Friday, January 31, 2003





*Asharq al-Awsat reports that in private, many Iraqi embassy staff abroad have begun thinking about a post-Saddam Iraq and what it will mean for their lives. They deny this concern is selfish, saying they can see that the regime could well fall soon. I can only imagine that ambassadors and chargés of Iraq in Europe are high Baath officials with things to answer for, and I guess they are right to be worried.



*There were large demonstrations yesterday at the al-Azhar seminary and at al-Husayn square in Cairo, Egypt, against [alleged] US aggression toward Palestinians and Iraqis. Mainstream politicians from the left parties attended. The al-Azhar demonstration included both secular politicians and Islamists who came for prayer. A left/Islamist alliance helped overthrow the Shah, and if such relationships are being forged in Egypt it is a bad sign for Mubarak's regime.







Thursday, January 30, 2003





*British authorities have been casting about for some way to deal with Abu Hamza Misri, the fiery engineer-cum-preacher at Finsbury Park mosque who has preached and written justifications of the September 11 attacks. They raided the mosque in connection with their discovery of an Algerian cell linked to al-Qaida that had ricin poison in its possession. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, also worshipped there. Misri as a British citizen has been hard to touch, despite his horrendous hate speech. Now it turns out that he may have come by his British citizenship fraudulently, via a 1980 marriage to a British woman. It seems that the woman was at the time still married to her first husband and had not secured a legal divorce. This may be grounds for stripping him of his citizenship and charging him with polygamy (a crime in Britain), and deporting him to Egypt. Presumably the Mubarak government is looking forward to debriefing him and hosting him.



*On a list, the question came up of why Saddam seems so willing to risk everything for the sake of his weapons of mass destruction programs. I replied:



1) Saddam is extremely ambitious. He does not want to be dictator of a

third-rate country. He wants to be a major Power. Iraq alone cannot

provide the proper platform for a regional superpower. But if he had been

able to keep both Khuzistan and Kuwait, he might have had something.

Failing such territorial aggrandizement, WMD is another route to Power

status.





2) Saddam is paranoid about the intentions of his neighbors. He fears

that not only will he fail to make Iraq a major Power, but nefarious

interests may harm Iraq itself and thus reduce him to weakness. He rants

against the Turks and their designs on damming the Tigris and Euphrates.

He fears Kurdish separatism, often backed by outside powers like Iran or

the US. He fears Shiite irredentism and Iran. He fears the conservative

Gulf monarchies are trying to undermine him. He fears Israel and Mossad

(he has called the inspectors spies for the CIA and Mossad; to be fair,

both agencies appear at one time or another to have seriously planned for

taking him out). He fears the US and the UK, even when they aren't

actively planning an invasion. Before the first Gulf War he interpreted a

VOA report comparing him to Ceaucescu as a sign that the US planned to

arrange his overthrow.





My reading is that Saddam's combination of overweening pride and ambition,

and profound fear of everyone around him drives the obsession with WMD.

Without the latter, he would just be a tinpot dictator of a small 3rd

world country. It doesn't suit his self-image. It would be like Napoleon

being satisfied with just having France. But also without it he would

feel weak and helpless before the designs of his nefarious enemies. It

isn't a completely crazy conviction. After all, we've decided that

Khomeini was only repelled with the aid of WMD.





The syndrome whereby authoritarian personalities represent themselves as

victims of the scheming of others and think of their bullying and

aggression as merely self-defense, is common in history. Milosevic did

this to the Bosnians, e.g. Saddam is not even the only leader in the ME

who thinks this way, and has WMD.















Wednesday, January 29, 2003



*The question was raised on a list of what would happen if the US invaded Iraq and found there were not weapons of mass destruction there. I fear I replied somewhat cynically, but also called it as I see it. If Iraq turns out not to have much WMD, the administration will fall back on its other main argument, that Saddam is a monster who has killed and brutalized his own people and repeatedly invaded his neighbors. We already have had Halabja survivors among the Kurds protest the doubts some Westerners have expressed about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and willingness to use them. They say, basically, *we* know all about WMD. And, given the thousands of Shi`ites the Baath killed in the south, there are almost certainly mass graves that will provide a macabre justification ex post facto for the removal of that regime. Footage of the Iranian vets injured by mustard gas could also be put on television. How wars are justified before they are launched and how they are justified afterwards is frequently different. If there is a relatively quick victory, no one will inquire into the justifications too closely. If it becomes a quagmire, it won't matter what the justification was: the public will turn against the war anyway if it goes badly.



*The fundamentalist parties in Pakistan have called for all US visitors to that country to be fingerprinted and registered, in retaliation for how Pakistani visitors to the US are being treated. I've got news for them. When I visited Pakistan in the 1980s, I always had to register with the authorities, and I had to get a no objection permit from the police before I could leave Pakistan again. Fingerprinting is a different matter, but the registration of foreigners has been insisted on by Pakistan for a long time. It is not therefore such a big slap in the face for Pakistani visitors in the US to have to register. My objection is that the law should be for everyone, and if Muslims have to register, so should Chinese, Indians, etc.



*On another list someone raised the question about whether Sharon will attempt to expel the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, perhaps under cover of a second Gulf War.



The American Friends Service Committee has spoken on this issue at:



AFSC Urges

Public Statement by U.S. Government




98 Israeli academics circulated a petition on this possibility recently. See:



http://www.nimn.org/jewishper/IsraeliAcademe.html



I think it is more likely that Sharon will simply continue to annex Palestinian lands to Israel and leave the Palestinians with weak Bantustans that cannot have a hope of coalescing into a real state --sort of like the US Indian Reservations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not necessary to ethnically cleanse a people if you can corral and decisively cow them.



Expelling the Palestinians during a second Gulf War would be an even more extreme slap in the face to the US than any of Sharon's provocations in the past 18 months, and I very much doubt he would risk it. Perhaps the extra $10 bn. the Israelis are asking the US for is in part a quid pro quo for avoidance of very bad behavior.





Tuesday, January 28, 2003





* Iraqi Vice President Tariq Aziz has warned Kuwait that Iraq would not rule out hitting it if it allows US troops to launch an invasion of Iraq from its soil. Such complicity, he said, would make this action legitimate. (It is not clear exactly what Aziz is threatening to do. However, if it involved the deliberate targetting of civilian populations, it would not be legitimate; it would be a war crime. Aziz should be careful; he may find himself in the docket.)



*Jabir al-Mubarak al-Sabah, Kuwait's Minister of Defense, said he was not surprised by this threat, and that it revealed the sort of intentions Iraq had toward its neighbors. He pledged that the Kuwait armed forces stood ready to repel any threat. (Kuwait is a nice little country, but I'm afraid its armed forces aren't exactly up to this, and that it is the American umbrella that emboldens the minister).



*Saddam Hussein asked his generals to be vigilant against traitors in their midst who might sell out to the Americans. He saw the same reports the rest of us did, that the Saudis and other neighbors have been trying to convince someone to make a coup and depose Saddam so as to avert the looming war. (I wouldn't hold my breath. Saddam is not the resigning kind; he is a genocidal megalomaniac. And all the generals who even thought about a coup are pushing up daisies. Of course, if he and his circle of Tikritis actually cared about the country and the people they have looted and brutalized, they would go into exile. But they aren't that sort of person to begin with, which is one of the reasons we stand on the brink of war).



*Newsday reports that US Vice President Dick Cheney and special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad have been working to expand the expatriate committee of Iraqi politicians primed to succeed Saddam Hussein from 65 to 100, so as to dilute the influence of the pro-Iran bloc of 15 members from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Khalilzad is said to envisage a situation where policy makers will be drawn from the committee, but technocrats from inside Iraq will also be given power if they are untainted by association with Saddam Hussein. Khalilzad is said to recognize that since some 60 percent of Iraqis are Shi`ite, a similar proportion of high government officials will be. But apparently he has come to realize that SCIRI's support inside Iraq may actually be shallow. Many Iraqi Shi`ites are secularists. Apparently he will be looking for such secular Shi`ite technocrats as a counter-ballast to the clerical SCIRI.



One problem: If SCIRI's troops, the 15,000-man al-Badr Brigade, plays a "northern-alliance" type role in this new Iraq war, it may well be positioned to garner enormous political power in the aftermath despite the planning on paper going on now. A SCIRI dominated Iraq would be a huge gift to the clerical hardliners in Tehran, and it has long puzzled me why the Bush administration was putting so many eggs in that basket. Now they are backing off, causing a furore.



*Some 18 out of about 100 radical troops of a joint Hizb-i Islami /Taliban/ al-Qaida force have been killed near Spin Baldak in Afghanistan. This was the biggest battle between US forces and remnants of the radical Islamists since Anaconda, 10 months ago. Hizb-i Islam is the guerrilla group of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, who has made an alliance with Taliban remnants in Waziristan, tribal Pakistan. Hikmatyar was the darling of the US and of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence during the 1980s when the Reagan administration used him to batter the Soviets. He was all along a frightening extremist. In his youth he had thrown acid on unveiled women in Afghanistan. Having created this Frankenstein's monster, the US now has to deal with the mess the Reaganauts made. Our brave military men wouldn't be risking their lives in a battle against this guy if the Reaganauts hadn't gone overboard in backing extremely unsavory elements in the 1980s.



*Bush's State of the Union address gave specifics about what weapons of mass destruction the US thinks Saddam has and what he would have to prove he has destroyed to satisfy the Bush administration: 25,000 liters of anthrax; 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent; 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents; mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ warfare agents. But the wording was a little unclear, since the president kept saying Iraq had had materials sufficient to produce these quantities of these weapons, but seemed to sidestep the question as to whether it actually had done so. Apparently the anthrax and some of the chemicals were provided to Iraq in the 1980s by the Reagan administration to ensure that Iran did not win the Iran-Iraq war. I suppose that is how this administration is so sure Iraq has this stuff; it has people serving in it who provided the material to Saddam. Anyway, it seems clear to me that Bush is set on war. They are saying now it might not be until mid-March.



*Stanley Kurtz has written a lame reply to my History News Network response to his attacks on the Middle East Studies Association. He admits he knows nothing serious about Middle East studies (but trumpets his Hindi. Kiya hal hai, bhai? Zera aram karo!) He admits that MESA gets no money from the US government. He basically backs down on all the particulars of his irresponsible libel of the association. He retains vague and unstated reservations. And then he insists he has the right to judge the field even though he knows nothing about it. Well, of course. That is what punditry is. It is persons paid by sugar daddies to push agendas even though they know nothing about the subject. Sometimes they even push agendas they know to be false. Gasp. A survey showed recently that most people who are incompetent at their jobs can't even recognize the fact, not having enough competency to judge themselves. Kurtz cannot see how cartoonish his ill-informed rants about MESA are. Has he even ever attended a MESA conference? Apparently not. Another survey showed that having to work with or be around incompetent people can give you a heart attack. It is a hell of a thing.















Monday, January 27, 2003





The Journal of the International Institute ( University of Michigan)

Winter 2003, vol. 10, no. 2, p. 3







The Risks of Peace and The Costs of War





Juan Cole



Most discussion of the looming war against Iraq by the United States quite naturally focuses, in this country, on the pros and cons of such an action for America. I would like instead to talk about regional perceptions of the issue in the Middle East itself, and about likely costs of war and risks of peace there.



Risks of Peace



Let me begin with the risks of peace, reversing our title. The Gulf War of 1990-91 was a status quo war. It was conceived by the international community and even by the United States as a way of turning the dock back to July 1990, before Iraq invaded Kuwait. The problem was that the status quo ante was highly unsatisfactory. The Persian Gulf is the site of two-thirds of the proven petroleum reserves in the world. Yet the countries along its littoral have no means of providing security to themselves. They tend to be small if not tiny and militarily weak. The two exceptions here are Iran and Iraq.



The British created this situation of small states in the Gulf, to provide for the security of their shipping and communications to India in the colonial period. Yet they withdrew from the Gulf in 1969, and left behind no obvious successor. Nixon and Kissinger attempted to promote the Shah of Iran as the new guarantor of Gulf security in the 1970s, but that went sour in 1978-79 with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Iraq made a bid to become the premier Gulf military power with its attack on Iran and the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, in which it was broadly speaking backed by the United States (which, however, played both sides against one another). Iraq did so badly in the Iran-Iraq war, however, that it left itself without credibility as security provider in the region. It also was left deeply in debt. The attack on Kuwait was aimed at regaining the sort of petroleum wealth that would allow Iraq to launch itself as a great power in the region. But it was unacceptable to the world community and Iraq was pushed back and made a pariah.



The post-war arrangements were a tragic failure. Bush's call for an uprising of Shi'ites and Kurds against Saddam Hussein's Baath Party succeeded only too well. Alarmed, and perhaps under Saudi pressure, the US appears to have made a deliberate decision to allow the Iraqis to put these uprisings down with helicopter gun ships, which could have been interdicted under the terms of the armistice. Tens of thousands of Shi`ites were killed then and subsequently. Although the United States ultimately stepped in to protect the Kurds, it did not do the same for the Shi'ites in the south, who continued to be victimized.



The sanctions regime initially allowed too little food and medicine into Iraq, harming civilians and children; and the Baath regime's insistence on skimming off profits from smuggled petroleum or later from the oil for food program of the UN only worsened their plight. This situation created vast discontents with the United States in the Arab world and in the Muslim world more generally. The mastermind of the bombing of a Western dance club in Indonesia that killed over 180 persons gave the US actions against Iraq as one of his motives. Although Iraq has arguably been contained, its containment has come at a very high price.



Domestically, the civilian population and children have suffered enormously from lack of medicine and from poverty produced by the sanctions and by the distribution of wealth toward party members. Politically active Shi'ites have been killed in the thousands and dissident villages in the marshes have seen their swamps drained. Internationally, the United States faces constant opprobrium for keeping the sanctions in place. Now we are told that after all this suffering, its prime aim, of preventing Iraq from continuing to militarize and to develop weapons of mass destruction, may well have faded anyway. The risks of peace therefore include: continued lack of good security in the Persian Gulf region, imperiling both the people who live there and the assured access to energy supplies on the part of the US and its allies; the continued brutalization of the Iraqi population by a totalitarian regime that has conducted virtual genocide against Kurds and Shi'ites; the continued demonization. of the United States in the region and in the Muslim world for the negative effects of the sanctions regime; the possibility that Iraq will develop enough in the way of weapons of mass destruction to break out of containment and to attempt to gain popularity by attacking yet another of its neighbors, perhaps Turkey or Israel. The aggressive, militaristic nature of the Saddam Hussein regime makes such a scenario, however unlikely, at least plausible.



I do not personally believe that a risk of peace includes an Iraq weapons of mass destruction attack on the United States itself, nor is there any solid evidence in open sources of a firm link between Iraq and anti-US terrorism.



Costs of War



The regional costs of a US war on Iraq are potentially great: The war will inevitably be seen in the Arab world as a neo-colonial war. It will be depicted as a repeat of the French occupation of Algeria or the British in Egypt-or indeed, the British in Iraq. These were highly unpopular and humiliating episodes. The US, even if it has a quick military victory, is unlikely to win the war diplomatically in the Arab world. Pan-Arabism has been more aspiration than reality in the past century, but this US war against Iraq might well promote the formation of a stronger regional political bloc.



As a result of resentment against this neocolonialism, the likelihood is that al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations will find it easier to recruit angry young men in the region and in Europe for terrorist operations against the US and its interests. The final defeat of the Baath Party will be seen as a defeat of its ideals, which include secularism, improved rights for women and high modernism. Arabs in despair of these projects are likely to turn to radical Islam as an alternative outlet for their frustrations. The Sunnis of Iraq could well turn to groups like al-Qaida, having lost the ideals of the Baath. Iraqi Shi'ites might become easier to recruit into Khomeinism of the Iranian sort, and become a bulwark for the shaky regime in Shi'ite Iran.



A post-war Iraq may well be riven with factionalism that impedes the development of a well-ensconced new government. We have seen this sort of outcome in Afghanistan. Commentators often note the possibility for Sunni-Shi'ite divisions or Arab Kurdish ones. These are very real. If Islamic law is the basis of the new state, that begs the question of whether its Sunni or Shi'ite version will be implemented. It is seldom realized that the Kurds themselves fought a mini-civil war in 1994-1997 between two major political and tribal fac- tions. Likewise the Shi'ites are deeply divided, by tribe, region and political ideology. Many lower-level Baath Party members are Shi'ite, but tens of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites are in exile in Iran and want to come back under the banner of ayatollahs.



Internal factionalism is unlikely to reach the level of Yugoslavia after the fall of the communists, since US air power can be invoked to stop mass slaughter. But there could be a good deal of trouble in the country, and as the case of Afghanistan shows, the US cannot always stop faction fighting.



A new government in Iraq raises questions about its relationship to its neighbors. Turkey is strongly opposed to Iraqi Kurdish control of the oil fields of Kirkuk. The Kurds have all but announced that they will try to grab them when fighting breaks out. The Turks have said that in case this happens, Turkey may well invade Iraq to stop it. It is unacceptable to the Turkish government to have well-funded autonomous Kurds on their borders. They fear Kurdish nationalism, which might well tear eastern Turkey away from Ankara. Shi'ite Iran will certainly attempt to increase its influence among Iraqi Shi'ites once the Baath is defeated.



Shi'ite political parties may well turn to Tehran for funding. A US-occupied country where the Iranian ayatollahs have substantial influence is a disaster waiting to happen. An Iraq war may have a negative impact on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A democratic Iraq, if any such thing emerges from an American occupation, will not necessarily be less opposed to Israeli policies toward Palestinians and the creeping annexation of the West Bank. Iraqi individuals and political organizations, freed from Baath monopoly, might well support the Palestinians, including Palestinian guerrillas, at a higher level than does Saddam.



The chaos of war could allow for an outbreak of major violence between Palestinians and Israelis. The Baath may target Israel with scuds tipped with poison gas, e.g. Israeli retaliation will make the war look even more like a joint colonialist and Zionist effort among Arabs, and further inflame passions against the US in the region.



Those who support an Iraq war argue that the potential negative fall-out consists of improbable scenarios that are no more likely to come to fruition than did the dire forecasts about overthrown Arab regimes in 1990. They argue that if we can get a genuinely democratic, modern Iraq out of the war, its beneficial effects will radiate throughout the region. They may be right. But it is worth remembering that we were promised a democratic Kuwait in 1991 and a democratic, stable Afghanistan in 2002, and have yet to see either.





Sunday, January 26, 2003





Asharq al-Awsat reporter Abdel Baqi Khalifa reports from Sarajevo today that retired Yugoslav officers and some politicians are warning Saddam Hussain against repeating the Kosovo scenario in Baghdad. These officers tilted toward Iraq in the past, and put their concerns in a letter to the Iraqi leader. Signatories include a former Yugoslav foreign minister. They painted a vivid picture of Iraq's likely fate, under bombardment from American smart bombs and cruise missiles.



They offered him some advice if he does stand and fight, including the need to establish some dummy military sites to draw American fire and to fill Baghdad with human shields so as to avoid an American occupation of that city. Khalifa says that many of the officers had friendships with Saddam and his circle that went back to the days of Tito. Saddam had admired the latter until Tito refused to turn against Egypt after Camp David at Iraq's request, saying Yugoslavia's policy was to remain friends with all.



The analogy the retired officers drew to Kosovo is insightful, since that became the new model for US wars against smaller powers, and the experience there will certainly inform US tactics.



They would have been better off, however, simply telling him that fighting the US is suicidal and that no number of human shields or decoys is going to prevent his army from meeting the same fate that of Serbia did in Kosovo if he does not voluntarily shed the weapons of mass destruction. Increasingly, it may be too late for him even to agree to do that.



Saturday, January 25, 2003





I posted on the new list H-Mideast-Politics an inquiry about the lack of grassroots democratic practice in the Middle East. I said that I had read in Asharq al-Awsat last year that the Egyptian parliament was seriously considering allowing elections for the governors of the major provinces, eg Buhayra, Minya, etc.



I wondered if this practice of appointing provincial governors went back

to the 1950s military junta or if governors have always been

appointed.



Then I began wondering about mayor positions. What about the mayor of towns like Asyut or Zaqaziq? Also appointed?



Sometimes the appointed governor has been at odds with the parliamentary

deputation from his province, as occured in Minufiyya in 1999. Is this an

appointed-versus-elected sort of issue? What exactly is the relationship

of the provincial governments to the parliamentarians elected from that

province, usually? I saw one quote that said that provincial secretaries

decided on the parliamentary slate. Provincial secretaries of the ruling

NDP? Or of the governorates? How do you get to be a provincial secretary?





How common is the appointment by the center of provincial governors and

mayors in the Arab world? I mean, one expected it in Saudia or the

Baathist states. But Egypt? What is the situation in, say, Lebanon, or

Jordan?





Is it possible that one of the problems for democracy in the region is that

most genuine democracy starts at the local level, and they do not have it

at that level, or even at the state/province level? After all, a lot of US

presidents have been former governors of states and got their start in

politics that way.



Some informed folks replied that the provincial governors are also appointed in Turkey, so we may be looking at an Ottoman heritage here. But there the office of mayor is an elected one and mayors are important civic leaders. Another poster suggested that there is generally a split in the world between democracies built from the ground up, such as the US, and more centralized ones that do more appointing from the top down.



It seems to me that if we are going to get democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq, that it should be set up so that mayors and provincial governors are elected. Democratic practice has to occur at the local level if it is to have any chance at the national level.



Friday, January 24, 2003

A major tiff has broken out between the Pakistani government and the US ambassador in Islamabad, Nancy Powell. Speaking at a dinner for businessmen in Karachi, she called on Pakistan fully to implement its pledge to stop cross-border infiltration of radicals accross the line of control into Indian-held Kashmir. "Pakistan must ensure its pledges are implemented to prevent infiltration across the Line of Control and end the use of Pakistan as a platform for terrorism," she was quoted as saying.



This rather straightforward comment aroused the wrath both of the Pakistani government and that of the extremist Muslim parties. The statement implied that there were still terrorists going across into India and that the Pakistani goverment hadn't done everything it could to stop it. The foreign ministry position is that the Musharraf government has cracked down hard on such infiltration, to the point where little any more occurs. The Jami`at Ulama-yi Pakistan condemned her for another reason, insofar as these backers of the Taliban reject the equation of the "freedom fighters" for Kashmir with terrorists.



The Pakistani government has not asked for to be reassigned, and the US intends to keep her there in Islamabad. The episode shows how America's allies in the war on terror need to be treated with kid gloves and with diplomacy. Sometimes blunt language and honesty have the opposite effect than the one intended.





Thursday, January 23, 2003



Kuwaiti authorities are confirming that al-Qaeda was behind the attack there Tuesday on two Americans, which killed one and gravely injured the other. They have been interrogating Sami Muhammad Marzuq al-Mutayri (Mutairi), who was captured by the Saudis and turned back over to Kuwait. An employee of Kuwait's department of social affairs, he had tried to go to Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks on the US, to fight for al-Qaeda. The 24-year-old has confessed to the shooting, and says that he had accomplices who are still at large.



Al-Qaeda has switched from theatrical terrorism to such smallish operations that can be carried out by a single individual against US civilians and government/military personnel.









Yemen and Bahrain both pleaded yesterday with Washington to employ non-military means to deal with the Iraq crisis. Since both governments are cooperating closely with the US military, it is hard to see such statements as more than fig leaves for public consumption. That is not to say the sentiments are insincere, only that these small, weak governments have no ability to resist the US if it goes to war, and would not try. Indeed, they will actively cooperate in key ways, especially Bahrain.



French President Jacques Chirac has also admitted that he has no power to stop the US from going to war if it really wants to, despite his own feeling that a war now would be at least premature. Nato ministers met yesterday to discuss whether to support the US in the coming war. It was from all accounts a heated discussion. Apparently the ministers do not dispute with the Bush administration about the grounds for a war, but feel the inspections should run their course and diplomatic avenues should be exhausted first.



Russian intelligence sources reported that the Russian military has been informed that the US will launch the war in the middle of February. That seems quite plausible to me.



Gen. Myers said yesterday that the US has evidence that the Iraqi high command is rattled at the prospect of a war. This is news? That they are Baathists doesn't mean they are brain dead.



It seems to me that the war has all but begun, and the Russians are right that we are about three weeks away from it. It amazes me that my friends on the left think that mere public opinion can still avert it. The only real bar to the war could have been raised last fall in Congress, and wasn't. Bush has all the domestic authorization he needs. And the UNSC resolution can be interpreted as a warrant for action if the Iraqis are found to be flaunting it (and they are at least being uncooperative with the inspections).



I think there are grounds for such a war, but think it highly unwise to launch it without an explicit, second UN Security Council Resolution. The Bush administration hawks are essentially tearing up the UN Charter and the post- WW II attempts to avert further aggressive, unilateral wars. The US is the most powerful country in the world, and sets precedents about things like legitimate grounds for military action. If we do this thing in the teeth of UNSC, we will all eventually suffer for it. But, that maniac mass-murderer Bin Laden gave the Bushies a public warrant for their perpetual war, and there is nothing anyone can do about it for now. When Wolfowitz goes on to China, then maybe the American public will be war-weary enough to put a stop to this crusade.



If the left is wise, it will begin holding the administration's feet to the fire about the need for democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. The former is being re-talibanized by our allies, and the Rumsfeld-Cheney axis would be happy with a less repressive dictatorship in Baghdad. If there is going to be a war, the US should do its best to get a genuinely democratic Iraq out of it. The worst case scenario is we risk all this world opprobrium and kill 30,000 Iraqis, just to end up with another iron fist, only garbed in a velvet glove.





Tuesday, January 21, 2003





History News Network





1-20-03: Culture Watch



Why Are Arch Conservatives Ganging Up on the Middle East Studies Association?





By Juan Cole



I had never even heard of Stanley Kurtz before he began attacking the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). He is woefully misinformed about my professional association. As far as I can tell, he speaks no Arabic or Persian and has never studied the Middle East. He does not show up in any author indexes I looked at online. Now he has set himself up to judge the scholarly work of persons like myself, though he has read almost none of it. He is a columnist for the National Review, and he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and is now is a fellow at the Hudson Institute, which has links to the Israeli Right as well as to Jewish neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz. Since his only trade appears to be in garish opinion, it is rather sad that some of what he says is so obviously incorrect that it makes him look like a clown.



Contrary to what Kurtz attempts to imply, the Middle East Studies Association is not a research institute. It is not a political action committee. Its members differ wildly among themselves about political issues. Arab-Americans, e.g., tend to vote Republican, and they are a small but significant proportion of members. Such matters do not arise in the panels, however, because it is just a professional association. Anyone can join it who can demonstrate possession of two of three criteria: a degree in, publications in, and service to the academic study of the Middle East. It was founded in 1966.



MESA's hundred or so founding members were highly diverse, including European immigrant scholars, WASP offspring of diplomats or missionaries who had encountered the Middle East as children, former State Department personnel who had gone into academics, Zionists who had learned their Arabic in Israel, Arab-Americans, and others whose lives had lead them into university teaching about the Middle East.



MESA has grown to have about 2600 members from colleges and universities in the United States, but by my count only about a thousand of them are tenured or tenure-track professors. The rest are adjuncts, graduate students, and associate members (e.g. architects and computer systems analysts who have at least an MA in Middle East studies). Still, there is no doubt that the field--though small--has grown enormously since 1966. MESA does not receive U.S. government money, and has a small income, mainly from private dues and its annual conference (in good years).



Now we come to Stanley Kurtz. After MESA's mid-November annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Kurtz commented in the National Review Online, that "they meet in DC regularly, to remind the federal government just how much MESA scholars contribute to our national security in exchange for all the money they get from the federal government." MESA does not meet in Washington, D.C., because of the U.S. government, and certainly not because the organization conceives itself as having anything to do with "national security." It is just an association of college teachers, for heaven's sake. I'm not aware that anyone from the government even bothers to come to most of the meetings. Washington is centrally located on the East Coast, and MESA conferences tend to be big when held there, generating a little extra pocket change for a cash-strapped organization every third year.



Moreover, MESA does not get any money at all from the Federal government. Some of its member institutions do get small sums, but they are not mediated by MESA. The 15 federally funded National Resource Centers concerned with the Middle East at major universities get an average of $200,000 a year each from the government through Title VI, much of which goes to funding graduate students to study Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. Since a typical fellowship costs $20,000, and since the Centers do other things, they can only really support a handful of students each with this money. This is a paltry sum of money, and the scandal is that it is so little, given the need of a democratic society to keep informed of foreign policy challenges. Kurtz wants to make it seem that MESA and its members are raking mountains of funds from the taxpayer. The NRC's have for decades turned out many of the few Arabic, Persian and Turkish linguists of high caliber that we have in this country, and the main complaint I have at this moment is that the government did not spend more on turning out greater numbers of them.



Kurtz then goes on to say, "Trouble is, there are no panels scheduled on suicide bombing or Wahhabism, no mention of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Even the few mentions of 'terrorism' are put in quotes." Kurtz now attempts to make it seem as though the annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association had no panels of any relevance to current events, and that this is a sin of some sort. But this complaint has two flaws. First, it is rather like flogging the Modern Language Association for having no panels on the resignation of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil. MESA is not a contemporary affairs research institute. A good third of its members are historians, who will likely not present papers on the present. Others work on literature, economics, and religion. Second, there were several important panels on contemporary affairs, including Islamic radicalism. I organized a well-attended panel on Afghanistan and the War on Terror in which Bin Laden and the Taliban were prominently mentioned and where there were no quotation marks in evidence. An evening session on the Israel-Palestinian peace process was [scheduled to be] addressed by the Bush Administration undersecretary of state for Near East, William Burns.



Kurtz continues, "These scholars, who are getting subsidized by the federal government for contributing to our national security, are busy planning panels on Middle Eastern 'sex and gender' in the early twentieth century." Most MESA scholars receive no subsidies from the government for contributing to our national security. And if Kurtz does not think sexuality and gender are wrought up with the region's current crises, he has not been paying much attention! In actual fact, there has been a lack of academic writing about sexuality in the Middle East, even though it clearly underlies many of the culture wars in the area. The panel he trashed was innovative and illuminating, but of course he did not bother to attend it, so how could he have known? Being informed is apparently not part of his job.



He ends this whine by saying, "where is the attention to the crisis of the moment? Is this what we're paying for? After all the embarrassing revelations about their refusal to deal with the reality of terrorism and Muslim fundamentalism, these scholars have learned nothing." But Kurtz has not paid for the MESA conference. Its members paid for it. Most panelists had never received a dime from the U.S. government. Many who did, received it because the Department of Education wanted historians of the region to be trained, and they are now doing history as requested. In actual fact, moreover, there have been papers on Muslim fundamentalism at MESA conferences ad nauseum since the late 1970s. There were such panels in Washington, and they were very interesting. Most Middle Easterners are not and never have been fundamentalists, however, and only a tiny number have ever been terrorists, so if you are interested in actually studying the region, having an overemphasis on these phenomena would not be very helpful. It would be like insisting that Italian historians work only on the Cosa Nostra.



Kurtz has been at this for some time. He has argued that the Middle East Studies field is ideologically dominated by the work of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said and that dissenters are denied academic positions in it. This argument is plain silly. Hires are made by history, anthropology, political science and other departments on a grass roots basis at universities throughout the country, and no such conspiracy could possibly be orchestrated. Said's work, which remains controversial, almost never appears in the footnotes of the organization's flagship journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies. MESA includes in its member organizations the Israel Studies Society, and some of its members are transplanted Israelis teaching at U.S. universities. Several presidents of MESA, including persons Kurtz and other conservatives have viciously attacked, have been Jewish Americans.



Last spring Kurtz implicitly attacked the political scientists at the Middle East Centers at American universities for being postmodernist, leftist, anti-American terrorist-coddlers. The 14 or so tenured professors of Middle East political science at the federally funded National Resource Centers, however, include Leonard Binder of UCLA (who fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war); Joel Migdal and Ellis Goldberg at the University of Washington, Seattle (exponents of the New Institutionalism and Rational Choice, respectively); Mark Tessler of the University of Michigan (with a Ph.D. From Hebrew University, who analyzes survey data quantitatively), Lisa Anderson and Gary Sick of Columbia (comparative politics and policy studies, respectively; Sick is a former naval officer and served on the National Security Council), and so on. Of the fourteen, only one (Timothy Mitchell at New York University) could be considered a postmodernist, and his work on the Middle East from that framework has been illuminating. None of the fourteen has ever to my knowledge supported any sort of terrorism.



Kurtz has no idea what he is talking about. The interesting question is why he should care. It may well be that this is a bank robbery. He wants Congress to give the little money that now supports the academic and linguistic study of the Middle East instead to partisan think tanks like his own Hudson Institute. Why should we fund a distinguished scholar like Leonard Binder and his students when we have Stanley Kurtz to tell us all about the Muslim world based on his vast fund of knowledge and his intricate knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Turkish? Or perhaps in his world, the study of manuscripts or the gathering of survey data is unnecessary. All that is important is to have a strongly held opinion, expressed with some panache.



Meanwhile, when Stanley Kurtz wants insights into contemporary Egypt, where does he turn? Why to the work of Diane Singerman, a political scientist at American University and a member of the Executive Board of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. (See his "With Eyes Wide Open: Who They Are; What We're Getting Into," National Review, February 20, 2002.)



If you'd like to see Congress increase Title VI funding for the professional study of Middle Eastern languages and cultures, contact the long-serving and prominent member of the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations, Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin) at 2314 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515, phone: (202) 225-3365. Other committee members can be found at: http://www.house.gov/appropriations/members.htm, and you should especially write them if you are from their district.



Monday, January 20, 2003





US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today sketched out his vision of a post-Saddam Iraq. He said it would be a country that was not attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction. And, he said it would have a government that tended toward what we would think of as a democracy, but that neither a US or a British template would be imposed on it. It would be authentically Iraqi. He gave the example of the Loya Jirga (tribal council) in Afghanistan that made Hamid Karzai president of that country last summer.



I find all this extremely dismaying. First of all, either Iraq is going to have a representative, parliamentary government, or it is not. The UK *is* the template for that. Its parliament is not called the "mother of parliaments" for nothing. When we say India is a democracy or Australia is a democracy, it is because they have a parliamentary template! There is no indigenous "Iraqi" form of "democracy" that would pass muster in today's world. I am afraid that if Rumsfeld is talking this way, what the Defense Department really intends to impose on Iraq is some form of authoritarian rule that has enough trappings of public consent that it can be fobbed off on the rest of us as vaguely democratic.



His choice of Afghanistan as an example was particularly inept. The Loya Jirga turns out to have been a mugging. The warlords and the secret police ran that thing and ensured a pre-ordained outcome. The "delegates" hadn't been elected by the people. In its aftermath, Karzai has gotten to be mayor of Kabul, with powerful warlords running Herat and Mazar, etc. There continues to be faction-fighting and Taliban-like oppression of women. The country is fragmented. If this is what Rumsfeld foresees for Iraq, then he is taking us into a huge catastrophe.



Sunday, January 19, 2003





* Both Colin Powell and Condi Rice have by now openly come out in favor of the University of Michigan admissions system, which awards points for various factors, including poverty, location (the Upper Peninsula students get points) and also race. They are thus in direct opposition to the position of President Bush. But, I think they had a duty to resign. In a democratic government if a minister or a close adviser differs deeply with the chief executive on a matter of important policy, the only honest course is resignation. Moreover, I suspect if the two of them had stuck together and made a stand, credibly *threatening* resignation over the issue, they could have forestalled Bush taking this step. Should the Bush position prevail at the Supreme Court this spring, I think the university should simply begin awarding extra points for urban poverty. It should not go to the Texas system of admitting the top ten percent of each high school graduating class, which is insipid and depends on de facto racial segregation. It should simply identify a race-neutral category such as urban poverty (in the Michigan context) that would have the same effect as giving points based on race.



* The Los Angeles Times reports that the Indian firm NEC Engineering Private Ltd., employed front companies and phony documents to "export 10 consignments of raw materials and equipment that Saddam Hussein's regime could use to produce chemical weapons and propellants for long-range missiles . . ." These shipments included "atomized aluminum powder and titanium centrifugal pumps" and were worth nearly $1 mn.; they were shipped "between September 1998 and February 2001." The destinations were listed as other countries in the region, but they actuall went to Iraq. An Iraqi dissident author visiting Jordan also gave a secret interview to Pino Buonagiorna of the Milan "Panorama" in which he said the emphasis on Iraqi scientists developing weapons of mass destruction themselves is overblown, and that much can simply be imported, which is what Saddam has done.



*On Monday morning at 2 am police finally raided a mosque in the Finsbury Park district of London, which has been under surveillance for some time. The preacher there, Abu Hamza al-Masri (actually just an engineer) has attempted to justify the September 11 attacks. He had refused to heed warnings that his statements made him liable to arrest on the basis of the UK's new anti-terrorism statute.



On Sunday, Sir John Stevens, head of London's Metropolitan police, had warned that there are large numbers of al-Qaeda supporters in the UK who have not yet been apprehended. Worries have sharpened recently because of the discovery of an Algerian cell, presumably of the Armed Islamic Group, that had stockpiled poison ricin gas in a London apartment. A British police officer--Detective Constable Oake--was stabbed to death when he and others attempted to apprehend some of this group in Manchester. According to Jane's Defence weekly, some 2800 Algerian militants were trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. This is the third largest country cohort after Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Spokesmen for immigrant groups in the UK expressed concern about suspicions falling on all Algerians. Many Algerians, they say, are legitimately in the UK as asylum seekers and are not violent. The Algerian civil war of the past decade has killed more than a 100,000 persons.



*Returned Afghan refugees numbering nearly 2 million are in danger of starving and freezing this winter because the international community has not sufficiently followed through on its pledges, made at Tokyo over a year ago, to provide reconstruction aid. There are also troubling reports of the US military high-handedly arresting Afghans in places like Kabul without any due process, which is beginning to provoke protests among the Afghan population.



*Japan is signalling behind the scenes that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi might well support a US war on Iraq without a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing it, as long as the US does provide compelling proof that the Iraqis are developing weapons of mass destruction. It would not do so in the absence of such proof. Presumably the Japanese stance on the issue is related to policy toward North Korea. But given how unpopular the war is in the Middle East, and how Japan has usually attempted to avoid stepping on toes there because it depends heavily on Middle East petroleum, this statement is remarkable.











Saturday, January 18, 2003

New Bin Laden Letter?







Muhammad al-Shafi`i reports in Asharq al-Awsat today that the newspaper has acquired a copy of a letter purported to be from Usama Bin Laden and signed by him via an Islamic institute in Pakistan. The letter is a call by Bin Laden for an end to factionalism among (hardline) Muslims, especially those of the jihadi (holy war) tendency, who, he says, have fallen to fighting with one another rather than against the common foe. The letter gives Koranic and other justifications for such unity and the need to band together against a threat to Islam.



The letter is the first written document in which Bin Laden identifies himself with the jihadi tendency explicitly (though that should have been clear from the videotape found in Afghanistan last year where he was boasting about helping plan September 11).



The article also notes that a couple of books with an al-Qaeda orientation have appeared, including one entitled "The New Crusades" which is dedicated to the US Congress on the flyleaf. (That dedication is chilling since Bin al-Shibh says the Capitol was an al-Qaida target on 9/11).



This document shows that either Bin Laden is still alive and attempting to gain leadership over the jihadi tendency, or that someone else is trying to do so in his name. The jihadis include the Egyptian al-Jihad al-Islami and the still-militant faction of the Islamic Grouping; as well as Pakistani groups such as Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet and Harakat al-Mujahidin.



It may well be that with the accession to political power of the Jami`at Ulama-yi Islam and the Jama`at-i Islami in the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, new civil leaders of the jihadi tendency are emerging, focused especially on Kashmir, which have dissociated themselves from al-Qaida in order to avoid the Pakistani government manhunt. The abandonment of violence by a major faction of the Islamic Grouping is also disturbing to the remnants of al-Qaida.





Friday, January 17, 2003





French President Jacques Chirac issued a blunt and forceful warning today to the Bush administration that for it to launch a unilateral attack on Iraq without a second, explicit UN Security Council resolution would constitute a breach of international law. Too right! It is absolutely unacceptable that the Bush administration should act in such a high-handed manner, and can only have bad repercussions on the US throughout the world. It is a horrible idea. Launching a war with a security council resolution is risky enough! But at least then it would have some legitimacy.



Thursday, January 16, 2003





* President Bush yesterday came out against the University of Michigan's admissions process, calling it a quota system because it takes race into account. What a crock. Obviously quotas are bad, but the U-M system doesn't employ them, and Bush knows it. He has just concluded that playing the race card two years before the election cannot hurt him with minority voters (not big constituents except some Hispanics anyway) because by then they'll have forgotten all about it, but might help him among closet racists in the white community. In actual fact, admissions are very complex. People also get extra points for being out of state and for being from states that don't send many students to Michigan. They get points for all sorts of things--evidence of artistic creativity that SAT scores don't measure, etc., etc. Michigan has an extremely regressive set of taxes, with a 6 cents on a dollar sales tax that hurts the poor. What Bush is saying is that poor African-Americans, Latinos and other minorities in Michigan should contribute part of their income to a university to which they can't hope to gain admission because the culture of testing is skewed toward the skills of the white middle and upper classes. Minority representation at the University of Texas Law School plummeted and has never recovered after they were forbidden to take race into account. Few African-American lawyers means few judges and little social power, thus exclusion from the ability to shape US law and practice. That is what this entire campaign against the Michigan admissions process boils down to. It is an attempt by rich white kids to make sure that they remain on top in this society. The alternative that Texas, Florida and California have adopted, of admitting the top ten percent of each high school, only produces undergraduate diversity because this country still has de facto racial segregation, so that school neighborhoods are often dominated by one race or another. It is an unsatisfactory system, because instead of giving us the brightest and most creative students, it gives us those who did best in their particular school settings (it is not difficult to excel in some schools). And, this remedy does not work at the level of professional schools. Now that Clarence Thomas has spoken out against cross burning, maybe he will speak out against its educational equivalent, which is what Bush just engaged in.



* Pakistani physician Ahmad Javad Khwaja is under arrest in Pakistan for allegedly having given refuge to senior al-Qaeda figures at his villa near Lahore. Four other members of his family have also been detained.



* It was reported that the Bush administration may go to war against Iraq without a Security Council resolution authorizing such a step. The current resolution insists on weapons inspections but stops short of stipulating military action in case they are unsatisfactory. Britain came out in favor of trying for a UNSC resolution. Saudi Arabia and Turkey have already said that their degree of cooperation with a US war effort will depend on a United Nations resolution. Even the foreign minister of Kuwait was talking like that last fall. I suspect this report is a trial balloon, to see what the domestic and international reaction would be. Let me be clear. I have said publicly that a war against Iraq might be justified under some circumstances and might even have some beneficial effects (getting rid of the fascist Baath that has committed virtual genocide against Shiites and Kurds is one). But if the Bush administration declines to go back to the Security Council for authorization, it will put the US in breach of the United Nations Charter and I will be out marching in the street against such an illegal war.





From: H-LEVANT Editor

Subject: Cole on Lewis, _What Went Wrong?_

To: H-LEVANT@H-NET.MSU.EDU





Bernard Lewis. What Went Wrong: Western Impact and

Middle Eastern Response. New York: Oxford University

Press, 2002. 172 pp. Index to 180. Hard covers, $23.





Reviewed by Juan R. I. Cole, Department of History,

University of Michigan





Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? is a very bad book

from a usually very good author. How a profoundly

learned and highly respected historian, whose career

spans some sixty years, could produce such a hodgepodge

of muddled thinking, inaccurate assertions and

one-sided punditry is a profound mystery. While I

cannot hope to resolve the puzzle, I can explain why I

come to this conclusion.





Lewis never defines his terms, and he paints with a

brush so broad that he may as well have brought a broom

to the easel. He begins by speaking of the "Islamic

world," and of "what went wrong" with it. He contrasts

this culture region to "the West," and implies that

things went right with the latter. But what does he

mean by the "Islamic world?" He seldom speaks of the

Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who form a very

substantial proportion of the whole. Malaysia and

Indonesia are never instanced. He seems to mean "the

Muslim Middle East," but if so he would have been

better advised to say so. With regard to the Middle

East, what does he mean by the question "what went

wrong?" Does he mean to ask about economic

underdevelopment? About lack of democracy? About a

failure to contribute to scientific and technological

advances? About ethnocentrism? All of these themes

are mentioned in passing, but none is formulated as a

research design. If "what went wrong" was mainly

economic, political and scientific, then why pose the

question with regard to a religious category? Lewis

straightforwardly says that Islam in and of itself

cannot be blamed for what went wrong (whatever that

was). Since Islam is not the independent variable in

his explanation, why make "the Islamic world" the unit

of analysis? Discerning exactly what Lewis is

attempting to explain, and what he thinks the variables

are that might explain it, is like trying to nail jelly

to the wall.





Lewis has a tendency to lump things under a broad

rubric together that are actually diverse and perhaps

not much related to one another. Speaking of classical

"Islam," presumably about 632-1258, Lewis says that the

"armies" of "Islam" "at the very same time, were

invading Europe and Africa, India and China" (p. 6).

Here he makes it sound as though "Islam" was a single

unit with a unified military. Later, (p. 12) he

actually speaks of the Crusaders' successes impressing

"Muslim war departments," as if medieval institutions

were so reified. In fact, Moroccan Berbers fighting in

Spain are highly unlikely even to have known about the

Turkic raids down into India. Nor is it clear that

those Turks were motivated primarily by Islam

(pastoralists have been invading India from Central

Asia for millennia). Moreover, tribal alliances

across religious boundaries bring into question the

firmness of the military boundaries suggested by

speaking of "Islam." Even the early Ottoman conquests

in Anatolia were accomplished in part through alliances

with Christian tribes. Finally, much of the advance of

Islam occurred quite peacefully, through Sufi

missionary work for example.





When discussing some European fears of the Ottomans

(p. 9), Lewis lets it slip that the Iranian Safavids

sought alliances with the Europeans against their

Ottoman enemies. Lewis does not tell us that the

Ottomans also made Protestant alliances in the Balkans

against Catholic powers. Since Europeans were fighting

amongst themselves, and Muslim powers were fighting

amongst themselves, and each was willing to make

tactical alliances across religious boundaries, it is

not clear what is gained by setting up a dichotomy in

the early modern period between the "West" and "Islam."





When speaking of Ottoman military weakness, Lewis

generally skips over the brilliant fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, when the Ottomans won wars in

Europe handily in part because they quickly took up

field artillery and their Janissary infantry was an

early adopter of the matchlock. Military historians do

not think central and western European armies began

having a technological and organizational advantage

over the Ottomans until after 1680. From Lewis's

account here one would have thought that the Ottomans

were all along somehow backward.





When Lewis does speak of the military advances of

the Europeans in the 18th century, he does not specify

what they were, and he does not say why the Ottomans

failed to adapt, merely noting the failure.

Comparative historians have long held that Western

Europe was innovative in warfare and technology in this

period because it consisted of many small states

constantly at war with one another. Many small states,

moreover, could not stifle innovation or impose

censorship effectively, since if only one broke ranks

the innovation could be introduced. Large empires such

as those of the Ottomans, the Mughals and the Qing

tended to be more complacent, simply because they faced

fewer powerful challenges. The Mughals never much

improved their casting of cannon over two centuries,

for instance, because it was perfectly serviceable

against the rebellious clans they faced. And the

regulatory power of these great empires was vast.

Lewis, by neglecting to discuss such social and

structural explanations, implicitly displaces the

question onto character or culture. The Ottomans were

hidebound, he implies, because Muslims look askance at

learning from the infidel. How such an explanation

could hold given the innovations adopted by the Ottoman

military in the sixteenth century is not clear.





Lewis repeats his often stated contrast between

curious Europeans who established chairs in Arabic and

tried to learn about the Orient, and remarkably

self-satisfied Muslims who did not interest themselves

in the outside world. In fact, the primary impetus for

the study of Arabic in Europe until the twentieth

century was that it helped in deciphering biblical

Hebrew, a matter of interest to European Christians for

internal reasons. Further, since al-Biruni learned

Sanskrit to write about India, Shahristani created an

encyclopedia of the world religions, and Qadi `Abd

al-Jabbar and many other Muslim theologians engaged at

length with Christian doctrine, Lewis cannot mean to

suggest that such a lack of curiosity was

characteristic of Islam or Muslims all along. He must

surely mean to say that after 1492 there was relatively

little such curiosity.





In fact, after that date the Spanish Inquisition

forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Muslims in

Andalusia and ruthlessly executed the recalcitrant.

The Andalusians had been key transmitters of knowledge

between civilizations, and now they were gone. The

eminent medieval historian R. I. Moore has called

Europe in this period "the persecuting society." In

the age of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions the sort

of access Muslims would have needed to Europe for a

study program in Occidentalism was largely denied them.

(Lewis admits this briefly on p. 42 but elsewhere

keeps blaming Muslims for being unduly insular in this

regard!) They were confined to a few trading enclaves

in places like Venice, and even there a debate raged

about whether they should be allowed. In contrast,

Christian Europeans lived freely in Muslim lands.

Rather than blaming Muslims for knowing so little of

Europe in the age of the Inquisitions and the Wars of

Religion, one might well view that continent as

isolated from the rest of the world in that period by

its own paroxysms of religious intolerance. Lewis

notes abstract juridical reasoning by muftis about

whether a Muslim should live in a state ruled by

non-Muslims (the jurists said "no"), but does not take

into account realities on the ground. Real Muslims in

fact paid no attention to such strictures when living

under Christian rule in southern Spain before 1492.

Muslims also lived under Hindu and later British rule

in India despite what jurists may have said.





Lewis creates a problematic West/Islam dichotomy

virtually everywhere. When he comes to Bonaparte's

invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the expulsion of the

French in 1801, he says that "the French were forced to

leave-not by the Egyptians nor by their Turkish

Suzerains, but by a squadron of the Royal Navy . . ."

In fact, the Egyptian populace revolted more than once

against French rule, and the British and the Ottomans

allied to expel the French from Egypt. While the role

of the British navy was pivotal, significant Ottoman

land forces at Akka and in Egypt also fought crucial

battles that helped convince the French to surrender.

A joint British-Ottoman military alliance to expel the

French, however, complicates the story he wants to

tell. The Ottomans are reduced to the burghers of

Hamelin, forced to call upon a British pied piper who

would rid them of the French rats. In fact, the

British needed the Ottoman alliance against the French

to protect their Indian routes as much as the Ottomans

needed the British.





In discussing nineteenth-century Muslim responses

to the new superiority of Europe, Lewis says that they

could not consider science and philosophy the secret of

success because they reduced philosophy to the

handmaiden of theology. Yet, it is the hallmark of the

thought of the Egyptian Rifa`ah al-Tahtawi (1801-1873)

that he views European advances in "practical

philosophy" to be the major reason for their

flourishing civilization. Similar views were held by

Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. It is unaccountable

that Lewis does not know this. Lewis goes on to

discuss attempts to found factories in the Middle East,

and simply says "the effort failed, and most of the

early factories became derelict" (p. 47). He maintains

that these efforts were largely aimed at equipping

armies. While it is true that the Egyptian textile

industries ultimately failed, at their height they

employed some 40,000 workers and were involved in

rather more than making uniforms. Later silk factories

in Lebanon were also highly successful for a period of

thirty or forty years. Debate rages as to why early

attempts at industrialization failed in the Middle East

in the long run. Some blame the restrictions European

powers placed on tariffs in the treaties of 1838 and

1840, while others point to Egypt's lack of coal for

energy, and of trained mechanics who could perform

maintenance on the imported machines. Middle Eastern

silk industries fell behind Europe in part because

Pasteur invented a way of quarantining healthy

silkworms against diseased ones, while Lebanese and

Iranian worms suffered from such outbreaks. Lewis here

as elsewhere attempts no explanation, simply noting the

failure of industrialization in the region.





He then adds that "later attempts to catch up with

the Industrial Revolution fared little better" (p. 47),

linking the present-day with the 1840s without any

segue. In fact, the 1960s and after witnessed

extensive industrialization in the Middle East. The

decade of the 1960s saw a substantial rise in living

standards for Egyptians, after a wage stagnation

1910-1950. Everywhere in the region industry now makes

up a significant part of local economies, which are no

longer primarily agricultural. Light textiles have

been a relative success story in Turkey and even in

Pakistan. There are real problems with the economies

of the Middle East, but to say that the development

efforts of the past fifty years have been no more

successful than those of the nineteenth century is

frankly bizarre. That the rise of Israel put pressure

on Arab budgets, when a different sort of neighbor

might have allowed them to invest the money in more

fruitful areas than the military, is never considered.

Among the biggest problems for Middle Eastern economies

have been high rates of population growth, which Lewis

does not even mention. That is, Pakistan's economy has

grown a respectable 5 percent per annum or so in the

past twenty years, rather better than Hindu India's 3

percent, but the population growth rate is so great

that the per capita increase remains small in both

countries. Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country,

has done even better than Pakistan economically, and

does not have a similar population problem. Lewis does

not mention Muslim countries like Malaysia. He is not

writing analytical history here, with a view to

explaining particular problems by isolating independent

variables. He is writing moral history, which is

tautological. He seems to insist on erasing any

successes they have had, and to imply that the Muslims

have failed because they are failures.





The supercilious air of the bemused put-down

suffuses this book. Lewis tells us that it is "sadly

appropriate" that the first telegraph sent from the

Middle East to the outside world concerned a military

event, the fall of Sebastopol. He adds, with drop-dead

timing, that "it is also sadly appropriate in that it

was inaccurate; it hadn't yet fallen" (p. 51). What

sort of history writing is this? The clear implication

is that the important news about the Middle East has

for some time been military. The other clear

implication is that the military news coming out of the

region is full of falsehoods. The use of clever asides

to create such a latticework of calumny has more in

common with the techniques of propaganda than with

academic history. Has Europe witnessed fewer wars

than the Middle East in the past two centuries? Surely

the comparative death toll from wars is about 100 to

one in that period in Europe's favor. Even the Crimean

War, the butt of the joke, was primarily a European

conflict in which France and Britain objected to

Russia's aggressive invasion of the Principalities

(Romania) and riposted with Ottoman help in Russia's

Crimea. As for the inaccuracy, it was more premature

than false. It is not clear that Middle Eastern wars

generate more lies and propaganda than other wars, in

any case. Truth is the first casualty of war, the

saying goes. It does not specify "Middle Eastern war."





Lewis virtually ignores European colonization of

the modern Middle East. He alleges (p. 153) that it

was "comparatively brief and ended half a century ago."

The French ruled Algeria 1830 to 1962. The British

were in what is now Bangladesh from 1757 to 1947.

While the British only formally ruled Egypt 1882 to

1922, it was already making and breaking its rulers in

the 1870s, and continued to play a heavy-handed role in

Egyptian politics and in the Suez Canal until 1956.

Radical Islamism was first provoked to terrorism in

Egypt precisely by the arrogance of British power

there, beginning a genealogy of violence that leads

through Ayman al-Zawahiri directly to September 11,

2001. In a marvelous bit of misdirection, Lewis

praises the "Chamber of Deputies" that British colonial

administrators allowed to the Egyptians, which was

merely an ineffectual debating society. He neglects to

inform the reader that in 1880-1881 a popular Egyptian

movement arose that imposed on the dictatorial Ottoman

governor a real parliament with the purview of

budgetary oversight, and that in 1882 the British

invaded to overthrow this democratic experiment and put

the autocratic Khedive back on his throne as their

puppet. In any case, Franco-British involvement in

the Middle East was not "brief." If we include

various forms of economic imperialism with actual

colonization, the period would be even longer.





Nor is the length of European rule the only

important factor. How deeply did they affect the local

economy and society? The French powerfully shaped

Algeria in ways that certainly contribute to its

current travails, including substantial expropriation

of land from owners and peasants and the creation of a

comprador bourgeoisie. While one certainly cheers the

British for giving refuge in Palestine to Jews fleeing

Hitler, it would have been nobler yet to admit them to

the British Isles rather than saddling a small, poor

peasant country with 500,000 immigrants hungry to make

the place their own. Nor was it a good idea, having

created such a situation, to simply leave and let the

two populations fight it out. The British exit from

South Asia was similarly botched, leaving us with the

Kashmir dispute as a nuclear flashpoint. Lewis's

attempt to virtually erase two centuries of European

imperialism and all its long-term consequences with a

wave of the hand is breathtaking. Nor did all

significant decolonization end half a century ago. The

French did not leave Algeria until 1962, and the

British did not leave the Persian Gulf until 1969.





Lewis repeats the tired saw (p. 62) that there was

widespread support in the Middle East for fascism in

the 1930s. That some urban groups admired Mussolini in

particular is true, but they were hardly "widespread,"

and not all of them were Muslim. Young Egypt, a minor

fascist-inspired party, had its analogue in the

Phalange Party of some Maronite Christians in Lebanon,

and later on in the Stern Gang and other Revisionist

Zionist movements. Israel Gershoni has shown that

Egyptian mainstream intellectuals roundly condemned

fascism in the 1930s. Moreover, since the vast

majority of Middle Easterners at the time were

illiterate peasants, and the transistor radio had not

yet been invented, the likelihood is that most of them

had never heard of fascism or Mussolini, much less

leaning toward them. Lewis alleges that "Muslims

developed no secularist movement of their own" (p.

103). It is difficult to understand what this could

possibly mean. Obviously, if he is referring to

believing Muslims, they would not be secularists. If

he means persons of Muslim background, then the

secularist wing of Iran's National Front in the 1940s

and 1950s was developed by Muslims; the secularist

policies of Muhammad Reza Pahlevi were developed by his

circle of Muslim technocrats; Turkey's secularist

movement was developed and promoted by Muslims; and

although the Baath Party was initially the brainchild

of Christian Arabs, its secularist ideology was taken

up with alacrity by Syrian and Iraqi Muslims in large

numbers. Nor is it true that a separation of religion

and state never occurred in Islam, in contrast to

Christianity. Ira Lapidus dates such a separation from

the classical period of Islamic civilization.





A final question has to do with Europe, the

explicit contrast for the Muslim Middle East in this

book. Why does he think things "went right" in the

West? I should have thought that the slaughter of

World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, the 61

million butchered in World War II, the savage European

repression of anticolonial movements in places like

Vietnam and Algeria, and the hundreds of millions held

hostage by the Cold War nuclear doctrine of "mutually

assured destruction"-that all this might have raised at

least a few eyebrows among emeriti historians looking

for things that went wrong. It is true that the East

Asian and European economies have flourished in the

past 50 years under a Pax Americana, but this

development hardly seems intrinsic to the West as a

whole. Political and economic instability relentlessly

stalked Europe in the first half of the twentieth

century, and it was divided against itself in a bitter

ideological battle for much of the second half. That

is, even the Western European efflorescence of recent

decades took place against the backdrop of a deadly

Cold War that could have wiped us all out in an

instant. In contrast to the massive death toll racked

up by Europeans in the past century, Muslim powers in

the second half of the twentieth century have probably

killed only a little more than a million persons in war

(mainly in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s). The Middle

East has its problems and Muslims have theirs. Lewis's

analytical views of what those problems are, why they

have come about, and how to resolve them, would have

been most welcome, given his vast erudition. Instead,

he has chosen to play a different role in this book.







Reprinted with permission from Global Dialogue, vol. 4,

no. 4, Autumn 2002.



Wednesday, January 15, 2003



Egypt's president Husni Mubarak yesterday conducted a summit with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Riyad, in part over the looming Iraq war. Both expressed grave concerns about the current situation, and called on all sides to exercise restraint and to avoid resorting to a military solution to the crisis. They called on Iraq to implement Security Council resolutions. They also expressed dismay at the Israeli government's continued refusal to restart the peace process. They praised efforts to establish a common Arab framework for security.



Mubarak left Saudia after the summit.



It is pretty clear despite the diplomatic language of the communique that both Mubarak and Abdullah are very scared that the Iraq and Palestine crises have the potential to blow up the Middle East. These are seasoned leaders in the region who have remained in power so far by being attentive to threats to security and order, internal and external.



Neither has much chance of being listened to.



Monday, January 13, 2003





Thanks to [MM] and others for reactions to this posting on the UAE Islamic law conference and the issue of suicide bombings.



War is a very messy thing, and attempts to think about it in terms of legalities have been dogged by inconsistencies and difficulties of implementation. Nevertheless, war crimes are recognized as a legal category and war crimes trials have been held, including, recently, that of Slobodan Milosevic.



I believe that the medieval Muslim jurists (and before them the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad) who laid down the laws of war were engaged in an ethical task that has clear similarities to that of the framers of the Geneva Conventions. They were attempting to specify what actions were licit during war. What they held was that warriors fight warriors. Muslim warriors were not to slaughter innocent women and children belonging to the enemy side.



Medieval Muslim thinkers quoted a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, ""Set out for Jihad in the name of Allah and for the sake of Allah. Do not lay hands on the old verging on death, on women, children and babes. Do not steal anything from the booty and collect together all that falls to your lot in the battlefield and do good, for Allah loves the virtuous and the pious."



Likewise, Sahih Bukhari gives an anecdote about the Prophet being dismayed when a woman was killed in battle, and forbidding it. Now, the pagan Meccans had chased the Prophet and his companions out of Mecca, and so were in the position of occupiers of that region, and were actively trying to kill Muslims. They had tried to assassinate the Prophet himself! Yet the Prophet was disturbed at the idea of Muslims killing pagan Meccan women in the course of battles, and he forbade it.



I therefore find al-Qaradawi's position illogical and un-Islamic, since he holds that occupation of Muslim lands justifies the deliberate killing of innocents among the enemy. I know of no classical Islamic jurisprudential grounds for such a position, and it contradicts the sunna of the Prophet. I think Dr. Hasan Safar's position makes far more sense within the Islamic legal tradition. (It is Safar with a sin, by the way, not al-S.affar).



Likewise the hadith corpus makes it clear that Muslims are to avoid creating an aversion to Islam. Thus, again from Bukhari: "It has also been narrated by Sa'd b. Abu Burda through his father through his grandfather that the Prophet of Allah (may peace be upon him) sent him and Mu'adh (on a mission) to the Yemen, and said (by way of advising them): Show leniency (to the people) ; don't be hard upon them; give them glad tidings (of Divine favours in this world and the Hereafter) ; and do not create aversion. Work in collaboration and don't be divided."



Since for Muslims to blow up babies in their strollers, kids in dance clubs, patrons in pizzerias, and college students in cafeterias creates an aversion to Islam, I should think it would be contrary to Islamic law simply on those grounds.



Obviously, it is possible that in the course of fighting a just war, women and children will be killed accidentally. This was recognized in Islamic law and excused as long as there had been no deliberate intent to harm innocents. In ethics, everything is a matter of intent. Once you admit that there are just wars, then you are simply going to have to live the with likelihood that some innocents will be killed. This is different from deliberately setting out to kill innocents, and even to kill mainly innocents.



Both in Islamic law and in the Geneva conventions, the deliberate targeting of civilians is condemned. (By the way, if the comparison is the US campaign in Afghanistan, it is deeply flawed. The New York Times was unable to document more than 450 non-combatant deaths in that war, which overthrew the tyrannical rule of 60,000 Taliban who had harbored international terrorists on a large scale. All of those casualties are highly regrettable, but they were not intentional).



Al-Qaradawi's attempt to distinguish between killing Israeli civilians and killing other civilians seems to me untenable. Let us say a group of American civilians goes to Kabul. And let us say that al-Qaida remnants believe Kabul is under American occupation. Is it all right for them to blow up the American civilians? How would such an act be different from Hamas blowing up Israeli civilians? Al-Qaradawi's position is a slippery slope that leads inexorably to terrorism. For, of course, the US according to al-Qaida was in "occupation" of Eastern Arabia, which then monstrously authorized September 11 in their eyes.



I am a little surprised that MM frames his response in part by questioning my ethical balance in not condemning the deliberate killing of civilians by parties other than Muslims. I actually think I have been consistent in this regard (and this goes back to my college-era protests against the Vietnam war). He clearly has not been reading my weblog at www.juancole.com .



The discussion at this particular panel at UAE conference was not about just war or the Palestinian right of self-defense (i.e. fighting Israeli *soldiers*). It was about the Islamic validity of deliberately targetting primarily civilians.









Sunday, January 12, 2003





Asharq al-Awsat reports today that a contentious debate broke out in the UAE at the 14th Annual conference of the International Congress for Islamic Law concerning the permissibility of suicide bombings. A scholar named Hasan Safar argued that while individual efforts against an enemy army are approved by medieval jurists, the Islamic legal tradition condemns such actions where they harm innocents in markets and so on. He further argued that the suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians in Israel have been not only un-Islamic but also politically inept insofar as they allowed the Israelis to delegitimize the Palestinian movement as terrorist in nature.



(There is a Hasan Safar from Kuwait listed at UNESCO. Does anyone know if this is the same man?)



The Egyptian Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi (Azharite and old-time Muslim Brotherhood activist) was there, and expressed amazement at Dr. Safar's position. He agreed that hijacking an airplane full of innocents is forbidden in Islamic law. But he upheld suicide bombings against a power that was occupying Muslim land, as in Palestine. He identified this sort of action as "defensive jihad," and condemned the idea that it is terrorism. Asharq al-Awsat's reporter felt that his view probably prevailed among participants.



Qaradawi, who is enormously influential, has stated this position in the past. He condemned unreservedly both September 11 and the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, which also killed German tourists. But he insists that virtually anything can be done to "resist occupation of Muslim lands." In his youth he was active in Muslim Brotherhood attacks on the British positions at the Suez Canal.

See http://www.islamonline.net/english/News/2002-06/23/article02.shtml



Qaradawi's rulings in Islamic law have a very wide following: http://www.qaradawi.net/site/topics/index.asp?cu_no=2



Qaradawi's position is at the least widely shared. Last summer the Saudi Ambassador to the UK revealed that he had had a private poll taken of British Muslims (who number about 1.5 million) and found that 80% of them support the Palestinian bombing operations. He suspected that support in the Middle East if anything would be higher. See http://www.ain-al-yaqeen.com/issues/20020719/feat7en.htm



I have to say that I see a logical contradiction (not to mention a moral lapse of huge proportions) in Qaradawi's position. Innocents are innocents. You can't logically speaking accuse a baby of being an "occupier" and deserving of being blown up for this reason. Medieval Muslim thinking on warfare always had special rules for the treatment of enemy women and children, who were to be safeguarded unless they were *active* combatants, in which case they would be treated like enemy soldiers. I am unaware of any support in classical Islamic legal thinking for denying to innocents the status of innocents merely because the soldiers of their people had managed to conquer land away from Muslims. I'm afraid that there has been a romance with terrorism on the part of the hardline Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots that goes all the way back to the 1940s. Western imperialism doesn't excuse everything.



Wednesday, January 8, 2003

Palestinian Childrens' Health Declines under Sharon







According to Asharq al-Awsat, a just-released Palestinian study reports that 33% of Palestinian elementary school children in the Gaza Strip under Israeli occupation are suffering from anemia. This is a tripling of the rate from before the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising two and a half years ago. Data indicates a strong link between this outbreak of anemia and the poverty imposed on the population by the Israeli blockade and the consequent unemployment. (The Gaza Strip is an economic black hole on its own; a third of its best land has been usurped by a few thousand Zionist settler-colonialists, and its borders are completely controlled by Israel, so that the blockade has essentially caused it to implode economically, with tragic results for children).



To help Palestinian children see the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund and the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. Save the Children also has a program in Palestine. Those little first-graders have not done anything to deserve being starved. And, I have to say, that Ariel Sharon doesn't look to me like he's missed too many meals.



Tuesday, January 7, 2003

Did the Reagan Administration Give Saddam Smallpox Samples?







I have a question for the biologically informed. We have all

been scratching our heads for some time as to why exactly the hawks in the

Bush administration have been so desperate to go to war with Iraq.

Opinion polls show that a majority of the American public thinks they have

not made their case.



I don't personally think control of petroleum sufficiently explains it

all. Petroleum is relatively inexpensive and Saudia remains the swing

producer, able virtually to set prices. It might be nice for the US to

have a base in southern Iraq or to have more assurance about stability in

Gulf affairs, but is the situation dire enough to go to war over?



It cannot possibly be that they are impelled by fears that Iraq has or is

anywhere near to having a nuclear weapon, since a) there is not good

evidence that this is so and b) the Bush administration is treating North

Korea (or for that matter Pakistan and India) completely differently.

The difficulties that the anthrax terrorist had in effectively delivering

his spores to any significant numbers of people also make me skeptical

that anthrax or anything like anthrax is the real worry.



I have begun wondering if smallpox is driving all this to some large

extent. That is, the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and the talk of

nukes may be euphemisms for smallpox. According to wire reports, "A 1994

investigation by the Senate Banking Committee found that dozens of

biological agents were later shipped to Iraq [in the '80s] under licence from

the US Commerce Department." On Dec. 30 the Washington Post leaked

a Reagan-era memo from the early 1980s that showed determination to do

"whatever was necessary" to prevent Iraq from losing its war with Iran.

Presumably this was the context of Donald Rumsfeld's 1983 visit to Baghad and

the preparations for the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two

countries.



In early Nov., 2002, the Washington Post reported a CIA survey that

determined that four other nations have smallpox samples: France, Russia, Iraq

and North Korea. The last known case of smallpox in Iraq was in 1976, and

it seems to me highly unlikely that the Iraqi authorities cultured it at

that time. Since about 1980 the world has been free of it. The US and

the USSR had samples in their labs (we used to think they were the only

ones). So, one question is, where did these other three countries get the

samples from? Apparently France's stock had not been known before the CIA

announcement.



Ken Alibek has alleged that the Soviets had a program to weaponize

smallpox. Although there have been shadowy allegations that the Soviets

gave Iraq smallpox, these seem highly unlikely to be true. It is not as

if the two regimes were that close. Why not give it to East Germany

instead?



A related question is, did the United States give Saddam smallpox samples

during the Iran-Iraq war as part of its support for Saddam?



Unlike anthrax, smallpox wouldn't be hard to get started among an enemy

army or even population. It kills thirty percent of its victims. And

since no populations are any longer innoculated for smallpox, it would be

absolutely devastating.



This question leads to another one. Did Khomeini give up the war against

Baghdad in 1988 because the US gave Saddam smallpox samples, and Saddam in

turn credibly threatened behind the scenes to use them against Iran?

Khomeini was a determined individual and why he gave up so suddenly has

always been a mystery. He clearly regretted having to do so. If Iraq had

samples and Iran did not, Iraq could hope to innoculate its population and

troops. Iraq had already demonstrated its ruthlessness by using chemical

weapons on Iranian troops and on the Kurds.



Did Bush senior avoid invading Iraq in the first Gulf War because he knew

Saddam had smallpox and might be tempted to deploy it if it seemed he was

in danger of being conquered?



Has US or Israeli intelligence gotten wind in the past few years of Iraqi

contingency planning for use of smallpox to achieve strategic goals? Is

that what Israel is really worried about and what drives the neocons?



The costs to the US public of mass innoculation against smallpox, which

President Bush says he favors, would be substantial. There will be some

loss of life, especially among children, and some will get sick. The

monetary costs are not insignificant. Is this necessary precisely because

the administration knows the US gave smallpox samples to Iraq 17 years

ago?



Did North Korea in turn gets its stock of smallpox from Iraq?



If (and I stress the "if") Reagan-era officials deliberately packed up and

shipped small pox samples off to Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s,

shouldn't the American people know who exactly made that decision? Maybe

some of the same people taking us into war against Iraq now? Is there to

be any accountability?



I stress that all this is mere speculation. But I think someone should

get to the bottom of it.