Middle East Politics

Last night’s edition of BBC’s flagship programme Newsnight contained fictionalized scenarios from the future of Iraq prepared by a pessimist (Toby Dodge of QMC) and an “optimist”—Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania. Brendan is an old friend of mine, but, as an adviser to the Kurdistan regional government, he’s been a keen promoter of something like the “decent left” agenda. His “optimistic” scenario has Iraq descending even further into the mire of sectarian killing, US withdrawal and Iranian and Saudi invasion … but then the character who utters his script tell us: “we were at the brink, and then, for some reason—a miracle—we stepped back”. (Oh, and Kurdistan ends up with the Winter Olympics.) I’m all for looking on the bright side. But miracles? Watch the whole thing here (today only). The “miracle” remark is at about 12.01.

Tomorrow is international women’s day, and in the past days the Iranian regime has, once again, shown its oppressive face towards grassroots women’s organisations who were peacefully demonstrating for their rights. On Sunday at least 31 women were illegally arrested during a peaceful gathering in front of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran. They were demonstrating in solidarity with women’s rights activists who had organised a peaceful demonstration on June 12, 2006, which was brutally ended by the police, and who had to appear before court last Sunday. They were also protesting the increasing oppression and criminalisation of the non-violent Iranian women’s movement, who has launched the one million signatures campaign to educate citizens about gender-discriminatory laws, and who are collecting signatures to demand an end to such discriminatory legislation. The correspondent for a Dutch newspaper was also arrested, but quickly released. Yesterday some women were released, but there are also reports that others were beaten and are in a bad condition. The 24 remaining women have started a hunger strike to protest their illegal confinement.
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The TRIPS survey of over 1,000 international relations faculty members is now available in full. I suspect that much or most of the public attention it gets will be paid to the answers to Question 74: Do you agree or disagree with the statement, “The ‘Israel lobby’ has too much influence on U.S. foreign policy.”

Which suggests either that (a) some two thirds of US and Canadian IR faculty members are conscious or unconscious anti-semites on the definition of anti-semitism that some people are trying to push, or (b) there’s grounds for a serious public debate about the US-Israel relationship. Since that serious debate ain’t going to be happening in the comments section here on past form, I’m keeping comments closed.

Garance Franke-Ruta accuses John Edwards of having no foreign policy principles.

Was it really just a month ago that John Edwards was speaking to an Israeli audience at Herzliya and saying [that Iran was at the top of the list of threats to the world and Israel]. … Because Variety’s Peter Bart reports that he has rather dramatically changed his tune [saying that perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities]. … How a serious presidential candidate could so rapidly go from taking a foreign policy position to saying that people who share that position are a grave threat to world peace is beyond me. … How is anyone supposed to trust that he means anything that he says now?

Now Edwards has been less than adept in talking about foreign policy issues, but not only is it clear to me that these points of view are compatible, but they arguably follow from each other. One of the arguments that I’ve heard repeatedly in informal discussions with Iran hawks is that the US needs to talk tough on Iran, and take direct action against it, because if it doesn’t, Israel will, perhaps provoking a major regional conflagration. In other words, you can both be in favour of (a) not taking the option of US bombing off the table, and (b) worry about what would happen if Israel decided to bomb Iran. To be clear, I’m vigorously opposed to bombing Iran myself (if nothing else, bombing is likely to be useless in achieving its express aims). I suspect that Edwards isn’t too keen on the idea either, and is more interested in rattling sabres to deter Iran’s nuclear efforts than in declaring war on Iran (although I suspect that his maladroitness has left some serious hostages to fortune if he gets the nomination and runs against a more hawkish Republican). But it’s clear to me that Franke-Ruta is flat out wrong in suggesting that this particular statement is evidence of untrustworthiness – it may attract political controversy (which is why the campaign seems to be back-peddling) but it’s a pretty unexceptionable claim. You don’t have to be either pro- or anti-Israel to recognize that Israeli action against Iran is likely to have pretty nasty consequences for the entire region. This is a broadly shared analysis, even if it isn’t often directly articulated; cf the first Gulf War, Hussein’s efforts to drag Israel in by lobbing Scuds, and Israel’s restraint, partly at the urging of the US, from retaliating.

Note to commenters: as usual, I will be policing comments and anything that drifts into a general discussion of the merits and demerits of Israel/Palestine etc will be ruthlessly deleted. I’ll be paying particular attention to the comments of past repeat offenders (yes, abb1; that means you).

Eugene Goodheart writes in the latest issue of Dissent, in an article entitled The London Review of Hezbollah :

The London Review of Books is an egregious instance of this one-sidedness. Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel [emphasis added], and the target is not simply the governing party, but the whole spectrum of Israeli political life. Absent from the columns of the Review are the injustices and cruelties of political Islam [emphasis added].

Perhaps accuracy is not Mr Goodheart’s strong point. Maybe he is merely unfortunate that the latest issue of the LRB contains an article by James Meek that begins:

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors.

But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s online archives reveals a total of five articles about the Middle East in 2006, some of which are, of course, about Iraq. To those should no doubt be added the well-known Mearsheimer and Walt piece. The LRB is published 24 times a year.

UPDATE: it turns out (thanks to Henry and K. Williams in the comments below) that the LRB’s online indexing is crap. The final para above is incorrect, but the basic point stands and the following para would have been better:

But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s back issues reveals a total of 17 articles critical of Israel in 2006, but ten of these come from two issues published during the invasion of Lebanon (and the LRB is published 24 times a year). It is certainly false to say, as Goodheart does, that “Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel.”

At this late stage in the occupation of Iraq, many of Henry Kissinger’s old arguments about Indo-China are being dusted down. Oneof the hoariest and worst is that we need to “stay the course” (or some similar euphemism) in order to maintain “credibility” – to demonstrate our resolve to our enemies, who will otherwise continue toattack us. It reminds me of my one and only contribution to the corpus of game theory.
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Christopher Hitchens writes :

What is to become, in the event of a withdrawal, of the many Arab and Kurdish Iraqis who do want to live in a secular and democratic and federal country? We have acquired this responsibility not since 2003, or in the sideshow debate over prewar propaganda, but over decades of intervention in Iraq’s affairs, starting with the 1968 Baathist coup endorsed by the CIA, stretching through Jimmy Carter’s unforgivable permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, continuing through the decades of genocide in Kurdistan and the uneasy compromise that ended the Kuwait war, and extending through 12 years of sanctions and half-measures, including the “no-fly” zones and the Iraq Liberation Act, which passed the Senate without a dissenting vote. It is not a responsibility from which we can walk away when, or if, it seems to suit us.

Well there’s a rather obvious answer, isn’t there? The United States could offer to resettle all and any such people in the United States (with, perhaps, a smaller quota coming to the UK). No doubt those states where the war was most enthusiastically supported would be the first to make generous offers to the Arab would-be immigrants. Come to think of it, why didn’t Kinky Friedman make this part of his election platform?

Glenn Reynolds on a speech by Chris Hedges in May 2003.

He recycles the looting lies, too. He sounds like a talk-radio caricature of a liberal, and he’s flat-out racist in his dismissal of Arab prospects for democratic self-government. “Iraq was a cesspool for the British. . . it will be a cesspool for us as well.” Yep. Racist.

An approvingly blurbed quote in November 2006 from one of Glenn’s anonymous email correspondents.

The ball is in the Iraqis’ court. We took away the obstacle to their freedom. If they choose to embrace death, corruption, incompetence, lethal religious mania, and stone-age tribalism, then at least we’ll finally know the limitations of the people in that part of the world. The experiment had to be made.

Glenn himself goes on to argue:

On the other hand, it’s also true that if democracy can’t work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can’t make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?

Is there any reasonable way to read this other than Glenn Reynolds denouncing Glenn Reynolds as a ‘flat-out racist’? Inquiring minds would like to know.

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Via Marc Lynch, some Congressional testimony (PDF) by Jim Fearon applying lessons from other civil wars to the Iraq conflict. Fearon suggests that the prospects for Iraq are pretty dreadful – civil wars tend to go on for a long time, and are usually resolved when one side or another gains a decisive military victory (less than one in six ends in a power-sharing arrangement). The reasons for this are rooted in the strategic situation that actors find themselves in – both sides in a civil war are organized so as to fear that the other side will try to grab power, and both are likely to be tempted to try to grab power for themselves. Given this, the least-worst strategy for the US to follow is to withdraw troops gradually, seeking to prevent major massacres of civilians while it does this, but recognizing that a Lebanon-type civil war is highly likely to break out when it does withdraw completely. This is a pretty bleak assessment, but I’m not seeing very many countervailing reasons for optimism.

Shorter Oliver Kamm (for the benefit of those who don’t want to wade through 5000 words of Kamm’s unique prose ):

Many thousands of people have died, Iraq is a mess, and the war was completely mismanaged. Some other war supporters have therefore changed their minds about whether it was a good idea in the first place. Not me! Thanks to the war we in the West no longer have to worry about Saddam having WMDs. So the war was justified.

Here are some comments from Andrew Gelman on the Burnham et al. paper. People who’d like (or ought) to learn more about statistics could do worse than read Gelman and Nolan’s terrific Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I am awaiting the publication of Gelman and Hill’s Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models with a degree of anticipation that seems indecent (or unhealthy) to direct at a statistics textbook. (More about the book here. Note the blurb from a well-known blogger.)