, and Hizballah could disappear off the face of the Earth tomorrow and that would still be the case. So when Egyptian leaders do not respond with the same timidity to the next Israeli incursion into Gaza as Hosni Mubarak did, those leaders will likely be reflecting the genuine policy preferences of the Egyptian electorate -- not creeping Iranian influence.

5. Issandr, in an epic rant on Arabist, wrote the following:

If things do come to a head between Saudi Arabia and Iran, I know which one I'll be rooting for: Iran, while its current regime is awful, is at least a sophisticated civilisation. Its current regime will hopefully one day fall. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, represents one corrupt family and its alliance with the most fanatical, retrograde interpretation of Islam in the world. Their downfall cannot come soon enough.

I'm not sure I would go that far (in fact, I know I would not), but the focus on Iran and Iranian influence in the Middle East is indeed a little curious considering the fact that Saudi-sponsored radical Sunni extremism has killed a lot more American citizens than Iran ever thought about. Saudi Arabia, with its oil reserves and spare refining capacity, is an exceptional case in terms of U.S. policy, I realize. But it's puzzling to me how Doran can take such a "black" view of Iran and Iranian influence and such a "white" view of Saudi Arabia and Saudi influence. To paraphrase one of my favorite works by the noted orientalist Robert Earl Keen, in the Middle East, we surely live and die by shades of gray.

Richard K. Betts, writing in the National Interest:

Ikenberry faults Bush for rejecting the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the “Germ Weapons Ban” (Ikenberry must mean the compliance protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, not the treaty itself, which Washington ratified in the 1970s). Yet although Clinton signed the ICC treaty, he immediately thought worse of it and recommended against ratification. Clinton also refused to sign the Mine Ban Treaty, a favorite of global-governance enthusiasts—although not because, as Ikenberry suggests, “unipolarity leads to demands by the lead state to be treated differently.” Rather, it is because states with serious national-security policies keep the military capabilities they believe they need. The land-mine treaty is a perfect example of an institution that looks strong on the surface, but weaker in substance. It is a perfect example too of how governments pick and choose which rules they want to accept (and reject) in the vaunted rule-based international system. Indeed, the treaty includes more than 120 signatories. But most of this membership consists of countries without pressing military concerns. The smaller number of states that have not participated are ones that do have such concerns (various vulnerable actors like Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Vietnam, Georgia, Cuba and the two Koreas) and most major powers (China, Russia and India as well as the United States). The nonsignatories represent the most important countries, and more than half the population of the world.

 

Ikenberry compliments Obama for returning to norms of liberal order after the Bush defection, yet the difference for national-security policy is far from dramatic. Obama too rejected all the accords just mentioned.

Obviously enough, what Betts writes here pertains to the somewhat controversial post that kicked off the week. But you should read the entire review essay, because Betts makes a number of other good points and raises many other questions in what is a courteous if brutal review of John Ikenberry's Liberal Leviathan. Among the criticisms of the book advanced by Betts, I find it interesting how even some of the most internationally minded Americans more or less assume U.S. interests to be the same as the interests of the world at large. (This leads to all kinds of problems, you might have read, in third-party military interventions where we assume our interests match up with those of the host nation.)

***

Speaking of the National Interest, the staff there have really outdone themselves in putting together a marvelous May-June issue. As my followers on Twitter are aware, I spent last night and much of this morning reading and digesting some of the essays, including Jacob Heilbrunn's essay on Samantha Power and liberal internationalism. Heilbrunn chastises Power for "dramatizing history through people rather than considering broader forces," and ironically, I think he might be guilty of doing the same here in choosing to focus so exclusively on the words and texts of Power in the context of our military intervention in Libya. But he deserves much credit for taking exception to the content of an individual's arguments without ever resorting to argumentum ad hominem, and his broader criticism of humanitarian intervention is a good one.

Elsewhere in the National Interest is an essay by Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs: A History, on the revolutions of 2011. Rogan focuses on the region-wide variables that have led to uprisings, so his essay should be read in tandem with Lisa Anderson's brief essay in the new Foreign Affairs parsing the differences between what has thus far transpired in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. (In light of yesterday's discussion of quantitative methods in conflict analysis, by the way, Anderson remains a living, breathing advertisement for the continued value of area studies in political science: how many other scholars out there have such deep knowledge of not just Libya, Tunisia or Egypt but all three countries?)

From Anouar Abdel-Malek's Egypt: Military Society:

The United States ambassador in Cairo, Jefferson Caffery, enjoyed the most cordial relations with the military group; his subordinates, especially the assistant naval attaché, David Evans, and his counselor, Colonel Lakeland, later active in Iraq, were of the same view. On September 3, 1952, Secretary of State Dean Acheson promised Egypt “the active friendship of the United States.” Fulbright scholarships multiplied. The various credits rose from $6 million to $40 million between 1952 and 1954. Within the framework of the land reform that the State Department had constantly advocated, a so-called Egyptian-American Rural Improvement Service was set up with Egyptian capital of £E5,450,000 and American capital of £E3,469,000, in order to reclaim and redistribute a model area of 37,000 feddans.

From the Washington Post:

Clinton arrived in Cairo with a package of financial aid, parts of which had been previously announced. She pledged to secure quick congressional passage of a $60 million U.S.-Egypt Enterprise Fund, a program backed by Democratic and Republican lawmakers to stimulate investment and provide Egyptian businesses with access to low-cost loans.

 

The new aid would augment a previous pledge by the Obama administration of $90 million in near-term economic assistance. as well as $80 million in insurance backing for letters of credit issued by Egyptian banks.

 

Clinton also said that up to $2 billion in financial aid will be made available to Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to fund small- and medium-size businesses and stimulate job growth.

I am currently looking at ways in which U.S. policy makers can support democracy in Egypt and have found it interesting to look at the similarities between the ways in which the U.S. government responded to the coup of 1952 and has thus far responded to the events of 2011.

I am still of the opinion that one of the better ways the United States can support Egypt going forward is to take an active interest in the reconstitution of Egypt's internal security services. A responsible police force in Egypt would be welcomed, I suspect, by both the people of Egypt and the Egyptian military.

Late last night, I linked to Mona el-Ghobashy's excellent article in which she identifies just what Egypt's people won -- or rather, won back -- through their uprising:

The genius of the Egyptian revolution is its methodical restoration of the public weal. The uprising restored the meaning of politics, if by that term is understood the making of collective claims on government. It revalued the people, revealing them in all their complexity -- neither heroes nor saints, but citizens. It repaired the republican edifice of the state, Mubarak’s hereditary succession project being the revolution’s very first casualty.

In critical ways, the Egyptian people are merely seeking a return of politics in a society that had been depoliticized by the previous three autocrats who ruled country.* The challenge for Egyptians now will be, according to el-Ghobashy, "[to construct] institutional checks against the rule of the many by the few." Egyptians, in other words, must construct those illiberal institutions (ex. A, B) which enable and protect liberal society.

This is altogether different than the challenges Libyans will face if and when Gadhafi falls. Libyans will be starting from scratch. "Libya's history of independence," Lisa Anderson notes in The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1820-1980, "exhibited a consistent avoidance of bureaucratic state structures."**

Unlike French colonial administrators elsewhere, the Italian colonial rulers of Libya "made no attempt to maintain and strengthen local administration ... The administration the Italians established after their pacification of the country was designed to serve only Italian settlers ... By the time the country became independent, there was no nationwide administration or broadly based political organization." (Anderson, pp. 181-183)

The Italian governors of Libya systematically undermined the old Ottoman administration, which they viewed as a threat. Gadhafi, incredibly, managed to make things worse. Suspicious of the very idea of the Libyan state, he denied such a state was necessary and undermined any attempt to create functioning bureaucracies.

This will be the Libya that whoever replaces Moammar Gadhafi will inherit. The challenges for all international partners who seek to support a new government in Libya will also be immense. Most post-conflict states (see Hand-Drawn Diagram a) go through a stage where external aid exceeds the the government's capacity to effectively administer it, creating conditions ripe for corruption. In Libya's case (see Hand-Drawn Diagram b), you will have a similar situation with both a) a lot of government oil revenues and b) very little bureaucracy capable of redistributing resources within the society.

Lib Ya

I predict a raft of corruption and other grievances, then, within the new regime, which could in and of themselves become drivers of conflict in post-Gadhafi Libya.***

Okay... so have a great rest of the week, everybody!

*Look, people like Mona el-Ghobashy are the real subject matter experts on Egypt out there, but some books I have gone back to over the past few months on Egypt include Abdel-Malek's Egypt: Military Society, Waterbury's The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, Cleveland's A History of the Modern Middle East, Vatikiotis's The Egyptian Army in Politics, and Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939. That's as good a reading list on mid-20th Century Egypt as my non-expert mind can come up with. (These were also the books I could find on my bookshelves.)

**I have, previously, recommended Anderson's book on Libya and Tunisia. For the purposes of understanding the absence of state structures in Libya, let me specifically recommend Chapters 9, 10, 12 and 13.

***At this point, I more than welcome any bona fide Libya experts to tell me why I am either wrong or what else needs to be considered.