Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The Bad, the Worse, and the Lousy

posted Sept. 23, 2014

THE WARS OF THE RELUCTANTThe Bad, The Worse, and the Lousy
Reluctant warriors like Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, and President Obama make special kinds of mistakes. We will see how those mistakes develop this time around.
The Obama Administration has just started its second Middle Eastern war, this one in Syria following some warm-up exercises in Iraq.  This follows the one it started in Libya back in March 2011, which, despite its coalition character and international legal pretense, may now fairly be reckoned a multi-dimensional disaster: it comes complete with a gratuitous failed state (as if we needed another one in the region), wild-eyed, murderous Islamist militias running around in the vacuum, a murdered American ambassador, collateral damage from Algeria to Mali to Northern Nigeria, and a probable forthcoming Egyptian intervention with consequences very much unknown.
Like that intervention, the one that began yesterday in Syria has been undertaken by a reluctant warrior. President Obama never wanted to be a war President; he wanted to be an un-war President, a wind-down-the-wars President. He also wanted to be a nuclear zero President, only to find himself presiding over the largest and most expensive nuclear weapons modernization program in decades (which is necessary and which is, if anything, too modest). So it goes.
Reluctant warriors do not often make good wartime commanders-in-chief.  Woodrow Wilson promised to keep the United States out of the World War only to enter it, and affect its termination, as a goo-goo-eyed secular crusader in a way that prefigured the toxic twenty-year truce that led to World War II and the Holocaust. Lyndon Baines Johnson did not want to Americanize the war in Vietnam in 1964-65, but he reluctantly gave in to his military commanders and advisors in the interest of “not losing”, bequeathing the counterproductive doctrine of graduated response that, in the end, lengthened the war and got more people on all sides killed in consequence. Reluctant warriors, whether prone to excessive ambition that would atone for the sins of violence, as with Saint Woodrow, or whether prone instead to dwell in the hell of half-measures, as with LBJ, make special kinds of mistakes. We will see how those mistakes develop this time around.
Mistakes of commission often follow mistakes of omission with reluctant warriors. As we have been at pains for years to make clear here at TAI, President Obama’s failure to devise and implement a judicious use of American power somewhere between direct military intervention in the Syria civil war and utter passivity contributed much to the rise of ISIS (along with the gradual but ultimately critical weakening of the Arab states and the Arab state system itself, the causes of which I alluded to last time). Leading from behind is one thing; sitting on one’s behind sounds similar, but it’s different.Leading from behind is one thing; sitting on one’s behind sounds similar, but it’s different. And now, as many warned, the President has fewer options, all of them distasteful, in an environment more radicalized, polarized, and militarized than he had two or three years ago. His instinctual Micaweberism backfired: Something did indeed “turn up”, but it’s nastier than a sewer rat full of bad whiskey.
As I described them in this space on September 17, the President’s options ranged—before yesterday—from bad to worse to merely lousy.
A lousy option would have been to simply demur, let another de facto presidential red line pass without action. All sorts of unfortunate consequences would have attended that option not chosen, to be sure. ISIS would look the strong horse in a region where nothing succeeds like success. No Arab coalition, or any coalition, would have formed against ISIS without American leadership, not that a truly effective one relative to the proclaimed mission has formed now. The U.S. reputation would have suffered further damage, driving frightened allies into dangerous forms of appeasement and self-help. All bad.
The worse option, which we may well choose by default in due course, is introducing U.S. troops once again into the heart of the Arab world—not just small numbers of Special Forces, but ultimately the “big army.” Airpower and special forces can devastate the ISIS military order of battle when it is in transit or set for battle out in the open. But they cannot drive ISIS out of towns and cities. That requires boots—and blood—on the ground, and if no ally will supply it, as seems almost certain, we will either have to do it ourselves or face defeat by our own definition of the mission.
So the reluctant warrior has chosen the bad option, for now: bombing without embellishment.  What will this option produce, militarily and otherwise?
Option Bad will come as good news to the large number of Syrian Kurds who have been fleeing to Turkey in recent days or who were about to do so. That is what probably accelerated the schedule, and while I lack detailed operational information, I am assuming that special attention is being paid to the area around Kobani in order to relieve the pressure and stop the refugee flow. That is all to the good, of course.
The air attacks will kill a lot of ISIS fighters—allied tribesmen as well as jihadi terrorists, foreigners as well as natives. Relatives of those dead tribesmen will know who killed them and will seek revenge against members of the American (and other) tribes responsible. They will seek this revenge possibly for decades and generations. That is not so good.
As for the jihadis, the call has already gone out to Muslims inside the U.S.-led coalition countries, in the Middle East and beyond, to exact revenge for what we have already done. Here (in translation) is what an ISIS spokesman said yesterday to the faithful embedded abroad: “Rig the roads with explosives. Attack their bases. Raid their homes. Cut off their heads. Turn their worldly life into fear and fire.” You have to hand it to the ISIS speechwriters; that’s very effective stuff.
Now, the French have taken responsibility publicly for attacks in Iraq but not Syria, as if that distinction makes any difference to the ISIS cadres who have erased not just the border between the two states but are making good progress on erasing the two states themselves. The United States is leading the whole effort. Everyone knows what side al-Sisi’s Egypt is on (except maybe some people in Washington). Announced “allies” include Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE. My guess is that these allies are named for decorative, not operational, purposes. Saudi Arabia is training FSA would-be fighters. Qatar’s contribution is letting us use the al-Udeid air base for this operation, and Bahrain’s is letting the Fifth Fleet fire cruise missiles from its territorial waters. Jordan’s forte is intelligence. The UAE may have actually contributed some airpower, seeing as how Emirati pilots recently got some practice bombing Libya from Egyptian airfields. I doubt if many—possibly even any—Saudi, Qatari, Bahraini or Jordanian aircraft took part in yesterday’s strikes.
I suspect that payback violence is on its way to all these countries in the region, not to exclude Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. (Yemen is already hosting a civil war in its capital so it doesn’t need outside encouragement.) France will probably be hit as well, and Britain too. The United States is now newly vulnerable to swarm attacks on American targets throughout the region similar to the Benghazi September 2012 fiasco.
As to the American homeland, attacks that would otherwise not take place cannot be ruled out. So please note in that regard Monday’s front page above-the-fold Washington Post headline: “Turnover at the top has DHS unsettled.” If that were not enough, consider that on Friday Omar Jose Gonzales made it over an iron fence and into the front door of the White House before the Secret Service stopped him to ask just what the heck he thought he was doing. Turns out he had an arsenal of eleven guns and ammunition—and a spotting scope—in his car, and a map of Washington with a line pointed at the White House. A month ago Gonzales had been spotted carrying a hatchet outside the White House; the guards spoke with him but let him go without further ado. Makes you wonder how ready we are for ISIS’s allies, doesn’t it?
The attacks will also destroy a fair bit of equipment, most of it ours by origin—which is ignominious in its own way if one is prepared to connect the dots that explain how that happened. But it will drive what heavy equipment we miss into hiding, and it will accelerate the melting of ISIS cadres into urban areas. This will slow ISIS’s operational tempo, but it will not destroy it. It may reduce its order of battle as marginal types think better of risking their lives, but that will only leave a radicalized true-believer core. And the attacks will certainly make the United States enemy number one again, as we attract hatreds heretofore focused on local antagonists. It is very useful in the Levant today to have everyone know that you are the Americans’ enemy. It is a badge of honor. ISIS may therefore end up more than replacing the faint-hearted and dead—a possibility noted, by the way, by Marine General James Mattis at congressional hearings late last week.
And last for now, the strikes will persuade a lot of people in the region that the United States is secretly allied with the Shi’a. Secretary Kerry has been publicly talking about how all countries in the region need to help out in the anti-ISIS campaign, even as he asserts no explicit cooperation or coordination with Iran or the Assad regime in Damascus. He needs to stop talking. All this blathering just persuades the Sunni street further that the opposite of what he is saying is the truth, and that is because they simply look over their shoulders to gaze upon what passes for regional (sur)reality. The strikes did not include Assad regime targets, like airfields, as they should have, and this objectively helps Assad militarily. Arabs are not stupid so they know this, even if many are afflicted with a penchant for conspiracy mongering and magical thinking.
As for Iran, well, the Iranians said the other day that they might be willing to help us out against ISIS but we’d have to relent in the P5+1 negotiations on our insistence about how many centrifuges they can run. Now, only a fool would pay Tehran in the coin of a negotiation concession to do something that is in its own interest to do anywayNow, only a fool would pay Tehran in the coin of a negotiation concession to do something that is in its own interest to do anyway, but a lot of Arabs think we are fools—and given our repeated demonstrations of cluelessness, stretching now over at least two administrations, who can blame them? So when the Iranians say things like this, and we are seen to ponder the notion as opposed to ridiculing it, what are the Arabs supposed to understand?
By choosing Option Bad, President Obama has eliminated forever the possibility of going with Option Lousy. It is not possible to call back cruise missiles and drone ordnance and bombs once they have delivered their payloads. He has not eliminated the possibility of moving to Option Worse, however, when Option Bad fails to deliver the mission goal.
Will the President proceed to Option Worse? We cannot know because he does not yet know. Chances are, however, that if he does, he will do so reluctantly. That suggests that he will wait and temporize as long as possible while Option Bad fails, the result of which will be to produce the worst possible political optic, that of an America that is uncertain, deadly but still timid, uninspired and uninspiring, and above all unable to use its power to achieve its stated aims.
I do not envy our airmen, sailors and soldiers who must and will do their best under such circumstances. My heavy heart goes out to each and every one of them.

The Coalition That Isn't

posted Sept. 17, 2014

Martin Dempsey’s statement yesterday before a congressional committee that U.S.ground forces might be used in the campaign against ISIS means one of two things: either the General let a skunk loose in the barn, or he’s a deputized trial balloonist, floating a dragon kite for a President who is too politically astute to do that sort of thing himself (especially within hailing distance of the midterms).
If this were an adult Administration in terms of process and craft, I’d credit the possibility of the latter—and it may indeed prove to be the case. But I doubt it. I think General Dempsey just spoke his mind, as he is wont to do, and he implicated directions from the President himself as his permission slip: Bring me cases, one by one, said POTUS to the JCS Chairman (according to the JCS Chairman), and I may change my mind about the use of U.S. ground forces. So, recognizing both the principle of civilian control over the military—yes, yes, he said, he understands the President’s red line over the use of ground troops—and teasing out his maneuvering room as far as possible (it’s just another Obama red line, after all), he set the skunk loose.
But why? Is General Dempsey chomping at the bit to go kill Arabs? Not at all. He is simply worried, as a competent military professional ought to be, that the anti-ISIS coalition-building effort the President announced in a primetime Oval Office speech on September 10 is not going so well. Actually, it’s going so very not well.
Let’s count the ways and update the misanthropic realities of the week that has passed since I last wrote on this matter.
As I indicated, we need Sunni-state boots on the ground to accompany American air power, and we are failing mightily to get them. Secretary Hagel’s futile trip to Ankara has since been followed by Secretary Kerry’s futile trip to Ankara, and this is critical: Only three armies in the region have a combination of sufficient size and competence to stop ISIS. Two can be ruled out a priori: Israel and Egypt. (The Egyptians under President al-Sisi, as I said last time, may intervene in Libya, but they are not going to go out of their way to help us in the Levant, especially on behalf of an American administration they neither respect nor trust.) That leaves Turkey, and the Turks want no part of this. We cannot even get them to promise to better patrol their own border, which they are using as a release valve to launch their own young religious fanatics on a path to paradise…once their guts are spilled out all over the Syrian desert.
If we have no Sunni state allies willing to do the military scut work, and if we are not willing to attack Assad regime and Hizballah targets in Syria to show that we are not acting as a regional Shi‘a air force, then we have not acquired the means to accomplish the end: the extirpation of ISIS.
It gets worse. The Saudis are also not willing to put boots on the ground, only to train some FSA-related types on their soil. This is just as well, since the Saudi military is useless (again, this doesn’t apply to the National Guard, and it remains true despite the inane blustering from Saudi media lately about how well prepared and stalwart the Saudi military is). But the Saudis apparently are not willing to train very many: News reports put the number that we are willing to fund and that they are willing to train at 5,000. Now, a few months ago the ISIS order of battle stood at an estimated 10,000; more recent estimates (25,000-35,000) show us what a string of victories and a lot of money can get you. This is what a bias for the “strong horse” in a rent-a-crowd part of the world can do. How are 5,000 FSA trainees, even with a lot of help, going to master five or six or seven times that many crazed and increasingly experienced enemy troops.
While we’re talking about the Ahl Saud (that is not a typo, and if you don’t know the different between “al-“ and “Ahl” at the beginning of a transliterated Arabic noun, it simply means you have never studied the language, which of course is fine and normal), two other notes are worth the jotting.
First, the Saudis never wanted this training mission, because it is impossible to know who a Sunni “moderate” really is as an actual living individual person, and the last thing the Saudis want is a bunch of foreigners with military training and no special affinity to the Saudi state moiling around inside the Kingdom. They wanted and expected the Jordanians to do this, but the Jordanians, for exactly the same reasons, demurred. So what did the Saudis do? They cut their aid subsidy to Jordan—all of it reportedly, to the tune of about $1 billion.
Second, Riyadh is apparently having some success at kicking the knees out from under those upstart troublemakers in Doha. Since the Gulf Cooperation Council’s pulling of their Ambassadors in March and the Saudi reading of the riot act to Emir Tammim just a few weeks ago, the Qataris have expelled the members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood directorate who had taken up residence there next to Sheikh Qaradawi and Khalid Meshal. The Qataris have assembled a kind of theme park of Islamist freaks and fire-breathers in recent years and have used Al Jazeera as their publicist. The Saudis have found this theme park increasingly unentertaining. Hamas announced that Meshal was not expelled from Qatar along with the Egyptian MB crowd, but that fact remains to be seen. In any event, don’t worry about where the MB weary will rest their heads; my guess is that the Turkish government, our erstwhile NATO ally, will welcome them generously.
There is a point to be taken here: The Saudis are engaging in far more vigorous forms of elbow-throwing diplomacy than they have demonstrated in many years, and that is a direct consequence of two developments: their extreme nervousness over the rampant polarization and militarization of the sectarian enmity within Dar al-Islam, and their complete lack of trust in American policy. The Saudis are not about to stick out their necks against ISIS if the net result is to help Iran and its nefarious allies and militias, and the U.S. unwillingness to go “all in” with ground forces and to disavow its wooing of Tehran (which they probably have exaggerated in Riyadh) are largely behind that judgment.
Moreover, the culture of Saudi high politics is, like the rest of the culture, highly personal. They take the measure of other men, and when King Abdallah and his closest aides take the measure of Barack Obama, they see a cold-fish community organizer from Chicago, a lawyer who would be judge, and a man who seeks multi-sum consensus and would direct the actions of others—not a man who would drive decisions and act forthrightly at the head of the crowd. They see, too, a man whose red lines have repeatedly dissolved into sour pink lemonade. In other words, they see the man for what he is, and what he is is not a leader of a military coalition where everyone else in the slime pit is playing by zero-sum Hama rules.
The President has fallen into the habit lately of saying things he really ought to keep to himself. In Saturday’s New York TimesPeter Baker captured the real Barack Obama, and it’s worth quoting at some length how his “haunting” feature began:
Just hours before announcing an escalated campaign against Islamic extremists last week, President Obama privately reflected on another time when a president weighed military action in the Middle East—the frenzied weeks leading up to the American invasion of Iraq a decade ago.
“I was not here in the run-up to Iraq in 2003,” he told a group of visitors who met with him in the White House before his televised speech to the nation, according to several people who were in the meeting. “It would have been fascinating to see the momentum and how it builds.”
In his own way, Mr. Obama said, he had seen something similar, a virtual fever rising in Washington, pressuring him to send the armed forces after the Sunni radicals who had swept through Iraq and beheaded American journalists. He had told his staff, he said, not to evaluate their own policy based on external momentum. He would not rush to war. He would be deliberate.
“But I’m aware I pay a political price for that,” he said.
This is an extraordinary remark. The President sees decision-making on the use of force as principally a political matter, and of course the midterms are all but upon us. He is basically saying that he gave the September 10 speech because a rising war fever made it necessary, and that he has had to pay a political price for not lurching faster and further toward war. He mentions the strategic stakes involved not second or third, but not at all. Given the Saudis’ settled perspective on the President, one can only imagine what they took away from their reading of these remarks.
Of course, the Saudis in large part deserve their fears. In recent weeks the regime and its press have been trumpeting a global campaign to defeat terrorism. The hypocrisy of it all is breathtaking. Did the Saudis not pay al-Qaeda for years to take their mad show on the road and not attack targets in the Kingdom? They did. Did their schools not encourage young Saudis to go a’jihading to Bosnia and Chechnya and elsewhere? They did. Did the princes not finance the Wahhabi madrassas in Peshawar that sired the Taliban? They did that too, and much, much more. Now that the fires they set are burning out of control closer to home, the regime is suddenly seized with anti-terrorist rhetoric, and would hire others to transform the rhetoric into action. It looks smarmy because it is; as Elena Bonner once said, “Fear gives bad advice.”
So who is General Dempsey et al. left with as a ground-going coalition partner? Well, aside maybe from 5,000 FSA trainees, he’s got some Kurdish pesh merga and the Iraqi Army, such as it is. No wonder he’s thinking about the need to use U.S. ground forces.
The Obama Administration certainly cannot count on the Iraqi military for any significant help. As I explained last time, the Sunni tribes in Iraq are largely related to the folks across the once-upon-a-time Iraqi-Syrian border, and they are not about to go kill other Sunnis while Iran is helping a Shi‘a regime in Baghdad and sending Shi‘a Arab militias to murder Sunnis in mosques and markets. Last time I mentioned Asaib Ahl al-Haq in this regard—and today, a week later, the front page of the New York Times hasgotten around to mentioning them, but without telling readers that Asaib Ahl al-Haq is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian al-Quds force. (The photo caption on page 1 claims that Asaib Ahl al-Haq is patrolling near Tikrit with Kurdish pesh merga. If this is true—if the Kurds are active that far from Kurdistan and if they are willing to cooperate with nut-job Shi‘a fanatics in the pay of Iran—then the situation is even more convoluted than I realized.)
Iwould be remiss not to mention the U.S. diplomatic thrust in the coalition-building process. Just a few days ago delegates from 24 countries came to Paris to engage in some feisty coalition-building (muffled laughter is appropriate at this point). Of course this is just policy theater. The real business here is military to military following leadership to leadership. But if the real business is not going so well, the theater has been even worse: Cancel the show, take down the posters, and fire the actors. Among the invitees to Paris were the Russians. This is like inviting the arsonist, in the person of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov disguised as a dancing bear, into the firehouse.
As to the Russian mission, which is carrying Bashir al-Assad’s murderous portfolio into pinstriped company, Lavrov was forced to warn Secretary Kerry that unilateral U.S. military action in Syria, or any action that is not coordinated with the sovereign Syrian government, would be a totally unacceptable violation of international law. This is from a man whose government is fomenting a war in Ukraine and on whose behalf Lavrov is lying so widely and so often that his nose should have grown all the way to Paris and arrived before the rest of his body.
A lot of people would be uncomfortable in this role, but Lavrov appears to enjoy it, especially the part where he looks the clueless Kerry in the eye and says the most outlandish things he can think of. Kerry just swallows and blinks; what else can he do?
So what will happen next? I am more confident of what will not happen: The White House will not go kinetic in anything like a big way until after the midterms. The President will certainly not let General Dempsey use Special Forces or any other forces on the ground in Syria until after the results are in.
Meanwhile, as I suggested would be the case a week ago, the ISIS leadership is trying to make itself targetless. A report just the other day indicated that ISIS troops have melted away into the civilian population that is left in Raqqa, lugging their equipment to population centers to make sure, Hamas-like, that if attacked from the air there will be plenty of civilian casualties to stir useful outrage.
Every day that passes also helps ISIS get its hands on MANPADs and other devices capable of shooting down airplanes and helicopters. Some reports claim that ISIS is making money by selling oil on the black market; with that kind of money, a group could buy pretty much anything available—and a lot is available.
The more time that passes between what amounted to a U.S. declaration of bitter enmity (only Congress can declare war, supposedly) and nothing happening as a consequence, the more people in the region and beyond will conclude that this is just another of Obama’s dissolving red lines—just talk, just politics, just words pretending they are actions.
If it turns out that we have no allies who can and will effectively take the fight to ISIS on the ground, the President will be faced with a very difficult decision around Thanksgiving time: Go it alone without effective allies and watch as unattended air power fails to make a decisive difference, and thereby raises rather than lowers the prospect of attacks at home; commit U.S. ground troops to achieve the declared end, without knowing in advance how many troops, deployed for how long, the mission would take, or what the inevitable unintended consequences would be of inserting American forces again into the heart of the Arab world; or demur altogether. What will he do?
I don’t know, of course, because at this point neither does he. Total demurral would be costly in terms of reputation, and if it coincides with what the world interprets as final U.S. defeat in Afghanistan (alas, not so unlikely), the optic would be horrible. Among the Arabs nothing succeeds like success; if we back down, the enemy will have a field day at the expense of those we still call our allies. Not good.
Doubling down and sending first U.S. Special Forces and ultimately, one has to fear, the “big army” into northern Iraq and Syria would be, in my view, the biggest mistake we will have made since the Marines hit the beach in March 1965 at Vung Ro Bay. What a Christmas present that would be, and what an irony if the most force-reluctant President since before the Spanish-American War were responsible for a disastrous war that would long outlast his departure from office.
What’s left—air power without embellishment—is almost certainly not going to work, and its potential downside goes beyond the possibility of inviting terror attacks to our shores. It would also feed Arab grievance culture in a most unhelpful way and redirect the ambient hatreds festering in the region away from local antagonists and toward us. But as lousy an option as it will seem, it will still probably look better than the alternatives.
It is all well and good to point out that the President is largely to blame for his paucity of decent options—and it happens also to be true. It is true that, had he acted with a judicious use of U.S. power in the early stages in the Syrian civil war, he very well might have avoided the mess that he, and the nation with him, are in now. Plenty of people urged him, and plenty of people warned him—both inside his own Administration and out—that passivity would exact the highest price of all. He ignored them all.
But none of that matters now. U.S. foreign policy is not on videotape, so that we can, in effect, cut out this morning’s hangover and roll it back to late last night. What matters now is choosing the least bad among a set of all pretty bad options. We are fated to watch that play out over the coming autumn months. Next to a choice like that, a skunk in the barn just doesn’t seem all that serious a problem.

Do We Have a Strategy Now?

posted Sept. 11, 2014

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECHDo We Have a Strategy Now?
The President’s speech was good as oratory, but the lack of understanding of what is really going on in the Middle East means that the strategy the White House seems bent on pursuing is unlikely to succeed.

President Obama just can’t catch a break, it seems. He has been acutely reluctant to get the United States directly involved militarily in Syria over the past three years, and at least some of the reasons for his reluctance have been well founded. Nonetheless, he has been criticized for his passivity, ducking the prudent use of American power far short of direct military engagement, and accused of allowing the problem to worsen, the latest evidence for that judgment being the sudden and frightening emergence in June of ISIS (or ISIL or the Islamic State or, in Arabic acronym Da’ash—take your pick). Now, as the nation heard last night from the Oval Office, he has decided to use U.S. airpower in Syria as well as in Iraq in the context of a complex and protracted coalition effort to extirpate the threat, and he is being criticized again: for supposedly perching the country atop a slippery slope; both for saying he doesn’t need Congressional authority and for seeking Congressional buy-in anyway; for having dismissed the moderate Sunni opposition in Syria only to turn around and embrace it as an irreplaceable instrument in his new strategy; for having blurted out last week that we didn’t have a strategy for dealing with ISIS even as we were already bombing it in Iraq; and for a host of other supposed sins. Well, this is what being President gets you, and in a partisan ether, for which he is as responsible as anyone, this is what it smells like.
How to sort all this out? Let me start with the speech itself, then move to strategic analysis.
THE SPEECH
It was a pretty good speech. It was clear, brief, and it had the rousing patriotic and optimistic finish such speeches need, with not one but two invocations of the Deity. It also branched orthogonally in a delicate but unmistakable way to punch the Ukraine and other emotional buttons. The President neither stumbled nor lost his place, he made camera-eye contact, and looked more or less confident. All that makes for a good presentation, and, as a recovering speechwriter, I am sensitive to such framing issues.
I would also grant that what the President laid out adds, sort of, to a strategy, at least insofar as a real strategy can be articulated in that sort of limited venue. For example, the President made clear that the Assad regime was still on the enemy list, and hence that we would not be coordinating with it or in any way helping it—at least not deliberately. One could interpolate from this that we have Assad regime targets in mind, which would be a proper part of a complex strategy befitting a complex situation; but it remains to be seen whether the Administration, or the President, has yet bitten into that particular apple. As to the existence of a strategy or not, David Brooks said it best in answer to a question from Gwen Ifill on the NPR aftertalk show: If you’ve got four points, it’s a strategy; if you’ve got only three it’s just a list. (David was being both glib and telegraphic, and quite likely a significant percentage of the audience missed both the humor and the implied deprecation; but I enjoyed it immensely.)
So were there no screw-ups in the speech?  Looking just at small stuff (we’ll get to the bigger problems in a moment) there were only two.
The President said that his policy eliminated Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. This is both demonstrably and non-demonstrably false. The demonstrable part is that the Syrian regime has continued killing people with chlorine gas, which was not part of the list but which is still deadly. The non-demonstrable part, yet, is that the Syrians never declared their entire stock of chemical weapons, a point I have been at pains to make in this space several times. Even Secretary of State John Kerry has mused publicly about this possibility. So this remark was misleading if not outright wrong.
The second minor screw-up was the tossed off remark that ISIS (ISIL, IS, Daash) was not Islamist. And this screw-up was a double screw up. First, he should have said that ISIL is not Islamic, not Islamist, since, as he put it, no religion condones the killing of innocents. The former adjective is a just a modifier of the noun Islam, but the latter one denotes a political ideology that uses Islam as a legitimating device—that is the universal usage of the words as they have become integrated into our vocabulary over the past three or so decades. In that sense, ISIS, like al-Qaeda from which it originally sprang, is about as Islamist as it can be.
But supposing the speechwriters had not been derelict or lazy on this point, is ISIS also not Islamic? Well, in some oxygen-deprived airy abstract zone of theology, the President is right: Islam, and Islamic law strictly understood, does not condone the killing of innocents in war. This goes all the way back to Caliph Abu Bakr’s rules of warfare, and we are talking 7th century here. And of course we all know why the President said this: It was a preemptive strike against the bogeyman of Islamophobia. For the same reason George W. Bush once called Islam a religion of peace.
Ah, but is it true? The answer is, in theory yes but in practice no. No armed religious movement is peaceful by nature. Looking at the actual history of the matter, there are lots of examples of jihadis killing innocents in droves, very much including other Muslims. From the Almohads in Spain to the Hausa-Fulani in Africa, examples abound. Of course Christians have butchered innocents too, as any depiction of the 1099 Crusader massacres in Jerusalem will attest. Does that make Christianity not a religion of peace? Not necessarily: What it shows is that statements of such platitudinous generality are meaningless except as speechwriter offerings on the altar of political correctness.
Beyond the text and its delivery stands a question that, surprisingly to me, I have so far heard no one ask: Why give an Oval Office speech at all? Plenty of portentous Executive decisions get made without primetime speeches being given about them.  Why now, on this issue?
The short answer: the upcoming midterm elections, which the President identified many months ago, however disappointingly and improbably, to be the core of his legacy as President. The “we don’t have a strategy” gaffe hurt him, and it hurt the Democrats at least a little by extension. More important, thanks to the media hype about the two beheaded American journalists, public opinion has clearly and rapidly hardened in the context of a raft of official statements about how horrible and barbaric and dangerous ISIS is.  So the speech was just plain good politics. It allowed the President as leader of the Democratic Party to rally around the flag, which is always good for votes, especially so at a time when the President’s foreign policy ratings are way down in the crapper. In the few months leading up to the elections, the White House can readily modulate the use of U.S. military power so that no bad headlines appear about U.S. planes being shot down and American pilots being captured or killed.
It was, certainly, telegenically horrifying to more or less witness the beheadings of two American journalists. And the impact of such events on public opinion is nothing new; similar spectacles, like the sinking of certain American ships (the Maine, the Lusitania, the Reuben James), have also turned American public opinion to blood red in the past. Yet there is something about the personalization of the news these days, especially in the electronic media, that, as part of the noxious wave of celebrity culture washing over us, strengthens the effect at the expense of any effort to understand the larger context. When media companies compete for market share, they know that simplicity trumps nuance, that personalization trumps abstraction, and that pictures trump text. The cumulative result of decontextualizing facts and trivializing meaning is to imbecilize the body politic. That is, in part anyway, how wild swings in public opinion can happen so readily.
But however it happened, the political utility of grabbing on to the sudden shift of thezeitgeist was not lost on a White House that, with the possible exception of its Clintonian predecessor, is the most partisan-politically avaricious in my lifetime. That’s why the speech.
One final point, if I may, about the “words” part of the words-and-deeds amalgam that composes any foreign policy action. The U.S. government, again, has been imitating Hamlet. In an agonizingly slow process, we have been talking our way to the use of airpower against ISIS in Syria and, again and more so, in Iraq.
What do you suppose ISIS has been doing all this time as a consequence? Very predictably, it has been preparing as best it can to absorb these strikes and still come out fighting. How can it do this? Well, by getting its weapons, mostly of U.S. manufacture either bought or seized from Iraqi soldiers, out of the open desert air. It can do this by imitating Hamas, co-locating important assets near schools, hospitals, markets and so on, and by hardening bunkers for its leadership to dodge drones that would decapitate them. We have no reason to believe they would not do these things; they are not stupid just because they are religious fanatics. The terrain offers little opportunity for quick cover in that part of the world, except in the northern zones near Kurdistan where mountains are useful for hiding things. So the very threat of U.S. strikes might be slowing the operational tempo of ISIS, but by telegraphing what we are about to do, and even how we are about to do it, we have forfeited the utility of surprise and uncertainty. As our men and women in uniform understand very well, this is unfortunate.
THE STRATEGY
Even granting that there is a strategy, from what we can know about it from a curt Oval Office speech, it is flawed on at least three counts. First, the threat does not justify the means identified to address it, and those means are as likely to exacerbate the threat as to reduce it. Second, unless we get incredibly lucky, the means identified are insufficient to accomplish the stated objective, which is for all intents and purposes to destroy ISIS. Third, the objective presupposes and depends upon a contextual endpoint for a successful strategy that will not exist. Let’s unpack these assertions in turn.
The public analysis of the ISIS threat has been, as Daniel Benjamin is quoted as saying in today’s New York Times, a farce. He is exactly right. In the article, entitled “Struggling to Gauge Threat, Even as U.S. Prepares to Act”, you will find little snippets of the intelligence community’s private assessment of the threat. The sharp bias of that assessment is that ISIS lacks the ability to strike the United States and evinces little to no interest in so doing; no evidence exists that, like al-Qaeda, it has a “far enemy” as opposed to a “near enemy” focus. Its order of battle is small (less than 10,000 probably) and unstable, being a conglomeration of locals and foreigners and, more important, of fanatics and tribesmen along on the make for reasons of their own. The main danger posed by ISIS is to people stuck inside the ISIS domain, to Arab and Kurdish neighbors within reach, and to U.S. citizens, personnel, and facilities also within local reach.
The danger down the road, according to the common wisdom, is that returning jihadis could wreak terror back home, or ISIS successes could stimulate supportive copycat terrorism from likeminded fanatics in the United States and other countries. This is possible and certainly worth guarding against. But it is hard to see how airstrikes and drone attacks designed to decapitate the ISIS leadership can deter such behaviors. They are far more likely to elicit them.
Indeed, when the ISIS leadership told James Foley and Stephen Sotloff that they were being executed in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes, there was and is no reason to doubt it. We Americans, in the main, appear to have no end of trouble understanding how tribal societies work and think. They work in the absence of effective central and impersonal Weberian authority through means of balanced opposition in which all people are embedded in concentric nestings of family relationships, and in which there is collective responsibility and collective guilt for all things. If we kill them, the relatives of the dead are obligated to seek revenge in any way they can. It’s within the bounds of the tribal system to take revenge on relatives of the actual perpetrators of crimes; that’s how collective responsibility and collective guilt work. ISIS types simply assumed that Foley and Sotloff were members of the American tribes responsible for attacking them, so they were fair game for taking revenge. The possibility that other societies are not tribally organized is simply impossible for most of them to comprehend.
I am not trying to make excuses for the barbarities of ISIS and similarly fanatical groups. Islamists are not and never will be our friends. They are natural enemies at least theoretically. But contrary to what the President said last night, and to what virtually everyone seems to be assuming, ISIS is not a simple, standard, out-of-central-casting terrorist group. The President also emphasized that ISIS was not a state, noting that no other state recognized it as such. Sorry to be such a contrarian, but this is wrong.
Terrorism, as the standard definition has it, is the use by non-state actors of deadly force against random civilians to sow terror, so as to induce the target of the attack to react in ways harmful to its own interests and principles. That is why, as I have said many times before, the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor was not an act of terrorism. It was an act of unconventional warfare. Attacks against uniformed soldiers on foreign soil (or territorial waters) cannot be, by definition, an act of terrorism. Same goes for the October 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon. These were heinous acts, to be sure; but examples of terrorism they were not. When we conflate terrorism with anything we don’t like that happens to us, we in effect give license to our enemies to mangle the definition of terrorism in ways that suit them. This is not good.
Now let’s consider ISIS in light of this definition. What we have here is a kind of in-between case. ISIS is not—not yet, anyway—a regular army that invariably wears uniforms and insignia and responds to chain-of-command orders. When it places bombs in markets or shoots up a Shi’a mosque, it behaves as a terrorist organization would. But it is a lot closer to a conventional army now than al-Qaeda ever was, and the reason is that within its ranks are lot of trained soldiers from the old Iraqi and Syrian militaries.
And what are these forces doing? They are mainly trying to seize and hold fairly vast, state-scale swaths of territory, something terrorists never do. As I have written before, ISIS represents a classic pre-modern state-building effort, and it resembles in that effort a revitalization movement famously described by the anthropologist Anthony Wallace in the 1950s. The fact that no other state recognizes it as a state is irrelevant. ISIS wants to become a state, but a pre-modern one in which post-Westphalian niceties such a secular spaces for religious toleration and Western laws of war simply do not apply. So U.S. policy, and the President’s statements last night, are both misframing and exaggerating the threat.
Does that mean we should not attack ISIS in Syria and do so again, more muscularly, in Iraq? No. ISIS has become more capable since its emergence into Mosul a few months ago, and we have allies at risk and direct interests in their well being, since the moderate Sunni Arab states are our natural allies in dealing with both ISIS et al. (Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar as-Shams, etc.) and the real threat emanating from Iran and its proxies. It does mean, however, that we must see with eyes wide open what we’re getting into: We will likely create future cycles of revenge lasting perhaps for decades and even longer, since we now live in a world where, to paraphrase an old telephone company advertising slogan, it’s so easy to reach out and slap someone. Moreover, we will not protect ourselves from blowback by bombing ISIS in the Levant; we’ll need to use other modalities for that purpose. But we would do that in any case, one hopes, U.S. air attacks or no attacks.
Now, to means and ends. The President said we want to destroy ISIS, but without putting U.S. boots on the ground.  Can we do that by relying on Saudi training and Iraqi military force and a properly armed and supported Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish peshmerga and Jordanian intelligence expertise and Turkish support?  Maybe, but I doubt it.
Turkish support does not seem to be forthcoming, judging from Secretary Hagel’s futile recent trip to Ankara—this despite the fact that the Turks foolishly abetted ISIS’s rise and now regret it. The FSA might become a coherent and capable force, but that is not a sure bet either, given the capacious propensities of Syria’s Sunni merchant families to backbite one another. Could Saudi or Jordanian troops turn the trick? The Saudi military (as opposed to the National Guard) is almost completely useless, having never fought a serious battle before; the Jordanians are good, but too small to make a decisive difference. An Egyptian expeditionary force?  Such a force might turn up soon in Libya; it’s hard to imagine lots of Egyptian soldiers cavorting around in the Syrian desert, although under Mohammed Ali they made it that far in the 19th century.
Above all, the idea that Shi’a and Sunnis will fight side by side in Iraq against ISIS, now that there is a more inclusive Shi’a-led government in Baghdad, lies somewhere between the highly suspect and the downright risible. Neither Shi’a nor Sunnis have a strong sense of affinity with the Iraqi state, or what’s left of it, of which more in a moment. Why should Sunnis in al-Anbar province again risk life and limb for another Shi’a prime minister in Baghdad while Iran arms and sends Shi’a militias—Hizballah is a case in point—to kill Sunnis in Syria that, just by the way, are more often than not from the same tribal confederacies that straddle the once-upon-a-time Syria-Iraq border? They won’t, unless of course someone bribes them big-time to do so. But as soon as the money stops, they’ll stop fighting.
And here we come to the biggest flaw in the strategy: ISIS did not just fall from the sky one day. As I have explained before in this space, Iranian hegemonic exertions, via support for the murderous Assad regime in Damascus, via Hizballah, and via Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi in Iraq and its latter-day incarnations (Asaib Ahl al-Haq, notably), and other machinations as well, to include the political subversion of Lebanon, have raised an existential threat to the Sunni Arab regimes and have radicalized heretofore mostly latent sectarian cleavages in the region. When the feeble Sunni Arab states proved feckless in responding, the radicalization process, with mischievous help from countries like Qatar as well as Turkey, created the monster that is ISIS. The point? It is not possible to extirpate ISIS unless we also address its source: Iranian power projection through Arab Shi’a militias (which, by the way, extends all the way to the Houtis in Yemen).
That is why, if the United States attacks ISIS in Syria, it must also attack Assad regime assets and, for good measure, those of Hizballah as well. A good start, as others have recommended, is to crater the airfields where weapons transports arrive from Iran and Russia. Otherwise, the moderate Sunnis we hope to enlist as allies against ISIS will conclude that we have secretly sided with Tehran. And a nuclear deal that can be interpreted as a win for Iran will mightily reinforce that perception.
In a sense, then, the President announced only half a strategy last night. A half strategy is useful in the same way that half a brick is useful: It can be thrown about twice as far for purposes of partisan politics and propaganda, but otherwise it will not get the job done. If you will the end—the extirpation of ISIS—you must will the means; the President did not do that last night, and the preemptive exclusion of the use of American ground forces will not work to instill confidence in would-be partners or persuade them to extend their own assets in this fight. But of course the reason for saying that was, again, partisan politics through and through.
Now, finally, there is an implicit but powerful assumption here that once U.S. strategy succeeds—and that means, according to the President’s words, that ISIS is destroyed, Syria transitions to its post-Assad era, and Iraq has an inclusive, democratically functioning government—there will be a Syria and an Iraq in territorial configurations we all know from roughly the past century. Anyone with even half a brain who has been paying attention to this part of the world knows this is not going to happen. In the Westphalia-addled, history-truncated American mind, the state system is the only system there is or can be. The shapes on the map are sacrosanct, believed to possess an ontological reality no less firm than the material world itself.
I’m sure that U.S. policymakers in the mid-levels of this dilemma know better. They realize that there is no more Iraq as a state or Syria as a state. They know that something else will come to replace them, but the idea is so perplexing, so scary, and so inchoate, that it would be heresy to give voice to such a notion in polite interagency company. Like the mad uncle locked in the attic, everyone sort of knows he’s up there, but no one dares mention it.
The future of the Levant, or at least the parts that used to make up Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, is up for grabs. So is the land on which Kurds live in four countries. That future depends on a series of interlocking contingent decisions not yet made, so no one can readily predict it. But generically speaking, there are only three possibilities.
One is that borders will be rearranged and newly configured states and statelets will emerge. Syria could be divided into a rump Latakian-Alawi state running along the Mediterranean from the Turkish border south to the Lebanese border, and encompassing the great Damascus area, and a Sunni state stretching from Aleppo eastward into the desert and south to Dera’a. Iraq could be split into a Shi’a state in the south, a Kurdish state in the north/northeast, and a Sunni tribal area in between—like the current status quo somehow formalized. Lebanon might or might not be absorbed in part into a Syrian fragment.
A second generic possibility is that the area will be divided, with some Shi’a and Kurdish and Alawi statelets and rumps congealing but with the vast swaths of the Sunni tribal areas being absorbed into Saudi Arabia and Jordan. There is a possibility, too, that the Shi’a areas of Iraq might be absorbed into Iran, but this is unlikely because Persian and Arab blood is thicker than Shi’a water.
A third possibility is that urban areas will have something like normal government, but that vast stretches of the region will return to their tribal status quo ante, reminiscent of the 14th-16th century period between the rescission of the Mongol armies and the arrival of the Ottomans.
The chance that a single imperium could cover and control the entire space, as in the days of Assyria, Babylon, and the Persian Achaemenids or Sassanids, seems very far-fetched. Too bad, in a way, because the national security challenges for the United States of this fourth possibility would probably be a lot less acute than those of any of the other three.
But that is where the region is heading, to one of those three highly uncertain situations. If we had a strategy really worth the name, that is what we would be thinking about now—because the destruction of ISIS and the fate of Bashir al-Assad pale beside the real decision points to come.  And they’ll be coming faster than most people seem to realize.

Fighting Ebola

posted Sept. 8, 2014

Fighting Ebola
Whenever the U.S. Government has a choice between doing nothing and sending in the cavalry to sort out a non-vital national security contingency, it is a sure sign of an antecedent failure of imagination and planning.
President Obama’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. Government would use the American military to help fight the Ebola epidemic in West Africa distresses me greatly. I am not dismayed because the case for action is weak, and I certainly am buoyed by the fact that the President justified the decision as a matter of national security instead of “just” a humanitarian exigency. The calamitous Libya escapade, remember, was justified as a humanitarian intervention; as a rule, liberals are hard-pressed to use force for “selfish” national security reasons. So the President’s locution is refreshing in this light, doubly so in tandem with a slow-moving but apparently real intention to use at least a dollop of wallop against ISIS in Syria.
No, the reason I am peeved goes deeper than that: Whenever the U.S. Government has a choice between doing nothing and sending the cavalry in a non-vital national security contingency, it is a sure sign of an antecedent failure of imagination, usually of the structural design sort. Why on earth should we use a strapped and splayed military to do something that is not essentially a warrior mission? Answer: Because our policy toolbox is otherwise empty, and it’s empty because our political class is composed on balance of a bunch of narrowly self-interested dullards with the foresight of myopic toads.
What we need for situations like this—long predicted and widely understood in the analytic and even academic communities—is an U.S. Expeditionary Medical Corps. That would be a specialized and larger version of USAID “dart” teams, which are small but effective and highly mobile first-on-the-scene responders when there is a humanitarian emergency (earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and so on) somewhere that U.S. assistance is requested. “Dart” stands for Disaster Assistance Response Teams.
Leaders of “dart” teams are trained a little like a Coast Guard “captain of the port” is trained—in other words, to be someone who can get various civilian and security functions to coordinate and work together in an emergency. (In case you were in any doubt, this sort of thing does not happen spontaneously.) We don’t have many of these teams and they are underfunded, but beyond that they lack the technical and professional ability to deal with the threat of a pandemic.
Understanding this, and anticipating in a globalizing world the increasing danger of planetary-scale pandemics, a trove of commissions and studies—some government, some private; some large-scale, some by individuals—have been warning for years that the U.S. Government is not properly designed or prepared to deal with such contingencies. There are ongoing, semi-permanent institutions at various U.S. universities and policy think-tanks devoted to global health and medical issues, and many of them do excellent work, to very little practical avail. One of the functional organizations of the United Nations is the World Health Organization, and it too has issued a stream of recommendations over many years—all of which have pretty much been ignored by the U.S. government. The WHO is also poorly funded and varyingly staffed thanks to UN patronage corruption.
The closest the U.S. government has come to doing anything serious on this front came about a decade ago when Dr. Bill Frist, then a Republican Senator from Tennessee, prepared a bill calling for the creation of a U.S. Medical Expeditionary Corp. As a medical professional, he understood the issues. He understood above all that it is no act of charity for Americans to want to be able to get to and deal with a potential pandemic at or near its source, wherever it may be anywhere in the world. Rather, it is highly self-interested to want to do so, because once something like Ebola spills beyond the containment capacities of weak states—and they are all fairly weak in West Africa, as we have seen in recent weeks—the problem grows exponentially. There is no effective “Fortress America” strategy against pandemics.
I cannot remember if the bill was actually introduced, but it had no chance of passing anyway.  This is the sort of foresight that regularly fails to capture any attention in our Legislative Branch. If it costs money but cannot be shook to yield near-term campaign contributions from lobbyists, no idea is going to get very far just on its merits.
So push comes to shove, as it usually does, and the President has no choice but to send the military to do something it’s not really trained to do, that strains its budget, distorts its operational tempo elsewhere, and diffuses its core warrior ethos. Nothing new here; it happens a lot, whether it’s “nation-building”, so called, painting school buildings in Peru as a gesture in public relations, or eavesdropping on drug dealers from an offshore submarine.
In my proposal for a large-scale voluntary national service program based on a “baby bond” concept (you can read it in chapter 14 of Broken, my March 2013 TAI ebook), one of a dozen categories I listed for national service is precisely in a national medical expeditionary corps.
Young Americans who wish to use their baby bonds to help them become doctors, nurses, physical therapists, lab techs, and so on would be perfect volunteer service apprentices for what I envisage as a fleet of hospital ships and M-Dart Teams (Medical Disaster Assistance Response Teams). Their mission would be to improve health as an integral part of U.S. development assistant efforts and be dual-hatted as early-warning stations against pandemics. For public diplomacy as well as a host of other reasons, I want these U.S. ships sailing into foreign ports not with guns on view but flying the flag of the U.S. Medical Expeditionary Corps (USMEC):
flag-caduceus
As things stand now, the United States has but one hospital ship—the Mercy—and one private ship from the old Project Hope. This is woefully inadequate to the point of really inexcusable. It’s not just the Legislative Branch that is at fault here: no President in recent decades has had the foresight to do anything about this deficit, and no President since Dwight Eisenhower has really understood that, given how large organizations function, if you want government to do something new and necessary, you have to redesign its structure to have any hope of getting it right.
So off will go the U.S. military to do battle with Ebola. I wish the men and women assigned to this mission the best. I know they will do their best. And my heart just aches at the very thought that multiple sins of omission over decades has mandated this obscene mismatch of national assets and obligations.
Mr. President, in the time left to you in office, will you act so that no successor has to face the same sort of awkward choice you have had to face? This will not be the last pandemic that constitutes a national security threat to the United States. Be a leader, please.

Toot, Toot

posted Sept. 2:

Toot, Toot
Just a day or two ago came the news that the Libyan government, such as it is, has lost control of its own capital—Tripoli—not long after losing control of its airport there. The rump government is holed up in Tobruk now while Misuratan and Islamist rebels (Ansar al-Sharia and others) roam the capital’s desultory urban landscape. This is despite last week’s Egyptian-aided UAE airstrikes that were supposed to prevent exactly this outcome. There may be joy in Doha, for the Qatari Emir has long supported the presently winning clot of militias. But members of political elites in North Africa and the rest of the Arab world are by no means amused, and it is hard to imagine General al-Sisi tolerating such mayhem next door for long. Nor, chances are, do these elites look kindly on the Obama Administration and its clueless “humanitarian” war, without which the Libyan state would most likely not now be in an advanced stage of collapse.
Well, you might say, who knew? Who could possibly have foreseen such an outcome? Really want to know? Read the following excerpt from my essay, entitled “Down the Rabbit Hole”, published here on March 11, 2011:
It is unlikely that the Benghazi-based rebels could by themselves establish stable control over the whole country. It is almost as unlikely that the Tripolitanian tribes could re-establish firm control over Cyrenaica. . . . We are therefore looking into the maw of a Libya that may well be divided, in the throes of some kind of protracted, at least low-level civil war. . . . And in due course, if the fractious mess lasts long enough, there is a reasonable prospect that al-Qaeda will find a way to establish a foothold amid the mayhem. . . . Now, given that this sort of problem is foreseeable, and that it was also foreseeable before the cruise missiles started flying on Saturday, it stands to reason that a responsible, serious government will have thought about all this in advance, and come up with some plan for the post-combat “Phase IV” of the Libyan War, right? Not on your life; the President and his war council almost certainly have not even begun to think about this sort of thing, because they’re still in denial that it could happen. This is, after all, just a limited, humanitarian mission as far as they’re concerned. They don’t realize it yet, but these guys are on a path to make even Donny Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks look good—and you thought that was impossible.
Toot, toot.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The Ironies of a Palestinian State

posted August 6, 2014:


Now that a ceasefire appears to have taken hold in and over Gaza—a result, most likely, of the fact that Israel is done destroying Hamas’s tunnels and Hamas is starting to run out of missiles—it is only a matter of time before the so-called international community once against turns its attention to the great white whale of global diplomatic yearning: a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. As it happens, two ironies attach to this well-intentioned quest. Pointing them out is a little like an indiscreet remark at a dinner party about the mad uncle in the attic, but someone has to do it, and it might as well be me.
Marginal reservations about the two-state solution aside, it remains the goal of the (so-called) international community and the formal objective of U.S. diplomacy. The Oslo Accords are based on it as well, which means at least some Palestinians, as well as the Israeli government, are bound to it. And to hear most Palestinians talk most of the time, a separate state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem, is what they want.
One irony lies in the shifting positions of the two sides, very broadly construed. Back in 1984, when my friend Mark Heller wrote A Palestinian State: The Implications for Israel, he usefully scandalized the Zionist world. His argument, that a Palestinian state would be in Israel’s long-term interests under certain circumstances that Israel had significant control over, ran painfully against the grain of common wisdom at the time. Most Israelis and diaspora supporters of Israel still found the idea of an independent Palestinian state anathema; most sympathetic analysts remained enchanted, to one degree or another, with some variation of a Jordan Option (myself included). But now, after Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, after Oslo, and after the Likud Party under Benyamin Netanyahu threw in the Revisionist towel and accepted the proposition in 2009, mainstream Zionists overwhelmingly accept a two-state solution.
Back then, too, the vast majority of Palestinians articulated support only for a one-state solution: Palestine, built on the smoldering corpse of the State of Israel—in other words, the Hamas position. But now, according to Khalil Shikaki’s polls and plenty of other anecdotal evidence, most Palestinians are at least resigned to the two-state endgame, even if they don’t especially like it. Thus those who have argued that it’s now too late for a two-state solution because of Israel’s establishment of demographic facts in the West Bank miss the most important counter-development of all: More people than ever on both sides support it.
Despite this, the Palestinian political class, divided and weak as it is, remains either unwilling or unable to partner with Israel to bring a two-state solution about. And the compound condition matters. When the Palestinian side was able, under Yasir Arafat, it was not willing. Arafat’s PLO could have negotiated a state when Ehud Barak led Israel’s government in 1999–2000, but Arafat walked away at Camp David without even posing a counterproposal. He preferred being a live revolutionary to a possibly assassinated head of state. When the Palestinian side subsequently was willing, under Abu Mazen, it was not able to make a deal with either Prime Minister Olmert or Sharon, owing to its political weakness and societal divisions. From the Israeli point of view, it’s like trekking many miles in the scorching heat to a portentous meeting with one’s promised bride at the formidable castle of her uncle, only to find the uncle unwilling or unable to drop moat bridge and raise the portcullis.
The second irony is more complex but no less bracing. Let’s start simply by observing that 2014 so far has not been very kind to the Arab state, generically speaking. Neither was 2013, 2012, or 2011. Syria, Iraq, and Libya have pretty much fallen to pieces, and Lebanon breathes whatever vapors Syria wafts its way. Egypt is an economic corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead and so won’t fall down. (For my ducats there is no better symbol of the Egyptian circumstance than Cairo’s City of the Dead—a vast cemetery full of countless squatters.) Jordan is suffering a multi-sourced nervous breakdown, complete with anti-Hashemite mobs. Algeria and Bahrain are armed camps, albeit for different reasons. Tunisia is a political weathervane that cannot control its borders. Morocco is fragile and faces a rising Berber challenge. Yemen is an armed mess. Sudan is a truncated basket case. Only great gobs of resource rents keep Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar afloat and seemingly quiescent. Oman may be the only Arab country that has managed to keep its balance, and it’s not a real state anyway—just a family with a flag.
This sad state of affairs is not the wayward result of the so-called Arab Spring. Not only does it long predate the Arab Spring, but all that misnamed and wildly misunderstood phenomenon wrought was to accelerate the ongoing decay of the highly unappealing authority relationships in these societies. It has disrupted the ugly and the unacceptable in different ways in different countries, since they’re all different. But with the possible exception of Tunisia (and the jury is still out), the results have not been any improvement on the status quo ante. Some state authorities have their backs up and are trying to be more oppressive than ever, while others are simply flailing.
The ruling classes are right to be worried. Trust in the state has suffered, and rightly so, because the management efficiency of these states, never very good in most places, has eroded further in the face of deteriorating economies and social infrastructure (education, housing, and health care) and the rise of expectations among more mobilized, youthful, cyber-wired, literate, and urbanized populations. All these creaking, slow-moving and mostly corrupt states are in deepening trouble, if they haven’t yet collapsed entirely.
So here we have a bundle of collapsing or very weak states, states that never achieved Weberian status as modern states in the first place, and what is the favorite obsession of the (so-called) international community? To create yet another Arab state, called Palestine.
At least some who have thought about the dissonance between these observations have worried that, unless extraordinary care is taken with the birth of Palestine as a state—assuming the process ever gets that far—it will be born a surefire failure. But most people never allow these two observations to ease into the same mental zone. The generic and worsening weakness of the Arab state per se and the simultaneous desire to create yet another one do not strike most people as interesting juxtaposition because they hermetically compartmentalize the two pieces. The look first at one, then at the other, but do not allow themselves to see the two together. Amusing, no? Or perhaps it’s a bit troubling if this happens to describe your own mental habit, dear reader, to which you, having now read this far, may not ever return.
Why have the Arab states had such a hard time of it, and why might Palestine, were it to be born, be just another example of the trouble? This, to put it mildly, is a big subject, one we cannot do justice to in a venue like this. So I will be telegraphically brief, and those who get the message based on their own intellectual resources will be grateful for its brevity, while those who don’t probably won’t.
If you take an introductory Middle Eastern politics course at any respectable American university, or just read the material assigned on the syllabus on your own (something I have to assume virtually no members of the American political class have ever done), you will soon find that the modern state (in idealized form the nation-state, where nation, strictly defined, and polity are well matched) is an organic development of Western history, whose peoples have developed to one degree or another the attitudes and civic habits that parallel the institutional forms of the state. The modern territorial state, as a post-imperial era expression of nationalist ideology in the West, does not so well fit the Arabs (and many other non-Western ethno-linguistic groups) whose history supplied none of the predicates.
Arab societies are patrimonial in character (the term preferred by Francis Fukuyama and others), as all Western societies were before the modern era, and they are premodern in a specific Weberian political sense. That sense has three key elements.
First, in Arab societies communal ties trump individual agency, so that the social authority of family, and of clan and tribe, remain strong; gemeinschaft has never been fully displaced by gesellschaft. Second, religion has never been privatized away from the public sphere; there is no wide and broadly accepted secular zone in which politics (or the arts) as they exist in the West can take place. And third, it follows that, especially in heterogeneous societies (whether heterogeneous in sectarian or ethnic terms), the state cannot command much symbolic affinity relative to its natural competitors. The result has been what some analysts, like Joel Migdal for example, have referred to as “strong societies, weak states.”
If you make it to the second week on the syllabus, you might be introduced to three or four Arabic words, here in transliteration, to help you fill out this picture: watanqawm, and hamula.
Watan means “homeland”, which is the closest word Arabic has to capture the concept of the territorial state, and that’s the word that’s most often used to express what in English we call a country. Wataniya means nationalist feeling directed toward this country, the territorial unit with people and its borders. (Put an iya or sometimes iyya on the end of an Arabic noun and you usually get an ism.)
Qawm is a more expansive form of kindred feeling, encompassing all Arabic speakers. Soqawmiyya is usually translated as pan-Arabism or pan-Arab nationalism, which is a secularized version of pan-Islamism of which the human community is the umma.Qawmiyya is “above” the territorial state, so to speak, and its symbolic power is, again, derivative of the aspiration of Islam to be a unifying social force.
The word hamula means tribe, or an extended unit of family clans. It comes from the Semitic root hams, which means five in reference to the five-generational patriarchal structure that defines a tribe. It is also the root of the word for “armed”, since a hand symbolizes a fist or the appendage of a body that holds a weapon. This is not entirely coincidental; family units had and in some places still have military tasks to perform, to protect the tribal group or, in some cases, to predate on others. The hamula is where politics in its elemental form happens in traditional societies. It is where affinity (assabiyah) in primordial form is often strongest.
Obviously, no society is static, and no culture is frozen. Arab countries today are in the midst of bewildering change, vaulted beyond the firm grasp of tradition but falling well short of functional modernity. Some are more “tribal” (measurable in part by the percentage of endogamous marriages) and more characteristic of patrimonial polities than others (Yemen, for example, compared to Tunisia), just as some are more heterogeneous than others (Syria, for example, compared to Jordan). But none of the Arab “states” ever made it to the Weberian heights of substituting formal and impersonal authority for traditional consensual or charismatic authority, and nearly all are deteriorating today from whatever elevation they did reach in the good old days of the Arab Cold War.
To put it a bit glibly, then, the Arab state has a Goldilocks problem: To be stable and effective, it needs wataniya, but its reservoirs of wataniya are ever depleted by the power of qawmiyya above it and the assabiya of the hamula below it. To restate the impact of the Arab Spring in a nutshell, it has functioned to accelerate the depletion process, the power of qawmiyya taking the form of sectarian extremism, the power of hamula taking the form of ever more intense subnational identity politics.
The only known effective ways of keeping the Arab watan in working order is to militarize it (army rule) or to monarchize it (rule by a king). The former works via a repressive secret police apparatus (muhabarat) and the latter via a patriarchal structure that reaches all the way to the top, so that the king is the tribal sheikh of all the sheikhs. Actually, both forms of autocracy need both devices: the monarchies also have secret police functions and the military regimes implicitly run via the symbolism of patriarchal authority, hence the cults of personality that have tended to form around Arab dictatorscum national “fathers.” But the result, especially in the militarized form of the watan, has always been a weak, jerry-rigged expedient—sometimes unstable (think Syria before Hafiz al-Assad) and sometimes hyperstable in an enforced form of suspended social and economic animation (think Mubarak’s Egypt, Qaddafi’s Libya, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq).
While there has never been a true modern state anywhere in the Arab region, at least as Weber or anyone else who thought about the matter in terms of political sociology understood it, the outer forms and international rituals of the state have been present. But with the inner reality gone missing, the poor fit between new clothes and an old body has not been a pretty sight. There is nothing new here. Listen to how the late Hisham Sharabi, the Palestinian intellectual who lived much of his life in American exile, described the Arab situation in 1987 as one of “neopatriarchy”, the new grafted superficially and awkwardly upon the old social norms: Neopatriarchy reflected “processes of social, political, and moral decay: political despotism, corruption. . . ” that have led to “the frustrations and humiliations, the rage and despair . . . to the paralyzing traumas engulfing the Arab world. . . . The depths of self-hatred and cynicism equal only the ethnocentric fantasies and wild dreams of past glory.” Fouad Ajami’s assessment was not very different, nor is that of Bassam Tibi and many other astute, mostly self-exiled, Arab thinkers.
This traditional mélange of authority relationships masquerading as a modern state, as it were, were bound to confound Westerners, Americans in particular. Most Americans think their forms of government and the civic habits that go with them are universal in character. As far as the average person is concerned, they somehow just fell out of the sky one day in the 17th or 18th century, and we are so lucky to have been chosen to receive the tablets first. (We broke them in civil war and so had to have a second set carved out.) That average person also believes that people are essentially the same in all places and ages and that they’ll come around to our liberal democratic “best practice”—for we and the world all together of course are progressing, that being the faith of the thinly veiled “secular” eschatology of the Enlightenment.
This attitude has been mightily reinforced lately by political correctness, which assumes that any differences among ethno-linguisticaly defined groups of people presume better and worse, more advanced and less—and we can’t have that in a world in which absolute equality of all kinds is a postulate beyond question or even discussion. (To respect the dignity and beauty of difference never seems to occur to the PC crowd, unimaginative dunderheads that they are.) So if Arab “states” are called states and are members in good standing of the United Nations and they have Presidents or Prime Ministers and constitutions and a court system and so on, the typical American will assume that these states must have the overt character, its people the underlying attitudinal bases, and its result the standard socio-political functionality of any “normal” modern state like, say, Norway, or maybe Chile.
And of course the typical American would be wrong. Even most well-educated Americans are remarkably un-self-reflective about cultural differences. Nothing falls down out of the sky except rain and snow, and the occasional meteorite. Political institutions, rather, spring up from the ground of historical experience and human efforts to grasp its meaning.
Would a Palestinian state be any different from the other Arab states, should it come into being? The Palestinians have a couple of notable advantages here. First, they have been watching Israel intensely for the past sixty-odd years, and many have worked in Israel or for Israeli companies. They have been culturally pluralized. They know there is another way for a state to exist and operate. They know there can be such a thing as an independent judiciary, a free press, open debate, and so forth. They have a sense of what individual agency is, and of what equality before the law looks like. Second, they have no baggage, no legacy of failed administrations and regimes going back half a century, unless one counts the very recent experience since Oslo in the West Bank and Gaza. Third, Western patrons will have a special interest in a newly born Palestinian state not failing. They will lavish money and advice (for whatever the latter may be worth).
Will this be enough to compensate for the standard deviations, so to speak, that have made successful Arab territorial statehood so difficult to pull off? Will it compensate, too, for the rise of various new challenges to all states, no matter their origins or provenance or past glories? The Westphalian state is under siege nearly everywhere, for reasons I noodle on a bit in the new issue of the magazine (“What’s Going On”, September/October 2014). Could Palestine escape the general wave of deterioration in the performance and popularity of states worldwide?
No one knows. But the chances are that, one day, in one form or another, Palestine will be not merely declared but actually become real as a state. Not long afterward the Palestinians (and not just the Palestinians) are likely to experience a Goethe moment—getting what they long wished for, only to wonder why on earth they ever wanted a state in the first place, for all the good it will do them and for all the troubles it will bring.
The peoples of the Middle East are expert at living without peace and without much water, too. But no one is allowed to live without irony.