Middle East Politics

“Matt Yglesias”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/26513 and “the Poorman”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/02/11/we-need-to-improve-our-circulation-in-serbian/ have already pointed out what a staggeringly stupid contribution “Andrew Sullivan recently made”:http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/02/blackmail.html in the wake of the Great Cartoon Debacle. But something that boneheaded may need more than one or two blows of the mallet in order to crack. Sullivan is appalled to see the head of Hezbollah “threatening”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11251690/ to “defend our prophet with our blood, not our voices,” as if threats of violence like this were anything new from that department. He insists that it “is outrageous to be informed by a crowd of hundreds of thousands that the West must give up its freedoms in order to avoid violence.” Well, of course it is — but it’s also a lot of posturing, and Sullivan obliges by striking a pose in return. He then gives us the inevitable non-sequitur: “I’m relieved to see that this moment has forced some very hard thinking on the left.” Matt has “already covered”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/26513 why this is bollocks. But then he goes on to employ one of the favorite tropes of this genre of bullshit, the anonymous liberal correspondent with second thoughts. “Another liberal reader,” he says, emails to say that

I’m honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations — for elementary safety’s sake: (1) Capitulate totally to them and become a Moslem continent. (2) Intern all of them. (3) Deport all of them. (4) Throw all of them into the sea.

Jesus wept. As it happens, I’ve been re-reading Alan Bennett’s diaries. In an entry written towards the end of the Falklands War he notes:

The papers continue fatuous. Peregrine Worsthorne suggests that, having won this war, our troops emerging with so much credit, Mrs Thatcher might consider using them at home to solve such problems as the forthcoming rail strike or indeed to break the power of the unions altogether, overlooking the fact that this is precisely what we are supposed to object to about the regime in Argentina.

It’s a hollow joke that Sullivan’s blog is graced by a tag-line taken from Orwell — and one about not being able to see what’s in front of your face, at that. Instead of being impressed by the keen eliminationist _realpolitik_ of his idiot correspondents, he’d be better off re-reading Lord Hoffman’s remarks from December 2004 on “the real threat to the life of the nation”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/17/the-real-threat-the-the-life-of-the-nation/. They go double for cartoons. I certainly hope European countries are not about to “capitulate” to demands from some radical muslims that civil society be brought to an end for the sake of the prophet’s honor. (Whether certain newspaper editors deserve a kick in the pants for pointlessly stirring-up shit is another matter.) Nor, I take it, are they about to round up and dump “all of them” (for any value of “them”) into the sea. And if some countries _have_ started down one or other of those roads, it certainly isn’t because some clerical thugs are so awesomely powerful that they are in a position to destroy the institutions of western democracy. You’ll have to look elsewhere to find people with the leverage to do real damage there.

One Lee Harris, quoted by Glenn Reynolds, on Iran and its nuclear capability:

There is an important law about power that is too often overlooked by rational and peace-loving people. Any form of power, from the most primitive to the most mind-boggling, is always amplified enormously when it falls into the hands of those whose behavior is wild, erratic, and unpredictable. A gun being waved back and forth by a maniac is far more disturbing to us than the gun in the holster of the policeman, though both weapons are equally capable of shooting us dead. And what is true of guns is far more true in the case of nukes.

Reynolds: “A corollary is that the United States probably needs to be scarier and less predictable itself.”

Umm, not to dispute the basic point, which is sound enough in its way, but how much scarier and less predictable is the U.S supposed to get?

I’m puzzled by some of the reaction to the Jyllands-Posten affair. In free speech debates over the last few years I’ve often encountered “so-called libertarians”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_07_07_junius_archive.html#78784004 who argue that speech ought to be absolutely protected from state interference but that private individuals may legitimately do what they like when it comes to sacking people whose views they disagree with or boycotting products. That isn’t the way I see things, but it is hard to see how someone running that line can object to a private company sacking an editor for reprinting the cartoons or to Muslims boycotting Danish goods in protest. Of course, not everyone takes the view that the state should keep out of speech. Norman Geras, for example, “recently linked”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/06/criticism_not_n.html (I can only assume approvingly) to a report of a court decision in France which condemned the publisher of Le Monde for “racist defamation” against the Jewish people, an article that goes on to condemn the Western media quite generally for anti-semitic representations of Israel, including in cartoons depicting Ariel Sharon and described the court decision as “a major landmark”. Yesterday Geras linked to a piece approving of France Soir’s action, his blog headine being “France Soir takes a stand”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/02/france_soir_tak.html . I take it, then, that Geras would disapprove of any similar court decision against France Soir. No doubt those wishing to distinguish the cases would claim that cartoons of Sharon eating babies are racist but those depicting Muslims as ignorant towel-heads and suicide bombers are merely engaged in the legitimate criticism of ideas: the images may looke like they come from Julius Streicher but the motive comes from Voltaire … or something like that.

So what does Chris think, you ask? Well I was mildly heartened by the recent defeat of the UK government’s proposed law on religious hatred. Only mildly though, because it is obvious that racists in the West (such as the BNP in Britain) are using “Muslim” as a code under which to attack minorities in ways that don’t fall foul of laws against the promotion of racial hatred. When the assorted pundits and TV comedians who complained about government plans to outlaw satire begin to take _that_ seriously, I’ll start to take them seriously. But I’d certainly support a law that could reliably catch the racists but spare the satirists, _The Satanic Verses_, _Jerry Springer the Opera_ &c. That is, I think I’m in pretty much the same space as Daniel in” comments to a post”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2006/01/culture_strike.html over at the excellent “Blood and Treasure”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/ .

As a follow-up to Ted’s post, Chris Bray, a historian on duty as a sergeant in Kuwait has some interesting “reflections”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/20531.html.
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The _Boston Review_ has posted a very interesting “forum”:http://bostonreview.net/ndf.html#Exit where Barry Posen puts the realist case for getting out of Iraq, and various pundits and political types respond. The WWW version, however, is missing the introductory note from the print version of the forum, which closes with the following.

bq. Unfortunately, however, none of the proponents of the current policy whom we invited to respond – including several who have previously commented publicly on Posen’s views – were prepared to join the debate here. Suffice it to say that we sought a very broad range of opinion in the interests of moving policy forward, and we regret that proponents were unwilling to join in.

The online journal Democratiya has an interview with Kanan Makiya. Now Makiya is a smart guy who did much to expose the brutal nature of the Baathist regime in Iraq, so he deserves our respect. Nevertheless, I have to take issue with his narrative about “the left” according to which there was once a body of people who stood for universal values who then became seduced (around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union) by various kinds of relativism and postmodernism. Moreover this intellectual collapse into “relativism” explains, according to Makiya, that same left’s unwillingness to support the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam.

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There’s been much discussion in both the mainstream media “and the blogosphere”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_12_25-2005_12_31.shtml#1135724598 about the possibility of an attack on Iran by either or both the Israel and the United States in order pre-emptively to destroy any Iranian nuclear weapons capacity. As is well-known, the “United States National Security Strategy”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html contains the following doctrine:

bq. The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

Given the more or less open preparation for an attack on Iran, it is hard to see how such a doctrine could not now be invoked by Iran to justify a pre-emptive strike against Israel (or, indeed, against the United States). I wonder how far the bloggers who are advocating (or pre-emptively justifying) an Israeli attack on Iran would be willing to concede the legitimacy of such anticipatory self-defence by Iran? My own view is that such an attack on Israel would be criminal, but I’m not sure that the hawks could consistently agree with me about that. Indeed, given the supposed _imminence_ of an Israeli/US attack on Iran — as compared to the more long-term and speculative threat Israel faces from Iran — Iranian pre-emption looks more justifiable ( at least, _by traditional just-war criteria_ ) than an Israeli attack on Iran.

Further to the interview with Patrick Cockburn I linked to the other day, he “now has an analysis of the Iraqi elections in the Independent”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article334476.ece . The religious parties are in the ascendant, women’s rights are being trampled, everyone is retreating the their ethnic and religious identities, and the break-up of the country is on the horizon.

Is it me, or is The Economist getting much better? There’s nothing like as much out-and-out arrogance about its pronouncements as there used to be and they seem to be giving opposing views a much fairer treatment. I would say it’s about 40% less pompous than it was at the peak, which is bordering on readability. In the end, though, it is the market which will decide.[1]

Anyway, the rundown they give on the Iraqi elections is excellent and has certainly cleared my thoughts up substantially. (see here for what they looked like when they were unclear). I now think I know enough to make a few predictions about the elections, and if you say that with enough attitude on the word “think” then you’ll realize why The Economist is a dangerous drug that needs to be kept out of the hands of slightly tipsy businessmen on trains.

Update: Well what a bloody washout these predictions turned out to be!
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The “Patrick Cockburn interview in the New Left Review”:http://www.newleftreview.net/Issue36.asp?Article=02 is remarkable and informative. Read it. A noteworthy feature is the way in which the interviewer (Tariq Ali? Susan Watkins?) tries to push a silly Sunni-“resistance”-as-national-liberation/Shia-as-collaborators line and is firmly and persistently rebuffed by Cockburn. (Via “Chris at the Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/blogger.html ).

I wasn’t going to post about “last night’s BBC Newsnight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4507010.stm (still watchable for a few hours) which staged a mock trial of allied conduct in the “war on terror”. Clive Stafford Smith, the advocate for the prosecution, was simply in a different class from his opponent John Cooper. Via “Oliver Kamm’s site”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/newsnight_on_tr.html I learn that William Shawcross was invited to take part in the programme and declined, apparently because the “trial” format would constitute a trivialization of serious issues. As Shawcross puts it:

bq. A ‘courtroom’ pastiche is a fashionable but frivolous conceit …. The allegations about “rendition” need a thorough investigation and merit the closest attention of Newsnight, but a ‘trial’ will do nothing in that regard.

But commenter Max Smith at DSPFW “reminds us”:http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.blogspot.com/2005/12/newsnight-on-trial.html that Shawcross had no such qualms two years ago when “he appeared”:http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/tv-channels/channel-4/419783/ as an advocate in a similar televised “trial” on the war (on Channel 4). I’m sure that losing by 2 to 1 in that debate had no impact on his general view of the merits of such devices.

Update: Kamm has emailed me to say that “frivolous conceit” is a phrase of his making rather than Shawcross’s. Others seem to have also read the passage in Kamm’s post as a direct quotation rather than as Kamm summary of Shawcross’s communication with him. The basic point stands, presuming that Kamm’s summary accurately reflects Shawcross’s thinking.

Iraqis “vote for their first post-Saddam, full-term parliament”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/15/news/iraq.php today. As I write this it’s just before 7am in Arizona, but I’m sure some warbloggers are already up and about, compiling evidence of indifference to freedom and democracy amongst anti-war types.

My own view on the long-term prospects hasn’t changed much since “last January’s elections”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/31/prospects-for-iraqi-democracy/. If the goal is a viable multi-party democracy, then in the short-term the election should be free and fair with a clear winning coalition, which ideally would then lose the next election and peacefully hand over power. Back in January I thought it looked like this:

It’s often said that the key moment in the growth of a democracy is not its first election but its second, because—as Adam Przeworski says somewhere—a democracy is a system where governments lose elections. The question planners need to be asking is what are the chances that Iraq will be able to do this again in four or five years without the presence of U.S. troops and with the expectation that whoever wins will get to take power. This partly depends on whether some functioning government can really be established within the country, and partly on whether the U.S. wants a working democracy in Iraq (with the risks that implies) or just a friendly puppet state. … Unlike thousands of desk-jockey warbloggers, I don’t have any expertise in Iraqi politics. But it seems to me that if Iraq is going to succeed as a democracy then it has to consolidate itself in something like this way. A continued heavy military presence by the U.S. won’t help this goal, because it won’t do anything to legitimate the government as an independent entity. … The current prospects are not good at all, especially with respect to the continuous attacks on the new police force and the efforts to systematically eliminate the nascent political class. The fact that Iraq has a lot of oil and was formerly a brutal dictatorship doesn’t help much either. … Cases of successful transitions in resource-rich nations are few.

This time around, as before, voting will probably go reasonably smoothly (by Iraqi standards I mean: there will probably only be a small number of attacks and deaths), and this counts for a lot. I think the main problem will be the protracted round of post-election negotiations between the various blocs. If it’s anything like January’s election, we might not see a government for months. Another drawn-out tussle between the two or three biggest slates will do little to consolidate the legitimacy of the election or the institutions of government, especially seeing as the occupying power has a strong interest in seeing their favored groups win. An outcome like that will just continue to raise questions about the viability of the state itself, while doing little to change the day-to-day round of violence.

Today it is “exactly two years”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/14/newsid_3985000/3985287.stm since the capture of Saddam Hussein. I’d have expected the insurgency to have calmed down a bit in the interim. It doesn’t seem to have happened.

I’d decided to self-impose a moratorium on commenting on the ramblings of the “pro-war left”, but I’m roused by a post on Normblog entitled “At variance with certain depictions”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/12/at_variance_wit.html in which Geras claims that “a new survey of Iraqi opinion”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/12_12_05_iraq_data.pdf (PDF) gives a more positive view of life there than we get from unspecified sources of whom he clearly disapproves. He specifically draws attention to a “vox pop”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/middle_east_views_from_iraq/html/1.stm section of “the BBC page”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4514414.stm where one ordinary Iraqi voices the opinion that:

bq. The US invasion was a really good thing and the presence of the US troops is really important now.

Now I’m sure that any selection of material by Geras was intended to be in line with the standards of balance and accuracy normally to be found on his site, but I fear he’s slipped up in failing to notice the responses to the following question:

bq. From today’s perspective and all things considered, was it absolutely right, somewhat right, somewhat wrong or absolutely wrong that US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in Spring 2003?

Today 50.3 per cent of Iraqis polled answered that the invasion was somewhat or absolutely wrong. That’s an increase from 39.1 per cent in “last year’s survey”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/15_03_04_iraqsurvey.pdf .