Middle East Politics

bq. The sole aim, let us not forget, of the British military deployment in Iraq is to facilitate the establishment of a stable government in Iraq. But if, as now seems increasingly likely, that goal is unobtainable, then the sooner that they pack up and come home, the better.

So writes “Con Coughlin in the Daily Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/05/09/do0902.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/05/09/ixopinion.html . Now I’ve no brief for Mr Coughlin, whose absurd stories “Saddam had advance knowledge of 9/11”, blah blah blah … have regularly been picked up by Powerline, Instapundit and the credulous Euston left in Britain. My guess is that Coughlin is best seen as a relay for what “intelligence sources” want us to read. If British “intelligence sources” are now promoting the idea of abandoning Iraq that’s worth noting. (Btw, googling “Con Coughlin” and “intelligence sources” gives a useful sample of past reports.)

Mustafa Barghouti, who is Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, and was recently elected to the Palestinian parliament as an independent, is in Madison at the Havens Center. His first talk (yesterday) is already on the web (audio); my guess is that today’s talk will be up within 24 hours.

Havens Center talks are now routinely recorded and made available on the web, so you might be interested to check out the list here. Two that I would particularly recommend are our own Chris Bertram, and also Richard Miller, both on global justice issues.

One thing that strikes me as funny about this whole “let’s invade Iran” thing…wait, did I actually just type that? I’m looking at the desk and I don’t see any glass tube with burnt-up brillo pad in it, so I probably didn’t just smoke a glittering rock of yeyo. Probably. OK, nothing about this is funny except in a nervous, “ha ha I’m sure he’s just joking way” that one might employ if locked in a room with a drunk person holding a chainsaw and making jokes about how Texans love real meat. The warmongery is starting up, from Mark Steyn columns to “hawkish” “liberals” pontificating on how no options should be off the table (not even A NUCLEAR FIRST STRIKE ARE THEY INSANE???!!!!), to stop-making-me-commit-genocide wankery to credulous NYT articles to James Lileks relating everything back to this one chick who wouldn’t sleep with him was wrong about Iran in the ’70s. (You should really read the Vodkapundit post and accompanying thread. He says you’ll need a drink, and the man is not kidding at all. The story he links to [by Dan Simmons] takes grave misreadings of Thucydides to a whole new level, a category in which the competition is stiff. Simmons is sure to win this year’s coveted “Golden Hanson”. The trophy features a stern VDH uprooting an olive tree with one hand and hitting himself repeatedly on the head with an axe handle with the other.) [Edited for clarity–thanks tom scudder!]

Any minute now I’ll have to read from K-Lo about how hypocritical western feminists don’t care about women being oppressed in Iran. I can’t be the only one to find the machinery a bit creaky. Are the warbloggers’ hearts in it? The more important question is whether the US will really do something so extraordinarily, supremely crazy, but I’m firmly committed to lowering the tone at CT. If that means ignoring the important issues of the day to make mocking, ad hominem comments, then let the chips fall where they may.

No, the thing that strikes me as funny is that everyone who supports was with Iran is all about the “mad mullahs” and how they can’t be deterred by normal deterrance because they’re crazed jihadis content to incinerate their own country, plus OMG THE HIDDEN IMAM!!! The people making this argument now insist that of course MAD worked back when we faced rational opponents like the USSR or, you know, Mao’s China or whatever. But now, in a new era of crazy people having nukes, all bets are off. It’s like Iran is one big suicide bomber! The limits of the internet and my own laziness prevent me from researching this at all, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet that all these people (over a certain age) did not regard the commies as secular rationalists who weighed the costs or war carefully back in the day. Not at all. Much more of the “they’ve got a plan to retreat to their bunkers and sacrifice their own hapless citizens upon the altar of destroying America!!!” Just a theory. (Obligatory on-the-otherhanding: I’m sure some of the liberals now advocating deterrance railed against MAD at the time as an armageddon-hastening nightmare.)

This article on Iraq by “Nir Rosen”:http://bostonreview.net/BR31.2/rosen.html in the _Boston Review_ is a must-read – Rosen has talked to a lot of people who don’t usually talk to Western journalists, and captures the increasing tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the months leading up to the bombing of the Samara shrine. Also, how Americans are being drawn into local disputes:

bq. The Americans had come maybe 20 times before to search for weapons in the house w[h]ere Sabah lived with his brothers Walid and Hussein, their wives, and their six children. They knew where to look for the single Kalashnikov rifle the family was permitted to own. They had always been polite. “This day they didn’t act normal,” Hussein told me. “They were running from all sides of the house. They kicked open the doors. They didn’t wait for us.” With Iraqi National Guardsmen standing outside, the Americans hit the brothers with their rifle butts. Five soldiers were on each man. Sabah’s nose was broken; Walid lay on the floor with a rifle barrel in his mouth. The Shia translator told them to kill Walid, but they ripped the gun out of his mouth instead, tearing his cheek. The rest of the family was ordered out. The translator asked the brothers where “the others” were and cursed them, threatening to rape their sisters. As the terrified family waited outside on the road, they heard three shots and what sounded to them like a scuffle inside. The Iraqi National Guardsmen tried to enter the house, but the translator cursed them, too, and shouted, “Who told you to come in?” Thirty minutes later Walid was dragged into the street. The translator emerged with a picture of Sabah and asked for Sabah’s wife. “Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to die,” he told her. He tore the picture before her face. Several soldiers came out of the house laughing. Inside, the family found Sabah dead. Blood marked his shirt where three bullets had entered his chest; two came out his back and lodged in the wall behind him. American-made bullet casings were on the floor. The house had been ransacked. Sofas and beds were overturned and torn apart; tables, closets, vases with plastic flowers were broken. Sabah’s pictures had been torn up and his identification card confiscated. Elsewhere in the house one picture remained untouched—Sabah with his three brothers and their father, smiling in happier times. When Sabah was buried the next day his body was not washed—martyrs are buried as they died. Hussein told me that three days before Sabah was killed, an American patrol had stopped in front of Radwaniya’s shops and the Shia translator had loudly taunted the locals, cursing and threatening them for being Sunnis.

One of the most depressing parts of George Packer’s _The Assassin’s Gate_ was his depiction of a meeting between George W. Bush and Iraqi exiles, where the exiles had to spend much of the meeting explaining to Bush that there were two different kinds of Muslims, Sunni and Shia. I suspect he knows the difference now.

(By the way, _Boston Review_ now has an “RSS feed”:http://bostonreview.net/rss.xml – it’s a really great magazine, with a lot of good online content).

The _Financial Times_ “editorializes”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/8ed824fc-c11b-11da-9419-0000779e2340.html on the aftermath of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper.

bq. On various counts, this is a shame and a self-inflicted wound no society built on freedom should allow. Honest and informed debate is the foundation of freedom and progress and a precondition of sound policy. It is, to say the least, odd when dissent in such a central area of policy is forced offshore or reduced to the status of samizdat. Some of Israel’s loudest cheerleaders, moreover, are often divorced by their extremism from the mainstream of American Jewish opinion and the vigorous debate that takes place inside Israel. As Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, remarked in Haaretz about the Walt-Mearsheimer controversy: “It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there [the US].”

bq. Nothing, moreover, is more damaging to US interests than the inability to have a proper debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how Washington should use its influence to resolve it, and how best America can advance freedom and stability in the region as a whole. Bullying Americans into a consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own national interest.

This seems to me to draw a good and important analogy. The internal Israeli debate, for all its faults, is vigorous and real. There’s no similar debate happening in the US, nor is there likely to be one anytime soon if the response to the Mearsheimer/Walt piece tells us anything. Some of the critiques of the piece seemed to me to be useful (and indeed sound); but they’ve effectively been drowned out by diatribes like “this one”:http://www.adl.org/Israel/mearsheimer_walt.asp from the Anti-Defamation League which accuses Mearsheimer and Walt of engaging in “classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis.”

I’m opening this up to comments – but on the condition that these comments remain civil, respectful of opposing viewpoints and on-topic (and I’ll vigorously delete comments which fail to measure up to my doubtless idiosyncratic definitions of these terms).

Update: Matt articulates what should become known as “Yglesias’ Law”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/28465.

bq. any conversation that starts with the question of America’s Israel policy all-but-inevitably turns into a conversation about Israel’s Palestinian policy.

Jim Henley:

bq. The NOT A CIVIL WAR OH NO marked by Shiite death squad attacks on Sunnis, some of whom are surely guilty of guerrilla activity and some of whom are surely not, is really Insurgency Plus.

This reminds me of something I meant to say the other week. In much the same way as we’re not supposed to call Iraq a quagmire, we’re also not supposed to say it’s on the brink of — or already stuck in to — civil war. It’s worth bearing in mind that just as there are different “kinds of quagmires”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/09/01/kinds-of-quagmires/ there are also varieties of civil war. An example familiar to me — with the usual caveats that this just meant as an illustrative comparison, not a strong correspondence — is the “Irish Civil War”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Civil_War of 1922–23. It was a conflict between Free State forces (the government, who supported the “Anglo-Irish Treaty”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Treaty that ended the “War of Independence”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_War), and the opponents of the treaty, including a majority of the old IRA.

For present purposes, what’s worth noting is that while the conflict was relatively short it was also vicious, especially towards the end, and especially amongst the elites. There was a cycle of execution, retaliation and retribution both in the field and against prisoners. A relatively large proportion of the political class was killed. What did _not_ happen, however, was something like the American Civil War, where large armies repeatedly confronted one another on the battlefield. Moreover, life, as always, went on. The Irish Civil War was largely confined to active combatants, and casualties were heavily concentrated in the leadership. For instance (I’m open to correction here), the Free State army was of course targeted but its unarmed police force was generally not subject to attacks. It’s also worth noting that a very large majority of people did not support the Anti-Treaty side, but that didn’t stop the conflict from happening.

Less than eight years after the war ended the government peacefully handed over power to the party directly descended from the Anti-Treaty forces. For years afterwards many of those in Parliament looked across the aisle at the murderers of their fathers, uncles or brothers. Iraq is very different — much more complex — in all kinds of ways, not least because of its strategic importance, its oil reserves and the continued presence of an occupying army. So the Irish case offers little real direction. Optimistically, maybe, it reminds us that it is in fact possible for severe civil conflict to resolve itself into something like peaceful coexistence. But it also shows that you don’t need to wait for an Antietam or a Gettysburg to say that a country is in the middle of a bitter civil war.

Shorter Volokh Conspiracy today: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”

I’m somewhat reluctant to enter into the debate started by the “John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt article in the LRB”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html about the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Certainly I don’t know enough to judge the accuracy of many of their claims. But I can read, so I can read both what the article says and what hostile critics say about it. Norman Geras “reprints”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/03/a_reply_to_mear.html a letter of protest to the LRB by Jeffrey Herf and Andrei S. Markovits. Here is Geras’s comment on the letter:

bq. I add just one comment of my own relating to this sentence: ‘American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States.’ Yes, and Jewish citizens anywhere and everywhere likewise, mutatis mutandis. It is high time that the suggestion that somehow Jews are especially disqualified from having a voice in the affairs of whatever nation they belong to (lest they come to be a sinister cabal) was banished from acceptable political discourse. By that I don’t mean it should become a criminal offence; I mean merely that it should be regarded and roundly condemned by everyone of progressive democratic outlook for what it is: at best, a disgraceful exercise in the operation of double standards; at worst, anti-Semitism.

One might get the impression from all that that Mearsheimer and Walt had asserted that “Jews are especially disqualified from having a voice ….” In their article, however, they write the following:

bq. In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.

Mearsheimer and Walt are entitled to take the view that US foreign policy is biased towards Israel and that part of the explanation for that is the effectiveness of the pro-Israeli lobby. Critics might legitimately counter by saying that such a bias is justified, or that there is no such bias, or that the lobby is not as effective as they say it is, or some combination of those thoughts. (One might have similar arguments, of course, about the historical influence of the Irish diaspora on US policy and attitudes towards the British in Northern Ireland. Again, it was entirely legitimate for US citizens of Irish descent to lobby their elected representatives as they did. Similarly there might have been good reasons to deplore the effects of that influence, reasons that might be embraced by people not in the grip of visceral anti-Irish prejudice.)

Johann Hari, Independent columnist and one-time contributor to the “decent left” blog “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ , writes “eloquently in the Indie today”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=831 about why he was wrong about the Iraq war and how he now regrets his pro-war stance.

(I note, btw, that there is “a dismissive post at HP”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/03/20/whither_iraq.php referring to Hari as a “London-based journalist” but omitting to mention his former association with the site.)

When I first saw this Fox caption capture from Media Matters linked at Surfdom, I thought it was some sort of aberration. But the idea that civil war in Iraq would be a good thing has already made it into the opinion pages of The Australian , propounded by Daniel Pipes. The same from James Joyner and Vodkapundit, though Glenn Reynolds demurs mildly.

Meanwhile, as Tim D notes, doublethink is SOP at Fox. As far as I can tell, the official pro-war position now emerging is

* there is no civil war in Iraq
* there will be no civil war in Iraq
* if civil war comes, it won’t be our fault
* when civil war comes, it will be a good thing

Unfortunately, at this point there’s not much anyone can do. The US and Uk have long since lost control of the situation, and the dynamic has gone beyond the control of any individual or group in Iraq. We’ll just have to hope that the Iraqi leaders (Sistani and Sadr on the Shia side, and the various groups contending to represent the Sunni Arabs and Kurds, among others) can pull something out of the fire between them.

I got an email asking me about the Iranian Oil Bourse, which is causing great excitement among the Peak Oil crowd. Here’s my draft response. Comments appreciated.

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Poetic justice as fairness. Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Actually, my first thought, on hearing that the UAE company had edged out Singapore’s hometown PSA was, “shit, they should have had Singapore do it!” Say what you like about Singapore’s idosyncratic form of government, they a) run the most kick-ass port in the world and b) can really be counted on to deliver efficient government services, without either the corruption which plagues such services in other SE Asian nations, or the general how-can-I-make-this-person’s-life-worse attitude which often seems to prevail in such places as, oh I don’t know, say the Washington, D.C. DMV? On the question of whether it’s a good idea to allow a UAE state-owned company to control (in whatever attenuated way) our port security, I’m kind of of two minds. On the one hand, if some other foreign company would otherwise be running the show, and if the same US, union-member stevedores will be doing the actual work, then maybe its not that big a deal. On the other hand, it seems that the US actually had to refrain from bombing bin Laden (pre-9/11) at some falconing retreat because a good portion of the “emirs” who make up the Emirate in question were there too. I don’t know why that makes me feel dubious…On the gripping hand, I have a perverse sense of pleasure as I watch Bush twist in the wind of the very anti-Arab, our-oceans-no-longer-protect-us bullshit the rest of us have had to hear for the last 5 years. Enjoy! (Unlike during the cold war, where naiads festooned with the stars and stripes were on constant call to toss back offending ICBM’s from their dophin-pulled-seashell mobile tactical units.) But his latest defense is, “I didn’t know anything about it.” Whaaaa? “The president is a sock-puppet moron” is supposed to be a snide criticism, not an exculpatory point. In general I am confused and await further information. Matthew Yglesias rightly notes that the alert citizen will have learned not to trust the administration to make S’mores without plunging half the nation into a sticky-sweet inferno of death. Death that’s sandwiched between Graham crackers! Food for thought.

Juan Cole translates an Al-Jazeera interview with the new kingmaker of Iraqi politics. In many ways, he’s just what the Bush Administration has been hoping for. He’s a Shi’ite but favors a broad government of national unity, reaching out to Sunni nationalists. He has an impeccable record of opposition to Saddam and isn’t compromised by any links to the occupation or to the interim Allawi regime. And while he’s previously called for an immediate pullout of US forces, he’s now prepared to accept a timetable for withdrawal.

He is, of course …

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Last we heard from Andrew Sullivan, he was “hyping up the danger”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/11/the-papers-continue-fatuous/ of clerical thugs being able to blackmail western democracies into dismantling themselves. I suggested that, insofar as civil liberties were being eroded, this was something elites in these countries were doing to themselves. Now I see that he’s come up with an example from (noted democracy) Russia of, in his words “How Muslim Blackmail Works”:http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/02/how_muslim_blac.html. One of Russia’s leading Muslim clerics said that anyone planning to turn out for a gay pride parade in Moscow “should be flogged”. The parade was canceled, and QED says Sullivan. Except that, as “Cathy Young argues”:http://cathyyoung.blogspot.com/2006/02/hyping-muslim-peril.html the news reports actually show a more complicated picture. The short version is that rather than being canceled in response to this pressure it was vetoed by the city government, and the muslim cleric was joined in his opposition to the parade by the Mayor, the local Russian Orthodox Bishop and others. Astonishingly, Putin’s Russia turns out not to be such a haven for free speech, civil society or popular dissent. Who’d have thought it?