Middle East Politics

Jack Snyder, Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon are presenting a “paper”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/unipolarity.pdf at the APSA meeting next week that’s of considerable interest in its own right, but that also sheds some light on the recent debate between “Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003456.html and “Glenn Greenwald”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/08/20/drezner/index.html. [click to continue…]

Good stuff. Someone should hire this guy. (Via Unfogged.)

Johan Hari has “reviewed”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1157 Nick Cohen’s _What’s Left?_ for _Dissent_ . It is well worth a read.

While looking back at whether Iraq was “all about oil“, I thought it might be a good idea to check on the US reconstruction program, and found the State Department report for April 2007. The lead items are electricity generating capacity and oil output, which used to be followed eagerly by those in the blogosphere arguing that the MSM were ignoring “Good News from Iraq”. As Tim Lambert and Jim Henley pointed out a couple of years ago, the same good news kept getting announced over and over again, but the prewar levels (average electricity output of 4300 MW, availability of 11 hours per day, oil output 2.5 million barrels per day (MBPD)) were never surpassed.

We don’t hear quite so much about good news from Iraq these days. The original good news blogger Arthur Chrenkoff shut up shop a while ago. Winds of Change picked up the baton, but seems to have given up. Google finds this site with three entries this year, none containing any actual good news, and this quasi-official site, apparently produced by the Defense Department, and mainly reproducing press releases. It’s not clear whether press releases containing bad news are excluded or whether no such releases are issued.

So, I’ll pick up the ball and summarise the news in the State Department’s report. At this stage, 99 per cent of the US money has been committed, and 87 per cent has been spent, so there’s no more where that came from. Adding “new”, “restored” and “maintained” generating capacity, we get a total of 4373MW, which, assuming 80 per cent uptime, would correspond to average output of around 3500MW. Oil shows a capacity of 2.7MBPD and output of 1.9MBPD. (Table is over the fold). Then there’s the usual schools and hospitals, but these days both schools and hospitals in Iraq are very dangerous places to attend.

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“Matt Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2007/06/israel.html links to “an article on contemporary Israel and its future”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=462445&in_page_id=1770 . It is a remarkably even-handed, interesting, and generally civilized piece of journalism. All the more surprising, then, that the author is Christopher Hitchens’s ultra-conservative brother Peter and that it appears in Britain’s most repulsive newspaper, the Daily Mail.

I’m confused. According to the many media reports, the UCU, successor to the AUT and NATFE and the main trade union representing British academics, “has voted to reinstitute the boycott of Israeli universities”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,2091769,00.html that the AUT finally rejected last year. But in fact, _as far as I can tell_ , the UCU Congress has done no such thing. Rather it has passed some rather wooly pro-Palestinian resolutions and has ordered its executive to promote discussion of the boycott at branches over the next year or so. The practical effect of this in the world is at best close to zero. In fact it is almost certainly negative: no-one actually gets boycotted but the worst elements of the Israeli right (and the likes of Alan Dershowitz) get a renewed opportunity to portray themselves as victims.

Aside from the general stupidity of the boycott campaign (well “summed-up”:http://unspeak.net/exclusion-wall/ by Steven Poole last year), it promises to consume a lot of energy in fruitless arguments that go nowhere. Last time this happened “I stood up on my hind legs at my local AUT branch and opposed the pro-boycott motion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/03/ariel-sharon-and-the-aut-boycott/ . I’ll vote against it again this time, when the opportunity presents itself. I have to say though, that I’m a lot less motivated to oppose the boycotters than I was. They are just as wrong as they ever were, but I’ve been sufficiently disgusted by Israeli conduct over the past year (especially in Lebanon) not to feel all that much enthusiasm for making a big effort. And then there’s the fact that when I did speak up against the boycott I received a load of offensive email. Normally, you’d expect to get such email from the people on the other side, telling you what a horrible sellout you’ve been. But I didn’t receive a single bit of hostile email from a pro-Palestinian persepective. Rather, I got a good deal from Likudniks and their American friends who mistakenly assumed that if I opposed the boycott I must share their vile perspective on Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular. (No thanks. Go away! I don’t want email from people like you.)

“Martha Nussbaum’s article in Dissent”:http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=811 puts the case against the boycott pretty well. However there’s one pro-boycott argument that she doesn’t address and which I’ve not heard a good reply to. It doesn’t, for me, outweigh the arguments against, but I do think it weakens the often-put “double standards” argument that anti-Israel measures unfairly discriminate against Israel since there are far worse countries in the world. (This is often accompanied by the further claim that because Israel is picked out whilst other countries are worse, the motive of the boycotters must be sinister and is probably anti-semitic.) The argument is this: that the Israeli perpetrators of injustice are far more vulnerable to outside pressure than, say, the Chinese or the Russians are. Measures taken against Israel therefore stand a better chance of being effective. The Russian treatment of the Chechens or the Chinese treatment of the Tibetans may indeed be worse than the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. But we can take action _now_ to force the Israelis to negotiate and to end the injustice of the occupation, whereas we cannot act with similar prospect of success against Russia or China. Obviously that argument depends on a number of facts about the way the world is. And those facts are highly contestable. But it doesn’t depend (to the contrary!) on any claim that Israel is uniquely or even especially evil or unjust.

Fantasy Ireland is a long-running cultural trope in America and a few other places (including, at times, Ireland itself). In the old days, it was a bucolic paradise, with a surfeit of pigs in the parlor and an absence of indoor plumbing, which Irish-Americans imagined they could visit in search of their roots. But its content has changed in recent years and it has popped up in various places this past week. Wil Wilkinson brought up Tom Friedman’s Fantasy Ireland, a neoliberal paradise of fast growth and low regulation, “in conversation with Henry”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=247&cid=1324 the other day.

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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”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6332717.stm (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”:http://www.meydaan.com/English/showarticle.aspx?arid=175&cid=52 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”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5073328.stm, 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”:http://en.we4change.com/spip.php?article18 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”:http://onzemaninteheran.com/?p=60 was also arrested, but quickly released. Yesterday some women were “released”:http://www.meydaan.com/English/news.aspx?nid=211, but there are also “reports”:http://www.meydaan.com/English/news.aspx?nid=221 that others were beaten and are in a bad condition. The 24 remaining women have started “a hunger strike”:http://www.meydaan.com/English/showarticle.aspx?arid=181&cid=52 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”:http://www.wm.edu/irtheoryandpractice/trip/surveyreport06-07.pdf. 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”:http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/16639101.htm 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”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2007/02/post_2867.html#015583 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”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/siwps/images/newsletter3/Betts%20-%20Osirak%20Fallacy.pdf). 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”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=733 :

bq. 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”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n03/meek01_.html that begins:

bq. 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. One of 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 to attack us. It reminds me of my one and only contribution to the corpus of game theory.
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Christopher Hitchens “writes”:http://www.slate.com/id/2152548/ :

bq. 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?