Center for a New American Security

Matt Duss responds to my post from yesterday:

By offering democratic reform as a component to the war on terror, which many in the Muslim world see – rightly or wrongly — as a war against Islam, Bush alienated at the outset scores of potential reformist allies. By then promoting the war in Iraq as a showpiece for his broader agenda (”This could be your country! Who’s in?”) he discredited it even more.

I met up with an old commander of mine last night for a beer, and while I was waiting at the bar, I got caught up on some of the reading I had missed over the weekend. Included in that reading was this article in the Financial Times on Islam, the Middle East and democracy. For those of you who have read Hourani's classic, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939,this article offers little new by way of intellectual history. The first part is basically a quick tour through the life and thought of Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Mohammad Abduh, Rachid Rida, etc. (I am not sure about the declarative statements the author makes about al-Afghani and Abduh, though. al-Afghani in particular did not leave much of a written record of his thought, so I have never really been able to get a clear handle on his thought or that of his student, Abduh. Which, granted, may just be because I am not a specialist in 19th-Century Arabic thought but -- assuming it's not just me -- might also be why the inheritors of the legacy of al-Afghani and Abduh include everyone from Arab secularists to radical Islamists.)

But the article asks a key question -- the key question, perhaps.

Unless the Arab countries and the broader Middle East can find a way out of this pit of autocracy, their people – more than half of them under 25 – will be condemned to bleak lives of despair, humiliation and rage. Western support for autocracy and indulgence of corruption in this region, far from securing stability, breeds extremism and, in extremis, failed states. It will, of course, be primarily up to the citizens of these countries to claw their way out of that pit. But the least they can expect from the west is not to keep stamping on their fingers.

One of the tragedies of the neo-conservative era (2001-2006) is that it got the ends right and the means so very, very wrong -- thus discrediting the ends in both the Arabic-speaking world and in domestic U.S. politics. How the hell we Americans managed to discredit the idea of democracy promotion at home and abroad is anyone's guess.

Any sane policy would be devoted to preventing the evolution of a lethal form of radical Islam, in no small part by finding space for a thoughtful Islamism to emerge.

That is no longer easy. The freedom agenda proclaimed by George W. Bush has been discredited. Yet the insight brought to the west so violently by al-Qaeda on September 11 2001 and subsequently – that tyranny breeds terrorism and instability, infantilises politics and holds back development – is no less valid. Not the least of the challenges facing Barack Obama is to rescue that insight before it is too late.

I very seriously doubt that the United States -- facing the problems it faces in the Arabic-speaking world and the initiatives with which it needs regional help (the Iranian nuclear program, Iraqi reconciliation, the Middle East Peace Process) -- has democracy promotion anywhere on its list of priorities.

That is understandable. But sad nonetheless.

Unless my alma mater has suddenly ceased to be the stingiest institution in the Levant, I'm thinking the American University of Beirut wasn't the one that paid for Christopher Hitchens to travel to Beirut. The word on the street is that Hitchens was in Beirut as part of a junket paid for by Lebanon's March 14th coalition and its stateside lobby.

If you're looking for more dirt on Hitchens' ass-kicking or his talk at AUB, by all means check out my friend Sean's blog as well as Qifa Nabki, a blog I had not seen before but which has an amusing "take-down" of a piece that ran in Forbes. (This Hitchens thing has been a source of much hilarity for the journalists and scholars who make Beirut their home. This is at least as amusing for them as it is for me when Major Junior writes on Hizballah.)

I find this whole thing really interesting for an entirely different reason. Whatever your position is on Lebanese politics, there can surely be little disagreement that March 14th was left wrong-footed by the U.S. presidential election. For several years, March 14th cultivated an enthusiastic group of defenders in the U.S. media and think tanks: Tony Badran, Lee Smith, David Schenker, and Michael Totten -- just to name a few. The problem was, almost all of these guys only have influence in a very narrow band along the ideological spectrum. Put another way, a favorable op-ed printed in the Weekly Standard carried a lot more weight in 2004 than it does today. And if you're looking to carry the March 14th message to policy-makers in Barack Obama's Washington, none of these guys -- nice enough guys, all of them -- are really going to be effective.

For the life of me, I have no idea why they weren't doing this in 2006 and 2007, when, after the mid-term elections, anyone with half a brain could see the way the political winds were starting to change in the U.S.

Colin Kahl -- who, now that he is important, will likely never re-visit his friends on this blog -- is movin' on up:

DoD: Colin Kahl, a professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, has been tapped to become the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. In the position, he will help shape Defense Department policy on Iraq, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Spencer Ackerman, meanwhile, has done the hard reporting on Colin's nightlife.

In addition to being a rising Pentagon star, I should add, Kahl is also an acknowledged expert on IDM, and his disdain for so-called “candy-ravers” is well known. It’s a shame that the deputy assistant secretary job isn’t a Senate-confirmable position, because I’d like to hear him provide a for-the-record taxonomy on the differences between trance and ambient. Any true counterinsurgent would recognize the value of drawing such distinctions.

I don't know WTF Spencer is talking about, so any help from the readership would be appreciated.

As many of you know, my academic and policy interests have more to do with security studies and defense policy than they do with the Middle East. But I have a regional studies background and have spent a lot of time living and studying in the Middle East. And like a lot of people who study the Middle East, I have not been able to understand the academy's continued fascination with Edward Said's Orientalism. This past weekend, I was reading Maxime Rodinson's excellent Europe and the Mystique of Islam (1980) and came across this quotation at the back of the book, in the end notes:

Edward Said's Orientalism (New York, 1978) had a great and unexpected success. There are many valuable ideas in it. Its great merit, to my mind, was to shake the self-satisfaction of many Orientalists, to appeal to them (with questionable success) to consider the sources and the connections to their ideas, to cease to see them as a natural, unprejudiced conclusion of the facts, studied without any presupposition. But, as usual, his militant stand leads him to repeatedly make excessive statements. This problem is accentuated because as a specialist of English and comparative literature, he is inadequately versed in the practical work of the Orientalists. It is too easy to choose, as he does, only English and French Orientalists as a target. By doing so, he takes aim at representatives of huge colonial empires. But there was an Orientalism before the empires, and the pioneers of Orientalism were often subjects of other European countries, some without colonies. Much too often, Said falls into the same traps that we old Communist intellectuals fell into some forty years ago, as I will explain below. The growth of Orientalism was linked to the colonial expansion of Europe in a much more subtle and intricate way than he imagines. Moreover, his nationalistic tendencies have prevented him from considering, among others, the studies of Chinese or Indian civilization, which are ordinarily regarded as part of the field of Orientalism. For him, the Orient is restricted to his East, that is, the Middle East. Muslim countries outside the Arab world (after all, four Muslims in five are not Arabs), and even Arab nations in the West receive less than their due in his interpretation.

As Rodinson -- along with Malcolm Kerr, in his review of Orientalism for IJMES -- points out, Said "games" his sample in order to make broader claims than a larger body of evidence would warrant. So enough already. If you want to admire the late Edward Said for his advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people and their causes, fine, but can we please close the book on Orientalism? Why are we still letting that book cast such a long shadow?

Update: Martin Kramer -- who has written one of the more comprehensive critiques of Middle Eastern Studies as a field in academia -- writes in the comments section. In a display of what I can only describe as intellectual grace, Martin hosts both his own study and Fred Halliday's robust critique of it on his website. Both are worth reading.

Update II: Rex Brynen has weighed in, attaching this critique of Martin's book. Again, like Halliday's criticism, this is worth reading, but don't neglect to read Martin's book as well. In the same way, by all means read these criticisms of Said, but don't forget to read Orientalism too! So much to read...

I've had a busy week of work and am now home on a Friday night responding to all the emails I have ignored over the course of the past five days. There are a few items I want to highlight, though, as we go into the weekend.

1) My buddy Steve McInerney -- an old friend from both Beirut and Cairo -- is now at the Project on Middle East Democracy and has edited a new volume, available free of charge via teh internets: Speaking Clearly: What Should Obama Say to the Middle East? Steve is wicked smart and has assembled some valuable contributions from regional experts.

2) Man, this "fiasco" at the U.S. Army War College that Tom Ricks has been writing about has really heated up. Tom has a new post featuring testimony from Mark Perry, who writes that at a conference held at the War College, his unorthodox views weren't given a fair hearing. If this is the same conference I remember, Mark was recruited to speak on Hizballah along with one other scholar -- me. And my recollections of both the tenor of the discussion and the way Mark's views were received were ... well, different than those of Mark. But I have a lot of respect for Mark, and maybe he encountered some stuff in the small groups to which I was not a witness. Meanwhile, our own Charlie weighs in:
Oh, but it doesn't end there. Oh no. Steve Metz, who also sent me a private email regarding the matter, posted this comment on Small Wars Journal. He says he's been set up:

Let me try and put this to rest. I believe two points are important.

First, the email that I sent to my colleagues in 2005 (which, I believe, was dredged up and sent to Tom Ricks by a disgruntled employee seeking to embarrass me) was NOT about academic freedom at the Army War College. It was about journalistic methods. Several of us had experiences with Tom where what we said was portrayed as more critical of the administration than we intended, or things written by individual War College authors were portrayed as official positions. I was attempting to draw that to the attention of my colleagues.

Was that a purely time and context specific problem? I noticed that Tom's Foreign Policy blog entry of 31 December is headlined, "The U.S. Army Speaks Up For Hamas." It was summarizing a recent publication by an Army War College professor that includes the following disclaimer on p. ii: "The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government" so everyone can decide on their own.

In Tom's blog, I see that his major source for the fact that there is an academic freedom problem at the Army War College is someone who was a guest speaker for a few days a couple of year ago. This fellow drew his conclusion from the comments of some unidentified people who came up to him during lunch.

I've been in the Professional Military Education system for nearly 23 years. I've been on the faculty at the Army War College for nearly 18 of those. In my opinion, academic freedom in PME is, by necessity, different than in a secular, civilian university, but it is robust and rigorous. I think that DoD and senior military leaders deserve great credit for allowing, even encouraging their employees to second guess and critique their decisions. I doubt few industries or even civilian universities would be equally open to that kind of free discourse.

So when it comes to academic freedom in PME, my personal opinion is that there's nothing to see here folks--let's move along and discuss issues that really need it.

I kinda agree. Mountains and molehills come to mind.

3) Guess who else is home on a Friday night with nothing to do? The nerds at Small Wars Journal, that's who. They're now blogging on foreignpolicy.com every week. And I would totally make fun of them for not being able to find a date for the weekend if I weren't myself sitting here in my boxers with a bag of Cheetos and a copy of this book.Which isn't stopping my West Coast-living girlfriend from calling to tell me about the party she is attending tonight.

Laura Rozen? Yeah, her new blog is indispensable too.

Multiple media and sources report tonight that former Clinton-era U.S. Mideast envoy Dennis Ross has accepted a position to serve as the Obama administration's "envoy at large" on Mideast issues.

"Executives at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the think-tank where Mr Ross works, told the organisation's board that Mr Ross had ‘accepted an invitation to join the Obama administration as ambassador-at-large' in a job ‘designed especially for him,' covering a range of issues from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to Iran," the Financial Times reports.

A Democratic national security official said, "My sources said that Ross was choosing between jobs at NSC and State, and that the State one was narrower but had negotiating authority. This suggests to me that his own negotiating authority is pretty excellent."

Man, a lot of people in the Arabic-speaking Middle East hate Dennis Ross -- and don't understand why I always stick up for him. But I like the guy. A lot. Everyone has read The Missing Peace, but this book is my favorite -- and more relevant to the new job.

Here at AM, Londonstani's remit includes occassionally mentioning interesting things about the Middle East. But he usually avoids this in case people realise that what he finds interesting is rarely important. However, he's decided to throw caution to the wind for gloating rights over a good number of his friends.

Londonstani has always suspected that the Iraqis don't have a sense of humour. At first, Londonstani thought it was Saddam's fault, and then thought maybe getting invaded wiped the smile of their faces. But it turns out that Iraqis have never ever been funny.

A British TV station has got its hands on the world's oldest jokes. Top of its list is a true golden oldie (about 4,000 years old) from Sumeria, in what is now southern Iraq.

And it goes like this:.."Something which has never occurred since time immemorial." ready for the punchline.. wait for it.... "a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Are you serious!!?? Was this an issue of concern in ancient Sumeria? Goes to show that manners were not better in the past, as old ladies are always keen to point out.

And it's not just the Iraqis. For all their boasting about their glorious comic genius, it seems the Egyptians were too knackered erecting huge edifices to put effort into thinking up decent jokes. (It does make Londonstani wonder if Egyptian jokes are better today because the country is a whole lot less productive)

Ancient Egypt's effort goes like this: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." Ancient Egypt - the kind of place you want to be a pharoah in, but not a farmer trying to wait out a flood season in a tavern. Not a huge surprise there.

What a channel that caters primarily for the post-pub crowd was doing going through the history books is slightly baffling Londonstani, but its probably best not to dwell on it too much.

Check it out for yourself here.

Okay, this has little to do with counter-insurgency, but Abu Muqawama was stumped for something to post today and figured he would pass along this interesting review essay from the TLS by Robert Irwin.

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.

If you have an interest in the Middle East and have never read Orientalism, you should. Even if you disagree with what Said argues, you should still be familiar with his argument. And once you're done with Said, you can go back and read what fun things martyred AUB president Malcolm Kerr -- father of Steve Kerr (really) -- had to say about Orientalism in IJMES way back in 1980:

This book reminds me of the television program "Athletes in Action," in which professional football players compete in swimming, and so forth. Edward Said, a literary critic loaded with talent, has certainly made a splash, but with this sort of effort he is not going to win any major races. This is a great pity, for it is a book that in principle needed to be written, and for which the author possessed rich material. In the end, however, the effort misfired. The book contains many excellent sections and scores many telling points, but it is spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to spin too large a web, leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error.

Abu Muqawama bought and read the New York Review of Books yesterday mainly because of Max Rodenbeck's review of Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East. Rodenbeck -- the excellent Middle East correspondent for the Economist -- had mostly good things to say about Wright's book but concluded with this rather damning criticism:

In many ways Dreams and Shadows is an admirable book. Yet despite Wright's determination to be objective and her skill at her craft, there is something unsatisfying about the approach to journalism that she represents here. Perhaps it is a symptom of listening to the world from Washington, where the rumble of think tanks, the clatter of talk shows, and the whine of politicians synthesize into an agenda that often clashes with the sounds of the Middle Eastern jungle. Wright does try to challenge that agenda, yet does not really escape being informed by it.

She takes pride, for instance, in relying on local sources rather than distant "experts." Yet many of her local informants are famed talking heads, working in institutions that are furrowed pitstops for foreign correspondents. Often, too, the sort of questions they are asked reflect priorities set elsewhere. At one point, for instance, Wright describes three vital issues that Middle Eastern governments must address in order to accommodate pressure for change: political prisoners, womens' rights, and political Islam. Perhaps, but that sounds closer to concerns in Washington than to the more mundane things, such as jobs, the corruption of local officials, and the soaring cost of marriage, that actually exercise many Middle Easterners.

It occurs to Abu Muqawama that the attention of journalists based in the region to the issues people actually care about is probably why Rodenbeck is a better guide to the Middle East than, say, Robin Wright. DC-based journalists like Wright are probably better guides to U.S. policy toward the Middle East than they are to what's taking place on the ground. The reverse would be true of someone like Rodenbeck. But if you're a policy maker, to whose journalism would you defer? Abu Muqawama has his answer.